(no subject)

[jinian]

I had a bubble bath yesterday afternoon and my hair still smells of Bathos. Guess that means I might want to wash again before encountering snout. We could experiment, though. There's no lavender in this one.

Why had I never heard of the OTA? I guess I was fairly young. Anyway, it looks like the legislature may be realizing that they should know something about science, so that would be very good. I find it pretty disturbing that so many people dislike all science. (Specializing is fine; I've never taken a physics course, and I don't actually think they should have let me out of high school without one, but lots of adults know so little science and think it's not applicable...)

Whoa. Check out Captain Tootsie. I have nothing more to say.

Some really bad stuff going on in our lovely gigantic corporations, according to this article from the Multinational Monitor. My favorite line: "Sara Lee had a big hot dog contract with the Department of Defense."

I actually don't think it's such a bad idea for some restaurants to ban minors in favor of smokers. The problem is to make sure that people know what's up (which is why it sounds like everyone's pissed off) and that it's still possible for kids to get into some places (which doesn't sound like it's really a problem, but the precedent isn't so great). It's an inventive solution, at least, which is probably why I have warmed to it. The government could probably solve the problem by selling smoking licenses like they do liquor licenses; then it'd cost money to run a smoking establishment. Added bonus to me: there'd probably be more smoke-free bars.

It's interesting that the feral children listed were largely indifferent to sex. I remember hearing that sexual response was conditioned very early, so if they didn't have any humans to learn that from, it makes sense to me that they wouldn't be interested. One thing about the case summaries, though, is that I don't really feel they're reliable. I don't buy that Victor was "incapable of distinguishing hot from cold", though it seems likely that he wasn't a wimp about such things. And what does it mean that someone can't distinguish right from wrong? Oh, well, more research, poor me.

I haven't even started exploring Terrorism, Nonlinearity & Complex Adaptive Systems, but I have to share. Wow.

Comments

Re: Feral children

[rivka.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of problems with so-called feral child studies. Case historians tend to assume that these are children who, if brought up in a normal environment, would have developed normally - that the only difference between them and ordinary children is their lack of social contact. But there's typically no evidence about their pre-abandonment characteristics.

It's likely that many of these children were abandoned in the woods (or whatever) because there was something wrong with them in the first place - for example, because they were mentally retarded or showing signs of grossly abnormal development. You can't really know, and that makes it impossible to interpret their subsequent limitations. (Particularly their inability to learn certain types of new information after rescue.)

The article you link to also makes some weird assumptions - like the assumption that human children who grow up having no contact with other humans are somehow analogous to animals. But it's not normal for any mammals I can think of - human or nonhuman - to grow up in complete isolation from social contact with their own kind. Social interaction is hugely important for most animals. Monkeys reared apart from other monkeys have the same kinds of social abnormalities as humans reared apart from other humans. These kids aren't "like animals," they're "like completely unsocialized animals." There's a big difference.

And finally, there's the weird assumption that feral children provide evidence about which behaviors and abilities are genetic and which are environmental. Genes only express themselves in environments; just about all aspects of an organism involve the interaction of genetic and environmental factors.

To pick one simple example: the structures of the eye and the visual cortex are encoded in DNA. In all ordinary environments, visual ability develops according to that genetic code. But if you raise kittens in total darkness for the first six months or so, and only then expose them to light, they never develop normal visual abilities - regardless of their genetic perfection. Does that mean that vision is "caused" by the environment? No, it means that in this case the presence of an extreme and bizarre condition (total darkness) overwhelmed the course of visual development, nearly shutting out the importance of genetic factors. The same is going to be true for the extreme and bizarre conditions in which feral children develop. Not to even mention (as I said before) the likelihood that some of them weren't genetically normal in the first place.

I'm sorry. I'm totally rambling and taking over your comments page. I'll stop now.

Re: Feral children

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yay for rambling. Do it any time, that was great. :) Excellent points.