Nature and Nurture

Maybe your kitty decided not to pounce on that bird because she realized that she could easily plunge to her death in the process. I assume that your cats routinely walk around on your balcony and none of them have fallen off yet. Maybe they have an instinct that protects them from things like that, or maybe they just look over the edge one time and calculate that it's such a long way down that landing on their feet wouldn't do them a lot of good. Of course they don't understand physics the way we do, but they wouldn't necessarily have to, all they would need to know is how far is too far to jump. As graceful as cats are, they do get themselves into trouble occasionally. We had a cat back home that made a leap for our parakeet's cage, miscalculated the distance, and landed in a kitchen sink full of soapy water. She never tried that again. It's like Mark Twain  said, "A cat who sits on a hot stove once will never do it again, but it won't sit on a cold stove either."

Sometimes there's a pretty fine line between nature and nurture. I think that some genetic traits just predispose you for something, and the rest is up to you. Mozart played the violin at the age of three, but somebody had to put that first violin in his hands and teach him the basic fundamentals. If the average three year old was given the same opportunity, he might take that violin and beat his sister on the head with it.

People speculate about how peaceful or warlike our Stone Age ancestors were, but I don't think anybody knows for sure. It seems like they had to be pretty aggressive to take on those hairy elephants with their primitive weapons, but then they must have learned early on how to cooperate with others in the effort. As social groups got larger, there must have been competition for resources, and the "us against them" attitude began to develop. Wild animals squabble and fight a lot, but they will only do that for so long before they move away from each other in search of less stressful territory. Social animals quickly develop their pecking order and then settle down for awhile until somebody challenges the status quo. They only have so much spare time and energy to devote to stuff like that, and then they have to get back to the business of making a living.

I don't think that technology or lack thereof makes people happy. What makes people happy is if their situation is improving, and it looks like it's going to continue to improve for the foreseeable future. People become unhappy when their lives start going downhill, and it looks like the bottom is nowhere in sight. It's like, when you don't have it, you don't miss it but, once you have it, you don't want to give it up.

I think you're right about the futility of using isolated incidents to prove a general point, but that's what we are predisposed to do. Even scientists make generalizations from individual experiments. Maybe the secret is to go ahead and use methods like that, but realize that they have their limitations. Anecdotal evidence isn't the best evidence, but sometimes it's the only evidence we have. For thousands of years people have realized that the easiest way to teach kids something is to tell them a story. I doesn't have to be a true story, but it has to be one that the kid can identify with, and it has to lead to some reasonable conclusion. Once they have learned that lesson, then you can explain to them that it doesn't always work out that way. First you teach them the rules, then you teach them that there are exceptions to the rules, then you wonder why they don't pay attention to you anymore.