Thursday, April 18, 2019
Stupidest 'expert' of the year
Not gonna spend much time on this one. A flagrant and STUPID attempt to reclaim territory for the Enlightenment craziness about "rights" and "equality". Real science abandoned the craziness 30 years ago and finally admitted that genes exist.
Just one gratingly obvious logical error will do.
Children are masters of imitation. Copying parents and other adults is how they learn about their social world – about the facial expressions and body movements that allow them to communicate, gain approval and avoid rejection. Imitation has such a powerful influence on development, for good and ill, that child-protection agencies across the world run campaigns reminding parents to be role models. If you don’t want your kids to scream at other children, don’t scream at them. The conventional view, inside and outside academia, is that children are ‘wired’ to imitate. We are ‘Homo imitans’, animals born with a burning desire to copy the actions of others. Imitation is ‘in our genes’. Birds build nests, cats miaow, pigs are greedy, while humans possess an instinct to imitate.Conventional views are often false, but this conventional view happens to be true. In your attempt to disprove it, you prove it.
However, cracks began to appear in Meltzoff and Moore’s picture as soon as it was published in Science magazine – and they have been spreading ever since in fine but disfiguring lines. From the outset, some other experts on child development were unable to replicate the crucial results. They found that newborns copied sticking out their tongues, but not other facial gestures – so perhaps instead of an elaborate imitation mechanism, it was a simple reflex in response to excitement.Sounds like a disproof....
What we’re left with instead is a wealth of evidence that humans learn to imitate in much the same way as we pick up other social skills.There's the key problem. You just admitted that learning to imitate is innate. The imitation ITSELF may not be innate, but the ABILITY TO LEARN HOW TO IMITATE is. It's a distinction without a difference, and wildly illogical. If you want to claim that learning how to imitate is also learned, you'll then have to prove that learning how to learn how to imitate is learned, and then learning how to learn how to learn how to ..... Secondarily, the role-model notion ("If you don’t want your kids to scream at other children, don’t scream at them.") is a failure, but NOT because imitation doesn't work. It's a failure because genes do work. Violence runs in families because a strong tendency to violence is innate. It's a complex mix of genes, so the inheritance is mixed and variable, nowhere near 100%. Assortative mating helps to keep it going. People who are comfortable with violence tend to stick together.
Labels: From rights to duties, Loughnerian Logic
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