Jim Dougan wrote: >>Mike, do you have any more information about Kamin's views on >>schizophrenia? Did he publish anything on the subject, to your knowledge? >> >>Allen Esterson
> Kamin co-authored a book called "Not in our Genes" - If I remember > correctly, the authorship goes Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin in that order. It > is an *interesting* treatise, with claims that almost every claim of > genetic determinism out there is simply an attempt by the ruling class to > subjugate the masses. As I remember, there is a chapter on schizophrenia. > > An interesting read for a very extreme position on the nature/nurture > controversy. TIPSters might be interested in the views of a couple of well-known reviewers of *Not in our Genes*. Here is the concluding paragraph of anthropologist Melvin Konner�s review: Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin are brilliant figures in their respective fields who have, in this unfortunate book, devoted themselves to demolition instead of construction. They have attacked only the weakest points in the rising scientific edifice of behavioral biology, while resorting to innuendo and specious analogy to tar its builders with one or another ideological brush. They explicitly reject the extreme of cultural determinism as well as that of biological determinism, but they offer little, except for pious hand-wringing and "dialectical" rhetoric, that might help us to grapple with the great unanswered questions of our behavior and experience, normal and abnormal. How gratifying it would be if they now turned their talents to studies of human action and its causes. (�Natural History�, August 1984.) And a more extensive opening section from Richard Dawkins which captures the flavour of Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin�s approach: Those of us with time to concentrate on our historic mission to exploit workers and oppress minorities have a great need to "legitimate our nefarious activities. The first legitimator we came up with was religion, which has worked pretty well through most of history but, "the static world of social relations legitimated by God reflected, and was reflected by, the dominant view of the natural world as itself static". Latterly there has been an increasing need for a new legitimator. So we developed one: Science. "The consequence was to change finally the form of the legitimating ideology of bourgeois society. No longer able to rely upon the myth of a deity ... the dominant class dethroned God and replaced him with science ... If anything. this new legitimator of the social order was more formidable than the one it replaced ... Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.� Legitimation is also the primary purpose of universities: " . . . it is universities that have become the chief institutions for the creation of biological determinism ... Thus, universities serve as creators, propagators, and legitimators of the ideology of biological determinism. If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." And to think that, through all these years working in universities, I had imagined that the purpose of science was to solve the riddles of the Universe: to comprehend the nature of existence; of space and time and of eternity; of fundamental particles spread through 100 billion galaxies; of complexity and living organisation and the slow dance through three billion years of geological time. No no, these trivial matters fade into insignificance beside the overriding need to legitimate bourgeois ideology�[�] Enough of this, let me speak plainly. Rose et al cannot substantiate their allegation about sociobiologists believing in inevitable genetic determination, because the allegation is a simple lie. The myth of the �inevitability� of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology, and has everything to do with Rose et al�s paranoic and demonological theology of science. Sociobiologists, such as myself (much as I�ve always disliked the name, this book finally provokes me to stand up and be counted), are in the business of trying to work out the conditions under which Darwinian theory might be applicable to behaviour. I we tried to do our Darwinian theorising *without* postulating genes affecting behaviour, we should get it wrong. *That* is why sociobiologists talk about genes so much, and that is all there is to it. The idea of �inevitability� never enters their heads�[�] (Richard Dawkins, New Scientist, 24 January, 1985.) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
