Nursing programs are complex systems that articulate values of relationality and holism, while developing curriculums that privilege metric‐driven competency‐based pedagogies. This study used an interpretive approach to analyze interviews from 20 nursing students at two Canadian Baccalaureate programs to understand how nursing's educational context, including its hidden curriculums, impacted student writing activities. We viewed this qualitative data through the lens of activity theory. Students spoke about navigating a rigid writing context. This resulted in a hyper‐focus on “figuring out” the teacher (...) with minimal focus on the act of writing. Students used a form of behavioral “code‐switching” to maximize their grade while considering how their “valuing” of the assignment fit within their writing motives. Hidden curriculum messages taught students that academic success was assured whether their writing mirrored instructor preferences. Instructional practices of rigidity reinforced unequal social conditions for some minority students. Faculty can counteract the impact of the hidden curriculum through encouragement of choice and independent thinking about writing activities. Acknowledging power relationships and their influence on how students navigate writing assignments and nursing discourse may relieve pressures on students who fear penalties for countering norms and result in a more flexible learning environment. (shrink)

Ample research links mothers’ postpartum depression (PPD) to adverse interactions with their infants. However, most studies relied on general population samples, whereas a substantial number of women are at elevated depression risk. The purpose of this study was to describe mothers’ interactions with their 6- and 12-month-old infants among women at elevated risk, although with a range of symptom severity. We also identified higher-order factors that best characterized the interactions and tested longitudinal consistency of these factors from 6 to 12 (...) months of infant age. We leveraged data from eight projects across the United States (n = 647), using standardized depression measures and an adaptation of the NICHD Mother-Infant Interaction Scales. Overall, these depression-vulnerable mothers showed high levels of sensitivity and positive regard and low levels of intrusiveness, detachment, and negative regard with their infants. Factor analyses of maternal behaviors identified two overarching factors—“positive engagement” and “negative intrusiveness” that were comparable at 6 and 12 months of infant age. Mothers’ ability to regulate depressed mood was a key behavior that defined “positive engagement” in factor loadings. An exceptionally strong loading of intrusiveness on the second factor suggested its central importance for women at elevated depression risk. Mothers with severe depressive symptoms had significantly more “negative intrusiveness” and less “positive engagement” with their 6-month-old infants than women with moderate or fewer depressive symptoms, suggesting a potential tipping point at which symptoms may interfere with the quality of care. Results provide the foundation for further research into predictors and moderators of women’s interactions with their infant among women at elevated risk for PPD. They also indicate a need for evidence-based interventions that can support more severely depressed women in providing optimal care. (shrink)

In this paper I shall carefully examine some recent arguments for dualism. These arguments presuppose a strong version of physicalism that I consider inappropriate. I shall try to show that, if we reformulate the thesis of physicalism according to Kim's view of physicalism (in terms of the supervenience relation), there is a third option, a version of type physicalism, where physicalism and quaiia could be conciliated. In order to sketch this option, I shall consider the main argument against type physicalism: (...) the explanatory gap argument, and two arguments that Kim mentions against physicalism: the inverted spectrum / zombies argument and the intrinsicality argument. I shall try to show that these three arguments depend upon a misconception of the nature of our ordinary mental concepts. (shrink)

This essay will address a general philosophical concern about autonomy, namely, that a conception of autonomy focused on freedom of the will alone is inadequate, once we consider the effects of oppressive forms of socialization on individuals’ formation of choices. In response to this problem, I will present a brief overview of Diana Meyers’s account of autonomy as relational and practical. On this view, autonomy consists in a set of socially acquired practical competencies in self-discovery, self-definition, self-knowledge, and self-direction. (...) This account provides a distinction between choices that express unreflectively internalized social norms and those that are the result of a critical ‘self-reading’. I conclude that this practical conception of autonomy makes much higher demands upon nurses (and patients) than has previously been thought. In fact, if nurses are to be expected to genuinely promote autonomy, they are going to need specific training in counselling-type communication skills. (shrink)

Is the history of life a series of accidents or a drama scripted by selfish genes? Is there an “essential” human nature, determined at birth or in a distant evolutionary past? What should we conserve—species, ecosystems, or something else? -/- Informed answers to questions like these, critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, require both a knowledge of biology and a philosophical framework within which to make sense of its findings. In this accessible introduction to philosophy (...) of biology, Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths present both the science and the philosophical context necessary for a critical understanding of the most exciting debates shaping biology today. The authors, both of whom have published extensively in this field, describe the range of competing views—including their own—on these fascinating topics. -/- With its clear explanations of both biological and philosophical concepts, Sex and Death will appeal not only to undergraduates, but also to the many general readers eager to think critically about the science of life. (shrink)

"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of (...) cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--. (shrink)

For three decades the writings of Jaegwon Kim have had a major influence in philosophy of mind and in metaphysics. Sixteen of his philosophical papers, together with several new postscripts, are collected in Kim [1993]. The publication of this collection prompts the present essay. After some preliminary remarks in the opening section, in Section 2 I will briefly describe Kim's philosophical 'big picture' about the relation between the mental and the physical. In Section 3 I will situate Kim's approach on (...) the larger philosophical landscape, vis-à-vis various other approaches frequently discussed in contemporary philosophy of mind. This comparative discussion will further illuminate Kim's own position, and also will serve as groundwork for subsequent discussion. In Section 4 I will point out certain persistent internal tensions in Kim's philosophical position on the mind--body problem, tensions that emerge especially clearly against the backdrop of Section 3's comparative discussion of Kim's position relative to various competing positions. In the remainder of the paper I will focus on two issues at the heart of his position, with particular attention to what he says about them in some of the more recent papers and the postscripts in Kim [1993]. First, how should a materialist understand the notion that the mental is 'determined' by the physical? More specifically, what role, if any, should be played by the concept of supervenience in explicating this kind of determination relation? Kim's views on this matter have recently changed, and I will discuss the issue with particular attention to his own latest remarks on it. This is the business of Section 5. Second, need a viable materialism assert that mentalistic psychology is reducible to neurobiology? More specifically, should a materialist insist on reducibility, despite the currently influential line of argument used by non-reductive materialists, the 'multiple realization' argument? On this matter too, Kim's views have changed somewhat; again, I will discuss the issue with particular attention to his recent thinking. This is the business of Section 6. (shrink)

Once upon a time in evolutionary theory, everything happened for the best. Predators killed only the old or the sick. Pecking orders and other dominance hierarchies minimized wasteful conflict within the group. Male displays ensured that only the best and the fittest had mates. In the culmination of this tradition, Wynne-Edwards argued that many species have mechanisms that ensure groups do not over-exploit their resource base. The “central function” of territoriality in birds and other higher animals is “of limiting the (...) numbers of occupants per unit area of habitat”. Species with dominance hierarchies, species with lekking breeding systems, and species with communal breeding regulate their populations. These social mechanisms have population regulation as their “underlying primary function”. Wynne-Edwards argued that these mechanisms evolve through group selection. Populations without such mechanisms are apt to go extinct by eroding their own resource base. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. One is to defend an incrementalist view of the evolution of language, not from those who think that syntax could not evolve incrementally, but from those who defend a fundamental distinction between Gricean communication or ostensive inferential communication and code-based communication. The paper argues against this dichotomy, and sketches ways in which a code-based system could evolve into Gricean communication. The second is to assess the merits of the Sender–Receiver Framework, originally formulated by David Lewis, (...) and much elaborated and set into an evolutionary context by Brian Skyrms and colleagues, as a framework for thinking about the evolution of language. Despite the great strengths of that framework, and despite the great value of a framework that is both general and formally tractable, I argue that there are critical features of language that it fails to capture. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, first, that human lifeways depend on cognitive capital that has typically been built over many generations. This process of gradual accumulation produces an adaptive fit between human agents and their environments; an adaptive fit that is the result of hidden‐hand, evolutionary mechanisms. To explain distinctive features of human life, we need to understand how cultures evolve. Second, I distinguish a range of different evolutionary models of culture. Third, I argue that none of meme‐based models, dual (...) inheritance models, nor Boyd and Richerson's models fully succeed in explaining this adaptive fit between agent and the world. I then briefly develop an alternative. Finally, I explore (in a preliminary way) constraints on cultural adaptation. The processes of cultural evolution sometimes built a fit between agents and their environment, but they do not always do so. Why is folk medicine, for example, so much less reliable than folk natural history? (shrink)

The term zhen 真 in the Zhuangzi 莊子 is commonly associated with the zhen ren 真人 or "true person." We find metaphorical descriptions such as that he can go through fire and water unharmed. On the other hand, some scholars would claim that there is a more mystical element to the Zhuangzi that is missed if we think that such descriptions are "merely" metaphorical. However, the term zhen is not only applied to the zhen ren, and this essay has the (...) broader aim of investigating its various meanings and uses in the Zhuangzi. We shall situate our understanding of the zhen ren within the context of this broader investigation.Zhen has several applications throughout the text. To begin with, it may be used to affirm that .. (shrink)

This book approaches the topic of the subjective, lived experience of hate crime from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. It provides an experientially well-grounded account of how and what is experienced as a hate crime, and what this reveals about ourselves as the continually reconstituted “subject” of such experiences. The book shows how qualitative social science methods can be better grounded in philosophically informed theory and methodological practices to add greater depth and explanatory power to experiential approaches to social sciences (...) topics. The Authors also highlight several gaps and contradictions within Husserlian analyses of prejudice, which are exposed by attempts to concretely apply this approach to the field of hate crimes. Coverage includes the difficulties in providing an empathetic understanding of expressions of harmful forms of prejudice underlying hate crimes, including hate speech, arising from our own and others’ ‘life worlds’. The Authors describe a ‘Husserlian-based’ view of hate crime as well as a novel interpretation of the value of the comprehensive methodological stages pioneered by Husserl. The intended readership includes those concerned with discrimination and hate crime, as well as those involved in qualitative research into social topics in general. The broader content level makes this work suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students, even professionals within law enforcement. (shrink)

It is indeed important to identify the rich variety of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour, rather than squeezing this richness into a few boxes. We need to recognise both the variety of systems for the cognitive control of adaptive behaviour and to chart the relationships between such systems. But I shall argue that these projects are not best pursued by asking about the extent of animal rationality. The argument develops in three stages. The first outlines a picture of (...) the selective regimes that drive the evolution of the sophisticated use of information by animal agents. The second argues that hominid cognition has evolved in response to a somewhat different set of " 3 " challenges and that the transmission of social information and skill has come to be both a critical and an unusual feature of hominid selective and developmental environments. The third draws upon the ideas of Dan Sperber and others in arguing that the social transmission of information introduces a vetting problem. I shall suggest that we see rationality as an evolved response to this vetting problem. (shrink)

The subsistence technology of forager communities has varied greatly over space and time. This paper (i) reviews briefly the main causal factors the literature identifies as responsible for this variation; (ii) analyzes in some detail the most prominent idea in the literature on spatial variation:Complex technology is an adaptive response to elevated risks of subsistence failure; (iii) it argues that the alleged empirical support for this hypothesis depends on dubious proxies of risk; (iv) it argues that it fails to explain (...) the subsistence technologies of desert foragers, who generally live with simple technologies in high‐risk environments; (v) it offers an alternative analysis, based on the reduced opportunity costs of complex technologies in highly seasonal environments, on the high value of typical forager targets in those environments and their relatively predictable location in space and time; and (v) the paper concludes with a conjecture about the role of environmental variation in toolkit change over deep time. (shrink)

This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise community normative packages. Finally, I located my views, as requested, against those of The dawn of everything. (...) I argue that the more complex “original position” envisaged in Dawn depends on special conditions rarely found on Pleistocene Africa. (shrink)

ExtractBrian Skyrms's Signals has the virtues familiar from his Evolution of the Social Contract and The Stag Hunt. He begins with a very simple model of agents in interaction, and in a series of brief and beautifully clear chapters, this model and its successors are explored, elaborated, connected and illustrated through biological theory and the social sciences. Signals borrows its core model from David Lewis: it is Lewis's signalling game. In this game, two agents interact. One agent can observe which (...) of two equi-probable states the world is in, but that agent cannot act directly and profitably on that information. However, the informed agent can act in a way that will be perceptually salient to a second agent: say, by raising a red or a green flag. The second agent does have the capacity to respond appropriately to each state of the world. If that second agent chooses the right option, given the state of the world, both are rewarded. If the second agent fails to choose the right action, neither are. Obviously, the two agents are best off if they have a practice in which the informed agent regularly chooses a distinct, salient cue in response to each of the two world states, and in which the powerful agent uses that cue to select the rewarding act. Less obviously, agents with simple trial and error learning capacities can learn to signal and respond: neither explicit negotiation nor cognitive sophistication are required. Likewise, if individual agents do not have the capacity to learn, but if they breed true but with some variation, the evolutionary version of trial and error learning can take a population to one of the signalling system equilibria. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

The basic idea of Birch’s analysis is plausible: normative guidance began in agents’ assessment of their own craft skills. But I suggest developing that idea in a different way. I suggest that proto-normative affect plays its guiding role diachronically, in the development of those skills, rather than synchronically, in modulating their moment-by-moment execution. More importantly, I suggest a different pathway to normative affect’s direction at second and third parties. Normative response became social in the context of skilled collaborative activities, for (...) in those activities others’ failures have material consequences for each agent. In such collaborations, all have reason to care about others’ skill, or lack of it. (shrink)

What kind of people make good scientists? What personal qualities do scholars say their peers should exhibit? And how do they express these expectations? This article explores these issues by mapping the kinds of virtues discussed by American scientists between 1945 and 2000. Our wide-ranging comparative analysis maps scientific virtue talk across three distinct disciplines – physics, psychology, and history – and across sources that typify those disciplines’ scientific ethos – introductory textbooks, book reviews, and codes of ethics. We find (...) that, when inducting students into a discipline, evaluating peers, or codifying their professional standards, postwar American scientists routinely named virtues like carefulness, objectivity, and honesty. They applied such virtues not only directly to scholars’ characters, minds, and attitudes (thereby equating virtues with personal qualities), but also to their methods, modes of reasoning, and working habits (in the form of what we call virtue-qualifiers). Strikingly, we find that physicists, psychologists, and historians drew upon largely similar repertoires of virtue. For all of them, scientific work required carefulness, thoroughness, and accuracy. Not all virtues, however, were equally important in all disciplines (notably objectivity), nor did each ethos-forming genre place equal emphasis on the directly personal nature of such virtues. All in all, our research establishes an extended framework for understanding the ways virtues remained present in postwar American scientific discourse writ large. (shrink)

In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture. To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households and higher-income households? We divided members into LIHHs (...) and HIHHs. We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA. (shrink)

The wide range of conflicting interpretations that exist in regard to Locke's philosophy of mind and body (i.e. dualistic, materialist, idealistic) can be explained by the general failure of commentators to appreciate the full extent of his nominalism. Although his nominalism that focuses on specific natural kinds has been much discussed, his mind-body nominalism remains largely neglected. This neglect, I shall argue, has given rise to the current diversity of interpretations. This paper offers a solution to this interpretative puzzle, and (...) it attributes a view to Locke that I shall describe as nominal symmetry. (shrink)

Although contemporary Confucianists tend to view Western liberalism as pitting the individual against society, recent liberal scholarship has vigorously claimed that liberal polity is indeed grounded in the self-transformation that produces “liberal virtues.” To meet this challenge, this essay presents a sophisticated Confucian critique of liberalism by arguing that there is an appreciable contrast between liberal and Confucian self-transformation and between liberal and Confucian virtues. By contrasting Locke and Confucius, key representatives of each tradition, this essay shows that both liberalism (...) and Confucianism aim to reconstruct a society freed from antisocial passions entailing a vicious politics of resentment, and yet come to differing ethical and political resolutions. My key claim is that what makes Confucian self-cultivation so distinctive is the incorporation of ritual propriety ( li ) within it, whereas liberal self-transformation that relies heavily on a method of self-control comes back to the problem that it originally set out to overcome. (shrink)

1. A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture -- 2. Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color -- 3. "Commerce and Intercourse": Dramas of Alliance and Trade -- 4. The Daughters of Eve and the Children of Ham: Race and the English Woman Writer -- 5. "An Object in the Midst of Other Objects": Race, Gender, Material Culture -- Epilogue: Oil "Race," Black Feminism, and White Supremacy -- Appendix: Poems of Blackness.

Morin has identified an intriguing puzzle about human communication systems, and one element of the solution: Inscriptional sign systems pose more coordination problems, making sender/receiver coadaptation more difficult. But I reject his view of written language, concluding that inscriptional sign systems can be generalist. The upshot is a cost-based proposal about why generalist ideographic systems are essentially unknown.

Under Mencius' influence jen has been regarded as part of a theory of nature. As such, commentators have had difficulty resolving the apparent paradox in "Analects" 9.1 that Confucius rarely talked about jen. No paradox arises if jen is seen as a practice involving self-cultivation as a never-ending task and the immediacy of ethical commitment where a cluster of emotions, attitudes, and values are expressed. Jen is an ethical orientation from which one speaks and acts--not particular qualities that one might (...) enumerate and claim to possess. As such, the internal relation between jen and li does not amount to their being the same thing, as implied by some recent writers. (shrink)

Corporate reputation is decisive for stakeholders’ supporting or repelling behavior and, therefore, one of firms’ most valuable intangible resources. Drawing on signaling theory, this paper focuses on the usefulness of voluntarily provided corporate reputation disclosures (CRDs) and examines their impact on stakeholders’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Our experimental vignette studies reveal that CRDs reduce stakeholders’ information asymmetries, which positively affects perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation as well as stakeholders’ purchase, investment, and employment intentions. The relationships between CRDs and stakeholders’ (...) behavioral intentions are sequentially mediated by changes in the perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation. This implies that stakeholders use the signals transmitted by CRDs to adjust their perceptions of a firm’s organizational performance and corporate reputation, which ultimately induces their behavioral outcomes. Overall, our empirical results show the usefulness of CRDs for firms in effectively developing stakeholder relationships and, thereby, contributing to assure their going concern. For stakeholders, CRDs improve efficiency in evaluating a firm’s future development. (shrink)

A Darwinian theory of the evolution of language must be incremental: to explain the transition from a hominin baseline with great ape grade communicative capacities to language-equipped hominins as a series of small steps. This paper takes up that project for the special case of words, giving an incremental model of the call to word transition. The model is embedded in a general conception of human social evolution with independent empirical support, but it also depends on some more specific assumptions (...) about language and about the earlier forms of hominin communication. Given these assumptions, the paper can be no more than a working draft of a more complete theory. (shrink)

The language $L_A(\Finv)$ is formed by adding the quantifier $\Finv x$ , "few x", to the infinitary logic L A on an admissible set A. A complete axiomatization is obtained for models whose universe is the set of ordinals of A and where $\Finv x$ is interpreted as there exist A-finitely many x. For well-behaved A, every consistent sentence has a model with an A-recursive diagram. A principal tool is forcing for $L_A(\Finv)$.

Language is at the core of the cognitive revolution that has transformed that discipline over the last forty years or so, and it is also the central paradigm for the most prominent attempt to synthesise psychology and evolutionary theory. A single and distinctively modular view of language has emerged out of both these perspectives, one that encourages a certain idealisation. Linguistic competence is uniform, independent of other cognitive capacities, and with a developmental trajectory that is largely independent of environmental input (...) (Pinker 1994; Pinker 1997). Thus language is seen as a paradigm of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides’ concept of “evoked culture”: linguistic experience serves only to select a specific item from a menu of innately available options (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In explaining this concept, they appeal to the metaphor of a jukebox. The human genome pre-stores a set of options, and the different experiences provided by different cultures select different elements out of this option set. I think an appropriate evolutionary perspective on language substantially undercuts this idealisation and the evoked culture model of language. Variability between speakers; the sensitivity of linguistic development to environmental input; and the limits of encapsulation are not noise. They are central to the language and its evolution. (shrink)