>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 10/03/99 11:21AM >>
It seems that in the original form that Darwin came up with, the theory of
evolution had something of a divided mind in its explanation: (1) on one
hand, there is the 'struggle for existence,' which is a universalist
principle; on the other hand, there is 'sexual selection,' which is based
on the modern two-sex, two-gender model of biological differences -- hence
anti-universalist (and further, what's 'good' for the individual 'struggle
for existence' is not 'good' for 'sexual selection'); (2) on one hand,
there is the 'struggle for existence' on the level of individual organisms
-- an individualist & universalist explanation; on the other hand, there is
a desire to speak of the 'success' of a species, the hierarchy of genders,
races, etc. -- a group-oriented and basically anti-universalist explanation.
Darwin couldn't well reconcile these divergent tendencies in his explanatory preference, so he 'explained' gender differences and hierarchy by arguing that 'sexual selection' depended 'not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex.' As Cynthia Eagle Russett argued, for Darwin 'Men lived at the cutting edge of the struggle for existence. Women, removed from that struggle, led lives so sheltered as to amount to life in a different environment altogether' (_Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood_ 84). In other words, Darwin ended up naturalizing the social, reading the Victorian social convention of the middle-class female exemption from labor back into the evolution of human beings.
Our contemporary Darwinists, unlike Darwin, seem on the whole inclined to argue for a more egalitarian explanation, making 'reproductive success' a universalist principle. However, with the exception of people like Stephen Jay Gould (who argue against trying to find an 'evolutionary advantage or purpose' behind every single trait that an individual organism happened to develop), they tend to reconcile individualist and group-oriented explanations by relying on sexist assumptions.
It seems that there is no necessity to assume what's 'good' for an individual organism (pleasure) is also 'good' for the species that it belongs to ('reproductive success' or 'species preservation') in order to theorize the evolution of human beings, but people are perhaps not comfortable with the idea that pleasure is only _contingently_ related to reproduction _both_ for human males and females.
(((((((((((
Charles: Why is plearsure _only_ contingently related to reproduction ? Why not both deterministically (?) and contingently related ?
Is pleasure contingently related to eating ?
CB