Re: Science and Religion

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:
On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:22:32 GMT, Rita <nitany_98@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 19:22:50 GMT, Rumpelstiltskin
<PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 17:20:19 GMT, Rita <nitany_98@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:32:43 GMT, Rumpelstiltskin

<snip>


The biological father was still "the provider", so he's
fulfilling a role. The mother's brother does have a 1/4 stake in the child's genetic makeup, but the father
has either a 1/2 or a zero stake depending on whether
or not he's the biological father.

If you mean by provider the provider of the sperm, that
is correct. If you mean the provider in the sense of taking
responsibility for the rearing of the offspring, not the case
in many matrilineal socieities that have been studied.



I did assume that you meant that the father took financial responsibility. I probably assumed that from having heard of emotionally distant fathers back in the
19th century. Absolutely missing fathers we still have
plenty of today, of course, especially in the ghettos.
In many animals, of course, the male takes little responsibility for rearing, but just tries to spread his
sperm around as far as he can. And then there are
a few opposite situations, for example Seahorses.

Rumpel, I'm talking about the countless small societies
that often are lumped as "primitive" cultures -- in Africa,
Asia, our own Native Americans, South America, and
the South Pacific .Within these cultures the notion of
financial responsibility simply did not exist. The tribe,
the clan and other such entities were the units of social
and economic organization. Many of these groups hunted
and/or fished together or grew crops together and shared
it among all. Kinship served more as a means of arranging
marriages and taking on other kinds of duties to close kin
that did not really have an economic base. Various ritual
duties and duties to dead ancestors, etc.



Yes, when I said "financial responsibility" I was thinking
of the society you and I live in, where financial responsibility
is the main indicator of support. Of course, in societies that don't use money, people spend more time taking care of their dependents in a different way than moneymaking.
Not that moneymakers don't give support in other ways, just
that they can't do as much because they have to spend a lot of time moneymaking which tends to be an activity done
more or less in isolation from family in our times.

I'm not too keen on arranged marriage. Maybe it's
natural for humans, but maybe it's not.


I am cutting a wide swath here, but in general with the agrarian "revolution" and farming by individuals the kinship
systems changed. Certainly with the advent of private
property.

The concept of the "emotionally distant father"
is a very recent notion. For centuries and centuries people
were afforded support by the wider kinship group, tribe or
clan or whatever.

It is all this variation through human history that leads me to
be highly suspicious of any theory that applies today's concept
of "the family:" Remember Hillary being scorned for saying
something like "it takes a village to raise a child?" Think of that
concept as existing in earlier "primitive" societies.

Boys were separated out and went off with the
men in the tribe, clan for certain rituals at the end of puberty and
learned their obligations as well as skills needed for hunting and
warfare.

Now Dawkins and/or Dennett may take all this into consideration
when positing the adaptive benefits of certain practices throughout
human history. But you can't really look at society today and go
backwards and then argue from today's practices as having
universal significance.



I'm sure Dawkins has never gotten into that, and I don't recall Dennett ever having done so.




<snip>


Anthropolgists study various cultures first to record what goes on
in great detail. From that, some theorize as to the why"s.
Once an anthropoligist buys into some theory of cultue it can
affect what parts of the culture are paid attention to and which
are downplayed. As with much else, "facts" often are sought to
support a theory.



I was taken by surprise when you and Islander got into
"culture". I was thinking on the much less complicated
plane of basic forces. I certainly don't deny the vital
importance of "anthropology and sociology" (as you grouped them together in a different thread). I just don't feel at all sure of myself when talking in that arena,
doubtless especially because of my lack of social skill
in comparison with many other people.


There is nothing "basic" about the various ways humans have
organized their societies.




No, but there is something basic about genes, and about
the fact of memes if not necessarily about the more bizarre roads that memes walk down.

I haven't participated in this thread since I know very little about sociology and anthropology. Dennett gets into sociology in Chapter 7 as he develops the concept of increasingly complex memes to explain and justify the benefit of societal structures. In the process, he criticizes the functionalist school of sociology initiated by Emil Durkheim. Do either of you know anything about this? I'm having difficulty understanding the difference between treating societies as living things that maintain their health and vigor by "adjustments to their organs" and Dennett's memetic explanation which treats these structures as agents (intentional systems in his definition) that adjust to their environment. Both are abstract models of society, the relationship of the parts to the whole, and how societal organizations change. The only distinction that I can see is Dennett's insistence on the now familiar theme of cui bono as the explanation for how and why societies change.

Durkheim was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in keeping the society healthy and balanced—a position that would come to be known as functionalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Durkheim

See also Durkheim's whole vs parts argument: The obligatory, coercive nature of social facts (states of the collective mind), he argued, is repeatedly manifested in individuals because it is imposed upon them, particularly through education; the parts are thus derived from the whole rather than the whole from the parts. http://www.relst.uiuc.edu/durkheim/Summaries/rules.html

Dennett argues, "The fitness of the group must trump the individual fitness of its members and if groups are going to be the ultimate beneficiaries, groups must be the competitors."

I see no inconsistency in the two models. Both might be accurate. What am I missing?




Earler pre-industrial societies often are
called primitive, which is a misnomer because there was nothing
simple about them. They had developed elaborate rules governing
just about everything and today's family structure and rules
surrounding it are very simple in comparison to the complexity.

Actually the course I took in kinship -- a requirement -- was about
the hardest of any for me as it was so damn technical and we
had to diagram the various relationships in each of several kinship
systems we studied. Yet you simply cannot study one of these
societies in any meaningful way without this knowledge of how
kinship rules operate to confer and extract various rights and
obligations and indeed, the nuts and bolts of daily life in the group.

Sociology and anthropology have nothing to do with one's social
skills or lack of same.




It seems to me that people with good social skills would be more interested in and better at sociology than I am. I don't
understand a lot of what people do. I don't think they understand it either, but since I don't understand what they
do I guess I can't really claim to know whether they understand what they do or not.

My "Ban Republican Marriage" sign will stay up for a few days, anyhow. It's nice to find something about this
marriage brouhaha that makes some sense.




Individuals within any cultural
configuration, of course, vary in their grasp of and/or desire or
ability to participate in the social configuration they are a part
of.


"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves" -- Wm. Pitt the Younger
.

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