Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 18:11:17 -0600
Subject:  McDonough - Rogers 3


From: 	Terrence  Mc Donough <TERRENCE.MCDONOUGH-AT-UCG.IE>
To:	Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers-AT-state.ut.us>
Date: 	Thursday, March 7, 1996 4:19 am

 You're very quick off the mark.  I'm learning alot.

> 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?"

Now were getting somewhere.  One of the interesting things here is 
the extent to which economic metaphors are being deployed in your 
methodology.  Utility abstractly conceived as personal well-being 
then is apparently not one of them.  What is being maximized by 
behaviour is reproductive success and the economic metaphor is 
limited to maximization itself and  the concept of tradeoffs.  I 
would suggest then that the use of economic terminology like 
"interests" and "claimants" is confusing.  

> 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.

This makes your methodology one which is not falsifiable at least in 
its basic propositions.  This is no problem if you adopt a Kuhnian or
Lakatosian philosophy of science.  But to do so is to abandon some of
the rhetorical advantages of a "hard science" approach to the 
question.  Does this lack of falsifiability bother EE.

>  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,

Then the explanation of the behaviour is substantially rooted in the 
behaviour of the conspecifics which is reciprocally rooted on the 
behaviour of conspecifics etc.  One either has to come back to the 
individual reproductive fitness argument or admit cultural factors as
 at least one independent determinant of behaviour.

  >  > 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. 

It is interesting to me that you see these arguments as materialist 
(at least partially in the Marxist sense?).  I think you are correct 
to identify these ideas with a certain strain in Marxist thinking.  
You would probably find the field of analytical Marxism to be very 
interesting from your point of view.  The question of course is 
whether this kind of materialism is appropriate in trying to 
understand human history (or at least the foraging portion of it in 
time and space).

What makes culture?  Previous culture.  It's turtles all the way 
down.  What I am doing in this discussion is trying to understand 
foraging behaviour using the tools developed for understanding human 
economies in history and developed primarily in a context of 
attempting to understand class societies (principally capitalism but 
also feudalism and slavery).  You are approaching the same question 
using the tools developed by a particular kind of evolutionary 
biology.  We are reaching different conclusions.  In the case of the 
two groups with similar ecologies and divergent sharing behaviour, I 
put this down to different cultural histories, you assume there must 
be some as yet undiscovered differences in the ecology to account for
 this difference.  I submit that in this case it is your approach 
which is making the assumptions.  Or at least that the two approaches
 are equivalent in making assumptions and that neither is empirically
 superior to the other.  > 

> 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?

It sure does, but this is a substantial softening up.  Could one go 
further and say that behavioural and morphological characteristics 
must only be consistent with continued reproductive success given 
various environmental constraints.  This would appear to be the 
actual bound on the variation in cultural behaviour in the 
contemporary world.  And I suspect this is true in animal evolution 
as well though evolutionary forces will drive adaptation above this 
base level in many (maybe most) but not all cases.

>  And BTW, hairlessness, and the retention of head hair, do have >
fitness-related effects in terms of thermo-regulation.

I thought attempts to demonstrate this thesis had failed.


>  >  > ?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 avoids rather than solves the question.  In terms of going 
beyond understanding the world and trying to change it, I am enough
of a biological determinist to think that trying to establish social
institutions which actively conflict with biologically based 
tendencies is tilting at windmills.  Hence it is essential to
distinguish what's biological, what's cultural, what's a combination 
and in what way.

>  > 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.

This is an argument about the merits of alternative biases, not one 
of an approach with a bias versus one without.  

>  > [continued]
 





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