Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman           Our genes are ultimately responsible for the existence of our brains (to date, developmental biology is the only process capable of building this complex machine); but the genes clearly build it to be a somewhat (though by no means completely ) plastic processing unit. i And yet this degree of plasticity is itself a heritable, genetically encoded trait— the product of natural selection (which would by definition never be able to produce a genetic leash of zero percent). ii How else would we have evolved from brainless cells, to our simple hardwired ancestors, to the complex behavioral great apes? iii Neurobiologist Leo M. Chalupa points out that, “what's special about brain plasticity... is that the changes are mediated by events that are in some sense adaptive,” (what a fantastic coincidence that would be, if plastic-learning were a genuinely arbitrary process victim to the whims of, “cultural constructs”). iv Let's lo...

by Steven Gussman           Despite all of the posturing about, “interactionist,” models of phenotype (to say nothing of pure, “environmentalis,”) all of the theories of biology (and much of the controversial hypotheses still being argued over) are integrally genetic. You wouldn't know it from most discussions of behavioral genetics, but there are indeed reports of, “vacuum behaviors,” in the animal kingdom (let alone the obvious cases of vacuum morphology). i Richard Dawkins writes:           The urge to feel 'grateful' in a vacuum, when there's nobody there to thank, is very strong. Animals sometimes perform complicated patterns of behavior in a vacuum – they are even called 'vacuum activities'. The most spectacular example I know is from a German film I once saw of a beaver... Beavers probably don't understand why they do it. They just do it without thinking, because they have a mechanism in the brain that goes off ...