andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2006-03-17 08:48 am
andrewducker) wrote2006-03-17 08:48 am
Things so horrible you never want to be in the situation to find them out #167
Collecting your own stool sample is _exactly_ as unpleasant as you'd imagine.
no subject
I'll agree that the agreement between such 'camps' is unusual.
[I have my own opinions on any thinking about humans that doesn't take overwhelmingly strong account of us as an animal like any other. A lot of certain intellectual traditions come to what seem to me to be very implausible conclusions given even a smattering of biological knowledge, and jump through incredible hoops to explain things that are quite simple in their roots. And I think that has been very damaging in all sorts of ways. But I'm well aware that I'm not equipped to even get started on that, so I won't...]
no subject
In a few species there are hints of another medium of transmission of information. In some primates, for example, there is rudimentary transmission of simple tool use through observation and imitation. This cultural or horizontal transmission (as opposed to the vertical descent of genetic information) is a very minor part of each generations inheritance. Except...
“... there is one species, Homo Sapiens, that has made cultural transmission its information superhighway, generating great ramifying families of families of families of cultural entities, and transforming it’s members by the culturally transmitted habit of vigorously installing as much culture as possible in the young, as soon as they can absorb it. This innovation in horizontal transmission is so revolutionary that the primates that are it’s hosts deserve a new name....[but] we could use the vernacular and call them persons. A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages.” (Dennett 2003)