[MD] Science catching up

[ian glendinning]

Platt catching up in fact ;-)

Stephen Pinker "The Blank Slate" and Dr James Austin "Zen and the
Brain" mention their own and plenty of existing empirical research,
that support the point here. (I've posted references to both over the
years) So what you say is "true" but not the whole "truth". This is
just the age old nature vs nurture debate.

By the time someone is a teenager, that hard-wired bit (the genetic
bit) probably represents only 10-30 % of their working (moral)
principles. Interestingly the rest of the memetic stuff comes 80% from
social peer groups, and 20% from formal parental / education and
guidance. (Don't quote me on the numbers, I can dig out the refs if
you're interested.)

ie most of the moral resource comes from conscious experience,
starting in the womb naturally, but a smaller part does indeed seem to
be "hard-wired" there from conception.

Ian

On 10/31/06, Platt Holden <pholden at davtv.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> In today's NY Times is a review of a new book by Mark D. Hauser, a Harvard
> biologist, entitled "Moral Minds." In it he claims "people are born with a
> moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution." He argues
> that grammar "generates instant moral judgments which . . . are
> inaccessible to the conscious mind."
>
> In other words, Pirsig's morality of direct experience prior to
> intellectual conceptions.
>
> Of course like most people today, Hauser limits moral decisions to human
> societies, attributing our moral instinct to "restraints on behavior are
> required by social living and have been favored by natural selection
> because of their survival value." Maybe at some future time scientists and
> others will escape from the language prison of social morality to
> understand that right and wrong are not exclusively the province of  human
> society, but the creative force behind the world's order.
>
> But, don't hold your breath.
>
> Best,
> Platt
>
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