Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind
Jesse J. Prinz
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0393347893
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A loud counterblast to the fashionable faith of our times: that human nature is driven by biology . . . urgent and persuasive.”―Sunday Times (London)
In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible.
this day, the practice of IQ testing is sometimes justified by the assumption that g exists. If there is no g, then generalized intelligence tests may serve little purpose. We might replace them with independent tests for different skills, and we might dismiss the whole concept of general intelligence as meaningless. In recent years g has come under attack. Some researchers claim it is a statistical artefact.29 As just noted, g is postulated to explain the fact that performance on a variety of
when to pronounce the -s ending softly, when to pronounce it like a z and when to make it into a whole new syllable, as in blizzes? Even as thoughtful adults, it takes a lot of work to explain this pattern. In fact, we might not even be explicitly aware of any pattern until it’s pointed out to us. Or consider a harder case. It’s grammatical to say ‘Sally squirted paint on the wall’ and ‘Sally squirted the wall with paint’, inverting the indirect object and direct object. But when we say, ‘Peggy
main ingredients making up our cells. A typical body cell will comprise 10,000 different proteins. Most cells have a complete copy of the genome, yet they are very different. The reason for that is some of the genes are like switches. Within any given cell, some genes will be turned on and some will be turned off. This process is called gene regulation, and it can occur at various different stages of protein manufacture including transcription and translation. The DNA inside a cell comes into
and artisans. Consequently, medieval Europe had a collectivist orientation at the time. Studies of medieval biographies suggest that people did not conceive of themselves as unique individuals with distinctive traits and abilities, but rather, they saw themselves as dependent parts of a larger whole, with each person playing a preordained social role. Individualism re-emerged in the late Middle Ages as feudalism waned. To escape the drudgery of agrarian fiefdoms, people started moving to cities,
casts doubt on the idea that there is a set of universal laws of thought that we all use to the same degree in the same contexts. Theories of how the mind works that are taught in most psychology textbooks might be better described as theories of how the Western mind works, since most of the research reported has been done on American college students. The study of the mind cannot be separated from anthropology, since the mind is always informed by culture. 9 Gender and Geometry When we think