[lbo-talk] Just-so stories (was re: Language of Contempt)

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Wed Jun 7 13:46:22 PDT 2006


Just as Doug has revolutionary fantasies about who he'd line up against the wall for summary execution, I have a dream that any sentence that begins with "it's human nature to" would disappear from every human language. This moratorium would massively improve the likelihood of understanding the interesting and complex ways in which genetics and environmental conditions interact to create psychological traits and patterns of behavior.

Miles

^^^^^

CB: You know the Stalinist Lysenko was something of a social constructionist with respect to the "revolution" in wheat. He was working on ways to get wheat to evolve unlimited by the biological dogma of "no inheritance of acquired characteristics"; give "culture" to the wheat species, as it were.

Lining people up against walls and not wanting to hear about "wheat nature" or "human nature" are not as incompatible as some might think.



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