>>> Maureen Therese Anderson <manders at midway.uchicago.edu>
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.
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Charles: Sounds like Sahlinsism. Nature is a necessary but not sufficient condition for determining human activity. Or since nature is a constant throughout the human species, it as a constant cannot explain the differences between different cultures or societies. A variable can't be explained by a constant ( Leslie White)
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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.
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Charles: Yes, emergent levels of reality. Culture cannot be reduced to biology.
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-clippity, clip- a lot of good stuff.
Maureen says:
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.)
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Charles: Maureen, doesn't the logic of marrying out come in here too ? The logic of the incest taboo ? Marriages are for peace between different groups.
If human conduct were based on the selfish gene, individuals would be motivated to reproduce with their closest biological associates , so as to maximize fertility for their genes or genes closest to their's, no ? But instead we have the incest taboo, forbidding sex with those genetically close.
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In short, people are always, by definition, doing kin-inspired things that make absolutely no sense from the perspective of selfish gene theory. But they're things that do make sense within the society's meaningful schemes. And in light of this facct that kinship is manifestly not ordered by or for individual biological reproductive success, sociobiology has precious little left to stand on.
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Charles: Now here's where I question a little the logic of _Culture and Practical Reason_ and its emphasis on the meaningful. Or at least the meaningful as an ultimate explanation. Isn't the unity in diversity, the altruism for the society as a whole , of kinship logics a form of practical reason ( in a more general sense than productive efficiency) behind the meaning structure ? Kin systems that work to create alliances between all sections of society are likely to last longer than kin systems that encourage selfish division into a lot of isolated groups. This is perpetuated by the structure , the culture, the system of meanings, but meaning structures are not entirely arbitrary relative to viability of society.
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Maureen:
biological ideas, where the individual organism is the self-directing subject of adaptation rather than groups
Charles: I agree with your overall critique of the dippy biology, but on this narrow point, isn't there something about natural selection acting on individuals and not groups ? Not self-directing or anything, just selection for or against individual organisms. I thought Stephen Jay Gould said that in one of his essays. I don't mean that this contradicts your conclusions on the main debate here.
CB