Nature, Nurture, and Nonzero

When I first began to delve into the depths of evolutionary psychology, I (and others) worried that finding physical and evolutionary bases for beliefs would disallow more traditional reasons like God and love. What I (and they) failed to understand was the way that knowledge in this realm leads only to more questioning, greater mystery, and stronger faith in the ideas that stand the test.

An important part of learning more is realizing that learning is not an end in itself. It prompts thought, inspires belief, and demands action, and cannot exist without doing so. The danger of Orwell’s “thoughtcrime” was that it caused people to rise up against the establishment, and the way it was avoided was through distraction (the constant wars between superstates) and punishment (the thought police). But if the ideas of the ruling class were truly right, they would stand the inquisition and no rebellion (nor policing) need occur.

Perhaps this is different for nations than it is for individuals. The rebellion against one’s own prejudices is less traumatic than a coup d’etat in the streets. But it is no less important here to realize that the knowledge is not the problem; the action (or lack of it) is.

The inspiration for this was UCSB evolutionary psychology research (via Phil):

More nature allows more nurture. There is not a zero-sum relationship between “nature” and “nurture”. For EPs, “learning” is not an explanation — it is a phenomenon that requires explanation. Learning is caused by cognitive mechanisms, and to understand how it occurs, one needs to know the computational structure of the mechanisms that cause it. The richer the architecture of these mechanisms, the more an organism will be capable of learning — toddlers can learn English while (large-brained) elephants and the family dog cannot because the cognitive architecture of humans contains mechanisms that are not present in that of elephants or dogs. Furthermore, “learning” is a unitary phenomenon: the mechanisms that cause the acquisition of grammar, for example, are different from those that cause the acquisition of snake phobias. (The same goes for “reasoning”.)