You see, in The Ape and the Sushi Master, while completely demolishing the "human exceptionalist" view of culture, etologist Frns de Waal also makes some points about hierarchical structures being nearly inevitable, and not only among humans, which are quite shocking from an egalitarian leftist point of view [one of his best quotes is "put a bunch of left-leaning professors with an egalitarian ethos in the same room and watch a hierarchy develop: it's automatic"]. As you point out, in some cultures the "big man" position changes with context, and indeed there are two ways to look at our own culture. One is to say that it has only one hierarchy and that that comes from somehow, by institutionalising the natural hierarchy of status arising in one situation, extrapolating it to all realms of community life; the other would be to recognise that we, too, are active in multiple realms in our community life and that the status system in each of them is different.
I'm going to finish one more book before I do a diary on the final death of my leftist idealism over the past few years stemming from acceptance of evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology. I think that is all that is standing between your views and deanander's.
In my (newish) universe, the cultures humans are able to create can be used to either amplify or retard the base "desires" innate to our pesky brain stems. I have no other starting point now that I reject the "blank slate" concept.
you are the media you consume.
I always thought the "evolutionary psychology" crowd tended to undervalue and underreport symbiotic and cooperative, mimetic and reciprocal organisations in evolving biotic systems; at least when I dipped into the lit a while back it struck me as being over-enamoured of "Nature red in tooth and claw" and rather grimly determined to see all mammalian hardwiring as base and selfish (reading mammals as reptilian, you might say). But this doesn't jibe well with many decades of field observation of mammal social behaviours, in which kingroup selection is at least as important as individual survivalism, and deep reciprocal bonds are observed between individuals and between individual and pack or kingroup...
What are they up to lately, the evo psych gang? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Even with that I'm not very optimistic for a couple of reasons. The first can be summed up as "locking horns with nuclear weapons is not a stable survival strategy" and the second relates to the burden of consciousness and the very delicate (and thus difficult to achieve) balance needed to make and keep humans happy.
I'll rant further some other time.
However, as Sterelny says, these disagreements are not adequate to explain the antagonism and in Chapter 12 (p. 123) he gets down to the more philosophical ones. "Dawkins is an old-fashioned science worshiper" he states (and lines up with him), while "Gould's take on the status of science is much more ambiguous. ... In Gould's view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independent domains."
That might be enough to explain Gould's issues with sociobiology, which I will look into more this evening.
