First up, cards on the table; I think that the only fully consistent answer for a neo-Darwinian sociobiologist is the one Gordon (semi-jokingly, I think) gave -- that accumuation is counteradaptive. I'm just simply not convinced by the arguments that the facts about demographics can be made consistent with sociobiology.
For one thing, I perhaps didn't make the stylised facts clear enough. Non-reproductive individuals, (who never reproduce in their entire life, despite having opportunities to) are not as uncommon as one might think In the 1998 and 2000 US Census, 19% of women aged 40 to 44 had never given birth to a child, which suggests strongly that the number of non-reproductive individuals can't be dismissed as fluke, ill-health or coincidence; some kind of choice-based explanation is necessary.
Furthermore, in countries like Germany, Italy and Sweden, the population is shrinking. While I'm aware of the "better fewer but better" arguments to explain small family size, I don't see how they can be adapted to explain the fact that while populations are growing in countries with genuine problems getting food, they're shrinking in Germany and Italy. I've actually gone to the trouble of buying Maynard Smith's textbook on this (it was actually pretty easy going, as all the maths is familiar from economics), and I don't see how any of the modern evolutionary biology models can be twisted so far that they come up with the conclusion that a population with no effective predators and ample food, will shrink. Mike Pollak's response to Eric is right on the point; moving into kin selection arguments isn't going to help, as in rich countries, the number of kin is shrinking too.
The only other defence left to the sociobiology crowd is to suggest that this would all make sense in "evolutionary time". Which to me looks like the equivalent of the economics profession's retreat into "rational expectations"; ie, it's a complete abandonment of the attempt to describe the world as it is, in favour of explaining certain models of how the world was or should be, while at the same time trying to cod on that the models are more "scientific" than the world.
For this reason, I don't accept Luke's assertion that this can all be explained because "sex isn't necessarily connected with conception these days". As a matter of fact, sex *is* necessarily connected with conception, unless people actively make the effort to break that connection. And if evolutionary psychology is going to make it as a theory of psychology at all, it's got to be able to explain choices exactly of this kind. And I think Eric's version of the same argument doesn't even work in its own terms; what possible instincts might an Iron Age man have developed that would encourage him to reduce the size of his family when his access to food increased?
So I think that Joanna and Gordon's views end up being the most acceptable in the light of known facts; cultural development has, in fact, trumped any instincts developed in the Serengeti, and history has given us tastes in family size which are counteradaptive. Which makes one wonder why the sociobiologists bother.
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As to what all this has to do with the left, I think Eric was putting it a bit too thick in saying that Dawkins is "not inconsistent with any left project". (I'm going to treat Dawkins, who in fairness has been much more careful than most in this regard, as standing proxy for genuine idiots like Matt Ridley, Thornhill and Palmer (the "rape instinct" team) and other people who credit each other in their footnotes, and who Dawkins unfailingly praises when he needs their support in an argument with Gould.) For one thing, sociobiology is certainly inconsistent with historical materialism, which is still important to some people on the left.
But more deeply, the kind of "altruism" that arises out of kin-selection models, as I think Carroll pointed out, is a pretty thin shadow of any genuine comradeship or fellow-feeling. It's particularist rather than universalist, and, it has to be faced, for all the denials of the Dawkins axis, it's racist. The numerous genuine racists in the evolutionary psychology field, like Kevin MacDonald, are actually more intellectually honest than those who try to claim that kin selection doesn't make it more adaptive for me to hire a fellow pale-skinned Welshman to a well-paying job than a Jew (I've selected two groups with good genealogy and defined histories here in order to abstract from points about the invalidity of race as a concept).
Secondly, sociobiology is a form of power-worship; it is inegalitarian and reactionary in so far as it aims to explain distributions of income and wealth as natural outcomes. It treats status inequality of human beings as an unalterable fact of nature, and thus works as an argument against mitigating that inequality (because it will inevitably rise again). For all that they criticised "The Bell Curve" as bad science, I think that Dawkins and Pinker would be intellectually committed to something like its conclusion if something like its premise could be proved; I seem to remember that Justin Schwartz has pointed out in the past how odious this intellectual commitment is.
Thirdly, while I do not believe that sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists are logically committed to idiotic and/or repulsive views about women, there is enough of a pattern of offending to suggest that it comes with the territory. Reduction of relationships between the sexes to mating strategies allows Thornhill and Palmer, for example, to come up with a theory of rape which does not work as a theory of sexual assault without penetration. Sociobiology reduces men and women to a single hypothesised bargaining game, almsot always with pernicious results.
My conclusion would be that the evolutionary psychology strand of the literature which has developed from Dawkins (and which he has never disowned and often lauded) bears a similar relationship to the projects of the left to that of neoclassical economics; it is not logically incompatible to believe in both, but it is difficult, and the theory often points toward conclusions which the politics regards as bad.
DD
PS: Of course, Eric's original question of "why does it seem that leftists are so hostile to Dawkins? " is much easier to answer. Leftists are hostile to Dawkins because he is such an arrogant and self-satisfied w*nker, and because he was so unbearably rude to Gould, Eldredge and Lewontin in the course of the debate summarised in "Dawkins versus Gould: Survival of the Fittest" by Kim Sterelny, a debate which ended with Gould's position entirely unchanged, Dawkins sheepishly claiming that properly interpreted his disagreements with Gould had never existed, but with Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker still strutting about like the Lords of the fucking Dance claiming that they alone were the true heirs of Darwin and Gould was the equivalent of the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial. Gould, Lewontin and Eldredge (and Stephen Rose) are good leftist lads, and the left, whatever its sectarian faults, recognises a knobhead when it sees one attacking its mates.
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