Biology and People

[rowyn]

Using only biological drives to understand human nature is like using only the fact that computers ultimately run on binary to understand Microsoft Office.

Yes, that fact is true, and yet somehow it does not actually tell you "use Ctrl-C to copy".

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I would never recommend "using only biological drives" (emphasis mine) "to understand human nature." Doing so is to ignore the fact that our heritage is memetic in addition to being genetic; which is to say that we have culture; and that we are more intelligent than instinctive -- that we have thought.

Having said this, it is a very bad idea to ignore the role biological drives play in our lives, and even more importantly the effect of evolution on memetic constructs. Not all proposed customs are equally oriented to survival and reproduction, either genetic or memetic, and the accumulation of centuries and millennia of such selection has a profound effect on the cultures we evolve.