And, speaking of caricatures, who on this list, other than Cadet Cox, believes that biology has no impact on human behavior? Doubting EP is not all the same as dismissing biology.
So, please answer my questions:
1. What exactly makes our CNS hunter-gatherer? It obviously was formed under hunting-gathering, but how does that explain the tight fit you see? Somebody (Marvin Harris maybe) I read thinks the best explanation of why our brains mushroomed is that increased size allowed us to keep chasing after wounded animals without overheating. That's a by-product of hunting, but you surely wouldn't say that distance-running is the main purpose of the homo sapiens brain, would you?
2. Name an EP explanation that works and is provable.
BTW, what is the contrast between EP and historical materialism? If EP works, wouldn't it be a supreme example of the excellence of explanations that emphasize actually-existing material processes?
> > What is the CNS of a hunter-gatherer? Don't we also
> > have the CNS of serfs,
> > slaves, capitalists, workers, etc?
> >
> >
> > > I am glad somebody here had the guts to say this.
> > I
> > > agree.
> > >
> > > Thomas
> >
>
> It's a genuinely uninformed thing to say. The period
> of time in which humans have been civilized, rioughly
> 15,000 years, is totally insignificant ona n
> evolutionary scale. It might as well not exist. No
> natural selection (apart from the annihilation of the
> species) could take place in this period. Our NSN and
> the rest of was formed, evolutionarily, over the
> preceding 1.5 million years or so.
>
> There is no guts in saying what everyone on this list
> believes except for a handful of outliers like me. In
> these circles, the conventional wisdom is that our
> biology is totally irrelevant to our behavior, and we
> knwo thsi necause bourgeois ideologists use biogical
> explanatioins to justify existing institutions, and if
> those explanations were good it would be bad for the
> things we want. This is of course a string of
> fallacies.
>
> As for "provably" adequate ev psych or SB
> explanations, go out and learn something if you care
> to. I'll give some references to them as care to
> listen. I like davud Buss; book Strategies of Desire,
> for one. But don't hold these explanation to higher
> standards than you would for historical materialist
> explanations, which of course you will.
>
> jks