"Michael Ragland"  wrote in message
> One is known as the
> naturalistic fallacy. There is a strong belief among late 20th century
> Americans that if something can be shown to be "natural" then it is
> right and should be this way.
>
Note that this fallacy is also committed by those who buy "natural
medicines" or similar products.
>
> There are some other criticisms of sociobiology that Alcock does not
> address. Here I quote extensively from R. Lewontin (1984), Not in our
> genes. "The conventional description of human nature in sociobiological
> writing means that sociobiologists have failed to confront the
> fundamental problems of the description of behavior. They treat
> categories like slavery, entrepreneurship, dominance, aggression,
> tribalism and territoriality as if they were natural objects having a
> concrete reality, rather than realizing that these are historically and
> ideologically conditioned constructs.
>
"Not in Our Genes" is notorious as a weak attack on sociobiology. All words
except those referring to concrete objects are to some extent historically
and ideologically conditioned constructs. We need a word to describe ants
who take larvae of related species and use them as labourers, and
"slave-making ants" is a natural analogy to make. However every
entomologist
knows that there are important difference between slavery in ants and
slavery in humans.
>
> First, sociobiology uses arbitrary agglomeration." In our language, this
> is the problem of knowing what a trait is or of knowing what decision is
> controlling a particular pattern of behavior like a mating system or
> social structure. This is as much a problem for animal behavior as for
> sociobiology -- but if you have trouble doing this for other species you
> surely will have trouble with humans.
>
No behaviour (except the knee-jerk relex) is completely understood.
Agglomeration is not arbitrary - for instance we agglomerate all examples of
eating behaviour. However, in humans, eating socially may have important
differences from eating through hunger. Since we don't understand what these
differences are, it makes sense to treat "eating" as a category.
>
> "The second error of description
> is the confusion of metaphysical categories with concrete objects...it
> cannot be assumed that any behavior or institution to which a name can
> be given is a real thing subject to the laws of nature." In other words,
> how can you talk about war, religion or slavery as a real trait?
>
Because humans have words for these things, and use them successfully. It
cannot be that "war", "religion" and
"slavery" are applied to any and
arbitrary social situations. They have some reality, even if we don't know
what the material substrate is.
>
> "Sociobiologists commit the classical error of reification by taking
> concepts that have been created as a way of ordering, understanding
> and talking about human social experience and endowing these with a
> life of their own." When we apply these terms to animals, we
> understand that they are metaphors. The behavior just sort of looks like
> the human phenomenon, like rape in ducks
>
Lewontin is confusing "metaphor" (use of one term to describe something
which it resembles in one aspect, such as "key" for
"crucial") with the
extension of meaning - for instance use of the term "professional" to refer
to any well-paid employee. Use of the term "rape" to include actions by
mallard ducks is an extension of the meaning from purely human sexual
interaction to ducks.
>
> "The final problem of description" that Lewontin identifies,
"closely
> related to the use of metaphor, is the conflation of different phenomena
> under the same rubric. The classic that preoccupies sociobiologists and
> their predecessors is aggression.
>
Since we don't understand behaviour, we don't know how it should be divided
up. For instance Lorenz was probably right to distinguish "aggression" from
feeding in carnivores. Aggressive acts have sufficient in common to make it
reasonable to treat them as the same, until someone shows how chimpanzee
battles are inherently different from human gang warfare.
>
> Throughout history, warfare,
> representing only the most organized technique of aggression, has been
> endemic to every form of society, from hunter-gatherer bands to
> industrial states.
>
Wilson is arguably committing Lewontin's error 4 here. We don't know that
hunter-gatherer skirmishes actually have anything much in common with
industrialised warfare. However we don't know that they are different,
either.

> The differences in reproductive success are greater among men than
> among women, and are more strongly correlated with social status.
> Men, but not women -- young men above all -- have powerful
> incentives to fight for that status.
>
This can legitmately be attacked as a "just so" story (not one of
Lewontin's
errors). This is a plausible evolutionary explanation of something, which is
almost impossible to back up with hard evidence. You could also argue that
women have a violence inhibitor to prevent them from hurting their babies.
>
> Like the Jewish dietary laws, incest avoidance is cultural. It is also
> adaptive. However, it goes further in being universal and therefore
> suggesting genetic predispositions."
>
Failure to see that "incest" is a cultural construct? Except that
it isn't -
it can be precisely defined, and we also know the genetic reason underlying
incest avoidance (harmful recessives), and the proximate mechanism - don't
mate with those you grew with as children.
>
> "Daly's and Wilson's detailed analysis finds
> that, on the contrary, infanticide fits well with the evolved
> inclinations that we would expect in the allocation of scarce parental
> resources.
>
Can't see a fallacy here. The mistake was made by the sociologists who
didn't distinguish between a natural and a step-father. They were applying a
social construct (step-families) to a biological category.
>
> In such cases aggression is said to be a
> "density-dependent factor: in controlling population growth. As it
> gradually increases in intensity, it operates like a tightening valve to
> slow and finally shut off the increase in numbers.
>
Looks like Wilson has slipped into group selection in this quote. Aggression
may become more or less adaptive as density increases. Obviously there is no
point in fighting for control of resources that are lying around in
abundance. On the other hand, an aggrressive individual may survive if he
initiates one or two fights in a sparse population, but quickly be killed if
he tries ten or twenty fights in a dense population.
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