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evolutionary psychologists.
evolutionary psychology is best regarded as identical to human sociobiology.
altruism was the central problem of sociobiology in both animals and humans.
sense organs and programs of the brain.
The epigenetic rules, I believe, operate, like emotion, at two levels.
filtering and coding of stimuli
integration of large amounts of information.
lead the mind to predisposed decisions through the choice of certain memes
the breaking of otherwise continuous sensations into discrete units.
An infant begins life with other built-in acoustic responses that shape later communication and social existence.
Moro reflex:
Some preferences in chemical taste also begin at or shortly after birth. Newborns prefer sugar solutions over plain water and in the following fixed order: sucrose, fructose, lactose, glucose.
mostly audiovisual
majority of animal species, which depend mostly on smell and taste.
establish social bonds in infancy and early childhood.
The face is the chief arena of visual nonlinguistic communication and the secondary epigenetic rules that bias their psychological development.
mouth is the principal instrument of visual communication.
rich site of secondary epigenetic rules.
Yet their smile is identical in form to that of American and European infants, appears at the same time,
the telescoping of ideas and complex phenomena into simpler concepts,
Reification
dyadic instinct,
the genetic basis of the epigenetic rules.
genetics of human behavior
is that only a small number of the relevant genes and epigenetic rules have been identified. This
Because the neurotransmitters accumulate as a result of this deviation, the brain remains keyed up, prepared to respond violently to low levels of stress.
Such additive inheritance, as it is called, typically produces a bell-shaped curve in the distribution of the trait in the population as a whole.
multiple effects by a single gene.
The first is research on the heredity of mental disorders, and the second is research on gender difference and sexual preference.
Gender differences are an especially productive paradigm, even though politically controversial.
Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture.
begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules,
are no more than fragments cut from the vast mental landscape.
they offer persuasive testimony of the existence of a genetically based human nature.
into two discrete classes.
The search for human nature can be viewed as the archaeology of the epigenetic rules.
causal events ripple out from the genes to the cells to tissues and thence to brain and behavior.
they bias further evolution of the culture.
is only half the...
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The other half is what culture does to the genes. The question posed by the second half of the coevolutionary circle is how culture helps to select the mutating and ...
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overwork
and behavior are only segments of giant molecules.
activity appear as an emergent process.
which are constrained by epigenetic rules implicit in the organism’s anatomy and physiology.
plans its own future. By that means the brain determines the fate of the ge...
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Darwinian fate of everything human—the genes, the epi...
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Brains that...
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destructive. But by and large, natural selection, sustained and averaged over long periods of time, was the driving force of human evolution. Human nature is adaptive, or at least was at the time of its genetic origin.
While it is true that culture, strictly defined as complex socially learned behavior,
There is nothing contradictory in saying that culture arises from human action while human action arises from culture.
