Monday, December 21, 2009 - Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu NM
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Biking the Bosque, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, December 20, 2009
Today I headed up to the Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu NM to spend a few days with Kate & Terry.
Night camp
Ghost Ranch Campground, Abiquiu NM
- This is a basic, small campground with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are not available here.
- Locate Ghost Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Genetic Determinism and Human Nature
The "implication" that seems to worry people the most is so-called genetic determinism - the notion that if human nature was shaped by evolution, then it's fixed and we're simply stuck with it; there's nothing we can do about it. We can never change the world to be the way we want; we can never institute fairer societies - policy-making and politics are pointless.
Now, that's a complete misunderstanding. It doesn't distinguish between human nature - our evolved psychology - and the behavior that results from it. Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging, common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species.But human behavior, which is generated by that nature, is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules - the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So the answer to genetic determinism is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment.