Rousseau_CHN

I choose "Either we evolved a capacitiy for complex communication without communicating until after people left Africa."

Beleveng dat langwage as well as sosayati is a ferly modern creasyon.

Oh my Gak, itz alredi hapening

Seanie, helppppppp......

pz

I see all.

Can you name a few of these universal traits?

When I went to college, I was told that there are actually very few human behavioral universals. About the only ones that were regarded as indisputable were things like the maternal 'instinct' and the incest taboo...and since, most of those have been pretty thoroughly knocked apart (for an example of a behavior that was taken for granted as a human universal, see Hrdy's Mother Nature). People are pretty flexible, so I'm always dubious when someone claims that everyone does X -- especially when that someone has a blatant commitment to biological determinism.

seanie

No.

Though I could probably use Google to rustle up a list if you'd like to stomp all over me.

cricket

I'm not seanie but I have what I think is the list in question. It's in an index in the the back of The Blank Slate. I haven't read through the list yet and I have no opinion yet but here are the first few things on the list (out of hundreds):

abstraction in speech and thought
actions under self-control distinguished from those not under self control
aethetics
affections expressed and felt

I can list more later...

btw this index is called Donald E Brown's list of Human Universals

I'll be back tonight after work --

cricket

Oolon Colluphid

That, of course, is the problem. One human universal right here for you: phenotypic plasticity...

Do you know of anyone who actually espouses biological determinism (and what do you mean by it)? I refer you back to Barrett, Dunbar and Lycett (professors, note, of evolutionary psychology), who open their book by stressing the importance of culture. And hence, one of our main -- evolved (ie surely not created!) -- innate human behavioural characteristics is our ability to adapt through learning to a wide range of cultural environments -- our “phenotypic plasticity”.

Cheers, DT

pz

Yes. Pinker, for one.

It is an extremely ridiculous position. That's why all the proponents bracket all of their pronouncements on the subject with disclaimers, as you've cited. Yet when you look at what they are actually saying, it all boils down to genes defining behavior and selection for heritable behaviors.

beyelzu

when i took anthropology in college, the professor said that there were only a couple of things universal to all cultures.

marriage of some form
sexual restrictions on women

Rousseau_CHN

I guess when we start telling jokes, it only means that we have conceded. I have. My stand was based on disbelief, while yours were based on sound reasoning. Should I ever disproved your sound reasoning, I must look for that missing word, otherwise I should just shut up.

I'd like to point out one thing though. Someone (I'm so sorry I forgot your screen name) said that evolution is gradual change. That's interesting because that is the same argument used to debunk my "theory."

And yet, it is credible to look for the missing link, while my search for the missing "word" is ridiculoous.

I don't see the difference. We come from one origin, so no matter how we change through time, there is still a thread that connects us with the lowest (simplest, lest someone misinterpret it) life form.

In language though, even if Man orginated in a certain place, there is no guarantee that there ever will be a connection between language, not one word. To say so is heresy.

Or maybe evolution is not gradual, therefore the search for the missing link is a wasted effort? (But that is another story and deserves another post.) And maybe we didn't come from one place or maybe there was no language before our migration, therefore there is no similarities in language.

Oolon Colluphid

Really? Determinism? It’s a while since I read Language Instinct (his others are in my huge to-read pile ), but I certainly didn’t read it that way (hence asking you what you mean by it). Everybody who knows anything about developmental biology -- even me, for instance, and these guys are surely rather more expert than I -- knows that genes determine -- as in ‘make inevitable’ -- rather little. But they do influence the phenotype, in conjunction with, in a complex entanglement with, the environment. Dawkins has stressed that over and over, and I read virtually no difference between his and Pinker’s position.

It seems obvious to me that genes might affect behaviour -- a reasonable hypothesis -- and that therefore it would be sensible to look for ways in which they do -- ie test the hypothesis... and if none can be found, then we might reject the hypothesis.

It seems that opponents of things like EP, however, wish to deny genes have any influence at all on human cognitive and behavioural development -- ie the stuff that makes us ‘human’. (In this attempt to set us apart from the rest of nature, they seem to me to be little diffferent from creationists.)

What I want to know is, on what a priori grounds at least should we non-creationists think that we are in this way separate? If genes can in principle affect behaviour (through the brains they help shape), why might not our behaviour potentially be under (some -- that I have to say that) genetic influence?

Or does this anti-genetics cut deeper, and are we to suppose that genes cannot influence any animal’s behaviour, that everything is learned from the environment? There’s an awful lot of ethologists who’d be surprised by that... isn’t there?

Surely humans, behaviour-wise, are just at the far end of a continuum, in the balance between the relative influences of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, with environmental factors far more important that usual, rather than not influenced by the genes that (helped ) form their bodies -- including their nervous systems -- at all?

And one -- subject to you defining what you mean by ‘determinism’ -- which I haven’t seen argued for by any pro-EP people I’ve ever read. I’m disinclined to think you’re arguing with a straw man since you say you’ve read some of these people, but...

What’s wrong with that?

Defining? As in making it unavoidable? Or simply ‘influencing’? If the former, as I say it’s news to me that anyone argues so. If the latter, on what grounds is it dismissed out-of-hand?

What’s to argue with that? Are behaviours not at all heritable?

As a (far from scientific, but nevertheless concrete) example: both my wife and I were extremely shy and cautious as kids. At age five, for instance, I refused point-blank and in tears, I remember, to stand with my uncle merely on the other side of Main Street in Disney World so as to be in my mum’s photo. Other children of a similar age happily did so -- where my mum got the idea from -- running across unaided to stand among the strangers. My wife was similarly shy.

Now, remembering this, we have made every effort to encourage our four-year-old daughter to be more outgoing than we were: to say hello to friends she’s unfamiliar with, to climb the ladder of the slide when other children are around, and so on. Yet no matter what the encouragement, non-encouragement (leaving her to it, in the hope she’ll do it of her own accord if not being watched), promises of enjoyment (borne out when she does, eg, eventually get up the bloody slide), bribery or threats even -- all of which only required because she won’t do stuff voluntarily -- she is as shy as we were. Other children -- even her friends -- are just not like that, and happily barrel off into any new situation with glee.

Whether this behaviour is gene-linked or ‘cultural’ is, as Barrett and co state, irrelevant. Can there be any doubt that our daughter has inherited this behaviour pattern from her parents?

On an even less scientific basis, but still: is there any parent who has never said or heard the phrases "she get's that from you!" or "I don't know where he gets that from!" ?

I’d therefore suggest that a proclivity -- and that’s all we’re talking about, general underlying tendencies that our plasticity may overcome -- a proclivity to shyness is a heritable human behaviour.

Cheers, DT

seanie

I've read The Language Instinct several times, along with a lot of Dawkins, and certainly my understanding of it appears similar to yours. However I'm a lay person. I may've been seduced by rhetoric.

I think we're largely shaped by environment and experience. However I don't see why some of our behaviours shouldn't be influenced to a greater or lesser degree by our genes.

And as for biological determinism I think you do have to define quite tightly what it means. Because in a banal sense all human behaviour is determined by genes.