>>>>> ..The Rev. Greg Epstein, a "humanist chaplain" at Harvard University,
>>>>> is encouraging the fundamentalists or "New Atheists" to pipe down, and
>>>>> warns that their outspokenness is keeping fence-sitters from coming
>>>>> over to the side of the humanists...
>>> Religious belief is the result of years and years of indoctrination. I
>>> vividly remember my first time in church, before I was 6 years old. I
>>> thought it all arrant nonsense. It took the Christians literally years
>>> to indoctrinate me, but it didn't readily stick, as it apparently does
>>> with some people.
Can you explain your theory about me trying to lecture on things you
need to believe? I was merely explaining a large branchof evolutionary
theory, which is beginning to get very popuar. Decades ago it was very
unpopular and called sociobiology, but now its respectable. Human
Nature and hundreds of inborn neural structures, now taught on the
very campuses that used to throw pie in its face.
Here is a list of 200 or more proposed inborn neural structures which
make it slightly easier to chose outcomes in human ways. Religions is
just a few of them;
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy.debate/msg/138841eac85e261d
Here is some older evidence of human instincts;
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://tinyurl.com/eg0d
[1] Only a very small percentage of individuals prefer to have sexual
relations with brothers or sisters. They may harbor moments of inward
desire toward siblings.
[2] The learning of color vocabularies is also strongly biased and
hence falls in the category of gene-culture transmission.
[3] Infants prefer to look at objects that have particular shapes and
arrangements, and as time passes their choices change in a predictable
manner.
[4] Although facial expressions vary from one culture to the next,
strong tendencies exist that must be classified as gene-culture
transmission as opposed to a purely cultural form of transmission.
People around the world use a common set of expressions to register
fear, loathing, anger, surprise, and happiness.
[5] Newborn infants choose most kinds of sugars over plain water and
in this descending order of preference: sucrose, fructose, lactose,
and glucose.
[6] Anxiety in the presence of strangers occurs in very young children
in all the many cultures around the world studied by the German
ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt.
[7] The innate tendency for human beings to learn one thing as opposed
to another, in other words gene-culture transmission, is perhaps most
dramatically illustrated by the phobias.
Still we were able to locate published studies of twelve categories of
behavior that contain sufficiently precise measurements of the mode of
transmission. From this sample a remarkable result emerged: in every
case the behavior is learned through gene-culture transmission; mental
development appears to be genetically constrained. This result could
not have been the result of observational bias. The psychologists who
conducted the experiments were generally unaware of most of the other
work being conducted of similar nature. They had no visible
preconceptions about the mode of transmission; if anything, the
Zeitgeist of contemporary psychology for the most part favors a belief
in blank-slate minds. Yet the data from all the research programs
revealed gene-culture transmission, a partial automatic preference on
the part of the developing human mind for certain cultural choices
over others. Some of the more striking examples produced by these
pioneering studies entail the following familiar forms of thought and
behavior.
[1] Only a very small percentage of individuals prefer to have sexual
relations with brothers or sisters. They may harbor moments of inward
desire toward siblings. But the vast majority choose to mate with
persons raised outside their immediate family circle. Studies of the
origin of sexual preference in Israeli kibbutzim and Taiwanese
villages indicate that, even if other members of the society could
somehow be neutral or favorable toward sibling incest, young people
would still automatically avoid it in an overwhelming majority. The
aversion is based on an unconscious process in mental development.
Children raised closely together during the first six years of life
feel little or no sexual attraction toward each other when they reach
maturity, whether they are close relatives or not. As one
anthropologist put it, people who use the same potty when very young
do not marry when they grow up. The feeling has little to do with
culture or the classification of kin. Even if a society could somehow
begin anew with brother-sister incest as the norm, it would probably
develop a cultural antagonism toward the practice in a generation or
two. Eventually, the society would incorporate taboos in the form of
rituals and mythic stories to justify and reinforce the aversion. In a
phrase, the genetic leash pulls culture back into line.
[2] The learning of color vocabularies is also strongly biased and
hence falls in the category of gene-culture transmission. From infancy
onward, normally sighted individuals see variation in wavelength not
as a continuously varying property of light (which it is) but as the
four basic colors of blue, green, yellow, and red, along with various
blends in the intermediate zones. This beautiful illusion is
genetically programed into the visual apparatus and brain. Marc
Bornstein at Princeton University used special techniques that measure
attention span to show that four-month-old infants respond to
variation in wavelength as if they were discriminating the four adult
categories.
The same pattern occurs worldwide. At the University of California,
Berkeley, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay worked with the native speakers of
twenty languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan,
Hebrew, Ibibio, Thai, Tzeltal, and Urdu. The volunteers were asked to
describe their color vocabulary in an unusually precise way: they were
shown a large array of chips varying in color and brightness, and
directed to place each of the principal color terms of their language
on the chips that came closest to their conception of what the words
mean. Even though the words differed strikingly from one language to
the next in origin and sound, they fell into clusters on the array
that correspond, at least approximately, to the principal colors
distinguished by Born-stein's infants.
The physiological basis of the partitioning in vision is partially
known. The color cones of the retina, which are the cells that
distinguish wavelength, are differentiated into three types that
approach but do not correspond exactly to the basic colors. These
cells are maximally sensitive to blue (440 nanometers), green (535
nanometers), and yellow-green (565 nanometers) respectively. In the
lateral geniculate body of the thalamus, one of the key relay stations
between the eye and the visual cortex of the brain, the visually
active nerve cells are divided into four types that appear to encode
the principal hues. The deeper mechanisms that translate these diverse
sensitivities into the conscious perception of color are under active
investigation. Few brain scientists doubt that a full explanation of
color vision at the levels of the cell and molecule will eventually
become possible. Furthermore, simple genetic changes in color vision,
creating the various forms of color blindness, occur widely through
human populations. They have been associated tentatively with the
malfunction of particular genes located on the X-chromosome.
The intensity of the learning bias was strikingly revealed by an
experiment conducted on color perception during the late 1960s by
Eleanor Rosch of the University of California at Berkeley. In looking
for "natural categories" of cognition, Rosch exploited the fact that
the Dani people of New Guinea have no words to denote color; they
speak only of "mili" (roughly, dark) and "mola" (light). Rosch
considered the following question: if Dani adults set out to learn a
color vocabulary, would they do so more readily if the color terms
correspond to the principal innate hues? In other words, would
cultural innovation be channeled to some extent by the innate genetic
constraints? Rosch divided 68 volunteer Dani men into two groups. She
taught one a series of newly invented color terms placed on the
principal hue categories of the array (blue, green, yellow, red),
where most of the natural vocabularies of other cultures are located.
She taught a second group of Dani men a series of new terms placed off
center, away from the main clusters formed by other languages. The
first group of volunteers, following the "natural" propensities of
color perception, learned about twice as quickly as those given the
competing, less natural color terms. They also selected these terms
more readily when allowed a choice.
[3] Infants prefer to look at objects that have particular shapes and
arrangements, and as time passes their choices change in a predictable
manner. From birth they gaze longest at pictures that are large,
contain numerous elements, and consist of curbed lines. Most of all
they favor figures whose outlines contain approximately ten
independent turns. By the age of eight weeks they also prefer bull's-
eye designs over parallel stripes, touching elements over those that
are separated, and irregular arrays of elements over those that are
perfectly aligned. These apparently innate biases parallel an early
preference for the abstract design of a normally composed human face
over various humanlike but scrambled designs. By twenty weeks the
infant shifts its attention increasingly to new designs and faces in
preference to those it has already learned, and as a result its visual
experience expands rapidly.
[4] Although facial expressions vary from one culture to the next,
strong tendencies exist that must be classified as gene-culture
transmission as opposed to a purely cultural form of transmission.
People around the world use a common set of expressions to register
fear, loathing, anger, surprise, and happiness. Paul Ekman of the
University of California at San Francisco tested the strength of this
predisposition in an elegant manner. He photographed Americans acting
out these emotions and New Guinea highland tribesmen as they told
stories in which similar feelings were emphasized. When individuals
from each culture (New Guinea or American) were then shown portraits
from the other culture, they interpreted the meanings of the facial
expressions with more than 80 percent accuracy. This was the case even
though the New Guinea tribesmen had been previously exposed very
little to the outside world, while the Americans who looked at the
pictures knew nothing of the Papuan culture.
The distinctive nature of the brain's program in facial recognition is
further illustrated by the rare medical condition called
prosopagnosia. When lesions occur on particular regions of the
undersurface of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain, the
patient cannot identify other persons by their faces. In extreme cases
he is unable to recognize the features of even his closest relatives.
The disability is not due to a general loss of visual memory; the
patient can still identify objects other than faces by sight alone.
Nor is it due to an inability to remember different people; the
patient can distinguish them by their voices. The bizarre properties
of prosopagnosia demonstrate how the brain can be biologically
programed to follow specific sensory cues, especally when the category
of learning is concerned with the most pressing needs of social life.
[5] Newborn infants choose most kinds of sugars over plain water and
in this descending order of preference: sucrose, fructose, lactose,
and glucose. They also discriminate among substances that are acid,
salty, and bitter, reacting by twisting their faces into the
characteristic adult expressions of distaste for each substance. This
selectivity continues into childhood and has important effects in the
evolution of adult cuisines.
[6] Anxiety in the presence of strangers occurs in very young children
in all the many cultures around the world studied by the German
ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. The baby turns away, buries its
face in its mother's shoulder, and often begins to cry. This
relatively complicated response first appears at six to eight months
of age and peaks sometime during the subsequent year. It does not
depend on previous unpleasant experience with strangers; nor does it
appear to be linked to crying and other signs of discomfort caused by
separation from the mother. The latter development is distinct in
appearance and first emerges when the infant is about fifteen weeks
old. Anxiety in the presence of strangers continues at a lower,
controlled level into childhood and even maturity. It slides easily
into fear and hostility, contributing to the tendency of people to
live in small groups of intimates. These responses are intensified
when strangers stare. Eyes and eye-like patterns have been found to
have a generally higher arousal effect on people of all ages than do
other facial features. They are also key elements in the attraction of
newborn infants to the face as opposed to other parts of the body, and
they play a central role in communication afterwards.
[7] The innate tendency for human beings to learn one thing as opposed
to another, in other words gene-culture transmission, is perhaps most
dramatically illustrated by the phobias. These are the extreme fears
into which people are plunged- stricken by nausea, cold sweat, and
other reactions of the au-tonomic nervous system. Phobias typically
emerge fullblown after only a single unpleasant experience, and they
are exceptionally difficult to eradicate, even when the victim is
carefully reassured and coached by a psychiatrist. It is remarkable
that the phobias are most easily evoked by many of the greatest
dangers of mankind's ancient environment, including closed spaces,
heights, thunderstorms, rurming water, snakes, and spiders. Of equal
significance, phobias are rarely evoked by the greatest dangers of
modern technological society, including guns, knives, automobiles,
explosives, and electric sockets. Nothing could better illustrate the
peculiar and occasionally obsolete rules by which the human mind is
assembled, or the slowness of man to adapt to the dangers created by
his own technological triumphs.
For convenience we decided to label the various regularities of
development as epigenetic rules. Epigenesis is a biological term that
means the sum of all the interactions between the genes and the
environment that create the distinctive traits of an organism. Thus
the color vocabulary used by a person is based on the interaction of
genes prescribing color perception in his eyes and brain with the
environment in which he developed. This environment ranges from the
fetal conditions that produced his eyes and brain to his subsequent
enculturation. The epigenetic rules of color vision and classification
are stringent enough to direct cultures around the world toward the
central clusters of color classification as revealed by the Berlin-Kay
experiments. But they are not strong enough to impose completely
identical classifications on every culture and every person.
The epigenetic rules of mental development are a menagerie of diverse
but still largely unstudied phenomena. During the past twenty years,
psychologists and brain scientists have uncovered evidence of
developmental regularities in even the most subtle and complex forms
of mental activity. People follow unexpected and sometimes remarkably
inefficient procedures in the way they recall information, judge the
merits of other people, estimate risk, and plan strategy. Among the
peculiarities of decision making is the excessive use of stereotypes.
When observers are asked to guess the occupation of another person who
is shy, helpful, and obsessed with detail, they are more likely to
choose librarian over other occupations, even when their personal
experience runs counter to this conclusion. Most people, including
some trained statisticians, intuitively expect small random samples to
reflect faithfully the large population from which they are drawn,
although this is demonstrably untrue in a large percentage of the
cases. Other studies have revealed that human beings are also poor
intuitive statisticians when dealing with the major events of life and
death. They tend to equate events that have a low probability and low
consequence with events that have a low probability but important
consequence. As a result they underestimate the effects of
catastrophes. In particular, they consistently misjudge the future
effects of warfare, as well as floods, windstorms, droughts, and
volcanic eruptions, even when such events are repeatedly experienced
and remembered over many generations. Other examples of developmental
bias in language formation, logic, and basic arithmetic will be
described in the next chapter, when the evolutionary origin of the
modern mind is more fully examined.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://tinyurl.com/eg0d
