there are humans who do not laugh [...] humans who do not shiver when cold
Are there? I don’t know! Part of where my comment was coming from is that I’ve grown wary of appeals to individual variation that are assumed to exist without specific evidence. I could easily believe, with specific evidence, that there’s some specific, documented medical abnormality such that some people never develop the species-typical shiver, laugh, cry, &c. responses. (Granted, I am relying on the unstated precondition that, say, 2-week-old embryos don’t count.) If you show me the Wikipedia page about such a specific, documented condition, I’ll believe it. But if I haven’t seen the specific Wikipedia page, should I have a prior that every variation that’s easy to imagine, actually gets realized? I’m skeptical! The word human (referring to a specific biological lineage with a specific design specified in ~3·10⁹ bases of the specific molecule DNA) is already pointing to a very narrow and specific set of configurations (relative to the space of all possible ways to arrange 10²⁷ atoms); by all rights, there should be lots of actually-literally universal generalizations to be made.
Are there? I don’t know! Part of where my comment was coming from is that I’ve grown wary of appeals to individual variation that are assumed to exist without specific evidence. I could easily believe, with specific evidence, that there’s some specific, documented medical abnormality such that some people never develop the species-typical shiver, laugh, cry, &c. responses. (Granted, I am relying on the unstated precondition that, say, 2-week-old embryos don’t count.) If you show me the Wikipedia page about such a specific, documented condition, I’ll believe it. But if I haven’t seen the specific Wikipedia page, should I have a prior that every variation that’s easy to imagine, actually gets realized? I’m skeptical! The word human (referring to a specific biological lineage with a specific design specified in ~3·10⁹ bases of the specific molecule DNA) is already pointing to a very narrow and specific set of configurations (relative to the space of all possible ways to arrange 10²⁷ atoms); by all rights, there should be lots of actually-literally universal generalizations to be made.