[HN Gopher] A Conversation with E.O. Wilson
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       A Conversation with E.O. Wilson
        
       Author : amadeuspagel
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2021-12-31 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (quillette.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (quillette.com)
        
       | epivosism wrote:
       | "What we have in human nature is our inheritance from a
       | prehistoric past going back millions of years. We do have strong
       | predispositions--you can call them instincts--that become
       | dangerous in modern society. So, what we should do is conduct the
       | best research we can, in biology and the social sciences, and
       | find out what it is to be human. And then recognize that these
       | are particular flaws in our nature in a modern techno-scientific
       | world, and work with that knowledge to pull us on through. This
       | is not unlike, say, trying to find the basis for genetic disease,
       | to look for things that make people sick because of mutated genes
       | or pathogens, to find out what causes sickness. Would you then
       | say this sickness is the way things should be, because "is" is
       | "ought"? That is crazy. But the naturalistic fallacy is equally
       | crazy in terms of human nature."
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | E.O. Wilson's work on ants is fascinating stuff, and his
       | Pulitzer-prize winning text co-authored with Bert Holldobler is
       | well worth reading [1]. Similarly he did a lot to bring the issue
       | of collapsing biodiversity at a global scale to public attention
       | [2].
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ants [2]
       | https://www.nap.edu/catalog/989/biodiversity
       | 
       | That said, his notion that a very large fraction of human
       | behavior is genetically determined, rather than being the product
       | of early childhood influences, i.e. the whole sociobiology
       | business... is highly questionable at best. Humans are not ants,
       | and claims that genetic determinism is the basis of human social
       | structures don't hold up under scrutiny.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-31 23:02 UTC)