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Re:Writing and the narrative fallacy (2018) by simonh on Sunday May 24, 2020 @06:37PM (#23295517)
Yes I read it. When it says biology, I don’t think it’s reasonable to substitute in genetics and retain the same sense.

Suppose that the tendency towards the narative fallacy is due to such fundamental architectural structures in our brain that they go back to our early mammal ancestors. If that is true, any genetic change sufficient to modify it materially would have to be so radical that we essentially wouldn’t have mammal brains anymore. We’re way beyond population genetics and incremental natural selection at that point. There’s no genetic study or engineering intervention we could possibly contemplate in our lifetimes that would be relevant.

So when I say genetics isn’t really an issue here it’s not because the behaviour isn’t genetically determined, it’s that it may be so strongly tied to huge, mutually interconnected tracts our our genome that it’s just not a useful level of abstraction for us at the moment.

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