On Sep 23, 2:54 pm, *Anarcissie*
gmail.com> wrote:> On Sep 21, 11:24 pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:
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>>> "*Anarcissie*"
gmail.com> wrote in message news:>>> On Sep 20, 10:35 pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:>>>> On Sep 20, 11:11 am, *Anarcissie*
gmail.com> wrote:>>>>> On Sep 20, 12:30 am, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote>
>>>>>> Very interesting post and it would take some time to respond the main
>>>>>> points. The argument you base on slavery made me think of the quite
>>>>>> below. I want to reply to other parts later.
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>>>>>> And more: individual human beings can be expected to resist too great
>>>>>> a divergence between the two evolutionary tracks. Somewhere in the
>>>>>> mind, as Lionel Trilling said in Beyond Culture, "there is a hard,
>>>>>> irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological
>>>>>> necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach and that
>>>>>> reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge
>>>>>> the culture and resist and revise it."
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>>>>>> Such biological refractoriness is illustrated by the failure of
>>>>>> slavery as a human institution.
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>>>>> E. O. Wilson is a curious bird. The argument below
>>>>> depends on the systematic recrudescence of slavery,
>>>>> so (in the argument) slavery is just as much a "success"
>>>>> as it is a "failure", and just as we could attribute the
>>>>> decline of slavery to biology, so we attribute its
>>>>> recurrence to the same cause.
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>>>>> Actually, the recurrence of advances and declines
>>>>> in slavery don't tell us about any "hard, irreducible,
>>>>> stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological
>>>>> necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot
>>>>> reach." That's just more of the romantic hogwash of
>>>>> which E.O. was so fond. The appearance of
>>>>> slavery may well have to do with social and
>>>>> ecological factors for which there is no particular
>>>>> biological coding.
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>>>> You claim something Wilson says if romantic hogwash, care to give an
>>>> example?
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>>> _Consilience_.
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>> Isn't that book a thesis on Interdisciplinarity? Thats been around
>> much longer than Wilson's thesis. Mainly they have been able to be
>> found, in compilations of various authors from various disciplines
>> working upon agreed upon themes, at college libraries.
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> Forget _Consilence_. I already have an
> adequate stick to beat Wilson with.
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>>>> Please describe a counter-theory also.
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>>> No counter-theory is necessary, since Wilson's view
>>> of the facts is blinkered, even in the light of common
>>> knowledge and common sense.
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>> Do you mean there is no counter theory to interdiscipliarity generally
>> or just Wilson's take on it? I can think of many counter theories to
>> both.
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> I was referring to Wilson's business about slavery.
> He views resistance to slavery as evidencing some
> sort of profound thing in human biology, but looks
> the other way to avoid seeing the equally logical
> idea that slavery is also some sort of profound thing
> in human biology. To accept neither, or both, may
> be rational; to pick one and omit the other is
> romantic hogwash. Here we go:
>
Let me put a few paragraphs that were before the part of Wilson's idea
that I originally posted. I think the point of his discussion about
slavery had more to do with the issue of how, "...Human social
evolution proceeds along a dual track of inheritance: cultural and
biological....biological evolution is always quickly outrun by
cultural change. Yet the divergence cannot become too great, because
ultimately the social environment created by cultural evolution will
be tracked by biological natural selection. Individuals whose behavior
has become suicidal or destructive to their families will leave fewer
genes than those genetically less prone to such behavior."
[full text below]
Genetic determination narrows the avenue along which further cultural
evolution will occur. There is no way at present to guess how far that
evolution will proceed. But its past course can be more deeply
interpreted and perhaps, with luck and skill, its approximate future
direction can be charted. The psychology of individuals will form a
key part of this analysis. Despite the imposing holistic traditions of
Durkheim in sociology and Radcliffe-Brown in anthropology, cultures
are not superorganisms that evolve by their own dynamics. Rather,
cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral
responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can
with social existence.
When societies are viewed strictly as populations, the relationship
between culture and heredity can be defined more precisely. Human
social evolution proceeds along a dual track of inheritance: cultural
and biological. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast,
whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.
Lamarckian evolution would proceed by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, the transmission to offspring of traits acquired
during the lifetime of the parent. When the French biologist Jean
Baptiste de Lamarck proposed the idea in 1809, he believed that
biological evolution occurred in just such a manner. He suggested, for
example, that when giraffes stretch their necks to feed on taller
trees, their offspring acquire longer necks even without such an
effort; and when storks stretch their legs to keep their bellies dry,
their offspring inherit longer legs in the same direct way. Lamarck-
ism has been entirely discounted as the basis of biological evolution,
but of course it is precisely what happens in the case of cultural
evolution.
The great competing theory of evolution, that entire populations are
modified by natural selection, was first put in convincing form by
Charles Darwin, in 1859. Individuals within populations vary in their
genetic composition and thus in their ability to survive and
reproduce. Those that are most successful pass more hereditary
material to the next generation, and as a result the population as a
whole progressively changes to resemble the successful types.
Individual giraffes, by the theory of natural selection, differ from
one another in the hereditary capacity to grow long necks. Those that
do develop the longest necks feed more and leave the higher proportion
of offspring; as a consequence the average neck length of the giraffe
population increases over many generations. If, in addition, genetic
mutations occurring from time to time affect neck length, the process
of evolution can continue indefinitely.
Darwinism has been established as the prevailing mode of biological
evolution in all kinds of organisms, including man. Because it is also
far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always
quickly outrun by cultural change. Yet the divergence cannot become
too great, because ultimately the social environment created by
cultural evolution will be tracked by biological natural selection.
Individuals whose behavior has become suicidal or destructive to their
families will leave fewer genes than those genetically less prone to
such behavior. Societies that decline because of a genetic propensity
of its members to generate competitively weaker cultures will be
replaced by those more appropriately endowed. I do not for a moment
ascribe the relative performances of modern societies to genetic
differences, but the point must be made: there is a limit, perhaps
closer to the practices of contemporary societies than we have had the
wit to grasp, beyond which biological evolution will begin to pull
cultural evolution back to itself.
And more: individual human beings can be expected to resist too great
a divergence between the two evolutionary tracks... [earlier post
begins here...]
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
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>>> If Wilson said, "Human beings constantly seek to
>>> reduce others to slavery, and constantly seek to
>>> resist slavery for themselves," then he might be
>>> talking about the facts and then it might be
>>> worthwhile to compose theories to explain the
>>> facts, biological or otherwise. But Wilson is not
>>> in the realm of the factual, and I am not interested
>>> in making up theories about his fantasies.
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>> Can you define this "realm of factual" with some examples of what is
>> factual and what is overly theoretical? Maybe your trying to say that
>> no theories from any social sciences shall be allowed, or perhaps your
>> requesting a rule that only Wilson's theories of social science shall
>> not be allowed. As for the "factual" don't a majority of scientists
>> claim that most things considered as laws of physics, such as the
>> theory of gravity, are just inductive theories based upon
>> explainations about observations? Are you supposing that the science
>> facts you accepts are deductive?
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> In this case factuality refers to connection to or
> reference to objective (that is, generally observable)
> physical phenomena. For instance, the law of gravity
> is factual in the sense that there actually is a physical
> phenomenon, widely observed, of attraction between
> material objects. This does not mean a set of
> rules that read like F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2 inscribed
> on each electron, just that material things act
> according to that rule (almost). Social scientists
> can discover such laws if they go out and observe
> physical phenomena (human interacting in some
> way) reliably enough to make up rules about their
> behavior. In the present case, Wilson could be
> asked to show that slaves always rebel against
> slavery. Of course he doesn't because he is
> making things up. If he were a full-blown
> magical thinker he would then claim that the
> things he made up were incontrovertibly true, as
> the proponents of most religions do.
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>>>> Normally I wouldn't
>>>> request such a thing but your language is getting close to an Appeal
>>>> to Ridicule fallacy in which ridicule or mockery is substituted for
>>>> evidence in an "argument."
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>>> This case is particularly funny because Wilson,
>>> wishing Man to be Good, promotes a just-so
>>> story about Man constantly striving to overthrow
>>> slavery. But where did the slavery come from,
>>> and why does it recur so often and persist for so
>>> long in so many cases? Wilson looks the other
>>> way, because _that_ doesn't fit in with his fairy
>>> tale. I guess it was imposed by the Saturnian
>>> ant men.
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>> The name calling seriously subtracts from your argument. In philosophy
>> it is always wise to let your facts and theories speak for themselves.
>> This ant man thing makes it appear that you need something other than
>> good science to make your case. It would also seem an irresponsible
>> act in a philosophy group to at least not to mention your error;
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> I haven't attacked Wilson's character, looks, learning or
> other personal attribute, merely one of his ideas, and I
> gave evidence and reason for my belief that his idea is
> crap. You're mistaking vigorous language for a
> logical fallacy -- another fallacy.
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I concede the point since after looking back at the "ant-men" comment.
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