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For instance most (possibly all) vertebrate species that take a relatively long-time from birth to maturation seem to show certain similar characteristics. One of those characteristics is cooperation in raising children. Many sociobiologists propose that there is a relationship between the length of maturation and cooperative parenting. If there is no cooperative parenting then of necessity the length of time from birth to maturity will be short. If the length of time between birth and maturity is long-enough to tax the energy or threaten the survival of mother and infant then there must be cooperative parenting. It is true of all other species. Why shouldn't it be true of the hominid line?
This is a sociobiological hypothesis.
^^^^^^ CB: Jerry, what's the difference between sociobiology of humans and anthropology ? Didn't anthropology come first ? Isn't the establishment of a new name for a discipline that already existed a politically motivated thing ( not by you , but by the originators)?
Isn't the human length from infancy to adulthood much longer, so as to be qualitatively different, than any other species' ?
Humans originated language use. Even if now some chimps or dolphins are using very rudimentary language in human designed experiments, no non-human species has originate language on its own, or learned even rudiments without human teachers. This is a well-settled fact. Anthropology has long established language as a defining characteristic of the human species. How Chomsky could think that it did not arise in the course of the evolutionary origin of humans is amazing (if that's what he thinks).
The key characteristic of language and culture in terms of human evolutionary advantage is that it allows the experiences of one generation to be shared by future generations after the first generation is long dead. This allows an accumulation of knowledge that no other species is able to do.
So, when a stone tool was invented by some early human, it did not have to be reinvented by future generations. Improvements in the design could be accumulated through experiences. Culture's critical adaptive advantage is that it allows accumulation of knowledge and experience across many generations.
I'm , well , annoyed, that sociobiology and ev psych go blithely along doing anthropology without some of the sociobio and ev psych fans here saying, "yes , we admit that we are doing anthropology, and we aren't using the enormous body of scientific work in those disciplines to address the issues in these threads." The first concept that sociobiologists should emphasis in analyzing human society is "culture".
I would like to get a reply from socibio advocates as to why you don't see sociobio is just particular anthropology project when it is "applied" to humans.
Otherwise, "sociobiology" is disciplinary "imperialism" in its effort to usurp the subject matter of anthropology , and give it a new name.
I very much suspect a political motive. You see the scientific evidence that was comes out of cultural and biological anthropology tends to refute the bourgeois concepts of human nature. Humans are not by nature individualistic, like the economic "rational man" or the like. What came out of the human EEA was a new species characterized by communism , communalism, intense sociality when compared to the prior primate species, not selfishness and individualism.