Libertarians Moving to N.H. to Establish 'Free State'

[Zhukov]

Bubba, I never said people were not naturaly individuals, I said that traits like selfishness and selflesness are aquired through life, as opposed to being imprinted into human genetics. Instead of 'all the things I mentioned' being inescapable parts of human exsistance, I believe they are behaviour adapted in relation to the enviroment.

I think I may be on a different wavelength to what oyu are talking about, so hook me up with some of your study material.

[CaptainBubba]

Thing is, I'm refering to egomaniacal in the sense that Rand would be one. Honestly I don't think shes egomaniacal, but if you choose to label her as one then I suppose I can't say I thinks its bad. And we all intrinsicly and unconciously focus on ourselves so much that if one chose to make a case for it, we could all be proved mentally ill in the sense that we are egomaniacs.

In fact that sounds like a good dystopia book.

I said that traits like selfishness and selflesness are aquired through life, as opposed to being imprinted into human genetics. Instead of 'all the things I mentioned' being inescapable parts of human exsistance, I believe they are behaviour adapted in relation to the enviroment.

And you're wrong.

Pick up any book dealing with the scientific study of human nature. I already reccommended this one to Helm, but The Blank Slate is a particuraly good one. A little too text booky at some points but still good.

[Zhukov]

Well I found a few people that don't seem to think I am wrong; like Dr Craig Venter for example (President and chief scientific officer of Celera Geonomics).

This is from the official press release issued by Science magazine http://www.sciencemag.org/ which published his firms results in its 16 February issue:

There are many surprises from this first look at our genetic code that have important implications for humanity. Since the June 26, 2000 announcement our understanding of the human genome has changed in the most fundamental ways. The small number of genes - 30,000 instead of 140,000 - supported the notion that we are not hard-wired . We now know that the notion that one gene leads to one protein and perhaps one disease is false. One gene leads to many different products and those products-proteins- can change dramatically after they are produced. We know that regions of the genome that are not genes may be the key to the complexity we see in humans. We now know the environment acting on these biological steps may be key in makin us what we are. Likewise the remarkably small number of genetic variations that occur in genes again suggest a significant role for environmental influences in developing each of our uniqueness.

This is Dr.Venter, from the Daily Telegraph, 14 February:

The fruit fly genome has 13,000 genes and everyone thought that because humans are so much bigger and smarter, we should have a lot more. If you think we are hard-wired—that everything is deterministic—there should be a lot of genes because we have a lot of traits. This makes me as a scientist both laugh and cry. I laugh at the absurdity of it and I want to cry because it is accepted as fact by so much of society. But we are not hard-wired

This is what he apparantly said in a pre-publication press conference to Science magazine:

The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are crucial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1164792.stm
Here is an article that may be of some relevance, specificaly:

There are two fallacies to be avoided," Dr Venter's team write in the journal Science.

"Determinism, the idea that all characteristics of a person are 'hard-wired' by the genome; and reductionism, that now the human sequence is completely known, it is just a matter of time before our understanding of gene functions and interactions will provide a complete causal description of human variability."

Another scientist, Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, makes the same point in another article in the same issue of Science:

The successes of medical genetics and genomics during the last decade have resulted in a sharp shift toward an almost completely genetic view of ourselves. I find it striking that 10 years ago, a geneticist had to defend the idea that not only the environment but genes shape human development. Today, one feels compelled to stress that there is a large environmental component to common diseases, behavior, and personality traits! There is an insidious tendency to look to our genes for most aspects of our "humanness", and to forget that the genome is but an internal scaffold for our existence.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected.../ecngen215.xml
Another interesting article:

Scientists also found that these instructions were strikingly similar across all ethnic groups, with every person sharing 99.99 per cent of their genetic code with all others.

So much for individualism through genes, eh?

We also share many genes with more humble organisms - about half with the fruitfly and the nematode worm, and about a fifth with yeast. All that distinguishes an Inuit from a Cockney or an Aborigine, even Britney Spears from Diana Ross, are variations in 300,000 letters in a three billion letter sequence in the human genome.

Individual variations in genetic code represent just 0.01 per cent of the sequence of letters.

biological determinism saw it's hey day with Hitler and Thatcher, and I think it is time for it to die.

I'll get back to you on The Blank Slate, I have only managed to find some stuff on Pinkers previous book How the Mind Works.