On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Luke Weiger wrote:
> From: <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org>
>
>> Sure, that's the great thing about sociobiology: we can make up any
>> stories we like!
>>
>> Miles
>
> How far does your radical anti-adaptationism go? For instance, would you
> deny that sexual desire itself is a product of natural selection? Would you
> argue that adaptationist accounts of sexual desire are necessarily on shaky
> epistemic ground?
Making fun of sociobiology isn't "anti-adaptationism", is it? Gould is my favorite example of a serious evolutionary theorist who blew well- deserved raspberries at goofballs like Dawkins and Pinker. In any case, it's a far jump from "female orgasm looks like a spandrel" to "all adaptionist accounts of sexual desire are bogus". I noted earlier that male sexual physiology can be quite obviously and plausibly explained using the principle of natural selection; the argument is quite a bit fuzzier for female orgasm, for all the reasons that have been explicated in this thread.
All in all, I agree with Gould: the problem with sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is not that it applies the principle of adaption to understand human behavior and thought; it is that it applies simplistic, dogmatic models of adaptation (e.g., "every characteristic of a species, from the number of fingers to the ability to orgasm, must be due to natural selection") instead of emphasizing how adaptation is one of many factors that can lead to changes at the individual, species, or cladal level. --In other words, the problem is not that they like Darwin's perspective; the problem is that they massively misrepresent and misinterpret Darwin (and most serious evolutionary theorists today).
Miles