From: Paul Fidika (Fidika@new.rr.com)
Date: Sat Feb 01 2003 - 07:00:31 MST
Jonathan Standley wrote:
>Speaking as one with an intense interest in sociology and anthropology,
what
>never ceases to amaze me is, in spite of the wildly variant cultural
>diversity of the earth's 6 billion + people, how *similar* we all are. I
>could think of several possible explanations, but the one that I tend to
>favor is that evolution has produced highly specific developmental
>processes, probably based on complex interactions involving the endocrine,
>nervous, and immune systems, among others.
I totally agree with you. Since we're all descended from the same ancesteral
envornment,
it holds that we all have very similar gene sets (even the cultures which
have been seperated
from all others for centuries, say, on a remote island, can produce healthy
offspring when
mated with an individual from any other race). And as Evolutionary
Psychology brings
out, our genes control a great deal more of our mental lives and development
than we may
care to acknowledge.
If you haven't already, I highly recomend that you read Robert Wright's "The
Moral Animal",
followed by "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture."
On a broader note, Steven Pinker has some very good books about the mind,
namely "The
Blank Slate" and "How the Mind Works." I know Eliezer would've recomend
these books to
you anway, so I just beat him to it ^_^ .
~Fidika
Fidika@new.rr.com
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