Word: anthropologists
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...strongest argument against sociobiology is that it underrates the emergence of the human brain, consciousness and culture. Said Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris to an M.I.T. audience last year: "Sociobiologists tend to drastically underestimate the result to which human cultures represent an emergent novelty." His point: even simple organisms show great variation in behavior, but only the genes can pass it on. Among humans, learning can be passed on by culture, thus overwhelming the genetic contribution to behavior...
...most vocal critics have been Marxist and other scholars with political points to make. University of Chicago Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins dismisses sociobiology as "genetic capitalism"?an attempt to defend the current structures of Western society as natural and inevitable. Jerome Schneewind, a philosopher at Manhattan's Hunter College, calls it "mushy metaphor . . . a souped-up version of Hobbes." Harvard Evolutionary Biologist Richard Lewontin is earthier; he thinks sociobiology is "bullshit...
...many, such explanations of noble deeds are cold comfort. But Harvard Anthropologist Melvin J. Konner sees a bright side to reciprocal altruism. Sociobiologists, he says, "have in fact uplifted [human nature] by showing that altruism, long thought to be a thin cultural veneer, belongs instead to the deepest part of our being, produced by countless aeons of consistent evolution...
...faculty appointment in 1972. Zoologist Ernest Williams, one of his teachers, describes him as a brash, brilliant student who turned in papers with slashing attacks on well-known biologists, some of whom have not forgotten?or forgiven. Brashness is still part of Trivers' character. He derided an anthropologist (who, incidentally, admires his work) as too old to understand the implications of sociobiology. The anthropologist was then...
...Anthropologist Sahlins in The Use and Abuse of Biology, the only anti-sociobiology book published to date, contends that kinship patterns among humans do not?as sociobiological theory predicts?always follow bloodlines. He also argues that Trivers' theory of reciprocal altruism simply does not work: an individual may help himself by behaving altruistically, but he also helps one of his competitors. Thus there is no net advantage to altruistic behavior, and it should be selected against by evolution...