Jerry Monaco wrote:
> When you say biological constraints are "inconsistent" with the idea
> of human choice-making, you are saying this simply by fiat. There is
> nothing inconsistent at all between biological constraints and some
> notion of choice.
This isn't what I said as you can discover by reading what you quote.
The claim "that societies psychology, and 'thought' are constrained and guided by our biological make-up" is inconsistent with the (Hegel/Marx) claim that societies psychology, and 'thought' are not constrained and guided by our biological make-up.
But what's not constrained by our biological make-up isn't, within this ontology, open to self-determination. it's determined by the "environment".
My starting point was that Marx's idea of a "true realm of freedom" is rooted in an ontology inconsistent with the scientific materialist ontology underpinning sociobiology (which was claimed to be compatible with a "form of cooperative democracy (anarchism, socialism)". The quotations are the textual evidence for this interpretive claim. They aren't an argument from authority.
The quotation on the "senses" for instance was meant to demonstrate the implications for the understanding of human "senses" of Marx's conception of us as potentially "conscious species-beings", an understanding different from the one provided by sociobiology which has no logical space for a real "subject" of any kind let alone for Marx's "conscious species-being". It has nothing to do with whether or not we are "less sharp-sighted than brachiating primates". That this escapes you explains why you can't see any incompatibility between Marx's "historical materialism" and your "materialism".
The rest of what you say just repeats your mistaken idea that scientific materialism provides the only ontological framework within which to think about "nature" and "biology". Humans as conceived within Marx's ontology are "biological organisms"; they're just not "biological organisms" in the sense on which you're insisting.
Ted