Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>but isn't the standard line that men
> want to be sure any kids are theirs and not some other guy's, or they
> won't stick around to support them?
This would only come into practice in the last 4000 years or so, with the development of a social surplus controlled by a 'ruling class' of distinct lineages through which property (control over a laboring popualtion) is allocated. At most one could push this back to fully developed neolithic village culture. It could hardly be relevant to a band of _homo heidelbergensis_. And we are now dealing with ideology, which presupposes a historical development of conditions which the ideology develops to make sense of. And we don't have any historical and/or archaeological evidence of when and under what conditions symbolic behavior became complex enough to embody ideological traditions.
Has anyone in this thread (which I haven't been following closely) tried to define what a "trait" is. Only traits inheritable, and what makes a trait is (as I understand it from brief posts by Dick Levins on Science-for-the-People) not a simple matter.
Carrol
>
> Doug
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