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Pastimes : Let’s Talk About Our Feelings about the Let’s Talk About Our -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (4551)	1/13/2008 11:36:51 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5290

Descent of Man, Pt. IV by Thomas Fleming Chapter 8: Sociality Wade surveys the familiar terrain mapped out by sociobiologists (Wilson, Trivers, Hamilton) and their primatologist (Frans de Waal) and sociologist/anthropologist allies (especially Napoleon Chagnon, Fox and Tiger). This is a popular book from which we do not expect original research or insights; nonetheless, it is an uninspired rehash of the sociobiological position. Wilson blurbs the book enthusiastically, but it is not at all clear that Wade has paid very close attention to his arguments, citing only the popular book on Human Nature and not the pathbreaking Sociobiology. Still, Wade gives us a good scissors-and-paste introduction. The basic points are: 1. Like chimpanzees, Homo sapiens is a violent creature, whose competitive behavior can be explained largely in terms of a genetic competition in which the greatest procreators (not the greatest fornicators) are the winners: Alpha male chimps account for 36% of conceptions, and another 50% are accounted for by other high-ranking males. Peripheral males kiss their sisters. Warfare among chimps and primitive men is very savage with high death rates. Hobbes, on this point, is more right than Locke. 2. Altruism emerged, so argues Hamilton, as a means of enhancing inclusive fitness, since primate altruism is primarily directed toward close kin that share our genes. Wade things that sociality can be partly explained by two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, but this is another chicken-and-egg problem. For example, in experiments on testosterone levels it appears that winning athletes experience in victory an elevation of the hormone. Cause or effect? I think both. 3. A comparatively new argument: Early man was not only a killer but a cannibal, and resistance to Mad Cow is the result of human adaptation eating human brains. 4. Religion evolved, as Wilson argued long ago, because it confers fitness. Wade also accepts the argument that religion and language evolved together, and that both are foundations of society. Unfortunately he also seems to fall for Roy Rappaport’s speculation that “sanctified statements were…an antidote to the misuse of the newly emerged powers of language.” Here we are back to just-so stories. Wade follows RR’s musings, derived from his study of Oaxacan “history”–in quotation marks because this history is a reconstruction done by archaeologists and anthropologists and then applied to other cultures they know even less about, i.e. ancient Egypt, a culture it takes a lifetime to understand. It never occurs to people like Wade or RR that they have painted themselves into a corner. We fight for food and women, because food and women actually exist and are necessary for survival and propagation. We develop language as a tool not just for communication and sociability but to communicate real facts about the real world. In the case of religion, however, we are not to imagine under any possible circumstances that rituals are directed toward a real being or beings or that they can have any effect that is not in the mind. 5. Marriage is a means by which a woman gains a partner in child-rearing. Pair-bonding also reduces aggression, as anyone can appreciate, who has seen what happens in a promiscuous trailer park or housing project. Being very PC, Wade tries to see something good happening when women choose to mate with several men–this way they are choosing the best fathers. Right. He clearly lives in some country I have never visited. He also glosses over the problem of who is going to rear the children. The answer is clearly social workers hired by the state, and we see the results all around us. E.O. said long ago that the degree of sexual dimorphism in humans suggests we are designed to be monogamous with a little room for men to cheat. This is too conservative an insight to be repeated today, now that we are desperately clawing our way back into the trees. Banana, anyone? chroniclesmagazine.org