[MD] Science catching up

[ian glendinning]

Platt, I forgot to say, in my rush to get in a witticism at your expense ...

Thanks for the link ... I'll look up the article and the book.

Ian

On 10/31/06, ian glendinning <psybertron at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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