:: 11/22/2002 ::

nonsecock.

http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/Spring02/polspring02-5.htm

Andrew Norton: You are unusual amongst contemporary political theorists in that an explicit theory of human nature is central to your thought. Do you think political theories can do without a view of human nature?

Francis Fukuyama: I think most social scientists and a lot of post-Kantian philosophers have tried to do without human nature. The only reason that I feel you can raise the human nature argument again is that over the last 30 years in the life sciences there has been a lot of empirical work that has made the concept respectable to scientists again. I think social scientists and certainly people in cultural studies haven't gotten that message yet. They are committed to the idea that all human behaviour is completely plastic and socially constructed. They are very resistant to the notion of human nature.

AN: you believe that over time those theories will be discredited because they are not consistent with human nature? stupido

(...)

AN: So do you believe that when some ideologies are put into practice they run into these limits of human nature?

FF: That was certainly true of the attempt by communism to abolish private property and the family. But even more recently, in the feminist revolution, you had certain feminists who argued on ideological grounds that if there is any observed difference in the behaviour of boys and girls it is simply the result of socialisation, so that, for example, if girls were more selective in choosing sexual partners than boys, that had to be because of Victorian norms. There's a whole long history of trying to construct a story about this which begins with Margaret Mead saying that being sexually selective was just a Western cultural norm. I think that partly as a result of people like Derek Freeman debunking Margaret Mead, but also as a result of studies of animals, the idea that sex roles are in part genetically determined has come back in a fairly important way. In fact, it is a sign of the times that with a little maturing of the feminist revolution, younger women especially are getting relaxed to the point that they can admit that, as everybody intuitively knows, that men and women are biologically different.


AN: Communism clearly ran against human nature.

:: phil 21:13 [link] ::

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Have resolved to abstain from the sensi between new year and end of course (sept), dropping fags and am thinking about drink; although living here this is extremely difficult and am keen to avoid social suicide - in the long term of course it has to go...

So was interested to hear this story on bbc today (govt keen to ally the massive progress that the pro-legal lobby has made - info is not new just regurgitated, our own field studies have exactly illustrated this point anyway, so expect story is largely a plant but nevertheless...)

Dr Louise Arsenault, London's King's Hospital
"People who smoke cannabis from an early age are likely to develop schizophrenia"

[...]

"Whether the use of cannabis triggers the onset of schizophrenia or depression in otherwise vulnerable people or whether it actually causes these conditions in non-predisposed people is not yet resolved."

From bbc website.

The explanation most accepted is that cannabis triggers the onset or relapse of schizophrenia in predisposed people and also exacerbates the symptoms generally. 4 5 Establishing direction of causality is difficult and is most appropriately assessed in non-clinical samples, but a low incidence of the illness and the fact that most drug users take other drugs in addition to cannabis create methodological problems and explain the dearth of reliable evidence.

[...]

The authors found, however, that young people who had used cannabis three times or more by age 18 were more likely to have a depressive disorder at age 26, even after use of other drugs was controlled for.

[...]

Although the number of studies is small, these findings strengthen the argument that use of cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia and depression, and they provide little support for the belief that the association between marijuana use and mental health problems is largely due to self medication. Whether the use of cannabis triggers the onset of schizophrenia or depression in otherwise vulnerable people or whether it actually causes these conditions in non-predisposed people is not yet resolved. Further, it cannot be assumed that mechanisms are the same for both conditions (cannabinoids have effects on a variety of neurotransmitter systems) or at different developmental stages. For example, although evidence shows that mental disorder leads to the use of cannabis among adolescents, the reverse seems true in early adulthood.

From BMJ.

:: alan 15:11 [link] ::

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