Visiting Anthropologist Faults Sociobiology for Its Methods

Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, entered the sociobiology debate by terming the biological approach of sociobiology an "absolutely insufficient" approach to understanding human culture in two lectures Monday and Tuesday.

In Monday's lecture at William James Hall, Sahlins said "the central intellectual problem comes down to the autonomy of culture and of the study of culture."

"Sociobiology mounts an attack on the integrity of culture as a thing-in-itself, as a distinctive and symbolic human creation; it offers a biological determinism of human interactions," he said.

Such an approach, he said, "is completely unable to specify the cultural properties of human behavior or their variations from one human group to another."

In his second lecture, Sahlins examined what he described as the "transformations" of evolutionary theory that have been occasioned by "its ventures into social organization."

Sahlins said that popular ideas about culture and nature have been "conceived in the image of the market system."

Attributes of the capitalist market system have been used to describe the human social order, and vice versa, he explained.

Perpetual Movement

Sahlins said that "we seem unable to escape from this perpetual movement, back and forth between the culturalization of nature and the naturalization of culture."

"It might be said that Darwinism, at first appropriated to society as 'Social Darwinism,' has returned to biology as a genetic capitalism," he said.

"Sociobiology has especially contributed to the final stages of this theoretical development," he said.