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QUIGGIN_TRADES

                                               January  3, 2018

More from John Quiggin's (2003) paper, "Trading Blows":

   "... Pinker, following Donald Brown, posits a Universal People
   as a parallel to Chomsky's notion of a Universal Grammar. This
   idea is backed up by a long list of cultural universals. The
   length of this list might seem to refute older claims that
   with the exception of taboos on incest, rape and murder, there
   are no cultural universals. The problem is that it is full of
   items such as 'decision-making' and 'ambivalence' that seem to
   be directly implied by the fact of human intelligence, and
   others such as ‘childcare’ which are obviously necessary to
   species survival. If items like this are to be considered as
   cultural universals, why not, as Gould and other critics have
   suggested, include eating and excretion as well?  ... a cynic
   might conclude that the only specifically cultural universal
   added to the traditional set of taboos is 'tickling'.


John Quiggin again:

   "... with the exception of language and vision the
   evolutionary psychology model scores its biggest success
   by pointing to cognitive weaknesses rather than cognitive
   strengths. Psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky have
   observed a wide range of biases in reasoning suggesting
   that people work on the basis of heuristics rather than
   rational calculation."


                   Quiggin, J. (2003), ‘Trading blows in
                   the evolutionary war: Review of Steven
                   Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern
                   Denial of Human Nature. ’, Australian
                   Financial Review, 24–27 January.



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