rhinoceros
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Some interesting stuff from Dennett
« on: 2003-01-30 06:40:39 » |
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[rhinoceros]
In the heat of the days, you may have missed two interesting posts by Bricoleaur in the BBS. It seems they have not been read by many. Take a look.
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=32;action=display;threadid=27693
The Mythical Threat of Genetic Determinism
by Daniel Dennett
<quote>
Gould and others have declared their firm opposition to "genetic determinism," but I doubt if anybody thinks our genetic endowments are infinitely revisable. It is all but impossible that I will ever give birth, thanks to my Y chromosome. I cannot change this by either will, education, or culture -- at least not in my lifetime (but who knows what another century of science will make possible?). So at least for the foreseeable future, some of my genes fix some parts of my destiny without any real prospect of exemption. If that is genetic determinism, we are all genetic determinists, Gould included. Once the caricatures are set aside, what remains, at best, are honest differences of opinion about just how much intervention it would take to counteract one genetic tendency or another and, more important, whether such intervention would be justified.
<snip>
The issue is not about determinism, either genetic or environmental or both together; the issue is about what we can change whether or not our world is deterministic. A fascinating perspective on the misguided issue of genetic determinism is provided by Jared Diamond in his magnificent book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The question Diamond poses, and largely answers, is why it is that "Western" people (Europeans or Eurasians) have conquered, colonized, and otherwise dominated "Third World" people instead of vice versa. Why didn't the human populations of the Americas or Africa, for instance, create worldwide empires by invading, killing, and enslaving Europeans? Is the answer ... genetic? Is science showing us that the ultimate source of Western dominance is in our genes? On first encountering this question, many people -- even highly sophisticated scientists -- jump to the conclusion that Diamond, by merely addressing this question, must be entertaining some awful racist hypothesis about European genetic superiority. So rattled are they by this suspicion that they have a hard time taking in the fact (which he must labor mightily to drive home) that he is saying just about the opposite: The secret explanation lies not in our genes, not in human genes, but it does lie to a very large extent in genes -- the genes of the plants and animals that were the wild ancestors of all the domesticated species of human agriculture.
Prison wardens have a rule of thumb: If it can happen, it will happen. What they mean is that any gap in security, any ineffective prohibition or surveillance or weakness in the barriers, will soon enough be found and exploited to the full by the prisoners. Why? The intentional stance makes it clear: The prisoners are intentional systems who are smart, resourceful, and frustrated; as such they amount to a huge supply of informed desire with lots of free time in which to explore their worlds. Their search procedure will be as good as exhaustive, and they will be able to tell the best moves from the second-best. Count on them to find whatever is there to be found.
Diamond exploits the same rule of thumb, assuming that people anywhere in the world have always been just about as smart, as thrifty, as opportunistic, as disciplined, as foresighted, as people anywhere else, and then showing that indeed people have always found what was there to be found. To a good first approximation, all the domesticable wild species have been domesticated. The reason the Eurasians got a head start on technology is because they got a head start on agriculture, and they got that because among the wild plants and animals in their vicinity 10,000 years ago were ideal candidates for domestication. There were grasses that were genetically close to superplants that could be arrived at more or less by accident, just a few mutations away from big-head, nutritious grains, and animals that because of their social nature were genetically close to herdable animals that bred easily in captivity. (Maize in the Western Hemisphere took longer to domesticate in part because it had a greater genetic distance to travel away from its wild precursor.)
<end quote>
[rhinoceros]
The second of Bricoleaur's posts is a review of a new book by Daniel Dennett:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=27694
Freedom Evolves
<quote>
In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies.
<end quote>
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