I guess I don't understand why you're emphasizing this point. Was someone garbling natural selection?
My point was that among humans what also matters is that you survive until your children (and your sib's children) have babies because you can help them bear and raise them. Therefore nonfertile parts of the human life cycle do influence genetic survival rates. Elderly beetles, on the other hand, may not have a lot to contribute to the reproductive success of their offspring and relatives. Of course, an cohesive band, not just immediate family, can have additional influence. But then we're getting into cultural adaptation and possibly even leaving entirely the realm of the much slower and more unwieldy genetic adaptation, so I'll leave it there.
>Language/symbolling enhances sociality tremendously. Was language/symbolling
>invented in the mother-child relationship ? i.e., did women invent
>language/symbolling ?
Has anyone tried to put together an argument for this claim? I'd be interested in seeing it. I do think that one thing the feminist anthropologists and (even) sociobiologists did was make a good argument for the greater significance of the mother-infant relationship as opposed to the male-female mate relationship.
Jenny Brown