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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (52161)	7/1/2002 6:28:18 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I put up facts, not arguments. Fact: Vouchers do not siphon money from public schools. Fact: Private schools do not necessarily limit diversity. JLA

To: epicure who wrote (52161)	7/1/2002 6:29:32 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 82486

And here, for the champions of OUP, one of their more "controversial" books. Many folks still do not like sociobiology the least little bit. Although many biologists do, others do NOT. I remembered this book, and many more like it. The OUP imprimatur does not guarantee accuracy, but it does usually embrace scholarship- although sometimes of a rather far out kind. My father was a librarian, and I remember one very illustrative example that I am trying to dig up for all you little bibliophiles out there. So beware! There is much controversy in the hallowed halls of the OUP- almost as much as on SI. Alcock, J. (2001). The triumph of sociobiology. N.Y.: Oxford University Press. After all the controversy beginning with the attacks of Harvard biologists Gould and Lewontin on their colleague Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The new synthesis (1975), could it be that sociobiology has finally triumphed? John Alcock’s book argues that it has. Moreover, Alcock’s thesis is that Wilson simply integrated what a large number of scientists had been doing over a long period as part of the new synthesis and gave it a name. In Alcock’s view, the motivation of the intellectual assault on sociobiology was ideological rather than scientific. After Alcock’s critique of a number of popular and to a large degree current misapprehensions about sociobiology, the reader is inclined to agree. If the criterion for triumph is popularity among biologically minded behavioral scientists, the growth of the multidisciplinary Human Behavior and Evolution Society is compelling. On the other hand, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society did change the name of its journal from Ethology and Sociobiology to Human Behavior and Evolution in 1997, it apparently still appeared politically incorrect to at least some academics to have "sociobiology" in the journal title. Similarly, the phrase "evolutionary psychology" has come to be used in place of sociobiology, in part because of political sensitivities regarding the name sociobiology, in part because having "psychology" in the new name is appealing to the scientific proprietariness of psychologists. It has been argued that evolutionary psychology views humans as adaptation executors, whereas sociobiologists see them as consciously pursuing fitness goals. However, I do not believe that the latter has ever been a defining characteristic of sociobiology. The fact that none of the critics changed their mind in response to the steady empirical progress of the sociobiological research program ably summarized in this book is one of the most salient aspects of Segestråle’s (2000) detailed description of the long history of the sociobiology debate. One wonders what it would take in the way of evidence or argument to convince the principal critics of sociobiology that they had been mistaken. As the old saw goes, science advances through the deaths of senior professors. An observation that suggests, at least to sociobiologists, that the dispute was more over status and social dominance than fact and logic. One can only hope that the tokens of increased fitness that accrued to the critics as a result of their involvement in the debate proved a satisfactory substitute for enlightenment. References Segestråle, U. (2000). Defenders of the truth: the battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, E.O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.