Saturday June 03rd 2006, 10:05 am
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There is no such thing as a nature/nurture debate. It’s something that caught on in the media because it rhymes. You can’t have one without the other. A gene can only work in an environment that triggers it to turn on. An environment can only express it’s influence through an animal by turning genes on and off. You can’t impose a culture on a rock.More... You can only impose culture on an animal designed by genes to learn from culture.

Genes don’t just build your body, wind you up, then sit back and watch you run. Genes switch on and off in response to your environment. The only way an animal can learn something is to switch genes on and off.

A monkey is born predisposed to see colors important to a monkey, like fruit and fertile rumps. No environmental training will teach it to see ultraviolet, like a bumblebee The environment is like the computer programmer. But the gene is the program. You can’t train iTunes to run your Kodak software.

Likewise, in our species, men are predisposed to notice hourglass shapes, and women are predisposed to notice baby shapes, and they each release different hormones when they see these shapes that evoke emotions designed to cause behavior, because evolution programmed them with sperm-spreading instincts and baby-nursing instincts.
Asking “What made Quirk get so many detentions in grade school? Genes or environment?” is like asking “What made this blog appear before your face? The computer or the user?”

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