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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Intelligence
Message-ID: <495@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Jun-85 12:17:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.495
Posted: Wed Jun 19 12:17:29 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Jun-85 09:40:23 EDT
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Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
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In article <> jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) writes:
>
>You seem to be strongly espousing the theories of a few people, and thereby
>claiming others are invalid, largely through name-calling.
>...
>But you carry this to an anarchistic extreme, by essentially saying (by
>allusion to a book you've cited before) that it is impossible to approach
>these as sciences at all.  Furthermore you attempt to argue, again by
>allusion, that because some "scientific" theories of psychology have been
>used to bad ends, all of it is invalidated.

This is ridiculous -- I don't see how you get this out of Bill
Ingogly's posting.  As I understood him, his point, with which I
entirely agree, is that we shouldn't take sociobiological
speculations for proven fact.  It's entertaining to speculate about
whether a biological imperative attracts women to muscular, wealthy
men, but the scientific evidence for this is unclear as of 1985 and
its implications for our understanding of human society is still less
clear.  

One should be skeptical of sociobiological claims about humans,
because the history of these claims from Ardrey on is replete with
poor reasoning and methodology that would shame other disciplines.
For instance, sociobiologists often commit the cardinal sin of
reification, i.e., assuming that because we give a name to a
collection of phenomena (like religion), it has a real existence as
an entity.  Another absurd error they often commit is to speak of
animal behaviors which in some way resemble human cultural patterns
as if they exemplified those cultural patterns, e.g., insect
"slavery" or animal "monogamy" or "polygamy."  Slavery, monogamy,
polygamy, etc. are of course peculiar to human beings because they
are cultural institutions and humans are the only animals we know of
that possess culture in this sense.  In general, sociobiologists tend
to overlook the fact that human culture intervenes between human
biology and human behavior.  For a devastating critique of
sociobiology as applied to humans, see *Not In Our Genes* by R.C.
Lewontin, S. Rose, and L. Kamin.

>The notion that human beings do not have fundamental properties in common
>with other animals has generally been shown to lead to many more incorrect
>ideas about the nature of humankind than the opposite.  

Who has ever denied that humans have basic properties in common with
all other animals?  The meaningful question is whether cultural forms
such as courtship, marriage, religion, and political institutions can
be explained by biological factors alone, or whether on the contrary
culture interposes another explanatory level that is not reducible to
biology.

Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes