Re: Pinker's How the Mind Works + The Blank Slate

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Sep 13 2002 - 15:38:08 MDT


Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> owner-extropians@extropy.org wrote:
>
>>Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>>
>>>### I wonder if mentioning this book will earn you accusations of
>>>being a barbarian, racist, or maybe even a Nazi. After all, Pinker
>>>reiterates the notion universally accepted by psychologists, that
>>>the variation in intelligence is predominantly determined by genetics
>>
>>Not that I noticed. Are you sure you're not confusing Pinker's
>>evolutionary psychology with the quite separate discipline of
>>behavioral genetics?
>
> ### The cryptic way is carrying over from SL4 - but bear with me, your
> question needs to be couched in simpler and more explicit terms.

****

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

In fact, evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics are animated by two
radically different questions:

    1. What is the universal, evolved architecture that we all share by
virtue of being humans? (evolutionary psychology)
    2. Given a large population of people in a specific environment, to
what extent can differences between these people be accounted for by
differences in their genes? (behavior genetics)

                -- Tooby and Cosmides

****

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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