Precis of Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature

The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both dcfieieneies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene-culture coevolution. Vaulting Ambition thus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior

Morality and the Brain

Non UBCUnreviewedFacult

The significance of neuroscience for philosophy

The ground is shifting under the traditional approaches to problems in the philosophy of mind. Earlier doctrines concerning the independence of cognition from the brain now appear untenable. As neuroscience uncovers more about the organization and dynamics of the brain, it becomes increasingly evident that theories about our nature must be informed by neuroscientific data. Consistent with this progress, we may expect that philosophical problems about the mind will be productively addressed and perhaps radically transformed by a convergence of neuroscientific, psychological and computational researc

Neurophilosophy: the early years and new directions

Neurophilosophy embraces the hypothesis that what we call 1Cthe mind 1D is in fact a level of brain activity. A corollary of this hypothesis states that we can learn much about the reality of mental function by studying the brain at all levels of organization. Until fairly recently, many philosophers preferred to believe that important domains of mental function could never be addressed using the tools of empirical science. Nevertheless, co-evolutionary progress by psychology and the neurosciences on many topics, including consciousness, free will and the nature of knowledge, have meant that such convictions need to be updated. Some large-scale mind-brain problems have not yet been solved, and do require significant theoretical innovation. In particular the problem of how to understand the true nature of representations remains unsolved