>Bullshit, rather. So there are exceptions to the
>general rule.
The general rule being that female monogamy increases the survivability of her offspring? Or that female monogamy is the rule among traditional groups?
>No intelligent Sb ever said that SB
>propensities were more than statistical. No
>intelligent SB ever denied that the environment
>influences human behavior, I have repeatedly insisted
>that to say anything else betrays a total
>misunderstanding of evo biology. There's a lot of bad
>SB out there and I have repeatedly said that it should
>be demolished. But the glee with which Jenny and
>Joanne welcome this trivial non-counterexample is an
>illustration of the fundamentalist cultural
>determinism that I criticized when Carrol expressed
>it.
Wow, I read this clipping completely differently. I read it as recording another possibility for a parental system that would increase survivability among human young. The claim has been that female monogamy does that. But if it doesn't, then what? Explanatory power is evidence only if what you're explaining is what is occurring.
If you want to demolish bad SB, here's some data with which to do so. Anyway, that was why I posted it, not to promote 'fundamentalist cultural determinism.' Who's pouring culture into an empty vessel around here?
>There is a lot of really good,
>careful, first rate work going on in SB, nut there's
>no point in mentioning it here because all good
>leftists know that biology has nothing to do with
>human behavior and it' just reactionary patriarchical
>claptrap to think otherwise. A few anecdotes will do,
>or not even those, just a priori assumptions.
I'm a little miffed by this attack, Justin. Biology has everything to do with human behavior, and not just in the trivial sense that we are animals. But if I dare suggest that, for behavior with a wide cultural variation, a biological explanation of part of that variation is problematic because it's picking and choosing what will be explained, then I'm a cultural determinist? ... I also think reasoning is left out too often as an explanation for human (especially female) behavior. Does that equal fundamentalist rational determinism?
Earlier, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>[...] The reason you say is is the reason that was given me
>by a well-known feminist writer (or a feminist writer
>who should be well known), basically that it is
>politically unacceptable to suggest that there may be
>a biological component to our behavior. Presumably
>this is because for two centuries or more right
>wingers have used biology as an ideology to support
>domination, but it's a blatant fallacy.
Not just to support domination, but to communicate the hopelessness of fighting against it and to ridicule those who do. (A woman 'outside of nature' 'abnormal' 'decayed'; lesser races and classes 'overreaching their capacity').
>And moreover, as I have repeatedly pointed out, apart
>from ignorance and fear that the world may not be
>friendly to our projects, there is a further fallacy
>involved in this standard leftist/feminist blanket
>rejection of SB. That is the preposterous idea that
>biological means hard to change and social means easy
>to change.
On the other hand, there are things that are biological that _are_ hard to change. Pregnancy and childbirth come to mind. (This leads to the strand of feminist thought that forecasts the elimination of these--Shulamith Firestone and Marge Piercy, for example.) But in general, yes, this is a good point, since risks of childbirth (for example) can be made significantly less burdensome, along with better contraception, lower rates of infant death and good substitutes for lengthy lactation.
There is another wrinkle in the blanket rejection you criticize: In feminism, there's a camp that believes men are unchangeable because of a biological flaw. It's a minority view, I think, but it takes sustenance from the evident difficulty of changing male behavior towards women, and the suspicion that men are more warlike (this is one implication of Code Pink, Women in Black and other all-woman peace formations, and a diversion from the main sources of modern warmaking, not to mention a diversion from feminism.)
Obviously, feminism as a political movement exists because there is the demonstrated possibility that men can change, which is much more hopeful than the biological determinism that creeps into feminism and the left despite--or because of--the allergy to evolutionary explanations. In other words, the allergy co-exists with, say, views that women are naturally superior, precisely because the debate that exists--starting with many male-centered biologists--is often so poor.
Jenny Brown