Re: Is it nature or nurture?
Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 8:03 am
Parked on a bookshelf, usually slightly out of arm's reach from where I usually sit when using this computer system, is Emil Durkheim, "Suicide: A Study in Sociology," tr. John A Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson, The Free Press, New York, 1951.
I got to be a member of the eunuch community mainly because I decided to not commit suicide by plausibly surgically-preventable cancer, such as activated the deaths of my dad and brother.
I made that choice based on my understanding of biology, and I find that I am among the apparent ranks of perhaps-leading-edge theoretical biologists. My theoretical biology research is focused on human destructive violence as a biological phenomenon and on the design and development of pragmatic alternatives to such violence.
Yesterday, I re-read Susan Sontag, "Illness as Metaphor," the 1979 First Vintage Books Edition, copyright 1977, 1978. It is a "small" book, only 85 pages.
I surmise that I know and understand vastly more about biology than would allow me to regard nature/nurture as other than one phenomenon; nurture is an aspect of nature, nurture is totally contained within nature, and the notion of "nature (exclusive-or) nurture" or "nature versus nurture" are biological absurdities.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, and many others, have promoted the view, one with which I substantially agree, that memory is reconstructive and memory reconstruction does not exactly represent the events being remembered.
The earliest memory I can find regarding my sense of physical gender is of a time well before I was born. In contrast with what I find to be generally true for people who go through the traditional infant-child transition at, commonly, around the age of 18 months in some societies, I never developed amnesia for my early life experiences. I find that I remember the onset of "the quickening" (or "the baby has started kicking"). That event came before I started kicking. My arms were in the classical fetal position, my left wrist closer to my chest than my right wrist, and I became aware of my wrists bumping for the first time (becoming aware of said bumping) ever. Is my memory of that event accurate? I have no clue as to how to test, or even begin to evaluate, such a question.
What I can remember now is what I can remember now, and certainly is not exactly the event represented by the memory I now have.
So, my first memory of what informs me that I am of the gender diversity spectrum came notably after I began to "kick" with my legs. I had been exploring my surroundings for some time (I have no memory of recognizing that the boundary of the space I could explore, my placenta (the placenta is embryonic or fetal tissue, not maternal tissue) forming the boundary, nothing I remember informed me that my cells formed the explorable boundary of my in-utero environment.
What I remember, or mis-remember, during my intra-placental exploration was finding nothing particularly unexpected until I found "IT" was, to the best of my memory now, seriously unexpected, unexpected in the BIID sense.
I cannot tell of what I do not remember because I do not remember it.
What I do remember, be the memory a psychotic delusion or somewhat factual, is that the unexpected "IT" seemed to not belong to me, and what I do remember, somewhat accurately or not, is a sense that "IT" did not belong to me. After a while, I remember (or only fantasize remembering?) pulling on "IT" as though to remove "IT" from where my mental model of me said "IT" did not belong. Only, what I remember, or don't know that I don't remember, is pulling on "IT" as though doing that would remove the unbelonging "IT" from me. The result was my first, to the best of my memory, encounter with pain. That was, as I now remember, a new experience for me and a learning event for which I had no precedent. I learned that pain, for me, indicated something to learn to not do.
What was that "IT"? My name for it now, is, "scrotum." And pain, ever since, for me, has been an indicator of that which I have learned to not do as best I have been able to so learn.
I was with my dad when he died as a consequence of cancer, and his life, shortly before he died, was severely painful. My dad's death taught me to work to avoid dying as he had died; and my understanding of family cancer history and such led me to seek to avoid dying a painful death if avoiding such became practical. Which, so far, it has been.
When I got my orchiectomy, I decided to keep my scrotum, as a reminder that pain indicates that which, when feasible, is wisely avoided.
In summary, I find the prior post by foxytaur to be wonderfully profound.
There is a name, in the annals of biology jargon, for the relationship of nature with nurture, to wit, "Independent Assortment of Genotypic and Phenotypic Traits."
Or, in the form of an "old saying," "Variety is the spice of life."
To me, what is normal is what is, and nothing that is can ever actually be abnormal.
If you are enamored of frequentist statistical methods, the sad news I have is that, for me, the whole normal curve (normal density curve or normal distribution curve) is normal, even out beyond a googolplexion of standard deviations. Life, in its entirety, is normal to me.
My theoretical biology perspective informs me that we are all absolutely and perfectly normal because life exists as it is only because of its magnificent diversity.
I encountered people. I encountered pheromones from people. For about 35 years, pheromones told me, "not quite." Then I met pheromones from an XX chromosome person and pheromones told me, "okay?"
I guess the pheromones were correct. Wedding anniversary number 38 is fast approaching.
Had I come upon an XY and pheromones said to me, "okay?" that is how my life would have gone.
The late Walter M. Elsasser, a theoretical physicist and recipient of the 1987 National Medal of Science in the U.S.A., studied and wrote extensively about biology from a physics-methodology perspective. To paraphrase his work, he found that what happens in a single living cell during one second of time is of unfathomably transcomputational complexity, such that, a binary digital computer made of everything in the observable universe could not compute what happens in one living cell in the astrophysics-based estimate of the duration of the life of the universe.
The mental model of something is never the something mentally modeled.
The luck of the draw is an aspect of nature.
To me, "nature" is synonymous with "all that is."
Life is manageable for me if I accept that what is is what is, and accept that what isn't is what isn't, and I also accept that I don't have to know or understand which is which.
I got to be a member of the eunuch community mainly because I decided to not commit suicide by plausibly surgically-preventable cancer, such as activated the deaths of my dad and brother.
I made that choice based on my understanding of biology, and I find that I am among the apparent ranks of perhaps-leading-edge theoretical biologists. My theoretical biology research is focused on human destructive violence as a biological phenomenon and on the design and development of pragmatic alternatives to such violence.
Yesterday, I re-read Susan Sontag, "Illness as Metaphor," the 1979 First Vintage Books Edition, copyright 1977, 1978. It is a "small" book, only 85 pages.
I surmise that I know and understand vastly more about biology than would allow me to regard nature/nurture as other than one phenomenon; nurture is an aspect of nature, nurture is totally contained within nature, and the notion of "nature (exclusive-or) nurture" or "nature versus nurture" are biological absurdities.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, and many others, have promoted the view, one with which I substantially agree, that memory is reconstructive and memory reconstruction does not exactly represent the events being remembered.
The earliest memory I can find regarding my sense of physical gender is of a time well before I was born. In contrast with what I find to be generally true for people who go through the traditional infant-child transition at, commonly, around the age of 18 months in some societies, I never developed amnesia for my early life experiences. I find that I remember the onset of "the quickening" (or "the baby has started kicking"). That event came before I started kicking. My arms were in the classical fetal position, my left wrist closer to my chest than my right wrist, and I became aware of my wrists bumping for the first time (becoming aware of said bumping) ever. Is my memory of that event accurate? I have no clue as to how to test, or even begin to evaluate, such a question.
What I can remember now is what I can remember now, and certainly is not exactly the event represented by the memory I now have.
So, my first memory of what informs me that I am of the gender diversity spectrum came notably after I began to "kick" with my legs. I had been exploring my surroundings for some time (I have no memory of recognizing that the boundary of the space I could explore, my placenta (the placenta is embryonic or fetal tissue, not maternal tissue) forming the boundary, nothing I remember informed me that my cells formed the explorable boundary of my in-utero environment.
What I remember, or mis-remember, during my intra-placental exploration was finding nothing particularly unexpected until I found "IT" was, to the best of my memory now, seriously unexpected, unexpected in the BIID sense.
I cannot tell of what I do not remember because I do not remember it.
What I do remember, be the memory a psychotic delusion or somewhat factual, is that the unexpected "IT" seemed to not belong to me, and what I do remember, somewhat accurately or not, is a sense that "IT" did not belong to me. After a while, I remember (or only fantasize remembering?) pulling on "IT" as though to remove "IT" from where my mental model of me said "IT" did not belong. Only, what I remember, or don't know that I don't remember, is pulling on "IT" as though doing that would remove the unbelonging "IT" from me. The result was my first, to the best of my memory, encounter with pain. That was, as I now remember, a new experience for me and a learning event for which I had no precedent. I learned that pain, for me, indicated something to learn to not do.
What was that "IT"? My name for it now, is, "scrotum." And pain, ever since, for me, has been an indicator of that which I have learned to not do as best I have been able to so learn.
I was with my dad when he died as a consequence of cancer, and his life, shortly before he died, was severely painful. My dad's death taught me to work to avoid dying as he had died; and my understanding of family cancer history and such led me to seek to avoid dying a painful death if avoiding such became practical. Which, so far, it has been.
When I got my orchiectomy, I decided to keep my scrotum, as a reminder that pain indicates that which, when feasible, is wisely avoided.
In summary, I find the prior post by foxytaur to be wonderfully profound.
There is a name, in the annals of biology jargon, for the relationship of nature with nurture, to wit, "Independent Assortment of Genotypic and Phenotypic Traits."
Or, in the form of an "old saying," "Variety is the spice of life."
To me, what is normal is what is, and nothing that is can ever actually be abnormal.
If you are enamored of frequentist statistical methods, the sad news I have is that, for me, the whole normal curve (normal density curve or normal distribution curve) is normal, even out beyond a googolplexion of standard deviations. Life, in its entirety, is normal to me.
My theoretical biology perspective informs me that we are all absolutely and perfectly normal because life exists as it is only because of its magnificent diversity.
I encountered people. I encountered pheromones from people. For about 35 years, pheromones told me, "not quite." Then I met pheromones from an XX chromosome person and pheromones told me, "okay?"
I guess the pheromones were correct. Wedding anniversary number 38 is fast approaching.
Had I come upon an XY and pheromones said to me, "okay?" that is how my life would have gone.
The late Walter M. Elsasser, a theoretical physicist and recipient of the 1987 National Medal of Science in the U.S.A., studied and wrote extensively about biology from a physics-methodology perspective. To paraphrase his work, he found that what happens in a single living cell during one second of time is of unfathomably transcomputational complexity, such that, a binary digital computer made of everything in the observable universe could not compute what happens in one living cell in the astrophysics-based estimate of the duration of the life of the universe.
The mental model of something is never the something mentally modeled.
The luck of the draw is an aspect of nature.
To me, "nature" is synonymous with "all that is."
Life is manageable for me if I accept that what is is what is, and accept that what isn't is what isn't, and I also accept that I don't have to know or understand which is which.