Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 19:20:43 -0600
Subject:  McDonough - Rogers 2


From: 	Lisa Rogers
To:   	STATE-DOMAIN.WPSMTP("TERRENCE.MCDONOUGH-AT-UCG.IE")
Date: 	Wednesday, March 6, 1996 6:57 pm

[following "part 2 of 3" thread]

EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY METHOD

TM: In setting up certain kinds of trade off are we constructing an
argument which can predict ANY observed behaviour. 

Lisa: Well, I wouldn't put it that way.  If I thought I was stuck
with the meaningless tautologies of Panglossian neoclassicals, I
wouldn't be in this business.  When examining behavior in the light
of evolution, the question at hand is 'what are the fitness-related
costs and benefits of the immediately available options?'  


TM:  Is a tradeoff between immediate nutritional intake (higher risk
strategy) and  variation-minimization (risk aversion) such a
tradeoff?  I seems to  me you might be able to find two cultures in
similar ecological  circumstances, one with a high degree of sharing
and one with a lower degree.  In one can it be said that individuals
are pursuing  survival using a strategy of high risk, high caloric
intake, while  individuals in the other are pursuing maximal survival
through a risk  averse strategy.  Or does such an observation of two
cultures falsify  the hypothesis?

Lisa: [Actually, that's not the nature of the tradeoff, but for the
sake of another argument...]
I'd assume that there _is_ a fitness relevant difference between the
two populations, that it _does_ make sense that they are acting
differently, and that I just haven't figured it out yet.  By the way,
there is no reason that difference cannot be social.  The behavior of
conspecifics has enormous effects on fitness for any social
individual, and the fitness effects of any given behavior are often
very different for different individuals in different circumstances,
hence the attention to age and sex differences.  


TM: My point here is that sharing exists on a continuum.... 
Tolerated theft appears not to  account for one end of the continuum
and as such is an incomplete theory.  To state that degrees of
sharing are controlled by a system of customary behaviour which is
historically determined can potentially explain all the observed
sharing behaviour.  There is circularity here too but it is an
acknowledged circularity. 

Lisa: Can it satisfactorily explain everything?  The circularity
problem begs for an answer - where does explanation begin?  To say
that 'culture made them do it' is simply to raise the question 'what
makes culture?'  My general answer to this one is a materialist one,
that includes evolved, strategizing, self-interested creatures all
using their big fat brains to try to get over.  Rather than trying to
go inside people's heads, where much of
psych-soc-cultural-anthropology is, EvolEcol focuses on behavior, to
see how far we can get by rejecting or ignoring cultural determinism.
 It may be said to abstract from all that business of intentionality,
'motivations', consciousness, etc.  

 ASSUMPTIONS

In the food example, the general evolutionarily based assumption is
that resource choice, sharing, etc. will vary in several different
ways [not only in the proportion of a specific load kept in one's own
belly] with the fitness-related costs and benefits of each option. 
This is not a hypothesis that is up for falsification within
Evolutionary Ecology, it is an explicit, examined, supportable
assumption.  The specific hypotheses to be examined [to guide data
collection and to be evaluated in light of that data] and to be
potentially falsified are about what exactly the tradeoffs are in
specific time/place/circumstances.  The answer is a kind of
explanation of 'why' those animals do one thing rather than another.

If a specific hypothesis under test is falsified, that does not mean
that one should toss the whole theoretical framework.  Instead, the
results may indicate a better direction to look, in order to continue
the process of trying to understand what is going on, in the light of
evolution.


>  >LR: ... to the extent that anything is "inherited" evolutionary
theory
> itself provides the warrant for expecting that any propensities are
> likely to be fitness-serving. 
TM:  I think this is probably unwarranted.  Many characteristics are 
probably irrelevant to fitness.  Human hairlessness or the human chin
 for instance.

Lisa: OK how about if I soften it up appropriately by saying that any
behavioral propensities are likely to not harm one's expected
relative fitness, and the same for morphological features.  Does that
help?  And BTW, hairlessness, and the retention of head hair, do have
fitness-related effects in terms of thermo-regulation.


'NATURE VS. NURTURE'

TM:  How does one distinguish between human behaviour which is
biologically rooted and behaviour which is culturally determined.  Or
behaviour which can be substantially explained with reference to
biology and behaviour which must be culturally explained. 

Lisa:  How do _you_ distinguish between 'biologically vs. culturally
determined behavior'?  Part of the analytical gambit of EE is to say:
 what if we don't have to make that distinction?  What if we don't
get bogged down in that impossible question of drawing a line through
an inseparable complex?  What if we don't go into that question of
'if culture determines behavior, then what determines culture?'  Can
we make sense of some of what is going on without that?  I think so,
and there is a growing body of work available for evaluation, to see
if there are some insights / understandings to be gained by going
this route.  I think there are.

This method has the virtue of avoiding all the issues of informants
lying to us, to each other, to themselves, and other biases
notoriously introduced by interview methods.  'Tell me, elder, about
all the taboos of your tribe'.  How does that relate to actual
behavior or real [ulterior? unconscious?] 'motives'?  And so on.  I
think there is something unreplaceable to be gained by actual
observation of actual behavior, and the data have often contradicted
the story one gets from what people _say_ about their cultures. 

[continued]




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