Philosophy, et cetera 2008-04-28

Culture is Biological

Ed Morrisey writes:One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the differences between whites and blacks. Wright claims that the very structure of the brains of Africans differ from that of European-descent brains, which creates differences rooted in physiology and not culture...Hilzoy responds by pointing out that Wright said no such thing. But this seems to me to miss the more fundamental error (which Hilzoy actually repeats in her post) of thinking that cultural and biological explanations are somehow alternative, competing, mutually exclusive explanations of behaviour.Clearly, that's just plain mistaken. If culture influences our thoughts and behaviour, it must therefore affect our brains (that's where the thinking occurs, after all). All behavioural and psychological differences have a neuro-/biological explanation. The only question is whether this biological difference is in turn best explained ...

read more   

more posts from Philosophy, et cetera