You are currently browsing the thoughts on thoughts weblog archives for the day 05/04/2009.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Mar | May » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
- 05/02/2012: Failure of conscious thought suppression
- 02/02/2012: What is the preconscious?
- 30/01/2012: Are there two types of cognition?
- 27/01/2012: The new way to view cognition
- 24/01/2012: About the claustrum
- 21/01/2012: Two sides of synchrony
- 18/01/2012: Skull shape changes are not independent
- 15/01/2012: the other way around
- 12/01/2012: A look at the dogma
- 09/01/2012: the Freud hangup
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
Archive for 05/04/2009
Biology and culture
05/04/2009 by admin.
On the Edge site there is a video featuring Denis Dutton.( here) He is the author of The Art Instinct. What he has to say is a little off the subject of this blog, consciousness, but it does highlight the turf war between biology and culture in explaining human thought.
Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don’t know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck. About human psychology, nothing could be explained in evolutionary terms: we just somehow developed a big brain with its spandrels and all, and that’s it.
Nicely put, I thought.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »