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Author Topic:   Evolution of Behavior
Cal
Inactive Member


Message 25 of 39 (242085)
09-10-2005 1:07 PM
Reply to: Message 17 by Psychopathologist
02-07-2005 7:15 AM


Re: Behaviors.
quote:
All behavior is intertwined with genetic transcription. The question is simply, in what way.
A masterpiece of understatement. I think that's a little like saying that global climate has something to do with physics, but it isn't quite clear what.
Part of the problem seems to be with defining 'behavior' crisply enough to allow us to even begin a serious investigation of the matter. Informal discussions like this one tend to take a rather high-level approach, and this fact tends to be somewhat transparent. We speak about a thing such as: "using birth control" as if it could actually be meaningfully reduced to a 'behavior'. The "as if" in that sentence does not render such an approach fundamentally flawed, it's just that when we do that, we are dealing with working approximations rather than with exacting precision.
Our first-hand familiarity with the nuanced complexities of human behavior develops gradually, a product of trial-and-error experiments with people who do not always say what they mean, mean what they say, say what they want, want what they say they want, say what they're going to do, or do what they say they're going to do. There is an evolutionary advantage in the ability to understand and predict the actions of others (or, for that matter, ourselves) and the key to that is making good guesses about their thoughts and intentions. In negotiating this terrain, we employ a strictly seat-of-the-pants approach. Not all of us are psychologists, but all of us are intuitive psychologists; our view of this landscape is not the high-resolution infrared scan of the scientist, but the poetic image of the impressionist painter.
If we attempt to identify the cognitive black boxes which produce our intuitive approximations regarding human behavior -- to deconstruct them in the hope of learning more about the complexities they manage for us, so mysteriously and so automatically -- we run the risk of becoming hopelessly lost. We may find that the efficiency of these routines involves the skipping of logical steps we would regard as vital if we were constructing them ourselves.
If, as an alternative, we decide to do this latter -- to rebuild, from the ground up, an approach to the complexities of human behavior which is logically defensible at every step -- we should be careful to avoid borrowing conclusions from the intuitive black boxes we are implicitly purporting to have abandoned. I see this as an ever-present temptation, by the way, because looking at the details means opening a Pandora's box of overwhelming complexity. To begin with, it's worth noting that the results of the recently completed human genome project indicate that there are not nearly enough genes in the human genome to account for everything a biologist (let alone a psychologist) would like to refer to as a 'behavior'.
This area of scientific investigation appears likely to be a producer of grist for the sensationalist media mill for a long, long time to come.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 17 by Psychopathologist, posted 02-07-2005 7:15 AM Psychopathologist has not replied

  
Cal
Inactive Member


Message 37 of 39 (243426)
09-14-2005 5:27 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by igor_the_hero
09-14-2005 4:55 PM


The delusion under which you are laboring has a history which predates Christianity. It is Aristotle's scala naturae, or: "Great chain of being", and is rejected by modern biologists as an imposition of human value systems on a value-free biological world. It is not hard to find it reflected in the language of naturalists in Darwin's time, and even today there are many (mostly laymen) who continue to make this error. I hope we can soon reach a point where this detail can be regarded as adequately addressed here, because I was sort of looking forward to seeing some actual discussion on the evolution of behavior (which was purported to be the topic of this thread).

This message is a reply to:
 Message 36 by igor_the_hero, posted 09-14-2005 4:55 PM igor_the_hero has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 38 by igor_the_hero, posted 09-14-2005 5:32 PM Cal has not replied

  
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