From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Dec 12 2000 - 22:57:46 MST
Gordon Worley wrote:
>
> Why a gene? How are genes afraid? From the gene research I've read,
> all that genes have been proven to determine is physical traits, not
> natural behavior.
The behaviorist fallacy to which you refer is a known but still-popular
myth started by social "soft" scientists in the decades before
evolutionary psychology. Please also note that I am not talking about the
variance between humans, but the species invariants that hold true for all
humans, as they do not hold true for all chimpanzees or all songbirds.
I strongly recommend "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" by
Cosmides and Tooby, in "The Adapted Mind" edited by Barkow, Cosmides, and
Tooby, to clear up any lingering misconceptions about the flow of
causality between individual minds, memes, adaptations, environmental
variances, and selection pressures in the ancestral environment.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:35 MDT