No individuals of a species

I am appalled by what passes as science, when it concerns "man".

So, while my friend LD discusses the battles of the day, I keep on the issues of the war.

It makes my heart cry when I see how American universities waste their money to finance research and teaching on nonsense.

First question: why does a man desire any woman? The answer is easy: evolution played on our apelike ancestors the trick of developing "lust" so that they could be brought to search for a partner and release the tension (I am not sure of what is included in the category "partner").

Second question: why do a man and a woman feel attachment to each other? Again the answer is easy: it is another trick of evolution that made our apelike ancestors develop the neural functions necessary to feel "romantic love", so as not to have to go roaming in looking for partners, and be able to dedicate themselves fully to mating with just the one to whom they are now attached.

Third question: what makes this attachment endure? By now you know the answer: it is still a trick of evolution working on our apelike ancestor's brain to make them wanting to raise the children born from their mating.

It seems that this is what teaches a certain biological anthropologists of Rutger's University, a woman who is known as one of the most prominent of her field (I leave her anonymous, "to name the sin but not the sinner").

Some call it just anthropology, without qualifications. It might even be, given the fact that she claims to explain in this way the origin of our moral feelings. Too bad that no such a thing exists outside of the mores, the habits or customs by which a group lives and perpetuates itself by passing them from a generation to the next. Her explanations fall therefore into the classical vicious circle, of presupposing that which they have to explain.

Too bad, in short, that a biological anthropologist feels authorized to ignore completely that other field of research on man called "socio-cultural anthropology".

The trouble, with bio- and psychological anthropology, is to take men as "individuals" of a species, in the same sense that any kind of animals (bulls, horses, pigs, dogs) are individuals of their species: which juman beings are not, because no one has ever seen a "man", who were not an Italian, a French, an American, a Chinese, or whatever.

What worries me, is that I discovered the existence of that woman "anthropologist" by reading an essay by a cardinal (again "the sin but not the sinner"), previously teacher of theological anthropology, who didn't simply dismiss her as I have done for the lack of any sense of what science is, but thought her worthy of being taken seriously, enough to deserve a reply.

HP