>
> Isn't the human length from infancy to adulthood much longer, so as to be
> qualitatively different, than any other species' ?
Charles, Jim,
To answer your question succinctly, none of this is "outside" of academic politics or the ideological conjuncture. That is why it is so much easier to read about social insects than is to read about primates. Pick up the best book about primates, even a good taxonomic book such as "The Natural History of the Primates" by Napier & Napier, and you walk into a minefield. But in another context I wouldn't want to change this to an argument about the rather artificial divisions that are maintained in academic departments.
What sociobiologists do might be called "comparative sociology of species." Again here is another reason why studying social insects is relatively easy. The hypotheses can actually be tested and refuted, predictions made, etc. because there are so many differ net species of social insects. Thus some insects engage in allomothering (where insects other than the mother help in providing care for the insects) and other insects don't. Some army ants forage and fight in a way that is constant some forage and try to stake out territory in a way that leads to less fights. Since there are so many species of social insects one can do many kinds of analyses, both horizontally across species and family lines and vertically within species lines where all the species have a relatively recent common ancestor. One can compare ecological niches, lifeways and social organization and actually explain why some social insects engage in cooperative breeding and others don't.
What is controversial for many people about sociobiology when applied to humans is that there is an assumption that one can somehow compare prolonged offspring dependence and cooperative breeding in birds with prolonged offspring dependence and cooperative breeding in humans and then come up with some hypotheses that might be investigated. But this is what _anthropologists_ did. It was groups of anthropologists who were inspired by studies of birds and social insects to try to form hypotheses about human cooperative parenting (allomothering - "allo" from the greek meaning "other".)
Sarah Hrdy was herself an anthropologist before she went back to graduate school to study biology and ended up doing primatology for some years. So let me quote her:
"One reason why the critical role of allomothers was overlooked was that sociologists studied Western populations with low rates of child mortality. By the end of the 1980s, however, anthropologists influenced by sociobiological studies of animals began to ask if allomaternal assistance mattered for human reproductive success. In a pioneering study, Turke (1988) found a correlation between the availability of allomaternal assistance and increased maternal reproductive success in a matrilineal, matrilocal population living on Ifaluk atoll. On this Pacific island, parents with a daughter to help rear subsequent children had higher reproductive success than parents whose first two children were sons. About the same time, another sociobiologist, Mark Flinn (1989), reported that Trinidadian mothers in households with nonreproductive helpers usually daughters had significantly higher reproductive success than mothers without such help."
My point here is two-fold. First, it is not that these studies are correct. but rather that sociobiology inspired these anthropologists to ask questions and propose hypotheses that they would have otherwise not thought about. And second, comparing human beings to other species can always help us to set a background, see things new, or transcend our limited world views.
> 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
This is one thing that I keep an open mind on. If dolphins have a high level of communication, I don't think it will be anything like human language. It would be more like some combination of symbolism and music I would think. The fact that dolphins name each other and seem to communicate with each other by name and about third parties is quite interesting. It shows some level of symbol making.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060508_dolphins.html
>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).
Chomsky's thought is like this. It is a mistake to think of
"language" as for communication between humans as opposed to an
organization of the mind brain that may have facilitated thought.
Thus it is possible that before the language organ was used as a means
of communication it could have been simply an increased complexity of
the brain that allowed for greater conceptualization. This might mean
that a random mutation that allowed for the basic structure of
language occurred before the physical ability to communicate evolved.
This would make language an evolutionary spin-off of a certain
complexity of the brain. He is suspicious of a strictly adaptationist
explanation of language but he does think tht language was a
biological development.
>
> 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.
This is true but every indication so far is that early hominids had tools and developed a tool culture. Since hominids were not much more than upright chimps it is unlikely that these hominids had a language in our sense of the word. As Engels guessed (for the wrong reasons) upright stance preceded big brains and complex culture. Upright stance along with changing sexual and cooperative relations probably (maybe, maybe) drove the evolution of big brains. This is Owen Lovejoy's theory. (See "Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind" by Donald Johanseon & Maitland Edey. If you do nothing else read Part Four "Why Did Lucyt Walk Errect?", Chapter 16 "Is it a Matter of Sex?".... I think you will find it very dialectical. I also believe if I was rewriting this chapter today I could find plenty of cross-species positive and negative evidence to dad on to Owen Lovejoy's hypothesis.) Significant in all of this would be cooperative parenting.
Significantly there is two schools of thought among archaeologists
about the relation between the tool-kit and biological change,. It
seems that tool culture among homo erectus was not varied. The tools
were very simple. Also there doesn't seem to be any sort of artistic
creation associated with homo erectus according to my archeology text
published in 2000. The simple tool kit of homo erectus stone tools
vary a bit in cultural transmission from west to east. But they are
all very simple. Complicated tool-making may be directly associated
with the biological emergence of early homo sapiens. That is why some
archeologists talk of a "biological-industrial association." The
evidence is not fully clear on all of this because we have the usual
problems with dating and fossil/tool association. The point is that
only after some transition from earlier hominids did "tool culture"
become significantly differentiated from cultural group to cultural
group, as far as the archaeological record is concerned.
>
> 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".
Frankly, I don't get the divisions. Some anthropologists are inspired by sociobiology and find good questions to ask by observing other species.
As an anthropologist Hrdy asked the question, "Why do human mothers committ infanticide?" She found out that there is only one other group of primates where the biological mother commits infanticide of her own offspring, usually very early on. so she went to study the Callatichid family (tamarins, marmosets). In the course of her study she found that they engage in cooperative breeding. The thesis she developed is that when biological mothers of cooperative breeders do not have allomothers to help them infanticide by biological mothers is relatively frequent. So she went back to studying human beings and found much evidence for this thesis. Also, strangely enough Callatichids and among humans who live at the subsistence level there is, apparently, a higher rate of survival of children who are aided in allomothering by relatives in the matrilineal line than those who only have the aid of relatives on the patrilineal line. If this hypothesis turns out to be true, isn't it a sociobiolgical hypothesis that has had anthropological results?
In the mean time evolutionary biologists of hominids decided to try to
think through this thesis in relation to our own line. They came up
with a hypothesis of sexuality and cooperative breeding among
hunter-gatherer groups that should remind you of some statements that
Marx and Engels made about production and reproduction of human
societies. The age group that benefits most from alloparental
assistance among primates are children who have just completed
weaning. A hunter-gatherer society that does not engage in a
cooperative mode of production with alloparenting, that allows for
quicker reproduction of children - with its food sharing etc. will
soon die out for both Marxist reasons and Darwinian reasons. For
Marxist reasons because a non-cooperative mode of production would
lead to less and less food for breast feeding mothers and weaning
children. For Darwinian reasons because the longer mothers breast
feed the longer period of time between births, thus resulting in less
propagation of genes compared to other societies.
>
> 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.
It is simply a matter of method, inspiration and comparison. There is
no hard divide.
>
> Otherwise, "sociobiology" is disciplinary "imperialism" in its effort to
> usurp the subject matter of anthropology , and give it a new name.
Well also as I said above, I think these divisions are a result of academic politics and disciplinary ideology, which we unfortunately cannot avoid.
>
> 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.
What ever "human nature" is, is for me an empirical question. Ultimately it is an unanswerable question in some respects. In other respects we know that all hominids have this very maladaptive upright stance, which is an evolutionary trade-off for having our hands free and having a bigger heads, I suppose. For all I know, intelligence is what will lead us to extinction. We haven't been on this planet very long and if we blow ourselves up very soon or destroy our planet, our imaginary Mauritian observers will be able to proclaim our big brains an evolutionary dead end.
>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.
>
>
I apologize for the length of this.
Jerry