<DIV>I will say, though, that I haven't found anything in the annals of evolutionary psychology that I find particularly threatening to the Left project.  Sure, dreams of resolving all conflicts go down the drain, but there's nothing that I think renders EP's view of human nature incompatible with something like market socialism. ravi <gadfly@exitleft.org> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">joanna bujes wrote: > Altruism only needs to be "explained" if you assume that the world is an > aggregate of (self-serving) individuals. > > Big assumption. > i do not know about economics, but at least in biology, its a very powerful assumption in terms of its utility. which suggests to me that the burden rests upon us to defend a more holistic model... no? in another post, i wrote: > a lot of very important work was done in the mid-20th-century against > the notion of a complete, predetermined and unchanging inner nature that > determines each individual's personality, position, etc. as i understand > them, none of these authors oppose that work and to a large extent would > like to extend the humanist/leftist tradition that motivates and > benefits from such work. after reading further posts on the thread (such as the one about pinker's appearance at the AEI), i realize that perhaps i naively took some of these gents (though not singer) at their word. --ravi ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page – <a href="http://my.yahoo.com">Try My Yahoo!</a>