"No matter that the social sciences set about reinventing much more alarming forms of determinism to take the place of the genetic form: the parental determinism of Freud; the socio-economic determinism of Marx; the political determinism of Lenin; the peer-pressure cultural determinism of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; the stimulus-response determinism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner; the linguistic determinism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. In one of the great diversions of all time, for nearly a century social scientists managed to persuade thinkers of many kinds that biological causality was determinism while environmental causality preserved free will; and that animals had instincts, but human beings did not."
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Science authorsNon-fiction authors from EnglandJournalists from EnglandBusinesspeople from EnglandLibertarians
Original Language: English
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Chapter 7 āInstinctā (p. 92)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley
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Matt Ridley
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