Rakesh and Rob:
Rakesh,
You may be right that the sociobiology I depicted was the extreme end of evolution scholarship. If so it's because this extreme is what's in most everyone's imagination when they invoke selfish-genes. Certainly that was the case in discussions here: selfish genes explaining why old men in our society consort with young women far more than vice versa, etc. So I specifically addressed the "maximization of reproductive success" school because it was their imagery and set of presuppositions that needed unpacking in the context of these recent threads.
As for the "smarter" theories, sounds like you're far more up on them. The gene-centered example you gave (kidney damage risk during pregnancy) is so far away from the maximizing selfish genes that I don't think I'd find much objectionable with it. OTOH, I didn't really follow the John Maynard Smith argument about capacity to be influenced by ritual evolving by natural selection hence existence of group loyalty. The capacity to be influenced by ritual is as basic and universal a human a capacity as there is (bound up with the very process of thinking and being motivated social-symbolically). So if he's just saying that natural selection was involved in the emergence of the human capacity to think symbolically, i.e., to be human, well obviously I'd have no problem with that either.
I'm not up on what Godelier has to say about the incest taboo, what's it about? (Though these days I believe it's referred to, with more finesse, as the "tendency for incest avoidance" -- reflecting a more complex understanding of what's behind this general tendency than those standard theories based on either biology or demographics or intra-group competition or Westermark's indifference theory or Levi-Stauss's alliance theory--the latter which I believe you said Godelier's theory is a critique of?)
Anyway, you've piqued my curiousity.
Rob:
Your selfish genes are very slippery. I point out perils of a maximization selfish-gene theory, you say you were implying no such silliness then go on to reassert the silliness; you start by suggesting most unambiguously that selfish genes might help explain why old men date nubile babes far more than OW-YM, then say you weren't at all suggesting any such differential, just concerned that we recognize some vague genetically encoded "instinct" that stands opposed to discourse and anyway, women's selfish genes could just as plausibly be programmed for promiscuity as well (just that, apparently, her genes know to shut it down after fifty but a male's promiscuity gene forges valiantly ahead).
So just a couple bleats to repeat from my end:
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?
Its _great_ Wall Street advice! But, Rob, all my haranguing was precisely to point ojt that it's this Wall Street model that makes selfish-gene theory so farcical! The differential reproduction of human organisms via natural selection has nothing to do with Chicago-School-of-Economics models of competitive self-maximization. Natural selection is just any genetically based relative advantage by some organism in its capacity to produce fertile offspring in a particular environment. This posits nothing about maximization and is in fact a _minimum_ principle. In that sense it's much less like Wall Street principles of resource allocation than poker: you don't need a flush to win, all you need is to happen to be one card better than your fellow players. And if you happen to get dealt, say, two kings every single hand (not four kings, not aces), by the end of the evening you're still likely to end up with a pile of chips. (btw, Charles: heard this before?)
Of course even this game-analogy misleadingly plays into the insidious slippage I'm trying to point out here: from neutral "differential reproduction" to motivated "competition" to "self-maximization." A slithery slippage because while interactions between populations and environments certainly lead to distinct adaptations, they're very specific ones and not encodings of generalized traits of competitive, maximizing motive.
But besides your maximizing male bed-hoppers bespeaking shoddy biology (and ditto with your new female bed-hoppers), on the human level I still don't think you've recognized the proper theoretical place for the emergent thing about human activity: the introjection of the language-symbolic realm between genotypes and phenotypic behavior. This _is_ the "human essence" and freedom you waxed on about. The fact that biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould are some of the most eloquent elucidators of the significance of this emergence (and how that informs what kinds of instructions are or are not passed down through human genes) should hearten you with reassurance that this emergent level does not ignore "nature" or presume discourse takes place in some disembodied realm.
You closed by saying that sociobiologists
> 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.
This is curious because abstracting from sociopolitical context was precisely how you first invoked the selfish-gene (May -Decembers in Manhattan). So if you really can back off from the suggestion that some "must-spread-glorious-seed" programming is the kind of genetic instruction that could even exist muchless have any bearing on the sociopolitical context that allowed that sorry dinner-party scenario, then you'll be freer to think up more constructive ways to address your nature vs.discourse concern.
G'day/night,
Maureen