On Mon, 29 Nov 1999 04:04:48 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
>Rakesh:
>>He begins by suggesting that it is possible to offer an evolutionary
>>explanation for a universal human characteristic--the ability to be
>>socialized by myth. The basic idea here may be no less convincing:
>that
>>those human groups that could instill group loyalty into their
>members
>>would be more sucessful and hence individuals in the group would
>transmit
>>more of the genes that made group loyalty possible. More
>specifically, if
>>cooperation is induced by myth and ritual, not by reason or selfish
>gene
>>algebra, the innate capacity to be influenced by ritual may have
>evolved by
>>natural selection. This leads John Maynard Smith to argue for the
>creation
>>of myths that extend loyalty to the human species as a whole. Highly
>>speculative indeed, but not necessarily bourgeois apologetics and
>>transposed vulgar economics.
>
>On the strength of your summary here, I'd say John Maynard Smith's
>motive
>is an old-fashioned humanist one, so it's not quite Hobbesian in the
>individualistic sense, but his theory sounds like, "add genes &
>evolution
>to Donna Haraway and stir."
John Maynard Smith is an ex-Communist and ex-Marxist who studied evolutionary biology under the JBS Haldane who was a Marxist. So perhaps this should not come as a complete surprise. I remember reading a piece in Science & Society by Richard Levins on dialectics and systems theory in which he recounts an exchange he once had with Maynard Smith over dialectics.
Maynard Smith argued that general systems theory could now take the place of dialectics while Levins argued that while chaos theory and complexity theory were useful enough they were not sufficient to take the place of dialectics.
> Anyhow, substituting society as an
>integrated
>organism (that succeeds or fails) for atomized individuals (who
>succeed or
>fail) has been an old bourgeois ideological tool. Adding genes &
>evolution
>to it doesn't change this fact. Further, an organicist &
>functionalist
>understanding of "myth, ritual, & group loyalty" certainly helps to
>gloss
>over class struggles, doesn't it? Where's your left communism when we
>need
>it???
I guess that is what happens when one abandons dialectical thinking. Maynard Smith might have come up with something a bit more useful had he retained a dialectical perspective. A dialectical sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) would no doubt be an interesting sight to behold.
Jim F.
>
>Yoshie
>
>
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