At 08:32 AM 5/28/97 -0700, Bill Lear wrote: >Buss uses what is called "evolutionary psychology" to explain the >"mating" preferences of men and women. Basically, women, since they >are more reproductively "valuable" than men and must invest much more >in the gestation of a child, naturally "select" men which can provide >them with a steady supply of resources. Men are looking for cues to >reproductive capacity, which must be deduced indirectly, since human >females have what is known as "cryptic" ovulation as compared our >primate relatives. These cues are youth, health, and other "beauty" >cues such as hip-size (actually, waist to hip ratio---.70 being about >"ideal"), which provide fairly good estimates as to a woman's >reproductive capacity. -- snip --- >I was just wondering if anyone has read any of this stuff (either >Buss, or evolutionary psychology in general) and if so, if they might >provide some comments. I reply: Even though I have not read the stuff you are quoting (I'm trying to limit the informational pollution in my intellectual environment) -- the arguments trying to link some cultural or better yet, moral traits to physiological or genetic traits are nihil novi sub solem -- there were the standard stuff of what passed for 'anthropology' in the 19th century -- a good critical review of those theories can be found in Stephen Jay Gould, _The Mismeasure of Man_, the value of this work lies in the fact that Gould himselef is a natural scientist and he actually knows the stuff he is talking about, as opposed to social philosophers, engineers or comentators who cook this kind of 'science'. The argument against this kind of thinking (old and new alike), that used to be called socio-biology in 1970s (or as my anthropology profesor used to say "so-so biology") goes as follows: so-so biologists have no way of demonstrating, without subverting the usual standards of scientific verification, that the connection they are claiming is not a spurious correlation or a hindsight rationalisation. This is so, because they are trying to establish a connection between the material and the metaphysical (ideational, spiritual, moral, cultural) -- the task known to scientists as impossible at least since Immanuel Kant. In order to establish a causal connection between physiological/genetic traits and behaviour, the researcher must identify an empircially observable mechanism that produces a particular behaviour (e.g. the secretion of a hormone); that task is not impossible, but what the so-so biologists try to accomplish is linking physiological/genetical traits not to behviour itself but to its specific form endowed with a cultural or moral value. To give you an example: suppose that we identify a hormon responsible for aggressive behviour. That fact would be normally construed by so-so biologists as a "proof" that aggresiveness is a part of the "human nature." What so-so biologists do not tell us, and what makes their argument a non-sequitur, is that aggressive behaviour can take many possible forms: from vicious attacks on helpless victims, to picking up fist fights, to systematic killing with the help of modern organisation & technology (cf. the army), to verbal and emotional abuse, to conventionalised competition (cf. among business execs) to culture and literary wars, and to political debates. While all these forms aim at defeating a competitor, only some are culturally labeled as "aggressive." The same, of course, applies to sexual attraction. Not only standards of beauty, but also "sexually explicit" body parts vary from culture to culture: whereas Americans seem to be fixated on large brests (an anomaly by European standards), for other cultures such "sexually explict" areas may be backs (sic!) or feet. Another variable is body fat, and for many African tribes the anorexic whitie models populating the pages of teen magazines are plain ugly. Now the question which the so-so biologists simply are not the position to answer without evoking some supernatural forces is "How are the hormones or the genes supposed to know which form of aggressive behaviour is "really" (i.e. socially defined as) aggressive? Or what body signals are "really" sexually explicit?" Furthermore, even if we manage to identify some empirically observable physiological mechanism that causes a particular form of behaviour, so-so biologists would have to tell us how that mechanism is triggered. That is, even if the secretion of a certain hormone can be positively linked to a particular form of aggressive behaviour (e.g. a physical attack), that hormone is released only upon a signal from the brain. In other words, cognitive processing is required to identify the incoming stimulus as a signal of a situation that warrants this particular form of aggression. For example, a mere sight of the "sexually explict" body parts (which themselves are culturally defined) is not enough to trigger a sexual behaviour; the whole context of the visual stimuli must be interpreted as 'sexual' rather than, say' 'medical' or 'artistic'. For these reasons, we can safely dismiss all so-so biologies, eveloutionary psychologies, etc. as crap without even reading it, for the same reason we dismiss astrology, parapsychology, and metaphysics without even bothering to refute them -- because they attempt to sneak on us an impossible task of linking the material and the spiritual into a single chain of events, or as my philosophy professor used to say: "to tie a real horse to a hitching post painted on a wall." That notwithstanding, please read Barbara Ehrenreich's article in the latest issue of The Nation -- where she describes radical social constructivism as "new creationists" who reject natural sciences althogether (that is another form of metaphysics known as idealism). They both signify the rise of the entire class of quasi-professional scribblers, half-doctors and quacks who equate scientific validity of their intellectual commodity with its marketablity. regards, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
