The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development by Kagan Jerome

Author:Kagan, Jerome [Kagan, Jerome]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780465037735
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

The ascendance of self-interest to an undisputed alpha position in the hierarchy of human motives over the past half-century has allowed economics to displace psychology as the central discipline in the social sciences. The enhanced status of economics has been accompanied by an extraordinary expansion of its earlier mission. No longer concerned only with the balance among taxes, investments, the supply and demand of goods, and the circulation of money, the author of one popular textbook defines economics as the study of individuals interacting with one another as they go about their lives. This is psychology’s mandate. But unlike the psychologists who believe that these interactions are modulated by a variety of factors—brain maturation, learning, conflict, ideals, and identifications—economists assume that most human encounters, including selecting a spouse and having a child, are controlled primarily by incentives for gaining or losing desired resources. Everything else is chaff. This narrow conception of the reasons for human behaviors should invite a smile. It does not, because most adults are susceptible to believing the claims of presumed experts and subsequently behaving in ways that prove the experts right. That is why generations of boys from the isolated New Guinea tribe described in Chapter 1 performed fellatio on older adolescents in order to become fertile.

When physicists discover evidence that does not match the predictions based on their equations, they usually change the equations to fit the observations. When evidence is inconsistent with the semantic networks of evolutionary biologists, however, many ignore the annoying observations in order to retain the assumptions of their theories. The dogmatic insistence that human actions intended to help strangers must share some properties possessed by bees, birds, rats, monkeys, and apes is preventing these scientists from attaining a fuller understanding of the human moral sense.

This resistance to acknowledging the unique meaning of human altruism resembles the resistance that Stanley Prusiner encountered in 1982, when he argued that a deformed protein, called a prion, could infect healthy proteins and thereby cause mad cow disease. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren met an equally stubborn resistance from colleagues when they wrote that ulcers were caused by the bacterium H. pylori rather than by emotional stress.

Every scientific discipline can point to a small number of rare phenomena that, according to theory, should be highly unlikely. These events, known as “black swans,” are common in biology. Among the bird species that produce songs, it is almost always the male who sings. But among plain-tailed wrens, common to Ecuador, both sexes sing, often in duets. It may be true that the primary biological urge in all animals is to maximize inclusive fitness through acts that increase the fecundity of the individual and genetically related kin. But this principle, which the biologist E. O. Wilson has questioned recently in The Social Conquest of Earth, has a black swan. Humans are the only species whose members need regular assurance of their virtue because evolutionary events have awarded them a conscious awareness of their psychological properties and a symbolic language in which the concepts good and bad permeate most decisions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.