Sociobiologists claim that human nature is universal and fixed by evolution over billions of years. However, they make this determination by only examining modern Western societies and ignoring historical changes over thousands of years. The most influential sociobiology work proposes several dubious claims of universal human traits, such as being easily indoctrinated and preferring belief over knowledge, without strong evidence, based mostly on modern Western and some tribal societies. It promotes a narrow view of human nature that does not account for cultural and historical variability.
Sociobiologists claim that human nature is universal and fixed by evolution over billions of years. However, they make this determination by only examining modern Western societies and ignoring historical changes over thousands of years. The most influential sociobiology work proposes several dubious claims of universal human traits, such as being easily indoctrinated and preferring belief over knowledge, without strong evidence, based mostly on modern Western and some tribal societies. It promotes a narrow view of human nature that does not account for cultural and historical variability.
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Richard C. Lewontin - Biology Ideology--The Doctrine of DNA 55.pdf
Sociobiologists claim that human nature is universal and fixed by evolution over billions of years. However, they make this determination by only examining modern Western societies and ignoring historical changes over thousands of years. The most influential sociobiology work proposes several dubious claims of universal human traits, such as being easily indoctrinated and preferring belief over knowledge, without strong evidence, based mostly on modern Western and some tribal societies. It promotes a narrow view of human nature that does not account for cultural and historical variability.
Sociobiologists claim that human nature is universal and fixed by evolution over billions of years. However, they make this determination by only examining modern Western societies and ignoring historical changes over thousands of years. The most influential sociobiology work proposes several dubious claims of universal human traits, such as being easily indoctrinated and preferring belief over knowledge, without strong evidence, based mostly on modern Western and some tribal societies. It promotes a narrow view of human nature that does not account for cultural and historical variability.
In this sense, the sociobiological theory of human
nature puts on a mantle of universality and of utter fixity. After all, if 3 billion years of evolution have made us what we are, do we really think that a hundred days of revolution will change us? Sociobiologists take the first step, the claimed correct description of what is universal in all human beings, more or less as every human nature theorist has done it, by looking around to see what people in their society are like and to some extent by telling their own life stories. Having looked inward at themselves and outward at modern capitalist society for a description of human nature, they then extend it a bit further by looking into the anthropological record in order to assure us that those very same elements that they find in twentieth-century North America and Britain are also, in one form or another, displayed by the Stone Age people of New Guinea. For some reason, they do not look much at the historical record of European society, of which they seem to be quite ignorant, but perhaps they feel that if New Guinea highlanders and Scottish highlanders show the same characteristics today, then there cannot have been much change in 1,500 years of recorded history. And what are these human universals that sociobiologists find? One can hardly do better than look at the most influential, and in some sense, founding document of sociobiological theory, E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.15 Professor Wilson tells us, for example, that human beings are indoctrinable. He says, "Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate. They seek it. "16 They are characterized by blind faith: "Man would rather believe than know. "17 That statement is, we must note, found in what is called a scientific work, used as a textbook in courses all over the world, filled with the mathematics of modern population biology, crammed with observations and facts about the behavior of all kinds of animals, based on what Time magazine has called the "iron laws of nature. " But surely, "man would rather believe than know" is more in the line of barroom wisdom, the sort of remark one makes to one's friend at the local after work following a particularly frustrating attempt to persuade the person in the next office that he ought to do things in a different way. Among other aspects of human nature are said to be a universal spite and family chauvinism. We are told that "human beings are keenly aware of