On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 17:43:09 -0800 (PST) Samuel Waite
<haymarket326 at yahoo.com> writes:
> Similar ideas are advanced in the book Unto Others:
> The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior by
> Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. I recommend it.
>
> I've avoided posting in the "Darwinian Left" thread
> because I prefer to lurk and didn't want to get drawn
> into a protracted debate with any Singer sympathizers.
> The topic interests me a great deal, however, and I
> try to keep abreast of current developments.
>
> Shortly after I first got involved with radical
> politics, I became aware of what I came to call the
> "human nature excuse" -- we can't have a more just,
> free society because it's "against human nature".
> Partly out of curiosity and partly out of a desire to
> amass ammunition against such arguments, I started
> spending a lot of time reading up on this stuff.
The "human nature excuse" goes back to antiquity. Aristotle used it against Plato's proposals as presented in *The Republic* and *The Laws*. Aristotle also invoked the "human nature excuse" in his defense of slavery. According to him, some people are by nature - "masters" who are fit to command others while other people are "slaves" by nature who are only fit to obey orders. Those arguments along with many other arguments that similarly invoked the "human nature excuse" were quite popular in the antebellum South.
>
> My research led me to a great skepticism toward
> biologistic explanations of human behavior, which I
> maintain. I read The Blank Slate after being assured
> by everyone from The Nation to the National Review
> that it was the best possible case for biologism that
> could be made. If this is true, then I can only
> assume that in 20 years, most of what's now called
> evolutionary psychology will have gone the way of the
> dodo.
I would draw a distinction between what is commonly called evolutionary psychology and what I would call Darwinian psychology. The latter seeks to understand the behaviors of human beings and other species from a Darwinian standpoint. The former is essentially a repackaging of the sociobiology of folk like E.O. WIlson that had been in vogue back in the 1970s. A good example of what I would call a Darwinian psychologist was the famous behaviorist, B.F. Skinner who sought to understand behavior using selectionist causal models.
>
> One scholar whose reaction to that book was very
> similar to my own is psychologist Hank Schlinger,
> whose article "The Almost-Blank Slate: Making a Case
> for Human Nurture" in the current issue of Skeptic I
> also recommend.
Schlinger, also BTW published a critique of Pinker, a couple of years ago in the journal, Behavior and Social Issues. His article can be downloaded from http://www.bfsr.org/BSI_12_1/12_1schl.pdf
I also wrote about Pinker at: http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg00572.h tml
>
>
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