On Wed, 18 May 2005, Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>736. Man's two worlds
>
>Now that even language differences between man and other primates, such
>as bonobo chimpanzees, are not so sharp as thought hitherto, what is
>emerging as probably our only unique characteristic as a species is man's
>ability to trade.
I think you'll find a strong argument from the proponents of the
standard items on that list, such as ability to imagine and plan
into the future beyond the next 15 minutes, ability to think in
the abstract, knowledge of the inevitability of personal death, etc.
Yes, and all these, together with language, were enormously enhanced with the great expansion of the frontal lobes of the cortex which is the physiological characteristic of man's predecessors as compared with the remaining primates.
[...]
>But if a mutation occurred in some groups where the post-puberty girls
>were more inclined to wander then these wandering girl-groups, being
>physically smaller and less strong than bachelor males would have been in
>greater peril. Unless, instead, they were directly exchanged between
>groups when the groups met occasionally at territorial boundaries! But
>what would have happened if there had been -- as one would normally
>expect -- a sexual imbalance between the sexes of the two groups? It is
>not too much to speculate that other prized goods would have been used as
>a "balance of trade" between two groups.
>
>We can still see the original direct linkage between sex and trade in the
>form of dowries which still obtains in many more "primitive" societies,
>such as in the agricultural areas of Asia, Africa and South America.
>Indeed, it is not too much to suppose that the surge of young Saudi
>Arabian suicide bombers flowing into Iraq is primarily caused because
>millions of young males in Saudi Arabia are totally without jobs and
>cannot ever save enough money to buy themselves a wife. Thus they are
>easily manipulated into believing that their plight is due to other
>causes.
I think this theory would have better legs if it were not the case
that universally (unless you can cite a counterexample) the tradition
is that dowries and similar exchanges are given _accompanying_ the
females, to their recipient families, as if a bribe to take the
women off her family's hands. This decidedly patriarchal slant to
the exchange suggests it stems from the patriarchal era, which is
to say the sedentary agricultural age. You would have a hard time
establishing a pre-agricultural basis for this practice.
Ghastly typo mistake on my part. I meant "pre-agricultural" in the above. Thanks for pointing this out. Dowries shift from male-dowries to female-dowries in regions of intensive agriculture. An excessive number of daughters (though not of sons) starts to become an embarrassment to a peasant farmer as they grow up because they're not so productive as male sons on the land. So he has to bribe males to take daughters off his hands. The very swift change in the economics of Saudi Arabia since 1920 (with the exploitation of oil) has meant that their traditions are trapped in pre-agricultural (pastoral) times. That particular sentence of mine above was a speculative one (though I think it's sound) and perhaps I shouldn't have included it. But on this line what might also be speculated is the difference between the respective structures of the Shias and the Sunni faiths, the former being highly hierarchical (the typical structure of long-time agricultural societies) with many grades of ayatollahs, the latter being more "democratic" in the sense that the local mosques and imams have far more independent power than their Shia equivalents. A Wahhabi (Sunni) cleric has sheikh-like powers within his own small locality (as with the power of the sheikh within a nomadic bedouin group) and this is probably the reason why reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost impossible to impose from on top. (The big danger in Iraq is when Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani is unable any longer to restrain the frustration of the Shias any longer. Being more amenable to strcit leadership from on high, the Shias are then more likely to move en bloc to a leader such as Moqtada al-Sadr. On the other hand, the Sunnis of Baghdad, being more "democratic" have far more semi-independent political groups ranging from the extremists [who are probably importing their suicide bombers colleagues from SA] to the moderates. It is the absence of extremist Sunnis within the Transitional government which is what is now being ventilated in Baghdad, and to which Condolezza Rice referred on her visit, and plainly preventing Bush from calling the government a "representive" one.)
Keith
-Pete
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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