03/29/07
I just ordered this book:
The author, a sociologist I admire, seems to have moved into the Evolutionary Psychology Sweepstakes. That is, he's now doing what Ardrey re-started years ago: taking evolutionary conjectures and testing them against the (spotty?) evidence.
From the publisher's website:
Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species.
How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line? The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene.
The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.
According to a review by Jack Barbalet, Turner takes some controversial positions . . .
Turner challenges many of sociology's cherished conventions: that language is key to social formation, that culture underpins social processes, and that biology is unnecessary in sociological consideration. Against these is the forcefully presented contention that "every facet of human endeavour is emotional" (p. 119) and that "all emotions ultimately have a biological basis because they are built from body systems activating one or more primary emotions" (p. 126).
. . . positions that I am familiar with largely because I've read Herbert Spencer.
This is not just one of my gratuitous Spencer references. Turner has written one of the best books about Spencer, and also edited an edition of Spencer's magesterial Principles of Sociology. He is attempting, in part, to carry on Spencer's approach in sociology, focusing his attention on at least two very Spencerian themes: evolutionary processes and biological foundations. These two programs were very suspect through the bulk of the 20th century, in the sociological profession anyway.
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