nature vs. nurture, was FBI on Einstein

Mikalac Norman S NSSC MikalacNS at NAVSEA.NAVY.MIL
Thu Sep 7 10:14:45 PDT 2000


Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> You're supposed to be _just_born_ knowing certain things. I
> don't think this is such an outlandish idea.
------------------ CB: We don't find it hard to believe that animals have instincts as inborn mental tendencies which have some correspondence to their objective realities. Humans may have some instincts.
>
------------------- on the contrary, biologists would all agree that humans have many instincts.

a parent doesn't have to remind little johnnie/janie not to kill someone when they go out to play for the first time. animals (incl. humans) have innate (genetic) wirings (neuro/chem programs) for certain behaviors that depend on the environment to trigger them. if confronted by what they determine to be beneficial they will greet and explore it (homo sapiens sapiens, remember). when threatened by it, they will instinctively (nature) try to flee or kill it. they don't need social conditioning (teaching/learning) to do these things.

racial/ethnic discrimination: if an infant imprints (emulates) on someone with specific appearance, speech and movement that feeds and shelters him/her, and shuns someone who looks, talks and acts differently who does not feed or shelter him/her, then his/her survival chances are better. that's nature. then you add a few years of what the parents whisper into johnnie's and janie's ears during infancy and you get someone who is more or less discriminatory. that's nurture.

however, it's useless to ask how much of behavior can be ascribed to nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) because it takes both and no one can separate them out. and that brings us to one of the great dividing lines btwn the Left and Right, IMO. from my forum readings thus far, it seems that the Left assumes the axiom that nature accounts for little and nurture a lot, so they believe that engineering the environment will change people enough to make them more altruistic towards each other and towards their environment.

in contrast, the Right assumes the axiom that nature accounts for much and nurture little, so they think that changing the environment will just bring us right back to where we are today with a lot of chaos and bloodshed in between.

(norm, you're on a roll today, but the lefties are gonna kill you on this one because they ain't too nurturing.)



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