Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Nature and nurture

There's an excellent article which is well worth your time over at The American Scholar by Brian Boyd entitled 'Getting it all wrong' (which I found via Arts & Letters Daily).

It's about, in essence, the radically culturalist assumptions which have taken over much of the humanities, particularly Boyd's field, which is literature.

Boyd, however, is convinced that understanding people is about more than understanding texts:

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak.

Alongside culture (note: not in place of culture) Boyd insists that humanities scholars take seriously the impact of biology on human experience and knowlege creation.

A biological view of our knowledge shows both its insecurity and its dependence on older and poorer forms of knowing, while also explaining the possibility of the growth of knowledge. Derrida’s challenge to the basis of knowledge seems bold, but it cannot explain advances in understanding, evident in the slow gradient from single cells to societies and the steep one from smoke signals to cell phones. Evolutionary biology offers a far deeper critique of and explanation of the origins and development of knowledge, as something, in Derrida’s terms, endlessly deferred, yet also, as biology and history show, recurrently enlarged.

Very true, very true.

I have a couple of forthcoming articles making, in one way or another, similar points. And I'll let you know when the slow gears of academic publishing bring them out into the light of day.

In the meantime, spend some time reading the rest of what Brian Boyd has to say in this article. If you like what you find there, check out The Literary Animal, to which Boyd also contributes. The book is a very thought provoking and insightful contribution to debates around the relationship between culture and biology.

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