References
- I want to thank Chrisoula Andreou, Steve Downes, Leslie Francis, Peter Hare, Cynthia Stark, and (as always) Barry Smith for willingness to read early versions of this essay and help me shape the argument. Thanks also to those in attendance at a reading of a version of this paper at the Feminist Moral Philosophy Conference held at the University of Western Ontario. But thanks most of all to Samantha Brennan, who asked me to write this paper and illuminated the way. Without her urging, I should never have learned so much as I did.
- Wilfrid Sellars originated use of the terms “manifest image” and “scientific image” to contrast common sense conceptions with those of science.
- Antony , Louise . 1998 . “Human Nature and its Role in Feminist Theory,” . In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice Edited by: Kourany , J. Princeton : Princeton University Press . See 63–91, for discussion.
- Ibid
- Kitcher , Philip . 1985 . Vaulting Ambition Cambridge , MA : MIT Press . is a brilliant diagnosis of the work of assumptions in pop sociobiology in its first flush of success.
- To claim that some trait is an adaptation is not to claim that it is adaptive— or advantageous— for organisms that manifest it today. It is instead to claim that the reason for its continued recurrence lies in an advantage it conferred on individuals who bore it in the past.
- 1999 . Vaulting Ambition. Nowhere is this criticism better substantiated than in Kitcher, But see also the criticism of early sociobiological explanations offered by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature (New York: Ballantine Books,.
- Vaulting Ambition 135 – 36 . !
- Wilson , M. and Dayly , M. , eds. 1981 . The Woman that Never Evolved Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . I am referring now to research by the likes of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Chattel,” in J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994). An invaluable source of guidance on this research is Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives, D. Buss and N. Malamuth, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), for philosophical discussion of Darwin's uneasy relationship with the political left.
- Downes , S. 2001 . “Some Recent Developments in Evolutionary Approaches to the Study of Human Cognition and Behavior,” . Biology and Philosophy , 16 : 575 – 95 . See:
- 1985 . Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago : University of Chicago Press . See, for example, R. Boyd and R Richerson, and by L. Cavalli-Sforza and M. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) offers a modeling strategy (called “replicator dynamics”) that can be utilized to model both types of forces.
- This theme is developed fully in Antony, “Human Nature and its Role in Feminist Theory.”
- Wilson , E. O. , ed. 1997 . Sociobiology Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . This is true of the social insects to a very high degree. But it is equally true of primates. See 1975), cf. Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin-Cummings, 1985), and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature. Vis-à-vis primates, see Robert Boyd and Joan B. Silk, How Humans Evolved (New York: W. W. Norton, 205–12. “Almost all zoologists agree,” Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes, “that if mammals are going to live in social groups, by and large it is the daughters who remain near their mothers, among their matrilineal kin” (Mother Nature, 141). Hrdy supports the contention of Barry Keverne and collaborators, founded upon genetic neurological experiments with mouse brains, to the effect that prolonged association among female relatives was the adaptive environment for social brains and that larger brains, built for social interaction, are passed through the matriline.
- 1988 . Mother Nature The evidence for this is discussed at great length in Hrdy, and in Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: de Gruyter,.
- Vaulting Ambition Much more on this in Kitcher, ch. 2 and 3.
- Turillazzi , S. and West-Eberhard , M. J. , eds. 1996 . Natural History and Evolution of Paper Wasps 451 – 76 . Oxford : Oxford University Press . Mary Jane West-Eberhard has had a lot to do with increasing the awareness of phenotypic plasticity and the evolution of development, even in the insect castes. “Wasp societies as microcosms for the study of development and evolution,” in “Evolution in the light of developmental and cell biology, and vice versa,” Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 95 (1998): 8417–8419. For a look at the burgeoning literature on phenotypic plasticity, see Elizabeth Pennisi, “Research News: A Look at Maternal Guidance,” Science 273 (1996): 1334–36; and Mary Carol Rossiter, “Incidence and consequences of inherited environmental effects,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 27 (1996):
- Sex, Power, Conflict This comes out most clearly in David Buss, “Evolutionary Insights into Feminism and the Battle of the Sexes,” in !Buss and Malamuth, and B. Smuts, “Male Aggression Against Women: An Evolutionary Perspective,” both in Buss and Malamuth, eds., Sex, Power, Conflict.
- Wilson . On Human Nature Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . by contrast, has a less behavioristic picture of the agent, which he gets from thinking about studies in cognitive and social psychology. He introduces the notion of schema: a schema is a configuration within the brain, innate or learned, against which neural inputs are compared as they come in, with either a “matching” or “not matching” result. The schemas, he writes, contribute to making up a person's mental “set,” screening out or preferring certain features or details in favor of others, filling in missing sensory detail, heightening some decisions or alternatives to the disadvantage of others. And this way lies gestalt psychology. Most significantly of all, schema within the brain could serve as the physical basis of will. An organism can be guided in its actions by a feedback loop: a sequence of messages from the sense organs to the brain schemata back to the sense organs and on around again until the schemata “satisfy” themselves that the correct action has been completed. The mind could be a republic of such schemata, programmed to compete among themselves for control of the decision centers, individually waxing or waning in power in response to the relative urgency of the physiological needs of the body being signaled to the conscious mind through the brain stem and midbrain. Will might be the outcome of the competition, requiring the action of neither a “little man” nor any other external agent. There is no proof that the mind works in just this way. For the moment, suffice it to note that the basic mechanisms do exist; feedback loops, for example, control most of our automatic behavior. It is entirely possible that the will— the soul, if you wish—emerged through the evolution of physiological mechanisms. But, clearly, such mechanisms are far more complex than anything else on earth” [, 1978], 76–77).
- Ibid., 71.
- Like Wilson , Kitcher . Vaulting Ambition ch. 11) also uses the framework of freedom and determinism to treat the subject, but the framework is too restrictive, as I think Kitcher's discussion illustrates.
- Culture and the Evolutionary Process Seminal work on this topic was conducted by Boyd and Richerson, and also by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution.
- Mother Nature. Study of human evolution has also made us humans look less honorable even than we took ourselves to be, and certainly less honorable than some other members of the animal kingdom. One of our bigger crimes (among many) is that we humans have practiced routine infanticide, as deliberate and well-timed as you please, not only of our own offspring, but of offspring belonging to our rivals, so as to advance the cause of our own lineage— though we most assuredly did not put it to ourselves in these terms. Chimpanzees do better. The research on this subject was spearheaded by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; see her
- Some folk might prefer the term “socially constructed,” but this term has overtones of an unreality about it, that philosophers should view as distasteful, or at least controversial.
- 1996 . Sources ofNormativity 100 – 1 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .
- Ibid., 96.
- 1981 . The Expanding Circle 77 New York : Farar, Straus and Giroux .
- Ibid., 78.
- Whereas I am naming it ‘behaviorism,’ Kitcher names it ‘determinism.’ Determinism is normally reserved for a doctrine that refers to the past's fixation of the future. And I am observing this practice. But it amounts to the same thing: there is loss of privilege or power that the self enjoys.
- 1995 . Fundamentals of Defectology Vygotsky's A. R. Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist, Man with a Shattered World, and The Making of Mind; luminous works by Sacks include An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Vintage Books, and A Leg to Stand On (New York: Summit Books, 1984).
- An Anthropologist on Mars xvii.
- Baressi , J. and Moore , C. 1996 . “Intentional Relations and Social Understanding,” . Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 19 : 107 – 54 .
- Cairns , R. B. , Elder , G. H. Jr. and Costello , E. J. , eds. 1979 . Social Development: The Origins and Plasticity of Interchanges 78 – 96 . San Francisco : Freeman . This concern is raised in slightly different terms by R. B. Cairns, Press, and by Jean-Louis Gariepy, “The Question of Continuity and Change in Development,” in Developmental Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- 1982 . The Growth of Biological Thought Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press .
- How Humans Evolved A very dramatic illustration of this plasticity in the insect kingdom is the mateguarding behavior of soapberry bugs studied by Scott Carroll, see Boyd and Silk, 72ff.
- See especially research of R. B. Cairns and Jean-Louis Gariepy, and their collaborators.
- 1993 . Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences New York : Basic Books . This proposal is associated with the name of Howard Gardiner:
- Human Nature On 67.
- 2001 . Mindware 76 – 79 . New York : Oxford University Press . Cf. the debate over systematicity of language, as between computational and connectionist theories. For a summary, see Andy Clark
- Antony, “Human Nature and its Role in Feminist Theory,” 85.
- This idea is perhaps strongest in the writings of Kurt Baier, but it also comes out to some degree in Peter Singer and David Gauthier.
- Mother Nature Buss, “Evolutionary Insights into Feminism and the Battle of the Sexes,” 314. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is somewhat more skeptical. Her research on the role of parental investment in shaping the human species lead her to this, somewhat contrasting, conclusion: “We are a clever and highly innovative species, but not infinitely so. Our past matters, not just on the physical, but on the emotional front. Does this mean we have no conscious choice over how we lead our lives? Not at all. People exercise free will all the time— but only in those areas where Mother Nature cuts them some slack. A woman can choose which baby she will adopt, but falling in love with that child will not be automatic. This book will make clear why efforts to legislate a mother's love— by telling a mother with an unwanted pregnancy, for example, that she must carry it to term— are so often destined to end badly” 117).
- 1995 . Human Nature , 6 : 337 – 68 . This is intimated especially by the work of B. Smuts: “The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy,”: 1–32 and “Male Aggression Against Women.” But compare D. Krebs, “The Evolution of Moral Behaviors,” Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, C. Crawford and D. Krebs, eds. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998)
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