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Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human by Matt Ridley |
by Matt Ridley
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by EO Wilson
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by Robert Wright
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by James & Spradley
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Humans have not always had all the cultural accoutrements of Hutus or Englishmen. At one time not so many million years ago, our ancestors could make only rudimentary tools while surely communicating in a far less sophisticated manner than we do currently. The immense increase in brain size over the last million or so years must have had profound consequences for our capacity to learn and acquire our culture. If you accept the less-than-revolutionary assumption that brains are necessary for learned behavior, then past selection on hominids that varied in their capacity for culture is a certainty.But doesn't sociobiology justify rape, racism and genocide? Not so fast, says Alcock--just because behaviour has a natural explanation, that doesn't make it moral. It would seem that those who want to prevent this sort of behaviour would be keenly interested in understanding why it manifests, but often the opposite case pertains. Through gentle dissection of the differences between scientific and ethical knowledge, Alcock shows that we can use them to complement each other. The Triumph of Sociobiology takes time and care to examine all of the claims made against the field, both political and scientific, and ends up making a strong case for deeper research. --Rob Lightner
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