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zdwyatt
Gender: Male
Age: 45
Location: Madison WI
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- #11
- Posted: 10/11/2015 17:32
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| Satie wrote: | | I don't think biology should be completely disregarded, but as an actual anthropologist, I find it very dangerous and also empirically, demonstrably false to fall into the trap of biological determinism and essentialism. |
As you've vehemently (and discourteously) disagreed with me, I will assume that I did not make my point well. As a fellow actual anthropologist, I am aware that biological determinism is not an accepted theory, and that is not the point I am making. Culture obviously plays a role in everything we do, including acts of mass violence. I simply want to suggest that for the given question--why are men more violent than women?--biology cannot be discounted. There is a curious temptation on the part of humans to wish to look exclusively to societal explanations for our behavior. I don't know what balance of biology and culture correctly explains this or any issue, but I do not accept that biology should be afforded 0% of the blame, so to speak.
So, to my original point (that men are big, strong, and sex-seeking), I was calling attention to the fact that humans exhibit sexual dimorphism and engage in polygamy. These are traits we see in other sexually selected mammals along with, relevant to our discussion, sex-biased violence. As much as we may want to put the blame for that violence solely/primarily on culture, the fact that we are similar in that regard to other mammals is telling.
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Satie
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- #12
- Posted: 10/11/2015 18:01
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| Quote: | | men are big, strong, and sex-seeking |
Even if this were absolutely correct (culture gets in the way of your neatly defined biological categories here, as much as you like to pretend that it's just some filter that obscures the "true" "natural" "primitive" man), then why do these biological impulses trump others and also cultural norms? Why doesn't the biological tendency towards cooperation in other mammal species as well as our own in early formulations not necessarily lead to primitivist communism in the present day? Could it perhaps be that these "natural" impulses are being selectively mentioned by evolutionary psychologists in the hunt for legitimacy and legitimization of current western societal formulations? Could it be that a history of culture might be a more relevant outlook for defining the underlying motivations and causes of problems in a species that hasn't had a major physical adaptation in 100,000 years and has primarily "evolved" by way of cultural and technological innovation? Could it be perhaps that the interpretations of the biological data undertaken by people in an atomized, competitive, sex-selling society might be colored by that context?
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