I didn't want to open this can of worms because it tends to bring out from leftists or the left (nyah, nyah, Carrol) and feminists the knee-jerk reaction that biology _cannot_ matter to our behavior because it would politically very bad if it did matter.
This gross fallacy is a consequence of the misuse of biology (sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, ethology, and the like) by vulgar ideologists who deploy biological concepts in defense of privilege and power -- the people that Gould, Rose, Lewontin, Kamin, and Kitcher rightly skewer in books like The Mismeasure of Man (or Carol Tavis' the Mismeasure of Women).
However, it is a fallacy on many levels. In the first place, the truth is not what is politically convenient. It might be true that the circumstances in which (say) men and women were socially equal and there was no sexual double standards did not significantly overlap with the ones in which, say, they leave lives that are not even more fraught with misery and unhappiness than they are now. I am not saying that this is so, and indeed I don't think we have any reason to believe it. But it is important that we acknowledge that this is at least partly an empirical hypothesis. There is no a priori reason to think that the world favors our ideals.
Moreover, the explanation of this hypothesis, if true, might have a biological component rooted in evolutionary theory/facts. Now, this does not mean that, if true, any differences in behavior between, say, men and women (which will only be statistical in any event), are "biologically determined," if that means they are manifested rigidly in all circumstances regardless of the environmental conditions. As I have said repeatedly, any such claim is evolutionary nonsense. Genetic predispositions are necessarily only manifested in environmental circumstances. This in large part the meaning the distinction between genotype and phenotype. Different circumstances may not trigger the predispositions at all, or may change their manifestation, or trigger other ones that override the ones in question, and so forth.
For this reason, likewise, talk of biological explanation of behavior is not necessarily, nor indeed ever, if intelligently and correctly used, a way of saying that certain behaviors are "human nature" in a way that means they are immutable. But correspondingly it is an error to think that talk of social or cultural explanation of human behavior means that the behavior in question can be easily changed. To take a fairly neutral example, a people's use of a particular language is as near to purely culturally and nonbiologically explained as anything, but it is very hard to change. Biologically rooted behaviors may be easily changed depending on the circumstances (if you are allergic to peanuts, don't eat them and you won't get he bad reactions). Socially rooted behaviors, including, for example social attitudes towards women, which (no one reasonable would deny) have a substantial social explanation whatever other sort of explanation they have, may be hard to change.
Incidentally not all sociobiology is right wing ideology -- from Kroptotkin on cooperation to Singer on ethics (I know, Marta, you think he's a bad guy, but most of what he says is that we should have more equality), there has been a left undercurrent of SB. Not all of it has been optimistic -Sebastiano Timpanario -- granted, not arguing from studies, but still worth reading -- was a socialist militant who drew pessimistic conclusions from our biological characteristics -- people should read his On Materialism. It's still a good book. (Also fun his his demolition of Freud on slips of the tongue, The Freudian Slip.)
Miles is innocent of the grosser versions of these errors. And he is right that a lot of SB is pretty sloppy. But be makes some error on which Luke nails him:
--- Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:
> Miles wrote:
>
> > Luke demonstrates two things that drives me nuts
> about evolutionary
> > psychology:
> >
> > 1. Confident predictions about what life must
> have been like for humans
> > hundreds of thousands of years ago in diverse
> environments.
No one "confident" -- every able evo biologist, including SBs, recognize that we are dealing with a lot of speculation and have very little evidence, nit only about human life but about all life.
We have
> > absolutely no way of knowing whether or not male
> infertility was common
> > in human prehistory.
Actually it's pretty fucking (ha ha) good bet that it wasn't. You don't need SB to tell you that infertile males would be highly likely to be selected down to a smallish proportion of the population pretty quickly.
> (Luke: I'll just say that I don't
> know of a single primate
> species that suffers from widespread infertility,
For the reason above.
> and mankind's present
> troubles with infertility appear to stem mainly from
> man-made pollution.
I don't know how bad these problems are anyway. However today the lowish reproduction rates among the more affluent citizens in the advanced countries have more to do with social and economic factors than infertility, I am pretty darn sure.
> And once again, even if we were to assume
> present-day rates, the slight
> increase in reproductive potential yielded by
> additional sexual partners is
> vastly outweighed by the potential cost of turning
> off all prospective
> providers.
Quite, if there is any selective pressure for a woman to prefer a guy who treats the balance between a macho man and stick-around stable provider, as well as for men to want to put their energy into raising their own offspring -- so the potential selective pressures it from two sides.
>
> > 2. The naive assumption that there was one period
> of time (the EEA) in
> > which human psychological traits "evolved".
Who thinks this? They are still evolving. Of course homo sapiens has only been around for 1000,00 years or so. an evolutionary blink, you might consider that "one period."
Luke: However, _it does_ stand
> to reason that our days
> as hunter-gatherers played a particularly huge role
> in our evolution, since
> the vast majority of humans were hunter-gatherers.)
And for most of the period of time in which homo sapiens and our ancestors have existed.
>
> Anyway, I know you're just trying to fight the good
> fight against ev-psych
> "just-so stories," but if I recall correctly, even
> Stephen Jay Gould
> conceded the promiscuity battle.
>
Some great proportion of evo bio necessarily consists of just so stories. That doesn't mean they are bad, just that you have to be modest about putting them forth.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > The fact that sociobiologists overlook
> > these plausible evolutionary reasons for female
> > promiscuity and exaggerate the evolutionary
> reasons for
> > male promiscuity provides another example of how
> existing
> > theories of evolutionary psychology are based on
> social norms
> > (here, gender standards) rather than a rigorous
> and logical
> > application of the principles of evolutionary
> theory.
>
> Absofuckinglutely!
>
> Thanks Miles,
>
> joanna
>
>
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