On 05 Feb 2005, at 7:51 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
But there is more and more evidence pointing to a combination of nature and nurture, rather than just one of those things, to explain more and more of human culture.
Not to split hairs, but the whole nature vs. nurture thing is a crappy metaphor. Hardware vs. software is actually much better.
If the language centers in a child's brain are damaged, it doesn't matter how much "nurture" they get, they will never develop normal human language. They simply don't have the hardware for it.
On the other hand, there are well-documented cases of children receiving nothing but ungrammatical input (pidgin) who nonetheless invent a fully grammatical language from this impoverished input -- this is called "creolization" -- the most-studied case involves deaf children in Nicaraugua, who invented their own fully grammatical sign language. So even when the software (culture) is defective, the hardware will still attempt to do what it was designed to do.
More info here:
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/u-Ch.13.html
The point is that hardware supervenes on software. The software (culture) depends on the hardware (human brains). And human brains aren't blank slates.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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