Sunday, March 18, 2012

This Heaven Gives Me Migraine: Cultural evolution, natural selection, and a look at what it's "natural" for great apes to do.

Are We “Meant” to Have Language and Music? | The Crux | Discover Magazine
What do ironing and hang-gliding have in common? Not much really, except that we weren’t designed to do either of them. And that goes for a million other modern-civilization things we regularly do but are not “supposed” to do. We’re fish out of water, living in radically unnatural environments and behaving ridiculously for a great ape. So, if one were interested in figuring out which things are fundamentally part of what it is to be human, then those million crazy things we do these days would not be on the list.
 A song to play while you contemplate what natural behavior is, and whether ideas of what's "natural" or "unnatural" ought to have any sort of sway in deciding what behaviors ought to be culturally acceptable ...



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