Quote:
Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden
This is a very deterministic opinion, and I don't believe that it is substantiated. The concept of 7.2 Billion people being "programmed" the same way after being subject to different cultural forces is ridiculously simplistic.
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Yes, I can see how my post could be interpreted that way - I am not denying that cultural forces at a macro level, or especially individual impacts on a person at the micro level, affect their behaviours to a significant extent. However, especially when you're looking at a large group of people, those people will have a lot in common simply by virtue of all being the same type of evolved simian. Consequently, patterns will emerge that will be more than just statistically significant. There is no cultural force that can erase millions of years of evolutionary psychology, and so people will have behavioural tendencies that have been ingrained in them by virtue of natural selection. This is one such tendency. People are not blank slates; their evolved characteristics can be masked, but not overwritten.