Back to sociobiology (Was Re: [lbo-talk] ...And it taste awfultool!)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Nov 4 08:08:50 PST 2005


Justin:


> You are confused.

I do not think so. To make the evolutionary claim in question, you need to empirically determine, that attractive women have had, on average for the past few thousand or so years, a larger number of babies surviving to their reproductive age than unattractive ones. This is an empirical statement that requires a positive proof with the data, conjecture is not good enough because of the fallacy I previously mentioned. Without proving that statement, the whole argument falls apart because the number of offspring and their chance of survival is the only thing what evolutionary theory calls natural selection. Anything beyond that, e.g. "better adaptation" "superior design" etc. is teleology not empirical science.

I may also add that while the proposition about the number of babies, while theoretically testable, is almost impossible to prove due to the lack of data. The best you can hope for is the historical vital stats, which regrettably do not report on the physical attractiveness of the female.

Wojtek



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