Neuromythography

The Architecture of the Soul

The Oxford Media and Communication dictionary defines biological essentialism as

The belief that ‘human nature’, an individual’s personality, or some specific quality (such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or a male propensity to aggression) is an innate and natural ‘essence’ (rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing, and culture).

This definition reveals its common use by believers in social constructionism to condemn heretics. The neuromythography response to this is:

  1. Essences–abstract nouns like creativity, masculinity, etc.–do not exist at all outside the confines of the anterior temporal cortex, so attributing them to biology or social constructs is academic at best.
  2. Much human nature is connected to innate biological entities, that shape and are shaped by environment. This is experimentally demonstrable, and social experiments with animals almost always demonstrate homology with humans.
  3. The same behavioral sexual dimorphisms are demonstrable in both environmentally-controlled lab animals and humans. That is not to say that cultural forces play no role.
  4. The biological essentialism critique is usually really a criticism of the genetic determinism presumption of evolutionary psychology. Specifically, that any abstract essence that we can imagine is a phenotype that must have a corresponding genotype, that can be revealed by analyzing statistical distributions of biometrics. Genetic determinism was the founding application for statistical inferencing. If you reject statistical inferencing and biometrics for genetic determinism, then you ought to question its validity in the overall social sciences project for theories that you are biased to support.

Neuromythography is a kind of biological essentialism, but one that replaces essences with old-school allegorical personifications, while rejecting both social constructs and phenotypes as the bad kind of philosophical essentialism.

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