Today the readings cover some of the new understandings of human behavior that were contributed by the sociobiology / evolutionary psychology perspective. Readings from The Blank Slate cover four areas of the behavioral and social sciences that have been affected (the chapter titles are less than transparent): Chapter 12, In Touch With Reality (human cognition mechanisms); Chapter 13, Out of Our Depth (about our innate categories and theories about the world and the behavior of other human beings); Chapter 14, The Many Roots of Our Suffering (about the evolutions of social relations, including exchange relations and family relations); Chapter 15, The Sanctimonious Animal (about the evolution of our moral sense). We will also discuss Chapter 8, Sociobiological Explanations in Steven Sanderson's The Evolution of Human Sociality.
1. What would be the implications of the existence of innate categories of thought in the human brain (as Pinker's discussion in Chapter 12 suggests) for the usefulness of some popular perspectives in the social sciences that emphasize the relativism of cultures, under such names of "social constructionism", "relativism", "language is the prison of thought", "Whorf's hypothesis", or "relativism"? For the origin of stereotypes and the post-modern idea that social categories (such as racial, gender, ethnic) do not exist in reality and are pure social creations? For the "euphemism treadmill"?
2. What are the implication, for understanding human cultures, of the idea discussed in Chapter 13 that the human brain acquired in the course of evolution a number of "mental organs" including an intuitive psychology (that views other humans as driven by an internal "mind" or "soul")? (See p. 226 "The idea that bodies are invested with souls is ... embedded in people's psychology.")
3. P. 233ff (in Chapter 13) Pinker discusses the hypothesis of the existence of 4 distinctive evolved psychologies related to human transactions: (1) communal sharing, (2) authority ranking, (3) exchange of similar goods or favors at different times (reciprocity or equality matching), and (4) market pricing. How can this hypothesis, and the possibility of contradictions between the 4 psychologies, might shed light on such diverse phenomena as the antagonism against "middle-man" ethnic groups all over the world; antagonism against traders in World War II POW camps; Karl Marx's dislike of the bourgeoisie; Karl Marx's theory of value and concept of "use value", etc.
4. In Chapter 14 Pinker asserts that Robert Trivers' "follow the genes" theory is the first "elegant" theory ever proposed in social psychology. How can one relate Trivers' theory to patterns of human relations such as gender differences in sexual strategies, parent-offspring conflict, siblings conflict, marital strife, coexistence of communal sharing and reciprocity logics in human exchange relations, differences in the nature of sexual jealousy between men and women, the origin of self-deception, and the possibility of explaining the existence of psychopaths (characterized by a particular cluster of traits) as an evolved strategy of behavior. What does sociologist Erving Goffman (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) have to do with this?
5. How useful are the concepts of "moralization" and "amoralization" (discussed in Chapter 15) for understanding recent public debates, e.g. on the small number of women engineers and physicists; on The Bell Curve; etc. See list of recently moralized things p. 276 for inspiration.
6. (Sanderson, Chapter 8) What is the nature of the controversy about "levels of selections" (i.e., gene, organism, group) in evolutionary biology. Why is the idea that the gene is the fundamental level of selection (i.e., evolution is the differential reproduction of genes in the gene pool) at once so important in explaining the evolution of social behavior, and so controversial?
Last modified 20 Sep 2005