I suggest you read Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Hrdy for a humble, interesting, and limited explanation of the sociobiological project.
Unless historical materialism can both integrate and criticize sociobiology it has condemned itself to irrelevance and ignorance. Besides that I have nothing to add to what Justin has said. He has stated the problem much better than I am able though I doubt that he would want someone who is morally depraved on his side.
Jerry
On 1/26/07, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen
> ________________________________________
> I don't understand the question. Big brains apparently
> enhance adaptive fitness and enable us to think about
> explanations for human behavior.
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB; To the extent that big brains, culture and science have now invented
> nuclear weapons, they have reached a prima facie point of _harming_ our
> adaptive fitness.
>
> ^^^^^^
>
>
>
> >
> > I would like to know if there's a sociobiological
> > explanation
> > for sociobiology. I can think of a
> > historical-materialist one --
> > but hey, that's easy, any of us can do that.
> >
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB: My historical-materialist explanation for sociobiology is that
> anthropology had become too ,well, historical materialist and left for the
> bourgeois ruling class' agents and guardians of academe. Anthropology has
> found lots of primitive communism in the most fundamental human societies.
> Human nature is more communist than bourgeois. There is no need for a
> separate discipline of "sociobiology". Anthropology, archaeology and
> physical anthropology had already established large amounts of research,
> empirical investigation and theory on human evolution when "sociobiology"
> popped up. But anthropology was confirming anti-bourgeois,
> anti-individualist, anti-private property, communistic versions of human
> nature too much. So, the bourgeoisie got some academics to start
> "sociobiology", which uses bourgeois concepts of human nature, and largely
> projects bourgeois social structures, such as rugged individuals,
> selfishness, inclination to war, and the like into the distant human past.
>
>
> By the way, andie's hypothesis seems similar to Desmond Morris' hypothesis.
>
>
>
>
> The evolutionary purpose of orgasms
>
> Evolutionary biologists put forward several hypotheses for explaining the
> role of the female orgasm in terms of the reproductive process. In 1967,
> Desmond Morris first suggested in his pop-science book The Naked Ape that
> female orgasm evolved to encourage physical intimacy with a male partner and
> help reinforce the pair bond. Morris suggested that the relative difficulty
> in achieving female orgasm, in comparison to the male's, might be favourable
> in terms of Darwinian evolution by leading the female to select mates who
> bore the qualities of patience, care, imagination, intelligence and so
> forth, this in contradistinction to qualities such as size and aggression,
> which pertain to mate selection in other primates. Such advantageous
> qualities thereby become accentuated within the species, driven by the very
> differences between male and female orgasm. After all, were the male to be
> motivated by and taken to the point of orgasm in the same way as the female,
> those advantageous qualities would not be needed: self-interest would do the
> trick.
>
> He additionally proposed that orgasm might facilitate conception by
> exhausting the female and keeping her horizontal, thus preventing the sperm
> from leaking out. This possibility, sometimes dubbed the "Poleax hypothesis"
> or the "Knockout hypothesis", is now considered as highly doubtful
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgasm
>
>
>
>
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>
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/