> (1) Like all explanations of anything which appeal (directly or
> implicitly) to some concept or other of "human nature," Ehrenreich
> utterly ignores the probability that an appeal to human nature cannot
> explain variation.
This is a complete red herring. Nothing in *Blood Rites* denies the existence of variation OR depends on its denial.
> (2) All appeals to human nature are *also* (implicitly or explicitly)
> appeals to Psychology.
>
> (3) All appeals to the pseudo-science of psychology (including the
> mechanistic ones) are (implicitly or explicitly) appeals to a human
> nature which has about as much reality (historical or natural) as does
> the Holy Spirit.
Psychology is NOT a pseudo-science merely because it's still riddled with a variety of pseudo-scientific detritus. In particular, evolutionary psychology points toward an embeddedness of human psychology in an evolutionary framework in which variation obviously plays a PRIMARY explanatory role.
Of course, this certainly DOES undermine most of the kinds of naive discourse about "human nature" we've been subjected to for past several thousand years. But it does so in a more complex manner than simply throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"