Whats this? Two posts in as many days? Madness!

[lorimt]

I'm curious. How much do you feel beholden to biology? Not, oh wow, biology has done some great stuff, but rather things like instinct or such impulses. I tend to think of myself as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions I make. Anyone else? Any particulars where you do or don't obey some sort of natural or biological demand? What sorts of things? I'm especially interested in personal choices or ideas rather than observations about humans in general.

(It just occured to me, and I realize I have no idea how typical my approach to such things actually is.)

EDIT:
In rereading, I can see I danced around what on earth I was talking about. Things like bobbzman wrote about. For example, I know that I will do something different just because I'm scared, or unhappy or whatever, even when unrelated to mood. Stuff like that, if that makes sense. Not just emotional response, but things where I'm more rationalizing an action than rationally deciding to do something, or feeling an impulse to do something even when it seems like a bad idea. ::mutters:: I'm not really talking about emotion, I'm just not sure how to distinguish this case. Stuff like sithjawa are good examples too, and not ones that occured to me originally.

EDIT THE SECOND:
I'm still not coherent. I'll try again some other time when I've had time to think, and wave my hands about while talking at people.

Comments

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

(1) Read Pinker's "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Its totally awesome, and i think gets at what you're asking.

(2) A number of neuroscience and psychology studies have documented people creating post-hoc justifications for doing something *immediately* after doing it, and then claim they planned to do it all along. Eg, our brains are good at convincing us that we have chosen to do things. So any feeling we might have about why we did something is also subject to a 'because my biology said so' response.

(3) A surprising number of social traits are heritable with strong support. Such as political party, which is somewhere between 60% and 80% heritable. Thats approximately as heritable as height, which no one contests is gene-based. Don't be surprised if during our lifetimes DNA-screening becomes standard for a diverse array of things from marriage (check for potential spousal abusers, etc...) to jobs (personality-type matching) to admittance to institutions of higher learning. Certainly if such technology were available tomorrow, there are no laws prohibiting it.

(4) Not everything is directly dictated by biology, but rather general features relating to specific decisions may be dictated: pessimism or optimism, pacifism or hawkishness; these general features lend themselves to particular decisions. And as anyone who has extensively debated philosophy should know, the axioms a person starts with are not held because of necessarily rational reasons, and no amount of argumentation will change their mind; reasons they give are post hoc justifications for believing it, not reasons to believe it.

(5) effectively, this comes down to the evolution of behavior. Because it can evolve, it must at some level be dictated by biology. And we know behavior in every other organism is related to their genotype. The only reason this isn't widely claimed for humans is because it isn't politically correct to do so. It may suggest unsettling things like "not all criminals can be rehabilitated" (empirically true as well, but evidence doesnt deter liberal ideologues).

(6) from a different tack, if humans are the only entities with free will, where did this come from? How does 'free will' evolve in a biological system where behavior has always been tightly regulated? How does the will become unconstrained by the biological architecture of the brain and the non-randomly laid out neural pathways that are created before a single thought is formed?

(7) I'd also redirect you to my earlier post in which i asked what free will would look like from an omniscient perspective, and proved (to my satisfaction) that free will is impossible. Briefly: either all possible actions have equal probability at a decision point or there must be constraints on the decision. If there are constraints, then the will making the decision is not free because it cannot choose every choice or is predestined to choose some with greater probability than others. If there are equal probabilities, the decision is random, and while free, is not rational. Nothing exists that makes totally random decisions (barring the existence of some obscure and thankfully rare mental illness).

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

Political party affiliation is strongly associated with geographic, ethnic, religious, and economic classes. Since these tend to remain moderately constant in most families between single generations, producing a "heritable" effect, I'd suggest that the case for a genetic basis is fairly weak (unless studies using actual marker genotypes across different populations have been done, in which case I'd be very interested in reading the paper).

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

And by ethnic class, I mean in terms of social identity. Obviously there are strong genetic biases correlated with ethnic ancestry, but that's not what I see going on here.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I've been calling this the "fruitcake recipes are heritable" definition of heritable. The original idea is someone else's, but I've forgotten who.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I realized I was unclear. It's a perfectly valid type of heredity -- it just has nothing to do with genes, unlike blue eyes or a tendency to be tall or whatever.

[jibb.livejournal.com]

Memetic heritability?

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

well, these are all correllation arguments though, just like heritability is. Its not possible to claim that political party isn't inherited (at some level) in a true genetic sense; that hypothesis isn't refutable on the basis of 'it also corresponds to these things'. Now, i'm not going to argue that there's a neuron in our brain thats either republican or democrat, but i would argue that its likely there are ideological premises that push us towards one party or another, and these are heritable in a biological sense. Just think of some of the very axiomatic assumptions made by the ideology of each party. Those are probably tied (vaguely) directly to brain chemistry and genes.