From: Chris Taylor (Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 19 Jun 2003 - 14:21:58 GMT
??? Er...
What I think is that brain structure, as evolved over aaaaages, supports
layers built on layers of informational patterning, and at the top, as
human government is to the chemical and physical processes of the
environment (with all those ecological pyramidial layers between), so
our minds are to our brains.
I'm an old style lefty blank slater - that's my objection to the
put-a-caveman-in-a-suit-and-i'll-tell-you-why-he-rapes-and-kills-and-invests
bull that comes out of that Kipling-esque posse of shysters. Chomsky
talked some sense about grammar (and politics of course) but a lot of
shit about innateness. The rest (Pinker, Cronin, that Randy Thingy the
US rape apologist / fluctuating asymmetry nonsense guy, and many others)
have added to the corpulent corpus with more fetid rubbish than you
could shake a stick at. Nothing, apart from a few reflexes and maybe
some basic animal emotional awareness (our wonderfully demarcated faces,
fear, pain etc., but not plugged in to any cognitive stuff - hence weird
fetishes being so easy to develop) is in at the start. For a get-go,
anything that could be culturally transmitted would rot away genetically
because there would be no selective force to maintain it. Noone has
found any 'behavioural' genes in any credible study except those
controlling big, general hormonal levers, or genuine flaws in 'the
machine' like failing to re-uptake a neurotransmitter or whatever. Drugs
like prozac work this way which is why some get better and some kill
their families with big knives. Next consider that your brain is made
with about as many genes as your liver, and is several secretory organs
in one none of those functions having anything much to do with
cognition. Then read a book on fractal compression, and a neuroanatomy
atlas, and tell me there's room left in your genome to preprogram jack
shit (to coin a phrase).
Evopsychos or God. What a choice!
But then of course I forgot that the big guy is all the rage now with
cosmologists(!) - "as rational as anything else" I heard one say (with a
completely straight face, I kid you not).
So anyway that'd be a no I guess :D
Btw the consensus was, I thought, that memetics was diametrically
opposed to the gene=behaviour evopsycho jocks?
And I'm still pissed at them for nicking the good name.
Cheers, Chris.
> <<I must admit to being alarmed by how close
> Dennett turned out to be to the EvoPsych nutters>>
>
> You think evolutionary psychology is nuts? So you believe the brain was
> designed by God then?
>
> Richard Brodie
> www.memecentral.com
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk) http://pedro.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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