Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 19:14:39 -0600
Subject:  McDonough - Rogers 4


TM: You're very quick off the mark.  I'm learning alot.
LR: Thanks much, I'm enjoying it too.  I haven't been all through
this stuff for a while, since I've been largely immersed in marxism,
economics and feminist theory for the last year or so.  Now I'm
trying to put it all together in my head, with a dose of philosophy
of science.  Brain sweat!

> Lisa:  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: 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. 

LR: What do you think it is a metaphor for?  What are the real
things?  Are there not limited resources that any organism may turn
into offspring?  Limited and variable rates of return on foraging, as
the mass of insects gathered per hour and the number of daylight
hours limit the total amount of food that a robin can put into
offspring's mouths; the rate of feeding affects the growth rate and
disease rate and the probablility of survival of a forager's [and
worker's] child; the spending on tuition for one child means there is
none for the other.  This is the nature of competition, which
requires the allocation of limited resources.

> TM:  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....  Or does such an observation of two
> cultures falsify  the hypothesis?
>  > Lisa: 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.

LR: I think we must have rather different ideas of what
?falsifiability? is for.  I thought that every ?hard science? had to
make some basic assumptions.  Unless one believes in some kind of
ultimately justifiable appeal to what? in order to claim some
absolute certainty, which I don't.  What I _do_ ask is that
assumptions be made few, explicit and well-supported.  When it comes
to animal behavior, it don't get better supported than basic
evolutionary theory. 

Also, doesn't this critique apply to your own position??  No matter
what happens, you can always say, ?well, they must have different
cultural histories.?  Nothing is falsifiable.

TM: 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.

LR: In my schema, culture is largely translated into the
social-material consequences of one's behavior, due to the behavior
of others.  It's not the fact that there is a ?rule? per se which
impacts upon one's life, it is the disapproving behavior of people
[which is therefore part of one's 'environment'].  So for me,
?behavior of conspecifics? is practically an operational _definition_
of culture.  These are not separate at all.  This is part of being a
?social animal?, and humans are not the only one there is.

Also, culture is not ?independent?.  Are you not a materialist?  I
thought that the farthest a marxian might go was for some kind of
?relative autonomy of the superstructure? but certainly not
independence.  What am I missing here?  Are you really satisfied with
?turtles all the way down??  Culture comes from culture and that's
the end of that?

TM: It is interesting to me that you see these arguments as
materialist  (at least partially in the Marxist sense?). [snip]  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).

LR:  What else is there?  Is there some kind of research results,
insightful commentary or anything that you would take as a sign of
its ?appropriateness? ?  Or how would you define that?

TM: What makes culture?  Previous culture.  It's turtles all the way 
down. [snip] 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.

LR: Of course they have different cultural histories, but what are
the forces that influence that history?  Do people just respond in
any random way to things that happen?  Or do they tend to respond in
self-interested, individually adaptive ways?  Another thing to be
clarified is what we mean by ?ecology?, EE is not referring to the
vulgar meaning of environment as food, terrain and weather.  Ecology
is about relations between everything, including mates, potential
mates, allies, enemies, relatives, etc. _Anything_ which affects
darwinian fitness, by definition, is implicated in natural selection.
 Past natural selection is expected to result in lifeforms that
respond adaptively to the circumstances in which they find
themselves.

TM:  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. 
LR: Of course evolved organisms tend to adopt behaviors which are
?consistent with reproductive success [RS], but there's more to it. 
They tend toward behaviors which are consistent with _the most_ RS. 
What do you mean by a ?base level??

This is very stimulating.  
Thanks, Lisa



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