Ever wonder what a sociobiologist actually does?
Chemists spend their day working for any enterprise involved with chemicals.
Biochemists might be employed by a company dealing with DNA. Efforts are
being made to paten pieces of DNA, so apparently it is turning out to have
commercial value. Psychologists-well? People are notoriously unpredictably,
and any psychologist able to convince the world he has some special
understanding of human motivation and behavior is sure to find employment.
But how does the average sociobiologist spend his day?
The sociobiologist's main enterprise is thinking up explanations for how
behavior developed as a result of "random mutation and natural selection".
This isn't always easy. For instance, take those strange individuals with a
tendency to sacrifice themselves for their fellow creatures.
Self-sacrificers sometimes perish because of the trait, and it isn't easy to
dream up an explanation for such tendency a becoming established in the
genome due to "random mutation and natural selection". The sociobologists'
explanation runs something like this:
This tendency to be concerned about others at the expense of one's own
welfare arose accidentally, with no particular purpose - as did everything
else according to the Darwinian model. One is more likely to sacrifice for
relatives than for strangers, and the relatives of a self-sacrificer might
carry some of his same genes, recessively perhaps. Therefore by sacrificing
himself the individual is actually ensuring that his genes survive at the
expense of more self-centered individuals.
Then there was the problem of explaining how homosexuality might arise by
"random mutation and natural selection". One solution I've seen
sociobiologists offer was that homosexuals "help with the children". Thus
families which included homosexuals survived at the expense of those families
lacking such "child care".
Eventually, sociobiologists run out of traits to explain by "random mutation
and natural selection". So what do they do the next day? The tax-payer
was the only institution that could be pursuaded to fund such activity, and
that was accomplished through colleges and universities. Sociobiologists
spend their time teaching others to become sociobiologists. They also engage
in the noble effort of fighting creationists and stealth creationists. (A
stealth creationist is anyone questioning "random mutationand natural
selection" while claiming not to be a creationist.) If sociobiologists are
provided salary large enough to support large families, it might be at the
expense of people who earn their living at less imaginative pursuits, some of
who might even be "stealth creationists". Perhaps in this way a tendency
to think up "random mutation and natural selection" stories might eventually
become a dominant trait in the human genome.
Bertvan
http://members.aol.com/bertvan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 06 2000 - 12:36:25 EDT