Quote:
Originally Posted by Kobi
|
When my wife pointed this article out to me, I cringed. EvoPsych/sociobiology is an intellectual passion of mine. If I could write just ONE book in my life, it would be a good primer on evo-psych and why I think it is critical, absolutely vital in fact, for left-leaning activists to understand the subject matter. Articles like the one published by Dr. Kanazawa make it that much more difficult to get liberals/progressives to pay attention to this field because most people will only ever encounter it when someone in the field publishes something like this blog post. That said, it should be noted that Dr. Kanazawa's paper was not a peer-reviewed article but a blog post.
I think that evo-psych is an important field. One of the most important new areas of the life sciences to come along in the last century. It is important because I think that the dominant models of human psychology used by both the left and the right are both spectacularly wrong because they are both based upon the idea that, unlike all other species on this planet, human beings do not have 'species typical behavior'. We are perfectly comfortable with the idea that, for instance, all domestic dogs share a range of common behaviors that they also share with other canines. We have no problem with the idea that all domestic cats share a range of common behaviors that they share, to some greater or lesser degree, with the larger cats. When it comes to us, however, we think that there's no inherent structure to our brains and that we are infinitely malleable. This cannot be true if human beings are an evolved species--and we are an evolved species.
Our politics should be driven by an understanding of the constraints we are operating under because of what we are. We cannot build just ANY society we might dream up. Some societies are more likely to work than others. To take two polar-opposite examples, neither a pure communist nor a pure libertarian society will work because we do not have brains that are like ants or orangutans respectively. A pure communist society runs up against the fact that people *prefer* their relatives and intimates to strangers. It runs up against the free-rider problem. A pure libertarian society runs aground on the shoals of the fact that we are not solitary creatures and that we have interests that are not, necessarily, subject to a cost-benefit rational actor economic solution. It also runs up against the free-rider problem. However, if we operate off the belief that there is no reason for me to prefer, say, my son over any random young man on the street or there is no reason for me to be more concerned about the welfare of my spouse than about any given random person on the street, we will try to build a society that runs contrary to human nature.
Just as there are general questions about biology that make no sense except in light of evolution, there are things in human society and psychology that make no sense except in light of evolutionary psychology. To take just one example, why are we *so* moral? The answer from evo psych is that we have a suite of mental modules that create the 'moral emotions' (anger, guilt, shame, etc.) and that provide us with a set of social tools to deal with cheaters, liars and free-riders (e.g. gossip, ostracism, taboos, etc.).
Cheers
Aj