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Sociobiology

  
 
Bill Posters
08:45 / 25.01.02
'Kay, sociobiology says: "blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and hence morally so also; women are naturally weak, over-emotional, subservient and not particularly bright; men are naturally dominant, clever, ambitious and push society forward". Or stuff to this effect. Discuss?
 
 
Bill Posters
08:48 / 25.01.02
Oh and with the net result that whenever an atrocity of any kind is committed sociobiologists say, "it's human nature". And shrug. Don't forget that Dawkins man explained S11 in terms of sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology as he'd prolly term it!
 
 
The Sinister Haiku Bureau
08:55 / 25.01.02
Tt! Oh Alright then, if you insist. I was trying to keep the topic as broad as possible to see where it would go, but ok...
As many of you are no doubt aware, sociobiology and/or evolutionary biology refers to the idea that many cultural traits and behaviours have their roots in biological and evolutionary factors. for example:

quote:
In some animals, males have to show, not just strength, but the ability
to provide.  This is especially true in any species which has the male
providing for the female during her pregnancy and lactation -- like
humans!  Sociobiologists suggest that, while men find youth and physical
form most attractive, women tend to look for indications of success,
solvency, savoir-faire.  It might not just be a cultural fluke that men
bring flowers and candies, pay for dinner, and so forth.


lifted from : http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/sociobiology.html

So, a sociobiologist, might argue, for example, that our concept of 'love' is derived from the fact that, as women need support from a partner to bring up a child, which takes a lot of effort and time, but is vital to the ultimate goal of passing on her DNA, whereas it's in a man's best interests to spread his DNA amongst as many fertile women as possible. So the concept of love evolves as a method of sorting out this conflict of interests, by giving an ideological reason for the man to stay with the woman. This also explains why polygyny is socially more common than polyandry. ( yes, I realise that this example assumes heterosexuality, that the role of the husband is more important in raising children than that of the community/tribe as a whole, and various other things, but can we just overlook that for the time being, for the sake of simplifying the example?)
Using this approach, it's possible to analyse politics in terms of primate territorial behaviour, human social structures, agression, and a wide range of social, psychological, and other characteristics.

So, what I'm basically asking is- what do you make of this way of interpreting society and the people in it? Does it conflict with other, more favoured models, and if so, where and why?
And any other thoughts you may have on the matter.
 
 
The Sinister Haiku Bureau
08:55 / 25.01.02
Bill, is that not just a tad simplistic? I mean, saying blacks and women are stupid isn't very scientific, is it? Especially when theres so much evidence to the contrary.
Are you, perchance, referring to THIS article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html
Because, I don't really see what's so bad about explaining, or trying to explain 9-11 in terms of sociobiology, given that it's at least one method of explaining human behaviour. Would you also object to someone trying to explain it in terms of say, economic relations, or marxist class analysis, or any other major theory of human social behaviour?
And as for the 'it's human nature comment' I think it's a little bit more complex than that. It's also about study the factors which made human nature that way over the course of several millenia, and of the situations which cause people in modern times to act in certain ways, with respect to evolutionary factors.
 
 
Jackie Susann
08:55 / 25.01.02
Um, suggesting that something is legitimate because 'it's at least one method of explaining human behaviour' isn't much of an argument - you could say the same of christian science, racism, astrology, etc. And if the best example you can offer is 'love', you are not doing too well there, either. Apart from the problems you point out, all it does is connect a pair of hypotheses (about the genetic interests of men vs women) to a universalised western value (love) via an entirely unexplained middle step - genetics, I guess. Even if we accepted the arguments about women and men, and the universal status of a particular idea of love, where is the argument for the evolutionary emergence of the love ideology?

Love, in the sense you mean it, is such a recent invention that to talk of it in relation to 'evolution', in the darwinist sense, strikes me as absurd. Am I missing the point?

This is leaving aside the well known and deeply fucked histories of social darwinism, eugenics, etc., which tend to make people skeptical of 'sociobiological' explanations.
 
 
Ganesh
10:10 / 25.01.02
Sociobiology: creaky at best.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
10:32 / 25.01.02
Sociobiology?

Pass me a couple of them ten foot bargepole please.
 
 
Fist Fun
10:34 / 25.01.02
Well I started a thread on the book the g factor which was about this.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:24 / 25.01.02
Walter Benjamin (bless him) has this to say:

"When the bourgeoisie conquered its position of power in the 19th century, the concept of progress may have increasinly forfeited the critical functions which originally characterized it. (The doctrine of natural selection played a decisive part in this process, for it popularized the notion that progress was automatic. Furthermore, it promoted the extension of the concept of progress to the entire realm of human activity.)"

I'd rather be a historical materialist than a sociobiologist, since the problems of agency and totalization that Benjamin points to here seem to me to make sociobiology unworkable - or at least not very helpful - as a, I don't know, discourse/discipline/critical method/whatever.
 
 
Bill Posters
12:49 / 25.01.02
Deva/Walter and Crunchy have said what needed to be said I think, tho' Jackie's point is sooo counterintuitive it might need more detailed explanation.

Yes, that article is the one I was thinking of. (Worth noting anyway that one of the hijackers allegedly spent the night b4 the attack in a brothel! Sort that out Dawkins ya tosser!)

As for the race thing, I was thinking of Hans Eysenck (sp?) who's name I can never recall how to spell and that book which had various different titles and argued that black people are stupid. A proposition to which as you rightly say, there's a lot of conterevidence. (Didn't stop it being on the bestseller lists for years though...)
 
 
No star here laces
14:37 / 25.01.02
I actually know that bloke who wrote the g factor. Very odd character. He doesn't actually make as strong claims in it as everyone thinks - his point is more that blacks do worse at IQ tests than whites. There are of course several explanations for this. The most significant issue it really raises is how accurate any test of intelligence can ever be - is it really ever possible to test intelligence in a non culturally biased manner?


On the main point...

Sociobiology is fine as a 'way of looking at things'. What it should not be seen as, however, is a science.

There are many definitions of what constitutes a science. However most of them rest on the basic concept that a science is a discipline that advances human knowledge by putting forward falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them by experiment to see if they are false (you can't ever see if a hypothesis is true, because there might be an experiment you've not thought of yet that would prove it false).

So this issue of falsifiability is central to something being science. So Physics is a science, because if I postulate a hypothesis about the way atoms work, I can design an experiment to test it.

Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology is not a science because its claims are not falsifiable. If we wanted to test whether the emotion we call love arose in order to bond parents closer together how could we go about doing it? Even if we could travel back in time to the dawn of humankind, we still couldn't establish a causal link between that need for parental bonding and that emotion.

Thus all it will ever be is an opinion. If people view it as such, it is not nearly so dangerous.
 
 
Ria
14:54 / 25.01.02
quote:Originally posted by Bill Posters:
'Kay, sociobiology says: "blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and hence morally so also; women are naturally weak, over-emotional, subservient and not particularly bright; men are naturally dominant, clever, ambitious and push society forward". Or stuff to this effect. Discuss?

[sighs with frustration]

did you mean that sarcastically or do you honestly not know any better?

I do not believe that you believe these statements relative to sex and ethnicity but don't know that you don't think that sociobiologists do not.

[ 25-01-2002: Message edited by: Ria ]
 
 
The Sinister Haiku Bureau
15:12 / 25.01.02
quote:
OPB Dread Pirate Crunchy
Um, suggesting that something is legitimate because 'it's at least one
method of explaining human behaviour' isn't much of an argument - you
could say the same of christian science, racism, astrology, etc.


You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, that's not actually what I was saying. I was replying to Bill's comment about Dawkins, which seemed to suggest that sociobiology was bad because it tried to explain stuff, (regardless of how well or badly it did so).

As regards the stuff about love, that was intended as a rather stripped down example of the type of argument a sociobiologist might use to explain what might appear to be a natural social phenomenon, chosen partly because it seemed most interesting. I probably could have chosen a better example. What I actually did was connect some statistical facts (long-term heterosexual couplings are very common accross many cultures, and polygymy is far more common than polyandry), the selfish gene hypothesis (that, when studying evolution, it makes sense to view things in terms of how DNA uses humans to ensure it's survival), with some fairly obvious facts about human reproductive biology (raising children takes a lot of time and effort, whereas sperm-squirting doesn't). These two sets of facts and one hypothesis go together to make the theory I outlined above. And, of course, you're right about love being a relatively modern concept. What I meant was that it had come about recently as an explanation of and development from the effects of the above phenomena.

quote:
OPB Dread Pirate Crunchy
This is leaving aside the well known and deeply fucked histories of
social darwinism, eugenics, etc., which tend to make people skeptical of
'sociobiological' explanations.

Yes, but every major belief system has a few skeletons in it's closet, especially if misinterpreted or judged by it's most extreme strain. The same arguments could be used to critise postmodernism for it's Nietzschean influence, who was in term misappropriated by the Nazis, or of Marxism/socialism, and various dubious regimes who claim to be marxist. And that's not even starting on the religions...

quote:
OPB Bill Posters
Yes, that article is the one I was thinking of. (Worth noting anyway
that one of the hijackers allegedly spent the night b4 the attack in a
brothel! Sort that out Dawkins ya tosser!)


well, i thought the idea was that it was ok for him to spend the night in the brothel, as that minor sin would be far outweighed by the brownie point's he'd earn by being a martyr. So Dawkins comments about religion still stand.

Deva, could you please expand on 'the problems of agency and totalisation' and why they make sociobiology a dubious "discourse/discipline/critical method/whatever."? I'm not sure how that ties in to Benjamin's comments about a common teleological misunderstanding about the theory of evolution. Cheers.
So, I'm not saying I'm a fan of sociobiology, or a believer in it, because to be honest I'm far from an expert. It just seems like an interesting tool for explaining social and psychological phenomena, and I'm still not convinced by any of the counterarguments given for it so far...And I'm slightly surprised by the revulsion the concept seems to be getting, even taking into account any eugenics-based associations.

And Lyra, although I agree with you up to a point, your argument could be applied fairly well to the theory of evolution as a whole. And falsificationism has it's limits as part of the philosophy of science- with stuff like evolution or tracing the early history of the universe it becomes more a case of collecting up evidence to support or shake your hypothesis.
 
 
Fist Fun
17:55 / 25.01.02
quote: I actually know that bloke who wrote the g factor.

Yeah, an old girlfriend of mine almost shared a flat with him but decided he was too creepy. Which isn't a nice way to talk about anyone is it?
 
 
NotBlue
20:07 / 25.01.02
quote:Originally posted by Lyra Lovelaces:
I actually know that bloke who wrote the g factor. Very odd character. He doesn't actually make as strong claims in it as everyone thinks - his point is more that blacks do worse at IQ tests than whites. There are of course several explanations for this. The most significant issue it really raises is how accurate any test of intelligence can ever be - is it really ever possible to test intelligence in a non culturally biased manner?



He also posited a genetic basis for this when he was lecturing at Edinburgh.
He was a pretty poor lecturer, and got into another shitstorm a few years later when he suggested it was ok for some underage kids to have sex, so long as they were of high intelligence, which is completley off topic.

The "pure" genetic argument also suffers from the major flaw that 75 - 80% of the people classified as "black" who tested for those questionnaires have at least one "white" ancestor. The data the conclusions were based upon were about fifteen years out of date as well.
 
 
Jackie Susann
20:31 / 25.01.02
quote: What I actually did was connect some statistical facts (long-term heterosexual couplings are very common accross many cultures, and polygymy is far more common than polyandry), the selfish gene hypothesis (that, when studying evolution, it makes sense to view things in terms of how DNA uses humans to ensure it's survival), with some fairly obvious facts about human reproductive biology (raising children takes a lot of time and effort, whereas sperm-squirting doesn't).

Well, I think we may have quite a difference of opinion here. The phrase 'fairly obvious facts' is one place it's happening; to me, these are not at all obvious facts, they are hypotheses offered without evidence. Raising children, indeed, takes a lot of time and effort; there is no obvious factual connection between this observation and any idea about women. It takes just as long for men to raise a child, doesn't it? So you are using an idea that needs to be explained as an explanatory tool.

Now, the obvious (sociobiological?) reply is that women bond with their children for genetic reasons; natural selection favours species who look after their young. If this is the case, I think you would have to explain why genetics hasn't come up with a more efficient system than 'love' for bonding males with their children.

Thus, my key problem with the idea of sociobiology presented so far is that it mistakes hypotheses for facts, then seeks to explain them with other hypotheses, in a system that tends to drift further and further from anything useful or interesting. Also, I wish I'd thought of Lyra's point.
 
 
Bill Posters
07:42 / 26.01.02
Ria: Some sociobiology does imply these things; the trouble is, there's more than one kind of sociobiology. After all, the bonobo chimpanzee has a polyamorous matriarchal social structure and (I believe) more similar DNA to humans than any other primate. I guess I was selectively representing sociobiology to start a fight. Sorry if I misled you or made you pissed.

I'm not getting into a debate about 'what is science?' with Lyra but I agree with the bit about the alleged causality being deeply unconvincing.

Jonny H, wow, that gave me a lot to think about! Three points.

1. I don't think it's bad because it tries to explain stuff; there's no law against asking 'why?' and starting the answer with 'because...'. Though as the philosopher Hume pointed out, causality is problematic. This is what happened when his partner found herself pregnant:

So she said, "You must marry me Hume!",
A statement that made David fume.
He said, "in 'cause' and in 'effect'
There is a great defect;
That it's mine you can only assume.

2. As for this brothel business, I stand corrected on that one; don't know enough about Islam obviously!

3. Your point about the bad reaction it's getting is important. There can be a knee-jerk tendency among lefties to get mad when they hear talk of sociobiology. There was an interesting documentary here in the UK which actually argued that not acknowledging biological differences was racist: the example it gave was that 'aboriginal' people in Australia have some brain structure that means they learn more visually than whites and hence the Oz education system is biased against them from the start. Crunchy may know about that. Sounds dubious to me (neuroplasticity anyone?), but their point was it would be ironic if the lefties, by claiming that there is no biological difference in perception/cognition whateva, were actually making the 'black' kids chances worse not better!

Couple more points. Basically there are two schools of behaviour explanation, one where the explanation for behaviour is located inside the person ("in my genes", say) and the other where behaviour is said to stem from the interaction of an organism and its environment (like, I don't think I am not a criminal because I have 'good genes'; I think if I had been born in a crackhouse and not a 'middle-class' home then I would quite likely be a criminal).

Prof Steven Jones put it well in a lecture once. Statistically, here in London most murders are committed by men. Therefore if an analysis was confined to London, one might claim that it is a fact of biology that men are more violent than women. However, in Chicago there are many more murders than in London, so many more that statistically-speaking the Chicago female is more likely to murder than the London male. Hence while there might be a biological tendency, environmental factors like gun availability and gang cultures etc will also play a part.

It's just a both/and not an either/or thing isn't it?
 
 
The Monkey
01:35 / 28.01.02
One point: someone else probably made it in the middle of a wad of text. Statistics aren't facts. The difference between general evolutionary study and sociobiology/
evolutionary psych. is that the former has the fossil record and the genetic/cladistic physical evidence.
Sociobio is "supported" almost entirely by statistical analyses and dubious "common sense" comparisons across species, etc. Ev. Psych people are continually looking for "genetic keys" for their behavioral paradigms, but haven't ever found anything closing on conclusive.
 
 
The Monkey
01:43 / 28.01.02
The funny thing is, it's pretty clear to everybody that genes and environment and experience mesh to formulate the person, but no one wants to just shrug and admit it.

This is a culture that wants easy answers with nice linear explanations...thanks Aristotle, I'll piss on your grave if I can ever find it.... Indeed, we expect scientists to give us nice easy answers...think about the way "scientific discovery" is presented in news media: all or nothing...every discovery is presented as overthrowing and stamping on the bloody bits of all previous theory. And it's people who think in those all-or-nothing terms who end up putting up money for research...hence a vicious cycle.

The Archons say they'll solve the whole problem for $20. Love and kisses from the Outer Church, [smack]
 
 
Bill Posters
13:57 / 01.02.02
I know this thread is preddy much done and dusted, but I had to add these words of wisdom from the current humour magazine Viz's Top Tips:

"Survival of the Shittest

How do people who subscribe to Darwin's theory of evolution explain ginger people? People in hot countries have dark hair, whilst people in cold countries have blond hair. In temperate climates, a mixture of hair colour is found. It can only be concluded that in his wisdom, God made ginger people for a laugh and placed them randomly about the globe."

From the Rev. J Porter, London.

Many a true word and all that. Like, what is the adaptive advantage of gingerity?!
 
 
Red Concrete
13:15 / 08.04.07
I'm bumping this ancient thread to see if anyone, particularly from this recent discussion wants to come and discuss issues of biologically determined gender roles with respect to evolutionary psychology. The posts above contain some good points about why the evolutionary psychology/sociology is not a science, and cannot contribute "facts".
 
 
DecayingInsect
18:43 / 23.04.07
Hi,

just wondering... really do all sociobiologists promote the hateful agenda given in the thread summary?

I mean clearly there are some people on the fringes invoking "sociobiology" and questionable statistics to promote racism and sexism but can anyone give an example with a mainstream figure publishing in a major peer-reviewed scientific journal?

I remember reading Wilson's book a few years ago... lots of stuff about genes and animal altruism that seemed quite reasonable to me, and then one (more speculative) chapter extending some of the ideas to humans.

Has anyone read Alcock's book The Truimph of Sociobiology?

It looks it engages some of the criticisms and gets a good review in Nature here

If sociobiology is an obnoxious and pernicious ideology with no scientific validity would Nature publish a favorable review of a book in its defense?

hope I don't come across as complacent here... just not yet convinced that all sociobiology is forever tainted.
 
  
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