On sociobiology

posted by Brit

Way back when, there used to be this thing called the Nature-Nurture Debate. That's long extinct, but its close cousin, Sociobiology, is still evolving alarmingly.

Sociobiology is the awkward antechamber where geneticists, anthropologists and artists get cross while trying not to bump into each other on the way to their respective lecture-rooms. Nick Cohen writes succinctly and well about it here.

The problem, as Nick explains, is that while some sociobiological explanations of human behaviour instinctively make sense and are, indeed, sensible (eg. "why old men desire beautiful young women and why rich old men are more successful in bedding beautiful young women than poor old men"), there are a lot of zealous sociobiologists keen to explain every tittle and jot of human interaction by reference to what our distant ancestors were getting up to with unfortunate caribou in the privacy of their own caves.

There was an example of this on Start the Week recently, when psychologist Susan Blackmore tried to suggest that the concept of "fairness" must have a genetic origin because the world's children universally cry "That's not fair!" when something goes against them. This forced Raymond Geuss to point out that while whingeing when you don't get your way may be a childhood universality, an appeal to "fairness" is a curiously Anglospheric ploy, the concept being closely linked to England's cultural and judicial history.

Unfortunately, this all leads to a further problem, whereby the absurdity of some of the sociobiological 'explanations' - and, I would argue, the joy with which mainstream journalists seize on them - opens up a lot of scoffing room and allows evolutionary sceptics to dismiss everything as a "Just So Story", and thus throw all the babies out with the bathwater.

By 'evolutionary sceptic', by the way, I here refer to the kind of scientific illiterate who thinks Intelligent Design is a valid academic subject. I don't know where these people get that notion, but I expect there's a genetic explanation.