samskivert: The Birth of the Mind (3)

29 September 2005

More hot genome action. There are plenty of fascinating tidbits in the book, but I felt a bit like the choir on the receiving end of a sermon. The author’s main point is that genes play a role in developing various structures in the brain, even though those structures can be modified after the fact based on influence from the environment. Nature and nurture, not versus. Roger.

Maybe there are a lot of people still running around that are sufficiently ignorant of the last fifty years of progress in biology, but I for one would have appreciated reading more about actual results in the efforts to understand the development of the brain and less about how people who are stupid enough to hold a strong “tabula rasa” position need to acknowledge that some parts of the brain are pre-wired.

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