Jim Devine wrote:
Diamond's not a "sociobiologist," at least not as the term is usually
used (to refer to E.O. Wilson _et al_).
Well, not quite so nearly as bad as E.O. Wilson, but pretty bad all in all:
The Independent (London)
May 22, 1991, Wednesday
BOOK REVIEW / Doing what comes naturally from animal instincts; 'The
Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee' - Jared Diamond: Radius, 16.99 pounds
By TOM WILKIE
HUMAN BEINGS are animals. We evolved, according to the traditional
formula, from a common ancestor with the apes. As Jared Diamond points
out in this book, we differ only marginally from chimpanzees. Yet by
inventing a culture whereby the experience gained by individuals in one
generation can be handed on to the next, we have, to some extent,
escaped the constraints of Darwinian evolution. If you seek the source
of the success of Homo sapiens, behold the schoolteacher.
Ours is a double life: our cultural inheritance sets us apart from
animals, but we also have a biological inheritance. For a couple of
decades now there has been a busy little industry, called sociobiology,
which attempts to seek parallels from the animal kingdom with our social
and cultural lives. This book is one of its latest products.
Sociobiology is, in my view, a deeply suspect enterprise. It risks a
double jeopardy. One problem is that by explaining some unpleasant
aspect of human behaviour - aggression, rape, war - in terms of the
allegedly similar actions performed by animals, there is a risk of
excusing the behaviour. To describe aggression, say, as ''natural'',
because animals living in a state of nature exhibit aggression, is not
very far from expressing approval of it: as the supermarkets and the
advertising men know very well, the word ''natural'' has become
virtually synomymous with ''good''. It is of little avail to claim that
it has a specialised usage, which means ''living in a state of nature'',
because the moral ambiguity is now inherent in the word.
If the first problem lies in the moral implications of the
sociobiological account of humanity, the second is in the factual
quality of that account. Human culture and society are different and
unique. We may seek analogies and parallels in the rest of the living
world, but we must always regard them as similies or metaphors and be
conscious of the limits. Unfortunately, the sociobiologists often try to
stretch things too far.
Professor Diamond's account of art is particularly crude. Since animals
have an evolutionary imperative to pass on their genes, he argues, art
must be a clever stratagem by men to attract women and get them into
bed. The problem is that such a contention is unprovable, so Professor
Diamond turns to anecdotage instead of real evidence and ends up
''demonstrating'' his conclusion with a story about how the composer
Haydn had two mistresses as well as a wife. So what went wrong with the
homosexual Tchaikovsky or the respectable and monogamous Elgar?
Even when his account of human behaviour is closely argued and supported
with detailed observations, Professor Diamond's enthusiasm sometimes
leads him too far. Discussing the relationships between men and women,
he remarks that sexual jealousy once loomed large in human history as a
cause of war: ''It was the seduction (abduction, rape) by Paris of
Menelaus's wife Helen that provoked the Trojan War''. Can he really
believe that the Iliad is to be taken literally as a work of history?
According to Homer, Greek gods and goddesses took part in the conflict:
how are they to be accommodated by an evolutionary biologist? In so far
as the history of that epoch can be reconstructed, the Trojan War
appears to have been a normal sort of economic dispute over access to
trade routes: if a real woman was involved, then it is likely she was
party to a diplomatic marriage - and such marriages have more to do with
the ownership of property than with reproduction of the genes.
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