Human Sociobiology, Human Ethology

"Is it that we are doomed to our genetic fate with all our illusions of free will swept aside by the force of our heredity?"

• Human Nature: essential qualities shared by all humans
• Human Culture: non-genetic mode of inheritance between one generation and the next, cultural tradition of information occurs in many animals, trial and error, libraries, is culture (ie. the tendency of individuals to respond to cultural influences) rooted in biology - we are cultural beings because we have been shaped by natural selection to be so, e.g. language learning
• Sociobiology: studies the biological bases of the social behavior of animals, such as aggression, territoriality, social systems, and mate selection. Sociobiology seeks to extend the concept of natural selection to social systems and social behavior of animals, including humans. Sociobiologists believe that behavior patterns come into being, are modified, and even disappear through the process of natural selection. see E.O. Wilson, W.D. Hamilton
• Comparing behavior of humans and non-humans: genetic determinism, environmental determinism, are there "genes for" homosexuality, schizophrenia, etc. genes and environment interact, PKU, "freewill factor"
• Human Aggression
• Human Attractiveness: Darwin on Human Beauty: "It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body" - Darwin in "The Descent of Man" (1872), biological basis for incest avoidance
• Communication Displays
• natural selection is short-sighted and slow to respond: pleistocene ancestors were omnivorous hunter-gatherers, e.g. "sweet tooth", hominid migration and diversification - mitochondrial eve hypothesis, advantages of inventiveness, bipedalism, opposable thumb - tool use, evolution of brainsize

Reading Assignment

• Chapter 19: Aggression. pp. 371-373

Food for Thought

What is free will? Can we isolate ourselves from our primal urges and arrive at purely conscious decisions? Are there behavioral characteristics that makes us different from all other animals?

Links of Interest

• Evolutionary Psychology
• Darwinian Aesthetics
• BodyIcon
• Landscape Preference and Perception
• Institute for Urban Ethology