Evolutionary Psychology

Very long, but relevant to recent threads

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 13, 2001

Answers

I enjoy the irony that political left and right have to flip-flop on this one.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 13, 2001.

That's a gut-busting bit of fun, Lars. A worthwhile read.

Here's an excerpt:

But this is how sociobiology works: A conjecture becomes an assumption, an assumption morphs into fact, and the fact is then used to prove the conjecture. Or you can characterize it this way, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith does in Alas, Poor Darwin: The sociobiological method "is a process of self-enclosed speculation directed by a set of mutually determining, mutually validating assumptions, descriptions, and hypotheses . . . a virtual prescription for self-affirming circularity."

ROTFL!!!

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), March 13, 2001.

By now, politics has turned sociobiology into something it was never originally intended to be.

Clearly, people are born to a physical template, with hardwired abilities and shortcomings. These things not only place outer limits on what we can do, they grease the skids of preference within our operating ranges. Nonetheless, we have wide ranges within which we can be comfortable. For example, we may be hardwired for language, but not for any particular language. And the languages we have are remarkably dissimilar in many respects.

The error lies in finding organic "explanations" for details far finer than our gross potentials can possibly dictate. There is a qualitative difference between the ability to adapt to changing conditions, and being "evolved" for any particular adaptive behavior. Like pulling a random card out of a deck -- you can't pull a card that isn't in the deck to begin with, but neither can you argue backward that you were designed by evolution to pull that particular card.

We have wide-ranging potentials. HOW we should use those potentials is not a question evolution can answer in any way. That's a political question, pure and simple.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 13, 2001.