> Is there anything to apologize for, excuse, or justify? The
> answer is No. This is love and lust we're discussing,
> magnificant when it is returned and gratified,
> devastating when denied or frustrated, and no one
> asked you whether you approved, thank you very fucking
> much. (I don't mean you, Luke. One. Someone. Pat
> Robertson. Dubya.) If you don't like it, if it doesn't
> turn you on, for God's sake don't do it. Why anyone
> should have thought that this required a biological
> justification beats me.
Well, I think this is something to be worked out in terms of strategies in a political field. My hunch is that it must be understood within the parameters of a society in which science is often cast as removing your responsibility - you are supposed to defer to the eggheads. Since people seem to believe - wrongly - that there is indeed something that needs to be justified, there is the possibility of a defense afforded by this. (Which I suppose is a rather decent illustration of Foucault's argument at the beginning of History of Sexuality.) The anti-essentialist argument I think can be explained by the complementary attitude towards the institution of science - that with responsibility off goes your autonomy, and that's not a good thing. But I agree this is strictly speaking a muddle.
As for the earlier reply, I think I agree with what you wrote. I suppose one problem would be containing the concept of biology you are working with. You say the environment of humans is always a social field - sure, but it is also a psychic domain, the 'inner environment', it is a cultural domain with a lot of depth to it, etc... - couldn't 'biology' spiral out of control here, coming to encompass sociology, psychology, and end up stuck well into soft interpretative soil? After all, aren't genes expressing themselves in an environment of Shakespeare, Fox News, Britney Spears...and this argument? In some sense they must, since my mitochondria are still burning ATP to press these keys down, but that would seem to be irrelevant - though maybe the large amount of caffeine zooming around my brains does partly account for these crappy sentences. You say that all behaviour is biological behaviour - well, no contest. So how to specify the sense in which some biological function is relevant to understanding a particular behaviour? Have I snorted too much Dilthey for my own good? My point, I think, is that maybe the muddle of the nature vs. nurture thing comes to be replaced by a difficult choice of limits to interpretation.
Thiago Oppermann