-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: What are we doing here? Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 08:02:25 -0500 From: Richard Levins <humaneco at HSPH.HARVARD.EDU> Reply-To: Science for the People Discussion List<SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU> To: SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU References: <3DC01282.10109 at igc.apc.org> <3DC1942E.74C2422E at well.com><p04310100b9e790dccc81@[136.152.194.173]>
Thanks, Michael, for focusing the discussion. I think there are three main directions for us:
1. The sociology and economics of evolutionary psychology: why is it popular now?Not only the politics of our regressive time but also the promise of marketable commodities.
2. Polemical challenging of specific claims and omisions. For instance, I haven't seen claims about genes for solidarity, pacificism or egalitarian family relations.
3. Our own alternative approach. The question of the appearance of human behaviors is a worth while topic.This should start from the assertion of both continuity and discontinuity in human evolution that would help understand what we mean by "traits". I do not doubt that the physical and chemical organization of the brain is the starting point. Questions of connectivity and neurotransmission are relevant, but to what? Human labor requires that we imagine the product before it is made. This capacity to visualize is then available to visualize all sorts of other things that have no evolutionary significance but are humanly important. The adrenals are active in a stress response, but the adrenal rush is not necessarily aggressive. It can be euphoric. So yes, in a sense corticosteroids may be a precondition for some kinds of aggressive behavior (spontaneous individual aggressiveness, not premeditated aggression that is part of the "cost/benefit" analysis by criminals or the impersonal aggressiveness of the warmakers). And a gene that inhibited synthesis of these molecules may alter the behavioral options(sugar levels might not rise much, blood pressure and heart rate may be stable). But this in no way explains "aggression". Similar, language makes limericks and sonnets possible but a biochemical variant that makes word recall slower or faster would not be a gene for poetry. The task of a real integration of the biological and social is to show the emergence of human behaviors out of human social arrangements on a substrate of rather general biological capacities. Or we could start with a problems such as, how have people coped with the variability of the environment? The basic modes are detection with response, prediction, broad tolerance, prevention and mixed strategies. We could examine any of these to see how they emerge from pre-human modes. For instance, all animals face food shortage. Food could be stored in the body as fat, in the ground as acorns, in more abstract form as social bonds, or more recently as wealth and money, in which case it can be insatiable. But where we do not have social/cultural mechanisms to cope with the environment, biological and behavioral modes persist. For instance in the short- and long term survival at high elevation.
Let's not let the reductionists set the agenda.