"Obviously it is because of some kind of idea that you have that humans are "essentially" different from the species we are related to and also the species from which our species emerged. This is a pre-Darwinian assumption and either you think that evolution is correct or you take your position."
Essentially, yes, but that essence is not a biological essence. The human essence is what you call 'institutions', just like Hegel said. Biologically, humans are only relatively different. You say I am pre-Darwinian, but all I am saying is that there is something outside evolution - human culture and civilisation - which is not reducible to evolution, has its own laws and features. It is not that I am pre-Darwinian, it is that we are post-, or beyond-evolutionary.
Jerry writes:
"Chimpanzees don't exhibit language but they do exhibit culture. They exhibit what we call empathy when a human exhibits it. They exhibit most of what we call 'politics' on a face-to-face level, and on a level that doesn't involve creating institutions."
Plainly you mean something very different by culture and politics than I do. Politics without institutions? What could that mean? Strictly speaking there cannot be a politics without the separation of state and civil society, but since chimpanzees do not engage in market trade, that is not really possible.
Jerry:
"Too bad you don't have the time to actually understand the subject."
You are confused about what "the subject" is. I am happy to leave biology to those who specialise in it. The subject, my subject anyway, is society. My problem with what you seem to be saying is not that it misunderstands biology (though I have to guess that it does), but that it misunderstands society. If you think what chimps do is culture or politics, I have to conclude that you do not know what culture or politics is.
Jerry:
"So when a wolf cooperates in hunting it is by definition not cooperation?"
Well, you might use the word cooperation, but it is not anything like human cooperation, so in the end the word, if you take it too literally, is wrong.
"Maybe wolf cooperations does not have all of the long range implications of human cooperation."
To say the least.
"Again the main difference here is institutional."
Yes, well, that's the sine qua none.
"Wolves, for example, don't exhibit "cooperation" over vast social networks and this is (mostly) because they don't build those artificial ecological niches that we call 'institutions'."
'Artificial ecological niche' - I think that says it quite well. Second nature, so to speak. The human essence, maybe.
"But for most of our existence as a species neither did we."
Exactly so, and for most of our existence as a species, we were not truly human. It is the institutions that make us human, and, if you'll forgive the resonances, supernatural.
When Jerry writes:
"Well, that is exactly what Europeans used to say about 'primitive' human beings. And the analogy is the same here. You assume because chimpanzees and bonobos are are other than us, and we can't communicate with them in our human language that when they exhibit emotions, behaviors, mental processes similar to ours, it is for some other reason and must be defined differently."
I think that is a very silly point. Racists used to say that Africans were monkeys. The difference is that chimpanzees and bonobos are a different species, Africans are not. The test is simple, human cultures are ultimately, if not immediately, commensurate.
Miles writes:
"I don't understand your reasoning."
I am sorry, I should have been clearer.
"If all you're trying to emphasize is that there are many nonevolutionary, sociocultural forces that shape human life, I'm right there with you. However, it requires a willful misunderstanding of evolution to assert that we've somehow transcended evolutionary processes."
No, I don't think that you can just put them side by side, like that.
Once human industry kicks in it necessarily frustrates the Darwinian 'survival of the fittest'.
Medical science would only be the most extreme example of the way that human society favours the life and reproduction of individuals that would in a natural state, not survive. Not to put too fine a point on it, something like nine tenths of the species simply would not be with us, but for industry. That means that the majority of the species owe their biological existence to nurture, not nature.
Dawkin proposed that the organism is the means by which genes reproduce themselves. But once industry kicks in, the situation is inverted: human biology is merely the vessel that carries human civilisation. Genes and organisms become the means by which civilisations reproduce themselves.
On your point about longevity, your different take speaks volumes. You assume from the outset that we have to explain the evolutionary process, and that because longer life would not impact upon reproduction, it would not have evolutionary consequences. But I was not seeking to illustrate the impact of longevity on evolution. On the contrary, I was trying to show you a fact of today's human biology - rapidly increased longevity - that was due to industry, not genetics.
At the risk of over-complicating the issue, I would not say that natural laws are wholly abolished, only that they are mediated through the production of the means of subsistence, not the sexual reproduction of the species. Natural necessity no longer impacts directly on individuals, but upon societies, who develop collective strategies for coping with scarcity of food, the need for shelter and so on.