Evidence for the innate

• Darwin, Lorenz, Tinbergen - species-specific behaviors - breeding of domestic animals
• Individual experience - phobias
• Child development

The innate as evolving matter

• Experimental demonstration of the innate

• Genes as the basis of the innate and genetics as the rules
  (Bentley and Hoy, The Neurobiology of Cricket Song, Scientific American, May 1974)
  • Ancestral importance
  • Scrambling
  • Semi-independence of individual action, experience
  • Semi-independence of culture

• Organized matter - getting the complex from the simple

Significance of innate/evolution/matter in general

• Spatial and temporal context
• Importance of process, story always in progress
• Importance of the unpredictable
• Evolution as summary of observations
• Importance of variation/diversity

Mental Health and Well-Being?

• Innate/matter/evolution productive to think about in all behavioral contexts (including mental health) and social work
  • NBS senior seminar - intro
  • NBS senior seminar - background
  • The Neurobiology of Parenting
  • Who's afraid of Emily Dickinson? Or ... How I learned to stop worrying and love the brain
  • Making the Unconscious Conscious, and Vice Versa: A Bi-directional Bridge Between Neuroscience/Cognitive Science and Psychotherapy?

  

• Genes an influence, not a determinant

• Helps to deal in turn with other influences
  • Individual experiences, individual choices, culture
  • The brain as the nexus point, intersecting all the influences

To explore in following ...


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