Fellow foci,
A number of folks this month have come to the conclusion that MOQ answers
the nature/nurture question by saying that "both" make a contribution and
that this conclusion is perfectly acceptable and expected from the MOQ
perspective, unlike the gut-wrenching torment that went on to reach this
conclusion from the SOM framework. This is all well and good (and a bit
boring, as some have mentioned) as a 20,000 foot answer but things get a
little more interesting when you pose specific nature/nurture problems and
try to answer them using MOQ, with the expectation of getting more
precision. In other words, it would be better to be able to say, "Yeah, the
answer is 'both' but the score isn't exactly tie on the such-and-such
nature/nurture question, and here is how I used MOQ and the evolutionary
levels to reach my conclusion".
So let's take the famous nature/nurture question involving intelligence. Is
the level to which you rise in this area due to your genes or your
upbringing, and if it's both, does one predominate? Let's try to put
elements of the problem into the appropriate MOQ levels, turn the crank, and
see what we get. Some of you have already started this so I'm going to use
your work.
- input your genes. That would be the biological level.
- input your upbringing. That would be the social level.
- output your intelligence. That would be the intellectual level.
This is interesting. This question actually spans 3 levels! The answer is
still both, but is the contribution 50/50 or something else? My first
inclination is to say that upbringing has greater impact because the social
level is more closely evolved to the intellectual level than the biological
level is. From this view the biological level is further removed and its
values less influential. But then I thought it's nature that might have a
stronger link since intellect is directly wired into a biological entity (a
brain), and the social level only has secondary influences that are grafted
on later. I think MOQ sides with the first argument, but the second is
troubling and won't go away.
So let's take another one that is timely here in America. It involves
incidents where school children take guns to school and shoot fellow
students.
We're inevitably asking ourselves who or what to pin blame on for such
atrocities, and it mostly boils down to two choices: 1) nature (the
assailants were bad seeds, it was inevitable they do this) or 2) society
(parental upbringing, TV violence, gun lobby, etc).
This nature/nurture question seems easier for some reason. I think the
negative social forces here bear the brunt of the blame. Assuming the
assailants were bad seeds, the social structures (parents, schools, church),
had they been operating properly, should have intervened before disaster
struck and turned these kids around. After all, MOQ posits that a higher
level is capable of suppressing the negative patterns of value of a lower
level. In fact it's morally obligated to. So it's this tenet that I base my
conclusion.
Regards,
Glennn
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:37 BST