"I think SB is mostly post hoc stories invented to shore up the status quo in the guise of science"
I thought it might be worthwhile to start a thread of the list's on-going sociobiology discussion which ties in with economics, so I'd like to ask Doug, as well as all others who hold the cited perspective and are familiar with these two guys, what do you make of the leap Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis made from marxist economics to an economics based on evolutionary psychology? These guys were pretty prominent, serious marxists, they started the marxist-oriented economics department at UMass-Amherst, they wrote some major dissident works like Capitalist Schooling in America, but in the 90's they distanced themselves from a strictly marxist approach to one that incorporated the insights of ev psych and related fields. A key motivation for this was their interest in the theory of reciprocal altruism that Robert Trivers originated in the 70s and which was later adopted by ev psych, essentially a tit-for-tat approach for explaining how human cooperation could have evolved. Bowles and Gintis very much digged how it undermined the conventional economic model of the self-interested, rational actor (e.g. psychological experiments show that in situations where two participants can split a sum of money as long as the receiving participant agrees with the first offer of the proposing participant the tendency is not what the conventional economist would expect, a $100 sum resulting in 1 cent given and 99.99 kept since each participant maximizes their own self-interest, but instead the trend is to split it fairly, literally $50-$50 in this case).
So now a decade or more after their shift in outlooks, B&G are pretty well settled into analyzing human cooperation with ev. psych style research and applying their findings to economic organization. So my question is do you think these guys are on to something or are they just sell-outs, simply shilling for ruling class ideology? I'd think Bowles would be particularly cognizant and wary of joining a field where limits imposed by authority confine the scope of research and theory, after all his opposition to status quo economic thought is what got him denied tenure at Harvard. I'm obviously skeptical of the idea that they have become willing contributors to bourgeois ideology or been taken in by it, but I am not deeply familiar with B&G's work or background so I am interested in all perspectives on their shift and appreciative of those who would like to share them.
Arash