Settle down, Sheldon. Carrol isn't saying there's no biology in our nature, just that it's not fixed by nature. Instead of having an "essence," we define ourselves historically according to our labor and our social (class) organization. What's fixed is our bodies and instincts. What's human is class consciousness. Of course, Carrol would never deny that human consciousness, as we experience it, is a sort of self-generated misunderstanding by which the brain imagines it's something other than either: a) a mass of blinking cellbodies and the proteins spewed from their quivering axonic cables; or b) the vanguard of the proletariat.
Of course, there's nothing else besides genes to define our brains and nothing other than brains to make societies, so it all comes down to good-old deoxyribonucleic acid in the end. Fortunately, the code that tells our bodies how to make themselves from thin air also instructs the alienated worker (due to her inability to define herself through her labor) to reclaim her lost birthright of self-expression and solidarity.
>
>>(Except for those
>>Panglossian idiots who think they can find an evolutionary (biological)
basis
>>for rape or for older men marrying younger women.) And what they are
speaking of
>>tends to be something very hard to specify except in almost mystic terms
(as in
>>Ken's positing of a "essence" that language alienates us from).
>
>Mystic, schmystic. Since the field is open, everything we come up with by
>way of definition of human nature has to be taken with a grain of salt,
>whether we call it essence or not.
This is the basic idea. Our nature is open, and we define it socially according to the functioning of our brain and-- ultimately-- our genes. Of course, you might say this means it's really not open, since it merely plays out according to physical necessity working through our macromolecules and is therefore completely determined. But we go on merrily saying it's open anyway, because our genes tell us to be good communists and do our catechisms at least twice daily (though when we go past three, we have this ritual we like where we go apologize to Father Doug and promise never to say "Stalinist" when having sinful thoughts.)
>Thankfully we're more complicated than chickens
Have you ever carved a whole chicken? Those things are highly ideosyncratic. And that's without the head.
>Well you have to admit we had no history before we were biological, don't
>you. I figure there'll always be interplay between the two.
Alas, not if it's all just matter and its forces. When history's a mere subset of biology, then it's really one thing "interacting" with itself, isn't it? Might as well forget about that secondary "text" known as history and genetically engineer a collective paradise before those damn capitalist geneticists create a paradise of atomized consumers.
Ted