I love seeing counter-evidence for everything. I estimate that while most of my beliefs are true (otherwise I wouldn't believe them in the first place), a small percentage is almost certainly completely false - and I don't really have any reliable way of telling the two apart.
Indiscriminatingly looking for counter-evidence for all of them can be very rewarding - the ones that are true are much more likely to sustain the assault of it than the ones that aren't. Yes, I might ignore counter-evidence of something that's false, or accept it for something that's true, ending up worse off, but it seems plausible that on average it should improve quality of my beliefs.
For example some of the standard beliefs about human sociobiology that seemed to be extremely widely held here are:
- Men have lower chances of having any kids than women
- Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids
Charting Parenthood: Statistical Portrait of Fathers and Mothers in America disagrees with them.
- It's true that young men are less likely to have children than young women, but it reverses at old age, and total chance of having children during lifetime is - for people over 45 - 84% for men, and 86% for women. As some of childless men might still have children between 45 and their death (quite a few according to data), but almost no woman will, the difference must get smaller by the time of death, or it might even reverse. This is pretty convincing evidence against a major gender difference in chance of having children, at least as far as modern America is concerned.
- The chance of having children is highest for people between 100% and 200% of poverty line (poverty line, not median income, these are all poorer than average people). For women going either lower or higher reduces chances of having children considerably. For men getting poorer reduces chance of having children considerably, while getting richer reduces it but only slightly. However - younger people are much more likely to fall below poverty line, and men tend to reproduce later, so even that can easily be an artifact of age-income relationship. The data is fully compatible with both poverty and wealth being negatively correlated with chance of having children in both genders.
These are not direct tests of sociobiological claims, so what we have is not exactly what we would like to, but I find them to be quite convincing counter-evidence. My belief in these sociobiological claims is definitely lower than before, at least as far as they concern modern world, even though I can imagine more focused studies changing my mind back.
More counter-evidence for things we commonly believe here, sociobiological or otherwise, welcomed in comments.
The letter is a pretty good example of problems of communicating over a paradigm difference, how convincing you find it seems highly based on which paradigm you accept.
And it seems to be mostly criticizing a version of sociobiology that attaches changes in post-Paleolithic to changes in genetic basis of humanity, and existing variety of behaviour to existing variety of genes in modern individuals.
As far as I can tell, they're perfectly right about this, they won, and nobody holds such beliefs any more. What's left today is far milder claim that all humans share pretty much the same range of highly flexible behaviors that was well adapted to ancestral environment, and cultural evolution is based on memes not genes. (and this mild version is what I was looking for counter-evidence for in my post)
The point that evidence for what Wilson was talking about was pretty much non-existent is as valid today as it was then. There are very few genes known to be linked with anything behavioral, and now that we know how few genes there are, it severely limits possibility of their existence. As they point out, there is also very little evidence that our ancestral environment was anything like what sociobiology tends to so happily assume, and variety and rapidness of change of human cultures is huge.
The point that scientific theories are often given much more credit than they're due when they're convenient for those benefiting from status quo, is a valid argument. This doesn't apply as much to mild sociobiology of today as to radical sociobiology they are criticizing, which basically says poor people have bad genes etc., you can easily imagine people in power happily accepting it even without proper scientific evidence. If there was overwhelming evidence for it, then well, tough luck, but as they point out, such theories were often proposed and widely accepted against the bulk of scientific evidence. As far as I can tell, this seems historically correct.
Where are you getting this? You go on to mention their complaint #5 that they don't like Wilson's reconstruction of the ancestral environment, which makes it sound like they're saying that he believes in uniformity.
They do say that some people say "poor people have bad genes" and they fear that those people will tur... (read more)