On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:46:09 -0400 Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com>
writes:
> No, it is not unfortunate at all.
Actually, I think that Carrol is right about that. Within evolutionary biology, altruism is given a definite technical definition. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
Within evolutionary biology, the term is used to describe behaviors and phenomena that we would not, in ordinary discourse, call altruistic. For example, the kin-selection hypothesis has been used to explain how multicellular organisms evolved from colonies of single-cell organisms. At the same time, evolutionary psychologists do think that the kinds of human behaviors, that we would all describe as altruistic, can be understood as having an evolutionary basis in kin-selection and reciprocal altruism.
Also, Alan Rudy is correct that the natural sciences and the social science cannot, in practice, really be separated. And in fact evolutionary biology and economics have, from the beginning. co-evolved in tandem. Darwin was sinspired to develop his theory of natural selection from his readings of the political economists Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. Contemporary evolutionary biologists apply mathematical models that were orginally developed for use by neoclassical economists. Some economists, going back to Thorstein Veblen, have looked to evolutionary biology for models to be used for understanding how economic insitutions and systems evolve over time. And social scientists, both bourgeois and Marxist, have sought to understand social and cultural evolution, using analogies with biological evolution. Engels did that to some extent, as did Kautsky even more so. The late Jerry Cohen suggested that historical materialist explanations can be given several alternative elaborations, which included intentionalist elaborations, Lamarckian elaborations and Darwinian elaborations. And Alan Carling has developed a selectionist interpretation of historical materialism.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> What is unfortunate is that the
> natural
> and social sciences are believed to be and taught as if they were
> two,
> discrete - if internally differentiated - intellectual columns
> rather than
> what they are and always have been, intertwined and interchanging
> efforts to
> engage, hypothesize, test and interpret the world we live in. For
> that
> matter, the humanities need to be tossed into the mix in order to
> understand
> - and in the hopes of generating some social self-reflexivity within
> the
> ranks of - scientists and the ways they operationalize the idea of
> nature...
> hello RG Collingwood, Keith Thomas, Leo Marx, Clarence Glacken,
> Susan
> Griffin, Neil Smith, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and beyond
> (whatever one
> thinks of any of these folks in particular).
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > Jim is of course correct on this. But also of course relatively
> few
> > non-biologists make this distinction when they use the word or
> come
> > across it in their reading. It is unfortunate the biologists did
> no
> > select another term.
> >
> > Carrol
> >
> > Jim Farmelant wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:42:16 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> writes:
> > > > The concept of "altruism," invented by Comte, is a futile
> attempt to
> > > > resolve the contradiction btween a radically individualist
> > > > conception of
> > > > humanity on the one hand and the obvious sociality of human
> history
> > > > on
> > > > the other hand. (This sociality is older than homo sapiens.)
> > >
> > > In biological theory, the concept of
> > > altruism is given a technical meaning. [CLIP[
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
> --
> *********************************************************
> lan P. Rudy
> Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
> Central Michigan University
> 124 Anspach Hall
> Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
> 517-881-6319
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
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