>I think if the main concern of those on the left is the sort of political
>applications that could be derived unsoundly from sociobiology then they
>should focus their activism on protesting the policy advocates who abuse
>research findings for their own agendas, not on vilifying the field as
>whole.
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I don't know about the "main concern of those on the left", but like
evolutionary theorists I admire (Gould, Lewontin, et al.), my major
problems with sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are that many of
the claims are (a) weakly supported by data and (b) inconsistent with
the well-established principles of evolutionary theory. --For instance,
when evolutionary psychologists see something like rape in a society,
they tend to assume that behavior must exist because it was shaped by
natural selection ("see, when men can't land a mate, they have forced
sex--"). The reason why this sort of thinking bugs me is that it's
data-free reasoning (we have no idea if rape actually increased men's
reproductive success at any point in human existence); moreover, no
serious evolutionary theorist makes the claim that /every/ discrete
trait or pattern of behavior in a species must be the product of natural
selection. For me, it is enthusiasm about evolutionary theory and
rigorous scientific practice--not my "left politics"--that drives my
ridicule of existing evolutionary psychology.
Miles