From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 11 Feb 2004 - 15:37:33 GMT
At 11:57 AM 11/02/04 +1100, Steven wrote:
snip
>In more recent times, sociology has been characterised by a range of
>different and incompatible positions, most of which must be wrong simply
>because they can't all be right at once. Sociologists avoid this obvious
>conclusion by the strategy of presenting the different positions as
>'perspectives'.
>
>Sociology is a mess and it is time sociologists admitted this.
>
>This doesn't mean that there is nothing of intellectual value going on in
>sociology, but it does mean that it is a minor current. If anyone
>disagrees with this, then spell out what sociologists have achieved of
>lasting value and then compare this with all the nonsense that
>sociologists have come up with over the last 200 years.
There was a time when chemistry was observation and recipes without any
fundamental understanding of what was actually taking place. Prior to
Darwin and the slow infusion of biochemistry, biology was more a
descriptive science than one of deep understanding. So the current
situation in sociology is not without historical precedent.
Sociobiology (now renamed evolutionary psychology) has what it takes to lay
a deeply rooted foundation under sociology. (In my opinion of
course.) When this happens, the buzzing complexity of sociology will be
understood in terms of a small number of common psychological traits (such
as status seeking) that have evolved in people just as the formerly
bewildering complexity of chemistry is now understood in terms of
combinations of about a hundred elements.
Unfortunately, "common psychological traits" can't be understood outside of
their environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). We can, however,
safely predict that every one of them contributed (in the EEA) to the
survival of genes that built the trait.
Most of the time this meant reproductive success for the individuals who
carried the genes, but there are major exceptions due to Hamilton's
"inclusive fitness" where the genes did well in spite of some of their
carriers taking terrible risks or being killed. (As I have been discussing
lately about the conditional psychological traits turned on by conditions
leading to wars.)
>If sociology had made a substantial contribution to the understanding of
>social life there would be no room for deficient explanations like
>memetics. Memetics only survives because sociology has largely failed in
>its self appointed task.
I see no deficiencies inside the frame of memetics. It is just too simple
to be wrong. The "memetics frame" though is only a small part of the
landscape. If you want to be able to put even a tentative answer to *why*
the xenophobic class of memes emerges in ecological situations leading up
to war, you have to look at the larger sociobiology/evolutionary psychology
picture.
Incidentally, I don't claim particular brilliance in figuring this
out. Motivation was more of a factor. If you want a share of the same
motivation, I would be happy to give you explicit directions. :-)
Keith Henson
PS: From
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
Our species lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times longer than as anything
else. The world that seems so familiar to you and me, a world with roads,
schools, grocery stores, factories, farms, and nation-states, has lasted
for only an eyeblink of time when compared to our entire evolutionary
history. The computer age is only a little older than the typical college
student, and the industrial revolution is a mere 200 years old. Agriculture
first appeared on earth only 10,000 years ago, and it wasn't until about
5,000 years ago that as many as half of the human population engaged in
farming rather than hunting and gathering. Natural selection is a slow
process, and there just haven't been enough generations for it to design
circuits that are well-adapted to our post-industrial life.
In other words, our modern skulls house a stone age mind. The key to
understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits
were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American --
they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer
ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at
solving some problems than others. For example, it is easier for us to deal
with small, hunter-gatherer-band sized groups of people than with crowds of
thousands; it is easier for us to learn to fear snakes than electric
sockets, even though electric sockets pose a larger threat than snakes do
in most American communities. In many cases, our brains are better at
solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs
than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college
classroom or a modern city. In saying that our modern skulls house a stone
age mind, we do not mean to imply that our minds are unsophisticated. Quite
the contrary: they are very sophisticated computers, whose circuits are
elegantly designed to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors routinely
faced.
A necessary (though not sufficient) component of any explanation of
behavior -- modern or otherwise -- is a description of the design of the
computational machinery that generates it. Behavior in the present is
generated by information-processing mechanisms that exist because they
solved adaptive problems in the past -- in the ancestral environments in
which the human line evolved.
For this reason, evolutionary psychology is relentlessly past-oriented.
Cognitive mechanisms that exist because they solved problems efficiently in
the past will not necessarily generate adaptive behavior in the present.
Indeed, EPs reject the notion that one has "explained" a behavior pattern
by showing that it promotes fitness under modern conditions (for papers on
both sides of this controversy, see responses in the same journal issue to
Symons (1990) and Tooby and Cosmides (1990a)).
Although the hominid line is thought to have evolved on the African
savannahs, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, or EEA, is not a
place or time. It is the statistical composite of selection pressures that
caused the design of an adaptation. Thus the EEA for one adaptation may be
different from that for another. Conditions of terrestrial illumination,
which form (part of) the EEA for the vertebrate eye, remained relatively
constant for hundreds of millions of years (until the invention of the
incandescent bulb); in contrast, the EEA that selected for mechanisms that
cause human males to provision their offspring -- a situation that departs
from the typical mammalian pattern -- appears to be only about two million
years old.
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