Stoic News

By Dave Kelly

Monday, December 15, 2003

Argument on spandrels/pendentives- Evolutionary Psychology.

"Alcock persuasively argues that one animating motive in Gould=s campaign against adaptation is his commitment to Marxist ideology. From a Marxist perspective, to affirm adaptive design is to acknowledge that the existing structure of social and political power is constrained in some way by the nature of things, and to acknowledge that much is to come too close, the Marxist feels, to justifying the existing social order. Marxist utopianism requires that human beings not be constrained by evolved motives; “human nature@ is to consist in little more than a capacity for culture that entails infinite flexibility. It is certainly the case that from the very beginning Gould=s ideological career has been punctuated repeatedly by attacks on human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and it seems more than probable that this social and political animus has helped to shape his formulations of general evolutionary theory, even when that theory directly concerns only insects, snails, pandas, flamingoes, horses, dinosaurs, and Cambrian phyla, not human beings."

See Modern Darwinism and the Pseudo-revolutions of Stephen Jay Gould also by Joseph Carroll [Membership in Yahoo Group: Evolutionary Psychology is required].

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