"John Jones" <jonescardiff@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1109012947.520110.12770@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> So you never wrote it.
The Dirty Mind Test
You're introduced to three new co-workers who happen to be of the opposite
sex. Would one of your first thoughts be, "which one would I most like to
have sex with?"
yes no
Would you give up a year of your life if you could live out your ultimate
sexual fantasy?
yes no
You and your spouse are shopping for mattresses. Do you immediately think
about how good the sex will be, rather than the sleep?
yes no
You're at a friend's pool party and see their incredibly gorgeous 17-year
old nephew (or niece) sunbathing. Do you fantasize about them?
yes no
You call up your girlfriend or boyfriend and they say they'll call you back
because they're just getting into the shower. Do you mentally insert
yourself into the picture?
yes no
If you were given a dollar for every time the thought of sex crosses your
mind in one day, your wallet would have:
Twenty dollars.
Fifty dollars.
You need a bigger wallet.
You run into a friend's ex at a business convention. You remember hearing
how great they were in bed. Do you:
Mentally undress them
Think about what you're going to have for lunch.
Imagine the two of you getting it on in the nearest closet
Is it okay to have sexual fantasies about a friend's spouse?
yes no
Can you get a massage without thinking about sex?
yes no
Do you think about sex more than your career?
yes no
> You made out you wrote it at the start, but only at the end did you
> show you never wrote it. What's the point of that...TEll MR Edward
> fucking Wilson its lucky he ain't here or he would be torched.
> JJ
>
At Harvard there were leaflets and teach-ins, a protester with a bullhorn
calling for Wilson's dismissal, and invasions of his classroom by
slogan-shouting students. When he spoke at other universities, posters
called him the "Right-Wing Prophet of Patriarchy" and urged people to bring
noisemakers to his lectures. Wilson was about to speak at a 1978 meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science when a group of
people carrying placards (one with a swastika) rushed onto the stage
chanting, "Racist Wilson, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide." One
protester grabbed the microphone and harangued the audience while another
doused Wilson with a pitcher of water.
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
The First Sociobiology Controversy
Academic disputes are more vicious than arguments in ordinary life because
the status of academic professionals depends not on money, physical
achievement, or even formal rank, but on the written tokens of esteem or
contempt bestowed by their peers. Academic arguments escalate into open
warfare if the disputed issues embrace the meaning of life, the foundation
of ethics, or, above all, political beliefs and the security of academic
disciplines. Then onlookers are treated to the spectacle of what in another
context has been called the fury of the theologians.
So it was with the sociobiology debate, which began in the 1970s with the
writings of a group of scientists from biology and the social sciences,
including Richard D. Alexander, David P. Barash, Jerram L. Brown, John
Crook, Richard Dawkins, Pierre van den Berghe, and Edward O. Wilson. These
efforts were designed as an introduction to a new field of study. For the
first time they drew together many previously isolated threads of research
and defined the discipline of sociobiology within the theoretical framework
of modern biology. Sociobiology did not appear out of thin air. It followed
preliminary and more philosophically oriented works on the role of biology
in human behavior by Konrad Lorenz, Donald T. Campbell, Irenaus
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Desmond Morris, Robin Fox, Lionel Tiger, and others. It was
based to a large extent on the achievements of hundreds of investigators,
from Jane Goodall's field study of chimpanzees and Theodore Schneirla's
discovery of the secrets of army ant life to theories on the evolution of
altruism by William D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and Robert L. Trivers.
Sociobiology has grown swiftly during the past ten years, alongside ethology
and behavioral ecology. It has become the subject of five new technical
journals and a spreading shelf of textbooks, research symposia, and
monographs. The mainstream of animal sociobiology is a rich mixture of fact
and theory about the intimate lives of fungus-growing termites, fence
lizards, anubis baboons, and the tens of thousands of other species of
social creatures that have attracted the attention of zoologists around the
world. Very few of the findings of this field are the subject of dispute.
And when the principles derived from the basic studies are extended to human
beings, there is no special reason to expect that human social behavior is
completely genetically determined. It could be entirely free of heredity or,
more likely, something in between. The question can be addressed with
equanimity through the interlocking techniques of genetics, psychology, and
sociobiology.
In spite of the inherent neutrality of the discipline, academic partisans
were soon locked in the win-or-die struggle usually associated with the
question of heredity versus environment. The reason is that most
sociobiologists did take a position on the key question. They suggested that
a great deal of human social behavior is affected by heredity and hence can
be explained more readily by biology than by the usual formulations of the
social sciences. This proposition, although comprising only a modest part of
the overall subject, received far more popular attention than the remainder
of the discipline. The sociobiology debate was triggered by both the idea of
genetic control (which seemed to negate the existence of free will) and the
means by which the enterprise was legitimated: a more hereditarian view of
human behavior had been invested with the apparent authority of a full
scientific field, and the social sciences were opened to the intrusion of
biology. Similar opinions had been prominently expressed in earlier books,
including especially the best-selling On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, The
Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey, and The Naked Ape by Desmond
Morris. But these were works designed for a broad audience, devoted to only
a few topics in human behavior, and they appeared to marshal evidence to
support a single idea. To critics predisposed against a genetics of human
nature, they were dismissible. The debates that swirled around them
foreshadowed the sociobiology controversy but died down with far less impact
than the central ideas deserved. Sociobiology, in contrast, was a scientific
discipline, into which human behavior had been embedded as the idiosyncratic
evolutionary adaptation of one among many primate species. It was not so
easily dismissible.
The principal technical novelty of sociobiology is its treatment of
societies as populations, subject to the laws of organized systems above the
level of isolated individuals. Each society-each population-possesses a
particular size, overall genetic structure, ratio of males to females, means
of communication among the members, and other higher-order features. These
traits can be observed as they change through time, just as the chemistry,
anatomy, and behavior of organisms are analyzed in more conventional
biology. We speak of such studies as population biology, the analysis of
life at the level of breeding groups of organisms. Sociobiology is to a
considerable extent the special branch of population biology that deals with
social animals and human beings, although it also draws heavily on other
branches of biology. Above all, it is entirely orthodox with respect to the
natural sciences. Its practitioners remain true to the generally accepted
facts and principles of biology and attempt to draw on the full arsenal of
that larger science.
On first inspection it might appear logical to apply the principles of
general sociobiology to human beings. After all, our knowledge of human
heredity and physiology, the very foundation of modern medicine, was built
to a large extent on principles derived from the study of other organisms,
including such lowly forms as fruit flies and colon bacteria. Might
animal-based biology also enrich the foundations of the social sciences?
This prospect seemed to appeal to the academic community, and sociobiology
promised to fulfill a widely perceived intellectual need.
Then, unexpectedly, a group from the American radical left began a major
campaign to change the earlier opinion. They viewed the effort to extend
sociobiology to human beings less as scientific research than as the
stirring of a dangerous political monster. During the summer of 1975,
fifteen scientists, teachers, and students from the Boston area formed the
Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People. Most prominent among
them were four colleagues of one of us (Wilson) on the Harvard faculty:
Jonathan Beckwith, Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, and Richard Lewontin.
They were interested, as Hubbard said, in "breaking down the screen of
approval" springing up around the new field, particularly Wilson's recently
published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. After meeting quietly for several
months, the Science for the People committee published a letter in the
November 13, 1975, issue of The New York Review of Books. There they said
that human applications of sociobiology are to be condemned because of the
political dangers such thinking poses. All attempts to establish a
biological basis of social behavior will lead to Social Darwinism and the
attendant evils favored by capitalist-imperialist regimes. Even the
presentation of hypotheses of this nature:
"consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and
of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex.
Historically, powerful countries or ruling groups within them have drawn
support for the maintenance or extension of their power from these products
of the scientific community. For example, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. said "The
growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest... It is
merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God." These theories
provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and
restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and
also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas
chambers in Nazi Germany."
To link opponents with Rockefeller and Hitler is to call for their exile
from the dovecotes of academia. The purpose is not so much to answer the
arguments of the authors under attack as to destroy their credibility. This
is particularly true at Harvard University, where a professor accused of
fascist sympathies is in roughly the same position as an atheist in a
Benedictine monastery.
The Science for the People representatives were well-meaning. They opposed
human sociobiology because its very pursuit implied to them a belief in
genetic determination of social behavior, and "genetic determinism" offers
support for racism, sexism, and the status quo. In their view, any
demonstration that differences in intelligence and temperament can be
influenced by heredity lays the groundwork for treating people differently
according to race or sex. To suggest that the proneness toward aggression
and dominance is partly inherited is to validate these destructive human
traits. The Science for the People group spoke with conviction when they
claimed that any admission of genetic determinism can be used by the ruling
classes to justify the existing social order, whether it is true or not. If
the idea of genetic determinism is allowed to flourish, they said,
legitimate struggles for social justice will be suppressed with the blessing
of science. To oppose this kind of pernicious research and speculation,
while redirecting science to the greater benefit of the poor and the
oppressed, is properly designated Science for the People. Armed with this
humanitarian formula, the critics attempted to take the moral high ground in
the opening round of the sociobiology debate.
The flaw in their argument, pointed out by many subsequent writers during
the debate, is the assumption that scientific discovery should be judged on
its possible political consequences rather than on whether it is true or
false. That mode of reasoning led earlier to pseudo-genetics in Nazi Germany
and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. The Science for the People committee
were on equally shaky ground in their political rationale. If societies
regard racism or any other kind of injustice as undesirable, whatever the
causation, its ravages can be mitigated. A knowledge of the hereditary
tendency and biological mechanisms then becomes a valuable part of political
reform rather than an obstruction to it, in the same way that information
about the hereditary basis of sickle-cell anemia and hemophilia is essential
to the diagnosis and treatment of these disorders. Opponents of Science for
the People argued that to suppress scientific research on the grounds of how
it might be misused is indefensible. They reasoned that the alleviation of
human suffering will be favored on a global basis, not impeded, by a deeper
investigation of the genetic processes of human nature. This procedure will
steadily replace rumor and folklore with testable knowledge. Nothing except
ignorance and fear is to be gained by the dogmatic denial of the existence
of hereditary components and attempts to discredit the scientists who study
them. Information humanely acquired and widely shared, related to human
needs but kept free of political censorship, is the real science for the
people.
The social aims of Science for the People, stressing justice and equality,
were admirable, but the logic they used undercut their own political cause.
By emphasizing the absence of hereditary influence on human behavior as a
virtual precondition for social justice, they made the very idea of justice
hostage to further scientific research. For if further research were to
produce evidence contrary to their hopes, and genes were shown to play a
role in human behavior, Science for the People would not merely lose the
technical dispute. They would also find it extremely difficult to respond to
those members of the extreme right who genuinely favor discrimination and
the status quo-for reasons having nothing to do with respect for scientific
evidence.
And that is essentially what happened. In recent years evidence has steadily
mounted to implicate genes in virtually every category of human behavior
chosen for close study. In order to test for hereditary influences in
differences among people, geneticists have made detailed studies of twins
and other siblings raised together and apart. They have supplemented this
work with complex pedigree analysis and the tracing of mental development of
children reared in different environments. Their research has produced
substantial evidence of hereditary variation in color vision, hearing
acuity, odor and taste discrimination, number ability, word fluency, spatial
ability, memory, timing of language acquisition, spelling, sentence
construction, perceptual skill, psychomotor skill,
extroversion/introversion, proneness to homosexuality, age of first sexual
activity, timing of major stages in intellectual development, proneness to
alcoholism, some phobias, and certain forms of neurosis and psychosis,
including manic-depressive behavior and schizophrenia.
Although human genetics is still in its infancy, researchers have already
identified the exact sources of some of the more extreme forms of behavioral
alteration. Single genes have been found, for example, that induce a
compulsive tendency to pull and tear at the body. Others lower the capacity
to perform on a few standard cognitive tests used in psychology but not the
remainder, or affect sensitivity to the odors of musks and floral scents.
The mapping of the human chromosomes has begun in earnest, and it is certain
to have a profound effect on both medicine and our perception of human
nature.
The basic weakness in the Science for the People argument was unfortunately
noted by the extreme political right, including the National Front of
England and the New Right of France. These groups, who favored various
shades of authoritarian government and racist practice, accepted the Science
for the People arguments with enthusiasm. They proclaimed, in effect, that
if the critiques were wrong, then the political ideals endorsed by Science
for the People must also be wrong. They embraced so-ciobiology-not the real
science of sociobiology but rather the caricature drawn by Science for the
People and a few of the more sensationalist popular writers. Although it was
far from what they intended, Gould, Lewontin, and other members of the
Harvard-based group had turned political ideology into a contest that
seemingly could be settled by factual studies in human genetics.
Fortunately, the debate went in a different direction. Most people in the
United States and Europe do not care very much for ideologies of either the
extreme left or right; they also pay very little attention to academic
squabbles. Among those who do care, it was generally perceived that Science
for the People was something more than a benevolent study group devoted to
the humane uses of science-it was also an action group that promoted
Marxism-Leninism, in a manner specialized to subordinate science to the
service of that ideology. Its official journal, Science for the People,
consistently praised communist regimes while excoriating the capitalist and
"imperialist" states of the West, and most particularly the United States.
The writers for Science for the People called for the exposure and
harassment of scientists, scientific projects, and institutions that they
classified as supportive of the prevailing order. A sample of titles from
their articles during 1975-1979 conveys the flavor: "Social Science
Research: A Tool of Counterinsurgency," "Sociobiology: Tool for Social
Oppression," and "U.S. Medical Research: For the Power Not the People."
Social criticism is a good thing, but the writers had a larger ideological
purpose in mind and were not prepared to tolerate challenges to their own
beliefs. Nearly all of the villains identified by them over the years live
in capitalist countries; few if any represent the "new, humane" socialist
countries that the activists sought to emulate. When a project in human
genetics at the Harvard Medical School was closed down because of a
publicity campaign by Science for the People and the resulting public
harassment of its directors, Jonathan Beckwith was triumphant. Proclaiming
an important victory (over the Medical School faculty, which overwhelmingly
supported the project), he called for a widening of the struggle against all
"ruling class academic institutions."
Given the expression of such sentiments, it was not unreasonable for the
academic community at large to suppose that Science for the People were
opposed to human sociobiology for reasons other than a pure concern for
humanity and scientific truth. Their campaign had the look, as Tom Bethell
once summarized the matter, of burning Darwin to save Marx. So by 1978 what
we knew at Harvard as the political wars of sociobiology had largely come to
an end.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
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