>But it does help if you can see their influences operating at different
>levels. On the level of social-symbolic dynamics, biology doesn't determine
>specific, positive cultural content, but functions as outer limits to
>signifying schemes. Think of this analogously to how you wouldn't look to
>physics or chemistry to explain the positive content of biological
>phenomena (for that you'd look to dynamics of natural selection, etc. i.e.,
>dynamics at higher levels of complexity). In the same way that chemical
>and physical dynamics are necessary but insufficient conditions for what
>happens on the biological level, so the whole premise of explaining social
>phenomena such as marriage strategies (or dating scene among NY literati)
>as a direct reflection of some biological instinct is a big category error.
Biology doesn't determine demonstrable varieties of sexual behaviour/conventions across cultures. Yep. The prevailing pattern of younger women with older men is not *caused* by biology (the latter being neither necessary nor sufficient). Yep.
All I thought I was doing at the time (with a bit of theory I thought sensible in the right context, but admittedly knew little about - as I know little about lots of things I talk about on lists), was allowing for the possibility that a 'degendered' world might still evince a greater number of YF/OM sexual relationships than YM/OF. 'Instincts' or 'natural tendencies' playing out differently in different settings 'n' all. And I can't prove what is and is not instinct - my little mission was to allow for 'essential humanity' insofar as lefty projects of emancipation then have something to emancipate - the logically tricky bit is we kinda have to wait until we're free to find out what, and how big, freedom for our kind would be. Marx didn't venture beyond this too much either, even in his expressly humanist Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and I reckon this is coz (a) he posits a natural something that should be free to fulfill its essence, and (b) he realises he'd be risking limiting that freedom by trying to get too explicit about the exact essence of the thing to be freed. Anyway, the specificity of the context of posts at the time led me to recall the selfish gene stuff to that end.
>But on to selfish gene theory itself. Because whether you're with me or
>not on the foregoing, I still very much doubt you need to scrape the bottom
>of the barrel here to address your culture/nature concern. Selfish gene
>theory is really in the rancid dregs.
Well, I didn't know that till I let the genie out. And I'm still not sure why - but I'm reading you closely as I go ...
>The theory is actually a mutation from natural selection theories about
>_differential_ reproduction of _populations_ (based on _chance_ genetic and
>environmental shifts), to an individualist and maximizing model of
>selection resembling nothing so much as the competitive bourgeouis
>market-place in which its metaphors were spawned.
Well, evolution has an element of competition in it (insofar as categories like phylum or species are concerned anyway). Mebbe Spencerian types forget that clumsy, tasty, slow, soft-skinned creatures like us developed, inter alia, cooperation in precisely this context. But again, I'm just guessing.
>Now granted, projecting the social dynamics of one's own society onto
>"nature" is nothing new, and ever since Hobbes Westerners have been
>projecting capitalist society onto nature (and then invoking that nature to
>justify capitalism).
With you so far.
>...which goes back to my wondering why this particular manifestation of the
>market-theory of nature--this one with its nubile women home nurturing
>their precious eggs while the y-chromosomed are out spreading their
>seed--why does this one garner respect from people who'd presumably see
>through market-logics-cum-nature models quickly enough in other contexts?
Well, it didn't manifest any such thing from where I was sitting. I know very little about selfish gene theory, but I'd've thought it was evolutionarily functional for females to pass their genes on in tandem with a variety of genetic others. Putting your eggs in many baskets is standard Wall St advice, no? It probably makes sense to behave yourself (as a female) if you're in a patriarchal society based on monogamous pairing, because you'd risk losing the protection and status of a mate upon whom you'd be entirely dependent. But that'd be assuming we've spent the decisive balance of our history as a species thusly organised. And we had that chat about Bonoboes - whose presence alone raises the possibility that we are not naturally patriarchal monogamists at all. And the 'chaste woman' is exposed as a discursive product by the 'rancid dregs' themselves. So, on that score at least, it ain't the selfish gene theory that ideologises nature, but rather a particularly convenient reading of it.
>Zizekian disavowal? plain sexism? or maybe just less general exposure to
>the perils of selfish-gene theory than I'd presumed? If the latter, then
>herewith some elucidations.
Theories have perils built into 'em, Maureen. Things have been done in the name of Marxist theory that get right up my nose (not least because people read 'scientific socialism' as a demand that we treat it like (a) a theory of everything in effect, (b) a timelessly correct theory requiring no peeks out the window ere it be employed as a guide for praxis, (c) a complete theory, and (d) one whose expression is not open to polysemy). I still like Marxist theory, though.
>In particular, some words on how ideas about kinship behavior does enormous
>work in holding up theories of the selfish-gene. "Kinship" was originally
>pulled in to explain away the paradoxes of an individual (vs. group) based
>theory of selection. Paradoxes concerning the frequent propensity for
>"altruistic" and self-sacrificing behaviors by individual organisms--a
>propensity which, by its competitive individualist-selection theory, ought
>to be selected against but is instead reproduced across generations.
Well, this is what I was getting at when I alluded to the Spencerians above. You don't have to be exclusively individualist just because you're into genetics. Evolution is a theory of species if I remember my high-school Darwin. That said, it might well be evolutionarily functional to afford the female as wide a preference-spectrum as possible (one male can inseminate a lot of females, but a female can only have one or two babies at a time - as males seem more inclined to succumb to disease and are probably more likely to hunt mastadons or fight other males - and as humans probably lived in quite small bands - this all sounds plausible to me. One nasty battle with the band next door, and your band's down to very few sperm sources and a disproportionate number of non-warrior-age males.)
>So "kin-selection" helped resolve the contradiction between
>individual-based theories of competitive advantage and empirical
>observations of persistently un-selfish behavior. Sociobiologists asserted
>that those benefitting from the self-sacrificing acts in fact share a lot
>of genetic substance with the altruistic actor. Thus, in terms of the
>reproduction of an individual's genetic code, self-sacrificing behavior
>could _still_ be based on individualist selfishness (=whew!= close call!)
>since the individual's sacrifice helped his kin reproduce.
I never wanted kids. Fell in crazy love with each of my two accidents, though. Sacrifice much for them all the time. Might even sacrifice all if called upon (one should never be positive until that thoughtless suicidial moment arrives, I s'pose - and then you can't tell anyone you were right). But I read enough papers to know that thousands of sweet little 4- and 7-year-olds are dying horribly while I'm typing, and that the $13.80 in my pocket could save a couple of 'em right now. I'm not claiming any hard determinism here (he said for the umpteenth time), but why might there not be something to this? That said, kinship is not the criterian for social living (as it wasn't in Uruk or Lagash 7000 years ago), and we're closer to friends and neighbours than we are to blood-rellies, so where the predictive role of this shite is supposed to come from, I dunno.
>This is of course where sociobiology gets its most parodic, with its
>theorists (and supposedly all of us, unconsciously) scribbling those
>marginal-utilities formulae; genetic cost-benefits calculations factoring
>average shared heredity between kin with benefit to others' repreductive
>success over cost to one's own reproductive success (sibling coefficient of
>shared heredity=1/2, parents' siblings 1/4, parents' siblings children=1/8,
>etc.) So, you know, you'd risk your life to swim out and save two of your
>drowning siblings, eight cousins (okay they're on a raft), 32 second
>cousins (a big raft), etc.
You'd only do these daft sums if you thought 'kin-selection' was entirely deterministic - if it's just a small constituent in a dialectical soup (and that it's not conceivably ever likely to be anything else - the fact that we no longer live as kith'n'kin - beyond the nuclear family, which still has some adherents - is much more decisive), you wouldn't. And it's not us doing the calculations; they're trying to calculate what we'd unthinkingly do. But, yeah, they're bonkers.
>Sociobiologists support this entrepreneurial algebra by pointing out
>(rightly) what a central category "kinship" has been for organizing social
>behavior for most of human history. They also point out that cooperation
>and shared interests (in production, property and varieties of mutual aid,
>etc.) are often correlated to determinations of "near" vs. "distant" kin,
>or kin vs. non-kin.
>
>But this is where they're most utterly deluded about how kinship schemes
>actually operate. Because they're not at all based on "natural" or
>"biological" kin-relations but on cultural ones. They're _arbitary_ (in the
>Saussurean sense) schemes of descent, residence, marriage, etc. That's why
>anthropologists who study kinship salivate when someone starts citing their
>geneologies: because they know they're going to hear about complex social
>dynamics, not biological ones.
You don't have to be an anthropologist, Maureen! But I still fail to see an either/or necessity, that's all. There's essential humanity in there, for mine.
>So yes kinship systems do have conceptions of shared substance between
>members, and yes, these conceptions have corresponding notions of
>sociability. But this is not about "shared genes." Members "inside" a kin
>group are always more closely related to lots of people outside the group.
>All but a small fraction of a person's geneological kin can in fact be
>excluded from "close kin," while conversely kin systems always stress
>"close" commonalities with people only distantly related or indeed complete
>(genetic) strangers. (And this not because they've been "hoodwinked" into
>thinking their nonkin are biological kin, but because kin membership, as a
>social and not biological phenomenon, is obtained performatively, not
>genetically.)
Mebbe kin with whom you live is pretty naturally potent. Emotions are demonstrably pretty high in these relationships. We die for each other and we kill each other at disproportionate rates, I reckon. I imagine we'd die for, or kill, only those who matter most to us - implying a depth of involvement which generally does not extend beyond the front door. The emotional intensity very possibly does go to our humanity - its expression perhaps the more context-dependent. Whatever, again the 'dregs' can be used to argue against the very nuclear family setting these ideologists might like to naturalise. The theory isn't undone at all - the theorists, or at least their interpreters, are.
>In short, people are always, by definition, doing kin-inspired things that
>make absolutely no sense from the perspective of selfish gene theory.
No sense to the theory as they wield it, no. But, like so many Economics 101 books, this lot abstract their object from social context. That's what they're doing wrong. Allowing for the natural, the instinctive, or whatever you wanna call it, is not what they're doing wrong, for mine.
>...So back, Rob, to your desire to partially explain (how much? 5%? 30%?)
>the May-December preferences at NYC academic circuits by selfish-gene
>theory. We all know the drill (at least those of us who read the popular
>press): genetically speaking, dads are deadbeats by nature, prone to
>abandon their sexual partners because they can reproduce their genetic
>material as often as they can knock a woman up, whereas a woman can only
>reproduce every year, and furthermore she becomes infertile earlier. So
>deadbeat dad is off to maximize his seed dispersal with more nubile babes.
>(always, always always "maximizing" in sociobiology, which has drifted so
>far from classic natural selection it's breathtaking.)
Like I keep saying - allowing for the basics of selfish gene theory does not need to lead you down this path at all.
>hard to keep track of all the "dippy" ideas we've got here: dippy
>biological ideas, where the individual organism is the self-directing
>subject of adaptation rather than groups;
Selfish gene theory, as I understand it, need not be deployed to give succour to individualism.
>dippy ideas of social fields,
>such that a specific social tendency such as differential dating patterns
>among, say, 55-year old men and women in upper-middle class NYC (neither,
>presumably,interested in more kids), directly reflects the differential
>fertility between male and female fifty-somethings; dippy ideas about
>kinship and reproduction that undergird the whole theory; dippy
>market-saturated imagery of Hobbesian men and women who in fact just don't
>exist as some pre-cultural base line because we were always already
>motivated by and enmeshed in all sorts of social relationships before we
>even became modern humans.
Well, Maureen, I'm surprised you feel you have to tell me this - how many times have I been saying it in just this thread?
>But of course even that thought exercise just dignifies the theory with
>more respect than it deserves.
So I disagree. Did learn a lot from your post, though. Ta.
>sufficiently vented,
I've got to vent some more, yet - still got Kelley to go ...
Cheers, Rob.