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Does the new work on the
brain further our species' self-understanding?
Clearly an extreme ethological view of human society as rigidly genetically
determined is as uninformative as an extreme behaviorist view of the
human brain as a tabula rasa written on by experience. According to
the extreme ethologists, we are "innately aggressive, acquisitive, nationalistic,
capitalistic, and destructive" (Rose, 1976:351). Some of them announce
our doom by overcrowding or urge the space race as a means of channelling
aggressiveness. Some even give veiled approval to limited war or natural
population control by drought, famine, or plague, as the means of securing
ecological balance. |
While B. F. Skinner would modify and adapt us by environmental manipulation, reminding me irresistibly of H. G. Wells's First Men on the Moon in which the Selenites (the original Moonies), an insect species, were quite literally shaped by biological and psychological techniques to perform the labor appropriate to their caste, some ethologists would argue that our genetics damn us, despite our intelligence and will to survive. Regnarokr, not Walden II, will be the end of history. Hence the vogue for doom talk about such inevitabilities as ecocide, population explosion, and innate aggressiveness. Surely, a middle path is possible. Cannot we see those modalities of human perception and conceptualization, the lower brain and the upper brain, the archaic and recent systems of innervation as having been for at least several millions of years in active mutual confrontation? |