<div style="direction: ltr;">On 4/21/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <<a href="mailto:sokol@jhu.edu" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> sokol@jhu.edu</a>> wrote: WS: Jerry, I know the spiel, I did read the _Harmless People_  and take an anthropology course or two.  I just do not buy the argument. I think it is a nice heart-warming story that we all wish were true, but unfortunately it is a myth  that uses the absence of evidence as evidence in its favor.  Not a good thing, at least in science. </div>Why attribute to me a spiel! Madonna mia, Woj!  You are bag full of prejudices and false attributions of what you think other people think and believe! And why do you constantly confuse social hierarchies, economic class, logical hierarchies, and cognitive categories.  To conflate and confuse these notions is to make one category mistake after another. Listen I have spent a good portion of my life studying sociobiology and primatology and evolutionary theory and the blanket statements that you make are ideological preferences, no more, no less. You may be surprised that I consider sociobiology basically correct as the only possible research program in this area.  Still most of the stories told from the point of view of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are not thought through.  The fact is that existing hunter-gatherer societies that we have studied enforce equality of distribution, sometimes brutally and violently, in a way that is not pretty and is not an example of anything I would advocate.  But though this equality is not pretty it still exists.  This does not mean that there is a lack of hierarchy. There can be enforced equality of distribution of goods such as food and still be hierarchical relations in other areas.  Studies of various primates have shown, hierarchy and enforced equality can coexist.  This is certainly true of bonobos but also of a few monkey species.  You attribute to me ideas out of a sort of ideological prejudice of your own.  Saying that there is class divisions, in hunter-gatherer societies, is like saying that there are class divisions in chimpanzee societies or bonobo societies or among gorillas.  Classes are simply economically impossible, in such situations where there is no discern able division of labor, except sexual division and age division.  This does not mean that there is no hierarchy, but the hierarchy varies greatly.  (Note there are always exceptions in a few superabundant hunter-gatherer societies such as in the Northwest of the U.S., the Kwakiutl, class divisions can be said to exist in some form.)  Distribution and competition among primates over food and sex, the various differences between species, and how these differences might relate to humans is something I have taken hundreds of pages of notes about and if you wish I will write to you separately and off list. But I will give a few short paragraphs.   Yes, as I said, hunter gatherer societies are  hierarchical... and so are all societies of apes and other primates.  But you should really study primate societies with an open mind because you show little understanding of their great variety.  I would suggest that you study the difference between rhesus monkeys for example and some of the less hierarchical old world monkeys.  Some monkeys share food equally within the whole group but have a strict hierarchical order for male sexual access.  I would also suggest that you read de Waal's two books "Chimpanzee Politics" and "Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape".  They provide a contrast between chimpanzee male dominated hierarchy and bonobo female dominated hierarchy.  The male dominated hierarchy divides food unequally between alpha favored females and other females, for example.  The bonobo hierarchy is essentially a female geritocracy that divides foods equally between all females and also has a regime of complete sexual promiscuity.