• yesman@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Psychologists are trying to get in on the act with ‘evolutionary psychology’. An exciting new field of unfalsifiable just-so bullshit.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Nature and nurture are just different levels of the same idea. Nurture is just a higher level version of nature, just as Python is a higher level language than assembly, but they both ultimately work by turning on and off transistors.

    It’s like when you’re watching a YouTube video. You can choose to explain how the creator digitally edited the video, the lighting, the chapters, the topic of the video. Or you can explain how packets of data are being sent over radio waves, and a complicated series of transistors turn on and off in complex ways, leading to certain pixels being displayed on your screen. They’re both describing the same phenomenon, just in different ways.

    In the same way, while describing human minds in terms of motivation, logical thinking, phobias, memory, etc may be useful for the higher levels of psychology, noticing that higher levels of dopamine are correlated with higher levels of hallucinations in people with schizophrenia, and noticing the complex ways neurons and biochemical indicators interact, is the same idea, just at a lower level.

    Both are useful, and both are true, they’re just different ways of thinking about it.

  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    We are genetically conditioned to learn from our experiences while we grow up, which are influenced by our environment.

  • Wes4Humanity@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Genetics= nature, neural structures= nurture… Human brains aren’t developed at birth, it takes a couple decades for the neutral structures to develope completely and it’s everything going on around the person that decides how those structures get wired (nurture)

    • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      As a biologist,

      We can’t even get the actions of water bears down.

      We have the entire genetic code and brain mapping of a fruit fly, and can get, very slow, good guesses about how they respond to very basic stimulus.

      Let’s not even get into epigenetics.

      I would never downplay the importance or difficulty of psychology.

      But I get nothing but kicks on this house of “science” memes.