[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[ian glendinning]

Case and SA, Platt and all,

And the key word you introduce there Case is "determined".

This is part of this (simple) causation vs (complex), recursive,
emergence debate. Dependent arising "as if" caused - to put the
buddhist spin on it. (You only get simple causation in simple
repeatable, isolated experiments, not in the real world.)

You and I, Case, know which side of that debate we're on.
Ian

On 7/6/06, Case <case at ispots.com> wrote:
> > Ian
> > E O Wilson sure does mention anthropology, his main agenda appears to
> > be the biological / cultural split. He's well known as a
> > neo-Darwinist, advocating an evolutionary view of both, and
> > recognising that one is built on the other, and that both are involved
> > in "co-evolution". (He's a memer, seeing memes as units of cultural
> > heredity, but one of those that still holds that however far ahead of
> > genes the memes get, they are still on the genetic "leash".)
> >
> > BTW the only correctness I was referring to negatively was political
> > correctness - a priori prejudice. Elsewere correctness = quality, for
> > me.
> >
>
> Wilson is most definately a biologist. Ants were his orginal subjects and
> his first book was on social insects. His second book Socialbiology
> started a whole new school of thought about the same time as Dawkins'
> Selfish Gene was published. His third work was On Human Nature in which he
> applied the concepts of Sociobiology to humans. His main thesis is that
> social behavior, in fact all behavior, has a fundemental biological basis
> and serves biological ends.
>
> He sold me when he pointed out in On Human behavior that it is not a
> question of whether biology determines behavior, it is a question of how
> much influence biology has on behavior. For example humans walk they do
> not fly as a means of locomotion. We eat other living things rather that
> absorbing nutrients from the soil. We see light in a specific range of the
> electromagnetic spectrum and on and on...
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