Human Nature and History/The Evolution of Human Consciousness/Sociobiology Examined/Fighting for Life
Caplan, Arthur L.
Books: IS SOCIOBIOLOGY DESTINY? SCIENCE is often depicted and perceived by Americans as an emotional antidote to the psychic aches and pains of modern life. Does a soul exist who is utterly...
...Professors Ong and Crook are less appalled by the suggestion that biology is destiny...
...They are also preferable to the ostrich-like posture displayed by most academics in the humanities on hearing that sociobiologists are attempting to breach the conceptual wall of the fact/value distinction...
...Where we normally see generosity, kindness, empathy, duty, and altruism - in helping a friend fix a flat tire, in helping our children do their homework - sociobiologists claim to have discovered only manipulation, egotism and self-interest...
...Kenneth Bock, in his carefully argued and highly readable work, notes that sociobiologists overlook the peculiarly unique set of events we refer to as history in explaining human activity...
...What is needed in addition to these concepts is an analysis of mind, intention, culture, and reasoning that can stand in explanatory contra-distinction to biological determinism...
...Not all academics have chosen silence as the best response to the sociobiological view of human nature and behavior...
...Sociobiologists such as Dawkins, E.O...
...They seek accommodation between social, scientific, theological, and sociobiological approaches to understanding human activity...
...The response of those academics concerned to tout and defend the autonomy and significance of culture, ethics, and politics has been, for the most part, to ignore the sociobiological vision as sci-entism gone blatantly bananas...
...It is hard to feel dignified on a voyage past the rings of Saturn believing that one's gonads are the ultimate rationale behind the occurrence of the trip...
...Sagan or peering into, the lymphatic system under the expert guidance of Dr...
...They are in you and me...
...Miller, science can be a heady, even liberating experience...
...The criticisms leveled against this nascent science seem driven as much by a collective recoiling from the dark vision of Dawkins's "lumbering robots" as they do by sound methodological critique...
...The authors collected in Ashley Montagu's anthology note with disdain the crude genetic determinism lurking behind the guise of sociobiology...
...However, there are those in other quarters who have chosen to speak out in protest against the view of man as robot...
...Does a soul exist who is utterly indifferent to the electronic image of the graceful space-shuttle touching down in the California desert...
...Who amongst us does not thrill from the comfort of our armchairs, to feel the sun beating down upon our brow as we ply the seven seas with Captain Cousteau and his gallant crew in pursuit of some tidbit of oceanographic knowledge...
...But there exists a darker, less-appealing vision to be gotten from contemporary science...
...If contemporary sociobiologists choose to believe that Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau, Jonathan Miller, and the rest of humankind are merely zomby-like robotic vehicles for abetting reproduction and genetic continuity, then so much the sillier for them...
...By viewing behavior in terms of reproductive costs and benefits, sociobiologists in biology, anthropology, political science, and sociology are attempting to recast seemingly altruistic acts in terms of reciprocal payoffs for the parties involved, or in terms of advantages to genetic kith and kin...
...Of course it is true that Darwin, and many other biologists since, have presented a vision of man as a lineal descen-dent of beasts - a vision that has elicited a host of vociferous criticisms from diverse quarters over the years...
...Wilson, Richard Alexander, W.D...
...Consider the view of man presented by the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: "The replicators which survived were the ones which built survival machines for themselves to live in...
...Hamilton, and many others are engaged in an effort to bridge the gap that so concerned Charles Darwin throughout his life - the application of evolutionary insights to human beings and their behavior...
...Ultimately, however, the books under review do not quite accomplish their intended debunking of Darwinism run amok in the form of sociobiology...
...They are especially critical of the sociobiologists' cavalier treatment of concepts such as altruism and selfishness...
...Invoking the holy words of mind, intention, culture, free-will, and uniqueness will not frighten this new breed of reduc-tionistic determinists as they have in the past...
...This evolutionary legacy is precisely what sociobiology claims to have discovered about our behavior...
...Sociobiology represents an effort to bring to fruition the rather unnerving chain of reasoning set in motion with publication of The Origin of Species over 120 years ago...
...It is something else again to accommodate to the view that the legacy of that descent is alive and well, and actively influencing our behavior on a day-to-day basis...
...Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control...
...Whether voyaging out past the farthest galaxies with Dr...
...Not only is the political climate conducive to fundamentalist values, there are many persons scattered around America who somehow perceive sociobiology and other efforts to study human behavior biologically as the beginning of science's "final solution" to anthropomorphism and anthrocentrism...
...They have come a long way - those replicators...
...We may find the robotic view of human nature expounded by sociobiology simplistic, repugnant, even unworthy of contempt...
...and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence...
...They see no reason to ignore the causal efficacy of intentions, reasons, purposes, and' motives in explaining human social behavior...
...The Moral Majority may not be very clear about who its secular enemies are, but they have obviously caught the scent of Darwinism waiting to cross the last thresholds of human uniqueness-and they do not like what they smell...
...Multiple levels of causality - biological, social, cultural, and intentional - are the means by which genes and spirit can live in peaceful co-existence, leaving psyches and the traditional academic disciplines relatively intact...
...We are no different, the sociobiologists note, in our manifest behavior from ants, monkeys, and other social denizens of the natural world - sociable when it pays us to be so, nasty and mean-spirited when it does not...
...they created us, body and mind...
...The very methods and techniques that reveal the natural world to be such a marvelous, intricate, and fascinating puzzle reveal darker and even terrifying images when applied to ourselves...
...This is hardly the stuff of romantic vision...
...But until we understand ourselves better as human beings, it is a vision that is likely to continue to haunt us.ontinue to haunt us...
...Many of them note that there is absolutely no reason to suspect that Darwinism will shed great light on cultural evolution-a process that appears qualitatively different from the biological events which govern the transmission of information among cultureless creatures such as bugs and baboons...
...Since science abhors a theoretical vacuum, sociobiology is likely to rush into the humanities and social sciences in places where nothing better is available - and those places are numerous...
...It is fallacious in the extreme, Bock argues, to see human behavior as the by-product of a static system of genes in a given environment...
...Historical factors must be cited to explain the existence of any particular environment, but this is precisely what sociobiology, with its ahistorical, mechanistic laws of reproductive advantage and reciprocal benefits, overlooks...
...Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines...
...However, it is one thing for persons to accommodate themselves to a world view in which an ape or dinosaur occupies pride of place in the family tree...
...Hearing that we are merely nesting grounds for squiggly little strips of nucleic acid and nothing more is information more likely to result in nausea than in setting our hearts aflutter with anticipation over the next bit of scientific news...
...It is no accident that creationism is enjoying something of a revival these days...
...The tradition of glorifying in poetry and prose our unique sociality - that we alone are cultural creatures, political animals, moral beings - is seen in the cold light of sociobiology as just so much self-deceptive arrogant puffery...
...Surely these responses are to be preferred to the intellectual Ludditism of the fundamentalists...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 18
