Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 23:30:26 -0600
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: population, infanticide


Lisa, thanks for the long reply. I think we've already come pretty much
together on this.

Female infanticide

To begin, I agree that for societies of the type we were discussing, at
this time we can't prove that extensive female infanticide is or isn't
going on. In the absence of firm evidence, my gut feeling is that it does
happen, although there are many possible reasons why it would be lower than
it is in India and China. for that matter, there is considerable evidence
pointing to the fact that FI is more widespread in India now, with the
infiltration of capitalist social relations, than it was in the good old
days. This sounds like some of that moral economy of feudalism crap, but I
don't think it is. An article I read about it made the very sensible point
that in the past, it was mostly uppercaste families (mostly Rajputs in the
area being studied) that placed such a premium on sons, whereas now the
plague has spread to the lower castes. This is analogous to the fact that,
say, in the eighteenth century an English farmer's wife was considerably
more valuable to his household than the wife of an upper middle class man
in Victorian England. Along with these economic dynamics comes the fact
that middle class morality becomes the standard by which the lower classes
are judged and judge themselves.

Group selection

The point I was making was simply that, whatever the valid  objections to
GS's being important in natural evolution are, they need not apply to
cultural evolution, which is a very different process. Important
differences: transmission of genes is rarely important, anastomosis is
common (branches which diverge can later merge together, impossible in
Darwinian evolution), rates of evolution can be much higher because the
source of "mutations" can be biased relative to adaptive outcomes. I read
Delbruck's arguments about group selection in Toward a New Philosophy of
biology, but I don't recall them all that well. Perhaps you could outline
the reasons that GS has been largely discredited. My own feeling is that GS
is likely to play a significant role in cultural evolution.

Superstructure

I find it odd that here I am, a physicist, arguing against the hard
materialist viewpoint. Yes, I agree that one shouldn't expect elements of
the superstructure to be independent of direct physical effect. In many
ways, clearly they are not. When a law is on the books, that doesn't mean
it's enforced. That question depends, among other things, on various
material factors. That much is given. However, strange as it may seem,
there are many historical examples of ideas and other superstructural
components somehow do seem to acquire an autonomous existence and to create
material conditions. Science and the technology it inspires is an extreme
example of this.

Admitting ignorance

Yes, of course to be a scientist you have to be able to say "I don't know."
Harris, for all his merits, is a social scientist. That breed, from what I
have seen, has a much bigger problem with this tenet. Harris clearly took
his analysis too far -- I never really believed that the Yanomamo men bang
each other on the head with sticks and shoot arrows into their wives'
buttocks as a natural, rational adaptation to an insufficiency of protein
in their diets. However, I don't see how you can do better than post hoc,
ergo propter hoc, if that's what you meant. That's the fundamental
limitation of science, the reason we can't prove anything in the sense of
logic.

Sex ratios

I read an excellent essay by Gould on this argument for the existence of a
1:1 sex ratio. It just sounds right as soon as you hear it. He made the
fine point himself that endless cataloguing of species with 1:1 sex ratios
will not have any bearing on whether this argument is correct, but that you
can see its correctness immediately by looking at the counterexamples. For
instance, there are certain species of ants where incest is the rule, so
that the assumptions in Fisher's argument don't apply, and sure enough they
have many females per male. With regard to Darwinian evolution, where gene
transmission is the important thing, this argument is fine. However, it
doesn't necessarily shed light on human affairs, because the imperatives
there are not genetic. You can try to make similar arguments, but as it
happens they simply don't work. How to explain the fact that India has
always had a woman shortage (about 930 to 1000) created largely by female
infanticide and more subtle measures, and furthermore that it has a dowry
system, not bride price (i.e., men get paid to marry women, instead of
having to buy brides)? Human beings don't have to be rational actors if
they don't want to.

I'd like to hear more about population control mechanisms, and also maybe
an assessment of how important this is as a factor in human cultural
evolution. Is Harris paying too much attention to this point?

Rahul




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