Download or read book Behaviour Development and Evolution written by Patrick Bateson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of parents in shaping the characters of their children, the causes of violence and crime, and the roots of personal unhappiness are central to humanity. Like so many fundamental questions about human existence, these issues all relate to behavioural development. In this lucid and accessible book, eminent biologist Professor Sir Patrick Bateson suggests that the nature/nurture dichotomy we often use to think about questions of development in both humans and animals is misleading. Instead, he argues that we should pay attention to whole systems, rather than to simple causes, when trying to understand the complexity of development. In his wide-ranging approach Bateson discusses why so much behaviour appears to be well-designed. He explores issues such as ‘imprinting’ and its importance to the attachment of offspring to their parents; the mutual benefits that characterise communication between parent and offspring; the importance of play in learning how to choose and control the optimal conditions in which to thrive; and the vital function of adaptability in the interplay between development and evolution. Bateson disputes the idea that a simple link can be found between genetics and behaviour. What an individual human or animal does in its life depends on the reciprocal nature of its relationships with the world about it. This knowledge also points to ways in which an animal’s own behaviour can provide the variation that influences the subsequent course of evolution. This has relevance not only for our scientific approaches to the systems of development and evolution, but also on how humans change institutional rules that have become dysfunctional, or design public health measures when mismatches occur between themselves and their environments. It affects how we think about ourselves and our own capacity for change.

Download or read book Incest and Inbreeding Avoidance written by Gregory C. Leavitt and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Darwinian social science through the substantive topic of incest and inbreeding avoidance, a behavior forward by human sociobiology as the best example of sociocultural behavior naturally selected in humans. I first encountered Gregory Leavitt's work while I was myself researching incest avoidance and the incest taboo. Like many anthropologists with limited expertise in genetics, I had assumed that inbreeding was securely established as a source of genetic depression. To be sure, anthropologists have commonly identified other factors as also having causative influences on incest avoidance and taboos, but I had presumed that the deleterious consequences of inbreeding had to be one - if not the ultimate - causative factor in a full accounting of the phenomenon. At around this time, though, Leavitt published in the American Anthropologist a cogent challenge to the conventional wisdom, and it seemed to throw everything back up into the air. Accordingly, in my own writings, it seemed best to side-step the issue, pending further research by those qualified to conduct it. examination of the inbreeding theory. From lacunae in the special and general theory of evolution, through the ethological evidence commonly used to support the existence of inbreeding avoidance in sexual species, to the oft-cited kibbutzim data, he mounts what is surely the most comprehensive critique that has ever been addressed to a theory of incest. Marshaling a range of disparate, sometimes neglected sources scattered through several disciplines, he trains an impressive level of fire on what many have accepted as the standard explanation for the incest taboo. Leavitt's treatment of the inbreeding and incest issue is neatly folded into a second, more encompassing focus: a rigorous critique of sociobiology. Beginning with E. O. Wilson, sociobiologists have commonly claimed the genetic depression explanation for incest avoidance as one of the jewels - if not the canonical gem - in the sociobiological crown. Leavitt uses his critique of the inbreeding argument as a point of departure for exploring broader inadequacies and weaknesses in sociobiology. In a theoretical field that prides itself for its scientific approach to social behavior, Leavitt finds a disturbing level of 'unscientific' sloppiness and an unsettling absence of 'scientific' skepticism. Although not all Darwinian theorists of social behavior deserve to be tarred with the same brush, Leavitt uncovers more than enough cause for dismay. To begin with, he finds that parts of the evidence used to support the inbreeding hypothesis do not warrant the weight placed on it; other aspects have been tendentiously (and sometimes incorrectly) interpreted; and yet other elements can be accounted for with more parsimonious explanations. Furthermore, although the cornerstone of sociobiological theorizing is the idea that genes or gene complexes generate complex, flexible behaviors, Leavitt points out that there is as yet no unequivocal evidence to support this proposition. of unequivocal evidence for the existence of energy strings and multiple dimensions invalidate string theory. The difference is that string theorists explicitly designate strings and multiple dimensions as hypothetical; they regard their existence skeptically; and they make constant efforts to test these basic propositions by deducing empirical consequences, by analyzing them for theoretical inconsistencies, and by examining how they conform with other, better substantiated theory. By contrast, Leavitt argues, sociobiology routinely hypothesizes the existence of full-blown, generative gene complexes behind incest avoidance, cannibalism, sacrifice, war, and other complex behaviors, yet it rarely tries to demonstrate or test the hypothesis. Too little consideration is given even to detailing possible intermediate steps through which such complexes might have evolved over time. A plausible explanation of how and why an inbreeding species might make the transition to outbreeding practice, for example, would go a long way to shoring up the inbreeding theory and might open up ways of testing it. exercise is far from easy, but the difficulties can hardly be more thorny than those encountered by string theorists. Leavitt even musters a critique of Darwinian theory, a risky exercise given the difficulties of mastering such a specialized and sprawling field and the defensiveness that biologists no doubt feel in the face of the ill-informed attacks and sometimes deceptive tactics of creationists and proponents of intelligent design. Some of the critics he cites - Gould, Lewontin, and most especially Behe - have provoked controversy, and only evolutionists can judge the ultimate value of Leavitt's critique. For a social science audience, though, these chapters are useful reminders that evolutionary theory has yet to be nailed down in all of its particulars, and they are valuable summaries of the issues that are and are not still in dispute. The real value of this book, though, lies in what it is not and in what it offers to sociobiology as well as to its critics. There can be no doubt where Leavitt stands on the issues, but what makes this book so exceptional is the absence of shrillness and polemic. racism with which sociobiologists are usually tarred. Nor is there resort to the tired claim that sociobiologists are uncritically externalizing western cultural assumptions (in contrast to the critics who make this charge, from whose eyes the cultural scales supposedly have fallen). Instead, Leavitt has done what is too rarely ventured, both within and beyond sociobiology. Rather than lobbing polemics, he has endeavored to engage sociobiology on its own terrain, to apply the critical eye that one wishes sociobiologists themselves had more rigorously applied. He mounts a strong and exhaustive case for the prosecution in a hearing that is long overdue, and social science and sociobiology will be well served if sociobiologists seize the opportunity and organize a detailed case for the defense. Where Leavitt has identified lacunae in the paradigm, these need to be addressed. Where the data have been misrepresented or over-interpreted, either further observational work needs to be done or the data have to be jettisoned from the debate. weakness needs to be acknowledged rather than sidelined or ignored. And - to admit a criticism that is inevitable, whether it is true or not - if Leavitt has misconstrued the arguments or the data, the error needs to be explained in detail, not dismissed offhand. In fine, Leavitt's work offers a rare opportunity for us to advance social science in a manner commensurate with that of the physical sciences. There are two broader matters in social science to which Leavitt's inquiry also makes valuable contributions. The first concerns persistent attempts to apply Darwinian theory not to genes, as sociobiologists do, but to memes - culture. These endeavors have permeated social sciences as far apart as cognitive science and political science, but it is perhaps most prevalent in anthropology. In cultural anthropology, the most familiar manifestation is Marvin Harris's 'cultural materialism'. For many years, Harris stipulated that cultural complexes were adaptive and that they had evolved through some kind of Darwinian process. truly scientific archaeology it is now ascendant in archaeology in the form of Robert Dunnell's 'selectionism'. Here, as in sociobiology, Darwinian theory is applied to the understanding of complex human behaviors, but the evolutionary vehicle is the action of natural selection on cultural traits, which are explicitly treated as analogs of genes. If the underpinnings of sociobiology are as tenuous as Leavitt argues, how much more tendentious must be those of selectionism? To the problems Leavitt identifies in sociobiological theorizing must be added the further difficulties associated with treating cultural traits as gene equivalents - not least the problem of identifying the mechanism that fixes 'successful' cultural traits in a population in the way that the physico-chemical properties of the universe fix 'successful' genes in a population.

Download or read book Inbreeding Incest and the Incest Taboo written by Arthur P. Wolf and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is incest widely prohibited? Why does the scope of the prohibition vary from society to society? Why does incest occur despite the prohibition? What are the consequences? To reexamine these questions, this book brings together contributions from the fields of genetics, behavioral biology, primatology, biological and social anthropology, philosophy, and psychiatry.

Download or read book Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos written by Arthur P. Wolf and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do most people never have sex with close relatives? And why do they disapprove of other people doing so? Incest Avoidance and Incest Taboos investigates our human inclination to avoid incest and the powerful taboo against incest found in all societies. Both subjects stir strong feelings and vigorous arguments within and beyond academic circles. With great clarity, Wolf lays out the modern assumptions about both, concluding that all previous approaches lack precision and balance on insecure evidence. Researchers he calls "constitutionalists" explain human incest avoidance by biologically-based natural aversion, but fail to explain incest taboos as cultural universals. By contrast, "conventionalists" ignore the evolutionary roots of avoidance and assume that incest avoidant behavior is guided solely by cultural taboos. Both theories are incomplete. Wolf tests his own theory with three natural experiments: bint'amm (cousin) marriage in Morocco, the rarity of marriage within Israeli kibbutz peer groups, and "minor marriages" (in which baby girls were raised by their future mother-in-law to marry an adoptive "brother") in China and Taiwan. These cross-cultural comparisons complete his original and intellectually rich theory of incest, one that marries biology and culture by accounting for both avoidance and taboo.

Download or read book The Natural History of Inbreeding and Outbreeding written by Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-08-15 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inbreeding, the mating of close kin, and outbreeding, the mating of distant relatives or unrelated organisms, have long been important subjects to evolutionary biologists. Inbreeding reduces genetic diversity in a population, increasing the likelihood that genetic defects will become widespread and deprive a population of the diversity it may need to cope with its environment. Most plants and animals have evolved behavioral and morphological mechanisms to avoid inbreeding. However, today many endangered species exist only in small, very isolated populations where inbreeding is unavoidable, so it has become a concern for conservationists. In this volume, twenty-six experts in evolution, behavior, and genetics examine the causes and consequences of inbreeding. The authors ask whether inbreeding is as problematic as biologists have thought, under what ecological conditions inbreeding occurs, and whether organisms that inbreed have mechanisms to dampen the anticipated problems of reduced genetic variation. The studies, including theoretical and empirical work on wild and captive populations, demonstrate that many plants and animals inbreed to a greater extent than biologists have thought, with variable effects on individual fitness. Graduate students and researchers in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, ecology, and conservation biology will welcome this wide-ranging collection.

Download or read book Consanguinity in Context written by Alan H. Bittles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential guide to this major contemporary issue, Consanguinity in Context is a uniquely comprehensive account of intra-familial marriage. Detailed information on past and present religious, social and legal practices and prohibitions is presented as a backdrop to the preferences and beliefs of the 1100+ million people in consanguineous unions. Chapters on population genetics, and the role of consanguinity in reproductive behaviour and genetic variation, set the scene for critical analyses of the influence of consanguinity on health in the early years of life. The discussion on consanguinity and disorders of adulthood is the first review of its kind and is particularly relevant given the ageing of the global population. Incest is treated as a separate issue, with historical and present-day examples examined. The final three chapters deal in detail with practical issues, including genetic testing, education and counselling, national and international legislation and imperatives, and the future of consanguineous marriage worldwide.

Download or read book The Natural History of Inbreeding and Outbreeding written by Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-08-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inbreeding, the mating of close kin, and outbreeding, the mating of distant relatives or unrelated organisms, have long been important subjects to evolutionary biologists. Inbreeding reduces genetic diversity in a population, increasing the likelihood that genetic defects will become widespread and deprive a population of the diversity it may need to cope with its environment. Most plants and animals have evolved behavioral and morphological mechanisms to avoid inbreeding. However, today many endangered species exist only in small, very isolated populations where inbreeding is unavoidable, so it has become a concern for conservationists. In this volume, twenty-six experts in evolution, behavior, and genetics examine the causes and consequences of inbreeding. The authors ask whether inbreeding is as problematic as biologists have thought, under what ecological conditions inbreeding occurs, and whether organisms that inbreed have mechanisms to dampen the anticipated problems of reduced genetic variation. The studies, including theoretical and empirical work on wild and captive populations, demonstrate that many plants and animals inbreed to a greater extent than biologists have thought, with variable effects on individual fitness. Graduate students and researchers in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, ecology, and conservation biology will welcome this wide-ranging collection.

Download or read book Pedophilia written by Jay R. Feierman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reason for this Volume If we were to judge the seriousness of a psychosocial problem by the attention that the popular media give to it, we would have to conclude that the modem world is in the midst of an epidemic of pedophilic child sexual abuse. One can scarcely go more than a few weeks in any large metropolitan area without reading about one of the community's upstanding citizens discovered to have been sexually involved with children or adolescents. The attention that the popular media give this topic is paralleled by the attention that it receives in the social sciences, where literally dozens of books and more than a thousand articles have been published on it in the past few years. In fact, "child sexual abuse," along with "co-dependency" and "dysfunctional family," have become the avant-garde psychological cliches of the decade. However, most of the lay and professional literature, although voluminous, reflect a narrow anthropo-, ethno-, and chronocentrism that precludes any real understanding of the topic with anything more than the preconceptions of our times.

Download or read book Coevolution written by William H. Durham and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin's "On the Origins of Species" had two principal goals: to show that species had not been separately created and to show that natural selection had been the main force behind their proliferation and descent from common ancestors. In "Coevolution," the author proposes a powerful new theory of cultural evolution--that is, of the descent with modification of the shared conceptual systems we call "cultures"--that is parallel in many ways to Darwin's theory of organic evolution. The author suggests that a process of cultural selection, or preservation by preference, driven chiefly by choice or imposition depending on the circumstances, has been the main but not exclusive force of cultural change. He shows that this process gives rise to five major patterns or "modes" in which cultural change is at odds with genetic change. Each of the five modes is discussed in some detail and its existence confirmed through one or more case studies chosen for their heuristic value, the robustness of their data, and their broader implications. But "Coevolution" predicts not simply the existence of the five modes of gene-culture relations; it also predicts their relative importance in the ongoing dynamics of cultural change in particular cases. The case studies themselves are lucid and innovative reexaminations of an array of oft-pondered anthropological topics--plural marriage, sickle-cell anemia, basic color terms, adult lactose absorption, incest taboos, headhunting, and cannibalism. In a general case, the author's goal is to demonstrate that an evolutionary analysis of both genes and culture has much to contribute to our understanding of human diversity, particularly behavioral diversity, and thus to the resolution of age-old questions about nature and nurture, genes and culture.

Download or read book The History of Human Marriage written by Edward Westermarck and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mapping the Cognitive Architecture of Systems for Kin Detection and Inbreeding Avoidance written by Debra Lieberman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos written by Arthur Wolf and published by Stanford Briefs. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do most people never have sex with close relatives? And why do they disapprove of other people doing so? Incest Avoidance and Incest Taboos investigates our human inclination to avoid incest and the powerful taboo against incest found in all societies. Both subjects stir strong feelings and vigorous arguments within and beyond academic circles. With great clarity, Wolf lays out the modern assumptions about both, concluding that all previous approaches lack precision and balance on insecure evidence. Researchers he calls "constitutionalists" explain human incest avoidance by biologically-based natural aversion, but fail to explain incest taboos as cultural universals. By contrast, "conventionalists" ignore the evolutionary roots of avoidance and assume that incest avoidant behavior is guided solely by cultural taboos. Both theories are incomplete. Wolf tests his own theory with three natural experiments: bint'amm (cousin) marriage in Morocco, the rarity of marriage within Israeli kibbutz peer groups, and "minor marriages" (in which baby girls were raised by their future mother-in-law to marry an adoptive "brother") in China and Taiwan. These cross-cultural comparisons complete his original and intellectually rich theory of incest, one that marries biology and culture by accounting for both avoidance and taboo.

Download or read book Sex Color and Mate Choice in Guppies written by Anne Houde and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1997-08-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the sexual behavior of guppies and examines how mate choice by females leads to the evolution of the conspicuous colors and the courtship displays for which guppies are widely recognized. The author shows that female guppies prefer males with bright color patterns, especially those with orange spots, and that the mating preferences of females lead to sexual selection on both color patterns and courtship displays of males.

Download or read book Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association written by Arthur P. Wolf and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1891, the anthropologist Edward Westermarck proposed that early childhood association inhibits sexual attraction and that this aversion was manifested in custom and law as the basis of the universal incest taboo. Then, in 1910, in the essays later published as Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud challenged the "Westermarck hypothesis" on the ground that "the earliest sexual excitations of youthful human beings are invariably of an incestuous character." The incest taboo only existed, Freud argued, because of this natural propensity. Freud's challenge carried the day and became the standard view throughout the social and biological sciences. Consequently, the question was: why do all societies repress this natural inclination? Biologists argued that the incest taboo protected us from dangers of inbreeding; sociologists argued that it was necessary to prevent sexual rivalry that would destroy the family; and anthropologists saw the real purpose of the taboo as forcing families to exchange women in marriage. The book uses a wide range of research - from studies of nonhuman primates to reports of incestuous child abuse - from African divorce practices to animal behavior - to demonstrate that Westermarck was right and Freud wrong. It shows that there is a critical period in human development - approximately the first thirty months of life - during which association permanently inhibits sexual attraction. It concludes that the incest taboo is unnecessary and cannot be explained in functional terms, and that encouraging early association between father and daughter is probably the best way of preventing sexual abuse.

Download or read book What s Left of Human Nature written by Maria Kronfeldner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

Download or read book Incest and the Medieval Imagination written by Elizabeth Archibald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-05-24 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incest is a remarkably frequent theme in medieval literature; it occurs in a wide range of genres, including romances, saints's lives, and exempla. Historically, the Church in the later Middle Ages was very concerned about breaches of the complex laws against incest, which was defined very broadly at the time to cover family relationships outside the nuclear family and also spiritual relationships through baptism. Medieval writers accepted that incestuous desire was a widespread phenomenon among women as well as men. They are surprisingly open about incest, though of course they disapprove of it; in many exemplary stories incest is identified with original sin, but the moral emphasizes the importance of contrition and the availability of grace even to such heinous sinners. This study begins with a brief account of the development of medieval incest laws, and the extent to which they were obeyed. Next comes a survey of classical incest stories and their legacy; many were retold in the Middle Ages, but they were frequently adapted to the purposes of Christian moralizers. In the three chapters that follow, homegrown medieval incest stories are grouped by relationship: mother-son (focusing on the Gregorius legend), father-daughter (focusing on La Manekine and its analogues), and sibling (focusing on the Arthurian legend). The final chapter considers the very common medieval trope of the Virgin Mary as mother, daughter, sister and bride of Christ, the one exception to the incest taboo. In western society today, incest has recently been recognized as a serious social problem, and has also become a frequent theme in both fiction and non-fiction, just as it was in the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary study is the first broad survey of medieval incest stories in Latin and the vernaculars (mainly French, English and German). It situates the incest theme in both literary and cultural contexts, and offers many thought-provoking comparisons and contrasts to our own society in terms of gender relations, the power of patriarchy, the role of religious institutions in regulating morality, and the relationship between life and literature.

Download or read book Cooperative Breeding in Vertebrates written by Walter D. Koenig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together long-term studies of cooperation in vertebrates that challenge our understanding of the evolution of social behavior.