Forms and processes of cohesion:Science--论文代写范文精选

人不需要相信有一个外部的现实主义,物质世界有某种内在的秩序,这样现实主义概念的科学理论渐近真理，我们觉得即使所有可能的科学问题已经回答了,生活依然没有任何改动。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Science
Both religion and patterns of sexual behaviour as cohesive forces have been, and increasingly will be, radically challenged by science, both as a mode of thought and as the source of technologies which change the environment in which societies operate, both at the societal level and at the level of the individual human being. An extreme view no doubt is that science and religion are totally incompatible and thus as science progresses, religion as an important cohesive force will simply disappear, with important consequences for many existing societies. This is a prospect which has long been commented on. So Amiel (1922), the 19th century Swiss author, said:
"La science est implacable. Supprimera-t-elle toutes les religions?"

What then is a science that it should have this potential destructive force? T.H. Huxley (1869), Darwin's bulldog, described science as that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call Science but, less rhetorically, science can be seen the brain's demand for consistency, for relatedness in phenomena. The history of science differs from the history of other cultural institutions in that it produces a progressively more adequate understanding of the natural world. Lorenz (1966, 249) characterised scientific truth as

"wrested from a reality existing outside and independent of the human brain. Since this reality is the same for all human beings, all correct, scientific results will always agree with each other ... [where political doctrine is allowed to influence] these particular results will simply fail on practical application." ,p
One does not need to be a realist to believe that there is an external, material world that has some kind of inherent order -- one can believe in such things but also maintain that the knowledge of that order is always partial and incomplete, such that realist notions of scientific theories asymptotically approaching Truth can be seen as radically misguided.

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched" (Wittgenstein 1922).
Many have seen the need for science is some way to replace religion as a positive force in society. So John Morley (Huxley, 1926, 235)said that
"the next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity."
It can be argued (notably for example by Einstein, 1938,;1950) that religion and science are not necessarily incompatible.

"Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science? [Cosmic religious feeling] The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. On the relation of religion and science."

Einstein offered his views as a physicist. Others with closer contact with biological thought have also taken positions. So;
"The modern scientific view of the universe is incomparably more wonderful than any competing view, at any time in history, in any culture or religion, anywhere." (Dawkins, 1994).
"Unless at least half my colleagues are dunces, there can be no conflict between science and religion." (Gould 1996)

Perhaps some of what von Uexkull wrote as a zoologist about the umwelt of the woodlouse is relevant. Each creature has the instruments of perception and analysis necessary for the life it actually leads. The limits of the world it perceives are set by the instruments available to it. We humans, like other creatures, have a limited array of senses (not, for example, including some senses available to bats, electric eels, dogs, fish, bees). The world we can perceive and claim to understand is delimited by the senses we have and the brain resources available to make use of them. Science provides a static sketch of reality as we are able to perceive it (not capable of course of dealing with the totality of reality in space and time). With different senses and different brains we would perceive a different world and one might argue that there is room for religious speculation and for religion as a construct to deal with total reality in space and time (including such minor questions as wonder that we exist or anything exists or that matter behaves as we think it does). Before science, there must be consciousness and we perceive the natural world only through consciousness; at the least, as already noted, religion might serve as a catalyst for the development of human thought. What makes science unsuitable as a religion? To a hungry people, science offers only stone; it cannot deal with problems of freedom and indetermination, free will as a practical problem. Reason (science) has no answer, as yet, to the question (central to religion) "What should I do? ". However, the division between Is and Ought may not be ultimate; we begin to see the possibility of the transformation of moral ideas into facts that can be assimilated to scientific phenomena since they are linked to evolution and represent new elements comparable to anatomical and physiological characters.

11.6 Sociology

A necessary project is how best to inject biology into sociology, or into the theory of the society. A sociobiology of societies has to be founded on a sociobiology of the individuals forming the society, where the validity of the insights of evolutionary psychology is for consideration, and on a biologizing of sociology, the interpretation of social forms in the light of evolutionary thinking. If sociology as at present organised presents a satisfactory account of the functioning of society and the forces which hold a society together, then no new sociobiological approach would be needed. The contention here is that sociology is inadequate insofar as it focuses only on interplay of groups, power structures and learned behaviour without introducing biological or evolutionary considerations.

There are varying accounts of the nature of sociology. There is no single authoritative statement but the following conflation of views from many different sources may be generally acceptable:


The basic insight of sociology is that human behaviour is shaped by the groups to which people belong and by the social interaction that takes place within those groups. The sociological perspective enables us to see society as a temporary social product, created by human beings and capable of being changed by them as well. Most behavioural and social sciences assume human sociality is a by-product of individualism. Briefly put, individuals are fundamentally self-interested; "social" refers to the exchange of costs and benefits in the pursuit of outcomes of purely personal value, and "society" is the aggregate of individuals in pursuit of their respective self-interests.

Evolutionary Psychology
Sociological approaches to the issues associated with societal cohesion are unsatisfying and confused. Whilst nominally sociology is individualist, in practice it concerns itself with the phenomena of group interactions considered simply as arbitrary and changeable aspects of socially-learned behaviours. Adhesion to a group is a consequence of the inadequacy of the isolated individual; the isolated individual (in an aggregation of individuals) cannot survive, must belong, feel he belongs and be seen as belonging to some group. But this goes further. The isolated group may not survive but must belong to some larger group of groups. The need at every level is for protection and contact and one should look for foundations of group feeling in empathy, love, emotions, often pre-human. Individuality can be considered both externally, that is the recognition of one individual by another and internally, the construction of the self, which we can discuss for human beings (I propose that it derives from language) but which we can only guess at for other creatures. 

The forces forming groups exist in the minds of the individuals; underlying these forces is the relation of individual identity and group identity. The forces of cohesion and division depend on individual evolutionary psychology (shared by members of the group) in interaction with the imitable social patterning, It seems clear that in understanding the formation of groups and social cohesion one must move to consideration of the structure of the mind, of perception of self and others, of social mapping in the individual, working outwards from individual biology and psychology to the group, society, State. One seeks explanation for societies in terms of individual behaviour and psychology. The foundations for societal structures are to be found in the evolved psychology of the individual plus his physical needs and capabilities plus the link between individual and society formed by the integration of the individual and social self. This is what the recently developed approach of evolutionary psychology claims to do but how satisfactory is its account? The following paragraphs first present the content of evolutionary psychology as adherents describe it. This is followed by criticisms expressed by others who do not accept 'orthodox' Evolutionary Psychology (that is as promoted primarily by Cosmides and Tooby, 1989: 1990: 1992).

Alternative approaches
Sociology, one concludes, offers no adequate account of the cohesion of societies and the current version of evolutionary psychology is also open to powerful criticisms. However no one doubts that human behaviour, human psychology, the human brain, underwent an evolutionary development so the question remains how one ought to approach these; what other account can one give of the physiological and psychological evolutionary foundations of society? A new approach to psychological evolution is needed. The unity, the balancing of cohesion and division forces in society can only take place in the mind of the individual, of the individuals composing the society.

Some have termed a national community as an 'imagined community' but how is such an imagined community created, sustained, transmitted from generation to generation? Similarly others have described society, the state in terms of 'virtual reality' - necessarily a shared virtual reality if the society is to function effectively. At this point one begins to see the possible application of the term 'methodological individualism'. 

Methodological individualism is at the base of most social sciences on the basis that all social processes are to be explained by laws of individual behavior, that social systems have no separate ontological reality, and that all references to social systems are merely convenient summaries for patterns of individual behaviour. This must surely be the case. There are obviously artefacts of society: buildings, courts, legal systems, rituals, parliaments, corporations, but these are significant only so long as the individuals forming the society see them as part of a social system, that is individuals have mentally mapped society in much the same way as they might mentally map a neighbourhood, or indeed as they might mentally map their own body. On this view the nation/country/state is perceived as an object moving through time. There is a society-image in much the same way as there is a self-image, a body-image, used to adjust and control behaviour, building up a picture of the physical and social environment - a mapping which makes possible appropriate behaviour.

Where is the state? where is society? one might ask and the right answer is: in your brain. But if this is so, how is the state-image, the society-image created and sustained in the individual's brain? The usual answer is: By the culture - but this is uninformative. The real sources of the state-image, the society-image, even indeed of the self-image, are language and constructive imitation. Language and imitation are the important underlying generators of cohesion and an account of their contribution has to be framed in terms of brain functioning and dealt with on the basis of an evolutionary account of the development and functioning of language and imitation. Elsewhere (Allott, 1989; 1992) I have given an account of the evolutionary basis of language origin and function and the relation of language as a motor activity to cerebral motor control more generally. An implication of this is one should take individual words more seriously as indicators of their meanings. In the present context this means taking more seriously the folk psychological lexicon to refer to our emotions, our attitudes, our thoughts. What stands out immediately one does this is that the psychological lexicon is body-based, a product of functional extrapolation from the familiar which seems to result from the economy of the brain manifested in abstraction and metaphor. Examples: Hold this in mind ; I see what you mean; ; The answer is staring us in the face; I can't swallow that ; Digesting this information ; Reflect on this ; Chew on this! The verbal account of the activities and states of the brain/mind is framed in terms drawn from the activities and states of the body. That this is so is not, I would contend, merely a curiosity but requires exploration in terms of neural functioning and can lead to a revaluation of folk psychology, often nowadays dismissed as trivial and insignificant. This could lead to a systematised folk psychology, a genuinely biological (evolutionary) psychology.

Concluding Remarks
Dobzhansky (1951, 304) observed that human genetics has not been superseded by human culture; the former remains the foundation which enables man to manifest the kinds of behaviour which are called social and cultural. The interrelationships between biology and culture are reciprocal.

The human society is a product of evolution because it is founded on the obvious reproductive and survival needs of the human individuals who compose it and is also an expression of evolved human behavioural and emotional patterns. The survival of populations (interpreted as gene pools) and of societal forms are interlocked. Success or failure of societies is also success or failure of the lineages of the individuals who compose the societies. Survival of a society necessarily carries with it survival of the array of genes found in the human individuals who form that society - the societal genome. The survival or failure of societies is a manifestation of group selection. The concept is inescapable in accounting for human evolution under the influence of language, imitation and the accumulation of cultural patterns. Ernst Mayr (1997), in a recent commentary, asked:

"whether groups as cohesive wholes can serve as targets of selection. The answer is 'it depends' some do and others not. ... A group, the selective value of which is simply the arithmetic mean of the fitness values of the composing individuals (when in isolation), is not a target of selection. ... This is false or soft group selection. ... If due to social actions, the fitness of the group is higher or lower than the arithmetic mean of the fitness values of the composing individuals, then the group as a whole an object of selection, hard group selection."

Human groups typically demonstrate this synergy.
Finally, two familiar quotations from E.O. Wilson (1975, 42; 11978,10):
"One of the functions of sociobiology ... is to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences in a way that draws these subjects into the Modern [evolutionary] Synthesis."
"the two cultures ... will be joined at last... This concern is the deep structure of human nature, an essentially biological phenomenon that is also the primary focus of the humanities."

This paper, a tentative exploration of a possible sociobiology of human societies, is intended to serve that objective. Obviously much fuller research and development of the ideas is needed. As the major forces promoting societal cohesion, religion, the sexual basis of society, distinctness of culture weaken, what is going to happen to existing societies? A nationalism based on tribal hatreds grows steadily stronger as, paradoxically, nation-states multiply and become weaker. A period of fragmentation of societies seems probable despite ambitious attempts to form new multinational groupings. All this no doubt goes well beyond anything sociobiology as such can hope to comprehend but surely there is a contribution it can make.

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