DRFseven

Well, goals are not contained in genetic structure; what are contained are capacities for learning. A goal such as accumulating wealth, being happy, helping others, etc., is learned according to experience and enabled by the human capacities of attitude internalization, habituation, and problem-solving. So experiential encounters would manifest in specific goals (or lack of) within a genetic framework.

Since the objective commonality can only be for capacities for attitudes and not for specific attitudes (we are born with the capacity to take on our parents' values, no matter what those values are), objectivity cannot lie in values. Rather, the valuation we place on behaviors is subject to whatever perceptions happen to have occurred to us via our personal experience, and is, thus, subjective.

Again, once an objective has been specified, objective measures of meeting it can often be agreed upon. Say, if everyone in a town agrees that human survival is the goal, they may decide, that being the case, allowing dangerous toxins in the water supply would be wrong. But this, of course is fraught with problems in real life because it's hard for people to agree because we all know contradictory things about specific issues based on our own experiences.

echidna

No, I’m still not so sure why some goals are not at least partially encoded. Certainly it seems safe to say that many of our basic drives are largely encoded, our survival instinct, our sex drive, maybe even our need for power and our fascination with violence. We don’t learn to try not to drown, not do we learn (well the males anyway) to get an erection when we are aroused by our sexual preference, and to enjoy the experience. There are many basic innate instincts which are subconscious parts of our psyche. I don’t see why accumulating wealth or helping others are not in part similar derivatives of these basic encoded drives.

Of course given circumstances these drives can be over-ridden, but the genetic influence is still there. We are far from being blank pieces of paper.

DRFseven

You're talking about instincts and reflexes, not attitudes, which involve considered thinking. The survival instinct, which occurs in human infants as well as my Pomeranian who dislikes swimming, when they are, for example, thrown into a body of water, is not an attitude. It is a blind reflexive action that results in survival. Men don't get erections thinking about survival (well, not usually ), they get them for other reasons and survival results.

Because, think about it. Newborn infants don't know what wealth or "others" are; they have to EXPERIENCE things to absorb that information. Their own personal experiences teach them what wealth is and whether or not they want it and at what cost. All of this, of course, is played against a background of biological disposition toward physiological threshholds (fearfulness, anxiety, optimism, for instance, are thought to be inborn traits that would determine, in conjunction with specific experiences, opinions on subjects such as the accumulation of wealth and the idea of being helpful to others. Anxiety is not an opinion, it is a physiological state. A shy, anxious person, whose life experiences taught that wealth was desireable, might hold the opinion that the field of real estate sales is not a good way to become wealthy, where a relaxed extrovert might be enthusiastic about it being the best way. This is what I mean by everything being learned against a biological framework. Regardless, it is still learned.

echidna

But survival for instance is hardly a reflex like tapping one’s knee or initiating the swallowing process. It’s an instinctive drive which arises out of our subconscious psyche and is more than capable of entering our consciousness. Instincts and reflexes are quite different. My argument is that attitudes are often founded on or biased by our geneticically encoded instincts.

“… in part similar derivatives …”

Not a literal inborn opinion about wealth, of course, but a combination of raw instinctive drives and learnt knowledge about the consequences of money. I contend that the final opinion is not entirely learnt. As such, the attraction of wealth for instance might be a derivative of our instinctive desire for power (to me it seems quite logical we have such an instinct, the desire to be able to exert our will). Of course it may be subsequently over-ridden by many other factors, but those factors will always be opposing our instinctive desire for power.

The “biological disposition toward physiological thresholds” not only includes the moods, emotions and personality traits you list, it also includes these raw inborn instincts as well, quite different from just reflexes, they are drives we are born with, drives which we are often not necessarily aware of ourselves. As such, many of our base instinctive goals are actually genetically encoded. And many of our opinions are then rationally based on these objective but irrational goals. Again, not to say these goals can’t be over-ridden, but that they will always be there as an innate foundation.

DRFseven

Yes, it is a combination. The two are intertwined and it is impossible to explain the effects of one without the other. Read what Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences and neurology at Stanford University, has to say about <a href="http://www.marxist.com/scienceandtech/genomics400.html" target="_blank"> genetic determinism</a>

I think behavior is heavily guided by genes, but I know that no matter how much a person's genes predispose him/her to be a violin virtuoso, the person must experience a violin or it won't happen.

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: DRFseven ]</p>

echidna

I think it’d be safe to say that instincts are not well understood yet at the genetic level. It would seem unlikely that there is a single gene responsible for a bird’s migratory instinct for instance. My own highly uninformed guess might be that since instincts seem to be a combination of several complex concepts, it maybe more in the basic networking structure of the brain, than individual genes. But you’re right, I really have no idea …

A friend of mine has 3 children ages 1 to 6, all with quite different personalities. She believes that in the nurturing role she can only influence 10% of their direction, the rest is outside of her control. As such she tries (like any good parent I guess) to treat each as an individual, with their own personality, not trying as much to mould their personality, but rather interacting with them more as though much of their personality was a given. Maybe she’s underestimating a little, but whatever the truth I rank her as a good mum (not that we should be ranking mum’s at all ).