On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:41:31 -0700, "glen e. p. ropella" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> > Sorry to break off a tangent; but, given that you're willing to discuss > the existence of cultural universals, I assume you have a relatively > solid method of distinguishing culture from biology. Is that right? If > so, what is that method? No, there is no definitive method, set of criteria, precision instrument that allows unambiguous differentiation and classification of an observed phenomenon into "biological" or "cultural" - unless you happen to be a socio-biologist and everything is biological. A recent example: religion has long been held to be "purely cultural" but recent advances in neuro-theology suggest that some of the base phenomenon - seeing a white light at then end of a tunnel in a near death situation, losing the distinction between self and the world, believing in an other - can be induced by changing the state of the biological (neurological) organism. The boundary between biology and culture is always subject to change and an observable categorized in one area might be re-categorized into the other or recognized as a consequence of interaction between the two. > My current strawman would be the supposed cultural/biological universal > that "People don't eat their children." It's not a biological universal > because I've heard that some dogs eat their pups and I assume other > animals will eat their offspring. that is why the zoo saving some shark babies was in the news recently - it is rare because sharks eat their young >Yet I've never heard of any society > where humans eat their offspring. Depends on how ritualized and total you want to get. In cultures that practiced human sacrifice accompanied by ritual cannibalism - the mom and dad of the sacrificed individual partake in the ritual along with everyone else. >Or perhaps there's clear > biological evidence of an immediate health consequence of eating one's > children? Not that I am aware of - other than the general consequences of cannibalism in general - ease of transmission of disease, especially the equivalent of mad-cow type diseases. However, people have tried to make a case for the "universal" taboo against incest on biological grounds. Problem is - as any livestock breeder knows - incest leads to improvements far more often than defects. If not, that makes it seem like a cultural universal rather > than a biological one. > > I'd also like to avoid equivocation on the word "universal". One > _might_ say there are no cultural universals because there simply are no > universals, at all, Universal is not being used in any special way except a sense of wholeness in the behavior pattern you are calling a cultural universal. For instance, all cultures, of which we are aware, believe in the supernatural but the form of that belief, the ways it is expressed vary from culture to culture. Or, all cultures have an incest taboo - but the definition of incest is not constant across cultures: parent-child is OK in some not others, brother-sister, child-to-moiety, child to mythical but not biological clan, all are OK/not OK somewhere. If you were to find a pattern of behavior that was expressed in all cultures, most anthropologists would expect a biological "cause" (quotes because of another long running FRIAM debate about causality). > - -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com > We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact > that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery. -- H. G. Wells > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org > > iD8DBQFH1u57pVJZMHoGoM8RAtbOAKCJhnbUTNe/HW7y1qd2SBblFumNmgCeK6lG > mwlvNXZtJNZCDQVvtajmCq4= > =yfnP > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
