You're telling me pristine harmony with nature depicted in Disney's "Pocahantas" wasn't the way it was? I'm crushed.

It actually brings to mind the reason I hated the movie "Avatar," aside from the fact that James Cameron is utterly incapable of directing characters that are realistically a mixture of good and evil; his characters are either/or. I'm basically fed up with being told how evil and horrible I am, and how much better primitive peoples are.

Yes, yes, yes...We're absolutely vile. I get it now. When I die they're going to bury me face down so I can see where I'm going. It seems to be the popular thing in Hollywood these days. Just present some other society -- even fictional such as in District 8 and Avatar -- and we're always the vile ones.

Posted by: Patrick at March 15, 2010 12:40 AM

THis guy needs to smoke a joint or pop a xanex before he gives a speach. Needs to slow down and calm down just a bit

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 12:46 AM

Fisrt off Patrick wasnt District 9 supposed to be a commentary on apartheid?

And I saw Avatar more as a longing for the type of intimacy that people can never really have.

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 1:48 AM

Offtopic, has anyone else noticed a problem with youtube latley, it seems to take forever to watch anything anymore

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 2:03 AM

Here are some important criticisms of this TED talk:

1. Why –why the fuck– are posters of Hepburn and Dot (of Kansas) hanging alongside Newton in such a venue?

2. Did you note the new introductory music? This is at least the third iteration of the musical introduction to these pieces. The first was just gob-smackingly horrific, a throbbing teenage cussword in church. The second was 12% less annoying. This version is 12% less annoying still. The people who are putting these together don't seem to understand that brief, charming presentations of the sort these tend to be will sell themselves. They don't need pompous, momentous, screechy dressings to get our attention. We clicked the link: What do they want?

3. The Macedonian and Korean subtitles on that clip are for shit.

(That's a joke: Don't bother translating them to check.)

4. The conclusion is red meat for naive, isolated, dimbulb liberals, a group still burping from a vast serving of hope and change. He explicitly suggests that life will get better and better as people bring more and more intimate attention to each other's feelings.

I doubt very strongly that this is the case. Stoicism is as valuable a tool in life as is connectedness. The people you still like after a lifetime are the ones who've grown, and they didn't grow because it was fun, they grew because life hurts.

Lou— What do you mean about Avatar? (Haven't seen it.) What intimacy can people not have? And what do you mean about Youtube? They've turned up the resolution nowadays... Some things go all the way to 1080, so many clips will take a while to watch if you download them first, which is the way I do it through cheap DSL (and Firefox).

Posted by: Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 15, 2010 3:41 AM

See it and get back to me its not something you can easily explain to someone who hasnt watched it

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 4:04 AM

Anyone who wants to live without technology is welcome to go camping, permanently.

The idiots who romanticize this lifestyle have never actually lived it. Things didn't go too well for that hiker in Alaska who was killed by wolves. A synonym for harmony with nature is "prey."

Posted by: MarkD at March 15, 2010 6:40 AM

One can also recommend reading the books "Little House on the Prairie" books. Not the sappy television take-offs but the original books.

Dig out a house on the bank of a river, put a roof on it yourself, while still managing to find enough food to eat. Read between the lines about what that really means. Living close to nature, sounds great until you think about the implications: the one-room house for the whole family. The packed-dirt floor.

The house heated by a fireplace, which has a chimney fire that destroyes the house in the middle of winter. Lots goes unsaid, but is nonetheless painfully clear...

The noble savage normaly led a life that was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Funny how so few of the extremist Greens are willing to live without the conveniences that they so decry.

Posted by: bradley13 at March 15, 2010 6:51 AM

Hey, lujlp. Thanks for your insights as to the themes of the two movies. I wasn't intending to tell anyone what the movies were about, per se, only to point out that in movies regarding conflicting civilizations, the civilization that most closely resembles our own is consistently presented as the evil, less cultured side.

Speaking of evil and uncultured, Crid, nice to see you again. We missed you yesterday.

Posted by: Patrick at March 15, 2010 6:57 AM

Thanks for reminding me, Bradley13. I LOVED those books. Read every one.

"Mother Nature" is a really, really tough bitch.

I was so impressed when we went to Christopher Leonard's house (Elmore's son) in Tucson to see how well-built it is vis a vis locking in heat when it's cold out and keeping the heat out when it's hot, with the windows arranged just so and in certain sizes.

Loved Tucson. Beautiful light, always wanted to live in a log cabin and lots of people have those old-wood beamed ceilings.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 6:59 AM

"being seen as greedy or narcissistic or being caught scamming another member of your band could get you voted out"

Not to mention that these definitions were different back then. Beating your wife was not only condoned, it was encouraged. So let's forget about the "good old days"...including how wonderful it was for the tribe to shun you. The definitions of why you might get shunned were for shit back then too!

Posted by: Karen at March 15, 2010 7:36 AM

It occurred to me last night that most children and young adults in the U.S. today have probably never heard of polio. That's quite a transformation in half a century; as recently as the 1950s, there were major polio epidemics, with 58,000 cases being reported in 1952 according to . Read the timeline (it's a quick read) to see how quickly polio went from unknown to a major public health problem; the first reported cases in the U.S. occurred in 1894, and major epidemics were taking place in the 1910s.

Given the disease's rate of growth, and scaling up for the current population, it's quite possible that we would be seeing over a million cases a year had vaccines not been developed. Picture millions of Americans bound to wheelchairs and respirators, and think about that the next time you see an anti-vaccine rant.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at March 15, 2010 7:37 AM

The possibility of being shunned kept people from behaving like narcissistic jerks.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 7:39 AM

My neighbor (who had her children vaccinated) told me that 45 percent of the children at her kids' charter school in Los Angeles are unvaccinated. Bye-bye herd immunity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

I shudder to think of what diseases could come back (Thanks, Jenny McCarthy!)

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 7:45 AM

One can also recommend reading the books "Little House on the Prairie" books. Not the sappy television take-offs but the original books.

(snip)

The house heated by a fireplace, which has a chimney fire that destroyes the house in the middle of winter. Lots goes unsaid, but is nonetheless painfully clear...

Posted by: bradley13 at March 15, 2010 6:51 AM

________________________________

Um, that didn't happen. The fire was put out - assuming you mean the book of "Little House on the Prairie."

And it wasn't even winter.

Posted by: lenona at March 15, 2010 8:05 AM

I had a shop teacher in r high, one of the last cases in america of polio. The difference in the size of his arms and hands were striking and unmistakable. His right hand looked like the BK comercial guys tiny hands.

And hasnt it come out that McCarthys kid doesnt acctually have autism?

I wonder how many peoples kids are going to have to die before they wake up.

And lets wildly assume for the sake of argument that vaccines do cause autism all evidence to the contrary. Lets weigh the numbers of kids who wind up dammaged vs the number of chldren who dont die and dont wind up damaged from dozens of diseies.

If you dont want to put up with the risks associated with living in a given society you are always welcome to leave all the comforts behind along with all the problms you se

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 8:27 AM

"genetically programmed tendencies to lie, sneak, steal, cheat and behave like thoughtless buttwads"

I don't think there are any such tendencies. We're born tabula rasa. We are what we learn and how we decide to act based on that knowledge. I do agree that idealization of pre-industrial existence is ridiculous, however.

Posted by: Mark Wickens at March 15, 2010 8:32 AM

Mark, we are most certainly not born "tabula rasa," which is why you find common human behaviors across cultures, even where there is no media. If you are not informed about a subject -- such as evidence-based science of human behavior -- it's best not to pontificate about it.

Suggest you read a wonderful quick book, Warrior Lovers, by Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons. It's only about 97 pages, and gloriously clear writing on common misconceptions, like yours.

Here's a link. Fantastic book, part of the Darwin series:

Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 8:36 AM

A much longer and also very good book on the subject: Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 8:39 AM

While it bears repeating, this is not a new point.

One of the characters in Robert A. Heinlein's book "Beyond This Horizon", who had been held in stasis from (I think) 1923 to some unspecified but very distant future said pretty much the same thing. He brought up things like (paraphrased), "You think of a simple farmer, planting his garden, or cutting trees with his axe. Well, who sold him the axe? Who made his plow? 'Living off the land' is brutal, dirty, back-breaking labor, and you have no time for anything but survival."

This book was first published in 1942.

Posted by: WayneB at March 15, 2010 9:52 AM

Me: "I don't think …"
She: "We are most certainly not…"

And I'm pontificating?!

Posted by: Mark Wickens at March 15, 2010 9:58 AM

I have the science behind me. You do not. Pontificating is not the problem; it's pontificating out your ass.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 10:02 AM

I think it was Asimov, who wrote on the Bible and said, an eye for an eye... was a sharp improvement. Before that, if someone poked out your eye, you not only took out his eye, you killed him, and his family and kinfolk as far as you could identify them.

Also, ancient Hebrew law recognized rape as a real crime, but unlike today also recognized that under certain circumstances women would make false claims of rape. So, Hebrew law made provisions for the reality of both things, and both were to be severely punished. It is found today in the Christian Holy book for those who don't have easy access to the Jewish versions.

Posted by: irlandes at March 15, 2010 10:03 AM

Lenona - That's how a remember a scene, but from which book I'm not sure. It could also be I am misremembering, as it's been a while...

Posted by: bradley13 at March 15, 2010 10:07 AM

"I have the science behind me"

The "nature/nurture" debate rages on. The scientific community still remains divided on the issue, so we certainly won't find the answers on this blog!! There is science on both sides of the coin, which pretty much points the the fact that BOTH theories have merit. The science is on both sides.

Posted by: Karen at March 15, 2010 10:51 AM

The scientific community most certainly does not remain "divided" over this. The people who believe in stuff without evidence (often because it's more palatable to them to believe in the non-science-based stuff) believe in tabula rasa. The people who use evidence and think know that this is crapthink. Across cultures, people have a taste for sweet foods and fat. Across cultures, parents will sacrifice their lives for their children's. I'm on deadline, so I can't weigh in on this more than just above, but would somebody who has not been polluted by feminism, post-structuralism, and the SSSM (Standard Social Science Model) please weigh in more substantively?

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 10:57 AM

The "nature/nurture" debate rages on. The scientific community still remains divided on the issue, so we certainly won't find the answers on this blog!! Posted by: Karen

I can give you the answer right now, do you prefer the smell of carion or carrots?

Do you prefer the taste of an apple before it has fully formed, plucked freshly from the tree at the proper time, or after sitting on the ground for a week in the hot georgia sun?

Do you perfer the sensasion on fur on your skin or hot coals?

Do you prefer the taste of animal feeces or honey?

Nurture might nudge someone one way or another a bit. But naturer lays down a track that is in most instances completley unescaplable

Posted by: lujlp at March 15, 2010 11:15 AM

Have you read "The Origins of Virtue" by Ridley. Besides animal research he brings together a whole ton of hunter gatherer research, espcially more recent research. It's basically an analysis and some hypothesis about where our ethics come from. It resonates with some of what you've written. One chapter is all about exploding myths of ancient people, showing how many indigenous people wiped out species and destroyed forests (and sometimes themselves). The best part is the book is heavily footnoted for every point he makes so you can go do your own research. (Books without footnotes (like Michael Pollan's) really annoy me.

Though he does give examples of people far larger than the Dunbar number that managed to create systems to use "public" resources (getting around the Tragedy of the Commons by everyone owning an equal share).

The last 2 chapters is his vision for society which he doesn't support as well even though I'm pretty sympathetic as a libertarian. The rest of the book is eye opening and given me a lot more to read about.

Anyway it is a great book and very enlightening.

Posted by: plutosdad at March 15, 2010 11:27 AM

@lujlp: The pleasure/pain mechanism is sensory. How this fact proves moral tendencies (i.e., ones affecting our *choice* of *actions*), let alone completely inescapable ones, is unclear to me. Do you really think we are unable, by our nature, to choose not to lie, cheat, or steal? Do you think scientific research has any bearing on the answer? What relevant information does science give us that introspection doesn't.

Posted by: Mark Wickens at March 15, 2010 11:36 AM

Wolves are not blank slates. They are wolves - intelligent, social animals living in packs with rules & expected patterns of behavior. Any wolves that break the rules can turn into buzzard bait very quickly. Whether they're in a pack of 5 in Algonquin Park, or a pack of 25 on the other side of the world in Siberia, breeding alpha wolves (male & female) raise their legs when they piss to mark their territories. All subordinate wolves (male & female) squat to piss. Whether the kill is a 50 pound goat or a 1000 pound moose, the breeding alpha pair gets the first crack at the choice cuts of meat. Intermediate wolves will fight to keep the lowest ranked wolves away from the kill until the alpha pair have finished, and then they take their turn. I could go on. Wolves may all be individuals with their own distinct personalities, but they are still wolves, and they must behave as wolves should, or face severe consequences. It's not plausible to think that the same wasn't true for our human ancestors.

Posted by: Martin at March 15, 2010 11:52 AM

Oh. Well I totally remain corrected. We are born with everything. Now we don't have to blame parents for anything. There is nothing learned. All the science proves it.

Phew! I stand corrected by all of you "science based" people out there.

Morons.

Posted by: Karen at March 15, 2010 12:21 PM

Karen, I suggest you read Boyd and Richerson on cultural evolution.

Not By Genes Alone

I'm so nervous, every week in writing my column, that I get stuff right -- that it's based in solid evidence. I'm concerned with this even as I speak, and always look to correct myself. Always amazing to me when people not only go on about stuff they know nothing about, but are convinced they know something based in nothing or very little, and call others morons for, essentially, not leaping to assumptions like they do.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 1:33 PM

Luj is correct, and it's not just sensory stuff, but that is evolved, and the commonalities in how humans prefer chocolate to, say, carrion, shows that human bodies are not blank slates.

The fact that men, across cultures, prefer sexual variety much more than women do, would be an example.

The fact that women, across cultures, seek men to be providers.

There are countless, just countless, examples. On deadline, can somebody else post some?

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 1:36 PM

The quest for honey is universal. Whether it's Pygmies in the Congo climbing to the tops of tall trees or Tibetans in the Himalaya climbing to the tops of tall cliffs, people everywhere would go to any lengths & take any risks for the chance to get at a hive full of honey, the sweetest, most delicious substance primitive people could ever eat.

Reverence for mountains is universal, even among cultures living on the flattest plains. The Rocky Mountains are littered with artifacts from Indians who journeyed across the prairies on vision quests to the sacred hills. Ancient Egyptians & ancient Amerindians, who were totally unaware of each other's existence, instinctively built their holy structures in the shape of pyramids, miniature mountains. Greeks with Mt. Olympus, Moses on Mt. Sinai....

Astrology is universal. Try finding a tribal culture in which people weren't convinced that the stars in the sky foretold human destinies.

Fear of snakes is universal, even among cultures living in places where there are no venomous snakes. Not that every individual person is afraid of snakes, but serpents - Quetzalcoatl, the talking snake in the Garden of Eden - play an outsize role in every mythology.

It's awfully hard to find a culture in which men who displayed cowardice on the battlefield got any respect.

Nagging mother-in-laws are dreaded everywhere.

Asking a Masai on the Serengeti how many cattle there are in his herd is the same as asking a businessman in Los Angeles how much money he has in his bank account. There has never been a culture in which men did not like to flaunt their wealth & status symbols, both to their fellow men & to women looking for a marriage partner. It's all exactly the same instinctive behavior, whether the wealth & status is measured in new Ferraris or new camels.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but any woman with the right hip-to-waist ratio will get instant male attention anywhere on the planet.

Posted by: Martin at March 15, 2010 3:28 PM

"The people you still like after a lifetime are the ones who've grown, and they didn't grow because it was fun, they grew because life hurts."

This. Yet, there is still something fun about growing. I think it helps if you have a dog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN9G-wMvbMI

Good old Odie.

Posted by: Pirate Jo at March 15, 2010 5:12 PM

"I was so impressed when we went to Christopher Leonard's house (Elmore's son) in Tucson to see how well-built it is vis a vis locking in heat when it's cold out and keeping the heat out when it's hot, with the windows arranged just so and in certain sizes."

I am pretty sure I don't have the money to live in the style to which Christopher Leonard has become accustomed, but I will share one thing I have observed while living in Iowa (check your latitudes). If you have cold winters coupled with short days, have south-facing windows. Then you will get direct sunlight in winter! And don't feel silly about sitting in the sun for hours, when it comes in. My condo has its interior walls facing the northwest when the cold northwestern winds blow, so a lot of the brunt is absorbed. In the summer, by contrast, the sun moves to the other side of the building, so my unit is always in the shade during summer. I can just open all the windows!

Of course, living in a hive only works when you have decent neighbors - and I do, at least for now.

Posted by: Pirate Jo at March 15, 2010 5:20 PM

Martin, thank you ever so much. Well-said!

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 15, 2010 7:03 PM

"Beating your wife was not only condoned, it was encouraged."

Really? What source do you have for that?

Posted by: crella at March 15, 2010 7:45 PM

Men and women across cultures and time have had similar physical makeups and have had to deal with the same world and each other. That patterns of behavior and even psychology would emerge is not surprising. But it's not proof of built-in genetic tendencies or instinct.

And, sorry, but all these examples are a long way from "genetically programmed tendencies to lie, sneak, steal, cheat and behave like thoughtless buttwads."

Posted by: Mark Wickens at March 15, 2010 8:28 PM

When the same patterns of behavior show up in people living in totally different environments (deserts, jungles, mountains, plains) separated by thousands of years of history, and when these patterns persist through all stages of development from the Stone Age to the Space Age, then external factors (local environments, the reactions of other people) cannot be entirely responsible. The intrinsic nature of the species Homo sapiens is at work.

No one here is trying to argue that people are programmed robots, or that nurture is not a powerful influence. Human beings are intelligent, social animals. No intelligent social animal is a blank slate.

No matter how you try, you can't take a baboon from it's troop, a lion from it's pride, or a wolf from it's pack and make it into anything you want. After thousands of years of domestication & living as part of human families, dogs have been trained to do so many things - guiding blind people down city streets, sniffing out explosives - that wolves could never conceive of. But they're still DOGS! They're still canids, not hominids. The imprint of their ancestry, and their instinctive heirarchical social structure, with their owners filling the role of the leaders of the pack, is clear in every aspect of their behavior.

I'll leave Amy to deal with the lying, thoughtless buttwads, since that's her forte.

Posted by: Martin at March 15, 2010 9:31 PM

Harry and the Hendersons is still a good movie.

Posted by: Jason S. at March 15, 2010 11:24 PM

And, sorry, but all these examples are a long way from "genetically programmed tendencies to lie, sneak, steal, cheat and behave like thoughtless buttwads."

Posted by: Mark Wickens

Thats because you arent paying attention Mark.

More than anything it is our brians, more specifically our ability to be clever that is humanity's true evolutionary advanage. Sure we have opposable thumbs, but so do all primates. Yes we fashion tools but so do other animals. And we pass on knoweldge we have accumulated down thru time, but that isnt nearly as impressive as the genitic memory you see in Monach butterflies who manage to find their way to the smae spot evey four generation even though the ones arriving have never been there.

Children Mark, have you ever wached kids? They lie, they lie because they can even though they are horrible at it. They grow up thinking everything they are told is the truth becuase we dont teach them to lie or even of ideas about fiction of falsehoods. Yet one day a switch in their brains flip.

They start processing things differently. They start thinking if everything everyone says is true then I'll be belived when I say something even if its false.

This is why children will claim they werent drawing on the wall with crayons seconds after you catch them coloring on the wall with crayons.

There is a moment where every kid thinks they are the first ones, ever, in the history of time to think of lying.

Its why they cant understand how easily they are caught in their lies.

Posted by: lujlp at March 16, 2010 2:17 AM

Mark Wickens, here, from Google Books, a little Salmon and Symons on the issue, from Warrior Lovers, that I linked before. Read the bit, mid-page, about why lemurs don't have culture and humans do:

http://books.google.com/books?id=c5wVAKQq3R4C&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=every+theory+of+human+action+salmon+symons&source=bl&ots=HoK7yYB3pE&sig=SVLNFOTaUzIgzS5Ox5X3SyHY1XM&hl=en&ei=vH2fS5DwH4j0sgPrlKWpCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 16, 2010 5:48 AM

Mark, Steven Pinker's book has already been recommend and you really should go read it. However, in the interim this presentation should help:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html

Posted by: Travis at March 16, 2010 5:56 AM

Unfortunately, Travis, I think Mark is most concerned with clinging to why he is right. Here's a bit on human universals from Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today. It's from his book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.

The excerpt is from Psych Today:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200706/ten-politically-incorrect-truths-about-human-nature

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them) Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media.

Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman's health status.

Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are healthier and more fertile than other women; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Alternatively, men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason they prefer women with small waists. A new study of Polish women shows that women with large breasts and tight waists have the greatest fecundity, indicated by their levels of two reproductive hormones (estradiol and progesterone).

Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.

Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females. One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest indicator of interest and attraction. And the size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 16, 2010 6:07 AM

"Do you really think we are unable, by our nature, to choose not to lie, cheat, or steal?"

You've turned the original statement around and made a question based on false premises. OF COURSE we can CHOOSE not to lie, cheat, or steal. The issue is whether we have a tendency to lie, cheat, and steal at the impulse level. If we did not, there would be no need for laws against that behavior, because it would not exist.

During one's life, there are many times and people which mitigate AGAINST bad behavior - First, there is the fact that parents expect to be obeyed and not lied to. If you don't abide by their rules, they will punish you. Then, by lying too much outside the home, everyone begins to distrust you, and most people have a desire to be trusted. Finally bad behavior such as cheating and stealing has a tendency to get you beaten up, unless you are the most badass person around. And even then, if it becomes bad enough, people will gang up on you or ambush you to get the message across.

Now, these are just the most rudimentary reasons why bad behavior are not the norm (except that it is being either condoned or ignored more and more, so it's not as out of fashion as it should be). The more refined behaviors are the result of people thousands of years ago realizing that their group could succeed better if we agreed to act in fashions which we now place under the header "honorable", and they were able to convince others of this. Slowly, there was a system built up in most cultures, of treating people certain ways, and of sublimating the impulses to bad behavior. As we can see today, not properly teaching this to the younger generation has deplorable, possibly even disastrous, consequences.

Posted by: WayneB at March 16, 2010 6:31 AM

There are just so many ways men differ from women that are cross-culturally exhibited. Across cultures, men have highly visual sexuality, and seek beautiful women (female beauty being indicated by the stuff that points to fertility in a woman), while women care more about whether men are providers (and prioritize tallness). This is true on the Upper West Side and in Upper Volta.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 16, 2010 6:55 AM

I definitely had no idea that the idea of original sin had such a strident crowd of new secular defenders. I will read some of the material suggested. But I know we have free will. And I know that a free will that has a "tendency" to choose in a certain way is not free. At the very least, the term "tendency" is being used in an imprecise way, perhaps to refer to what most people choose (or would like to choose) given the state of philosophy, psychology, culture, etc.

(@lujlp: You are the one who went the step further from tendencies to "completley unescapable" facts. That's what I was responding to.)

Posted by: Mark Wickens at March 16, 2010 8:14 AM

>>Here's a bit on human universals from Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today. It's from his book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.

I am pretty much share Mark Wickens' suspicion that it's overstating the case to claim "genetically programmed tendencies" dictate human "universals".

Psychology - though it offers brilliant insights - tends to be a fad-ridden soft science.

Furthermore, I feel like stamping on a fruit fly every time Amy insists: "We have a tendency to get all misty-eyed about early men and women, painting them as "noble savages," living in Bambi-like harmony with nature while selflessly looking out for each other."

Nice try! But that's simply ridiculing a fringe position.

Big chunk of Amazon review quoting next about the "Shopping with Savages" book, or whatever it's silly title really is. This reviewer gets it right:

"The writers start by looking at the interesting, and not commonly refuted, theory that our behaviors and opinions are influenced by our evolutionary urges. They then cross out the term "influenced by" and replace it with "dictated by." Example: Without any sense of nuance or subtlety, the writers claim that Bill Clinton jeopardized his career with Monica Lewinsky because having sexual access to young females was his sole (yes, sole) purpose in becoming President. No, this is not an exaggeration, there was no hedging in the language. Reasonable people can probably agree that Clinton's evolutionary desire for sex was real, and that he liked having power because it made him sexier, but did it drive his career? Or, did it explain 5% of his ambition? Or even 10% of his ambition? Does anyone really believe it explained 100%? Subtlety like "multi-variable analysis" is completely beyond the grasp of this book. Everything is childishly and comically simple, linear, pre-determined, inescapable, fixed in time...."

Posted by: Jody Tresidder at March 16, 2010 8:50 AM

I am pretty much share Mark Wickens' suspicion that it's overstating the case to claim "genetically programmed tendencies" dictate human "universals". Psychology - though it offers brilliant insights - tends to be a fad-ridden soft science.

Everything tends to be "a soft science" when practiced by people who pull opinions out of their ass. Satoshi is not. He makes claims based in evidence.

People don't like the idea that we're genetically programmed, so they try to cut it down like Jody does above. But, there are NUMEROUS studies that show how people, across borders and cultures, have the same behavior -- typically varying most down male/female lines.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 16, 2010 9:21 AM

>>Everything tends to be "a soft science" when practiced by people who pull opinions out of their ass. Satoshi is not. He makes claims based in evidence.

Amy,
Okay - then why doesn't he show us the mechanism?

As I said, brilliant insights and persuasive probabilities are one thing. (And you are a particularly perceptive commenter on some of the theories advanced - apart from the hip-waist whatsit:))

Show me the genes implicated.
Show me the controlled experiments.
Show me how you calculate - accurately - the effect of environment.

It's not at all to do with whether I "like" the idea of being genetically programmed.
But as a matter of fact, I find the thought something of a relief!

Posted by: Jody Tresidder at March 16, 2010 10:04 AM

Mark, if you are going to quote m please use the WHOLE phrase, you dropped the "in most cases" when you quoted me

Posted by: lujlp at March 16, 2010 10:36 AM

> Psychology - though it offers brilliant insights -
> tends to be a fad-ridden soft science.

Yes. Yes. So yes. Psychology in often seems to attract people who want truth provided in tweet-like, fortune-cookie nuggets that fit in your purse or pocket and can be readily shared for a surprise burst of sugary, digestible one-upmanship.

But science is a lot of work. People don't wear lab coats because they're stylish and slimming... They wear lab coats because they're working hard, moving fast and likely to spill horrible liquids onto the shitty sportswear they're wearing underneath, sportswear they can't afford to replace on an academic wage. Learning shit takes time; and learning shit always, always takes context. (Hence Jody's demand for mundane details.) To wit:

> People don't like the idea that we're
> genetically programmed

No serious person can ascribe as much to genetics as you intend to, or threaten to, with a comment like that.

Folks become fascinated with genetics because science popularizers (or mere media hucksters) like to say silly but appealing things like 'The genetic code contains all instructions an organism needs in order to thrive'. (These simplifications sound much more convincing when you're watching them with mid-level animation and synthesizer music on the Discovery channel, or reading them in Psychology Today with a cup of tea while tucked up on your sofa in a big floppy sweatshirt.) And people like to think of genetic studies as the product of sexually-unthreatening personalities working alone in tidy, well-lit laboratories on weekends, untroubled by their own presumptions or politics of any kind... Y'know, science-y science.

My favorite description of the interplay between genetics and environment was from Gould: Judging these forces independently is like guessing the area of a rectangle while knowing only the length OR the width. The values of both are decisive.

Posted by: Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 16, 2010 11:10 AM

Goddamn HTML.

Preview is for wussies.

Posted by: Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 16, 2010 11:13 AM

Ok, if jerkwadism is learned behavior, who was the first jerkwad and who taught him/her to be that way. IOW, who created the bad environment that led to jerkwadism.

If you have ever raised children you know that they do not have to be taught how to bite, hit, steal, and lie. They have to be taught how to share, take turns, and play nice.

Posted by: ken in sc at March 16, 2010 1:40 PM

Mark there are no secular adherents to original sin.

Original sin is not that all men are born evil, its all men are born guilty because of the tansgressions of Adam and Eve.

We're just saying that man is an animal like any other and therefore primarily self absorbed.

People steal because its easier than working, they lie because its easier then facing the consequences, they take thing from those weaker then themseves becuase its easier then getting it on their own.

Aside from the lack of lying due to the lack of grey matter you see the same behavior in one form or another in every animal species on the planet.

The only reason herbavores live in herds in there is saftey in numbers and thus the species survives. The reason carnivores live in packs is becuase single they would die far more quickly.

And yes, before anyone jumps in with herbavores that doent live in herds and carnivoes that dont live in packs, I'm just dealing with broad examples at the momment.

Now back to my point. You see the same pack mentailty in humans, larger groups fare better. As our brians and imaginations grew people saw the potential in banding together in ever larger groups and in supressing our baser insticnts for them most part.

Stealing your neighbors steak off the bar-b-que might feed you right now, but it opens you for realitaion down the line, sacrifice a small amount for a greater gain.

Thats all society really is, an investment in the future paid for with the occasional loss of immediate gratification.

Posted by: luljp at March 16, 2010 7:47 PM

I have a generally negative view of humanity, but not about their ability to accomplish great things. This wretched race produced such things as the USA, Dr. Pepper, and high tech, and this stuff is wonderful!

If somebody wants to go back to nature and drop dead from some curable disease, I'll just remind him not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out of civilization.

Posted by: mpetrie98 at March 17, 2010 4:16 PM