网范文：“The drugged society:Towards the antheap” 本文考虑社会生物学与人类社会的关系。历史是进化的延续或进化的阶段。看到历史和演化之间的关系，从历史学家的角度来看，自然过程不是真正的历史过程，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文，这篇历史范文讲述了这一问题。早些时候,一位的历史学家,认为人类历史进程的过程建立在系统的语言,也就是说,他认为历史是人类社会的起源。他构想的历史是人类社会的前进发展。承认历史的亲密关系和演化是很重要的,因为社会是由人类演化的产物。
其身体和大脑已经进化形成的,传播的遗传物质，人类社会是进化的产物,因为它是建立在明显的生殖和生存需要上的，人类个体组成,也是一种进化的人类行为和情感的表达方式。下面的范文进行详述。
INTRODUCTION
This attempts to consider the possible relation between sociobiology and human societies, nations, history. History is a continuation of evolution or an authentic segment of evolution. Collingwood saw the relation between history and evolution from the standpoint of the historian: "are not natural processes really historical processes, and is not the being of nature an historical being?" (1961, p. 210). Earlier, Vico, another eminent historian, regarded the historical process as a process whereby human beings build up systems of language, custom, law, government: that is, he thinks of history as the history of the genesis and development of human societies and their institutions (Collingwood 1961, p. 65). He conceived of history as the progressive development of human society. Other accounts have been less well-received. Thorson remarks that "an evolutionary perspective on human affairs... automatically raises the specter of Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists..." (1982, p. 83).
To recognize the intimate relation of history and evolution is important because societies are composed of human individuals who are without doubt the products of evolution and whose bodies and brains have been formed by evolution, by the transmission of genetic material (combined and occasionally mutated). The human society is a product of evolution because it is founded on both the obvious reproductive and survival needs of the human individuals who compose it and is also an expression of the evolved human behavioral and emotional patterns. Any sharp separation of cultural and genetic evolution is to be avoided. We should see "cultural evolution as a socio-genetic system, that is, as a social system for the transmitting of information from generation to generation. Society as a survival mechanism..." (Thorson 1982, p. 127).
The fact with which an evolutionary account of human societies has to cope is that there are many different human societies, different systems, different organizational patterns, and over time societies, systems, organizational patterns have failed, been superseded, emerged, spread, been replicated, shrunk, prospered, mouldered - and that each human society has had to exist in an environment formed by co-existing societies with which it may have contacts, or even conflict. The human society, the nation, is an example of a human group and societies have been selected (naturally?) for survival or extinction or for reconstruction. The survival or failure of societies can be described as an example of group selection - and even of genetic group selection (a debated but currently more acceptable concept.
Even those who do not accept group selection may nevertheless recognize that sociocultural evolution can mimic group selection. So Hamilton says: "The social behavior of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behavior - every situation - the individual will seem to value his neighbour's fitness against his own according to the coefficients of relationship appropriate in that situation" (1964, p. 19). And Williams: "most of the examples of gregarious and other group phenomena can be explained as the statistical summation of individual adaptation and require no recognition of a functional organization of the group" (1966, p. 258). Against this one can quote Barash: "kin selection is simply a special case of group selection" (1982, p. 114). 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 population gene pool which is the genetic environment of every gene" (Williams 1966, p. 251).
THE HUMAN GROUP
But what is the nature of the human group? Why does it cohere? The formation of a group depends, at a minimum, on the recognition of some similarity, some relative difference from individuals not included in the group, but this may lead to no more than the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish, the swarming of gnats. The relation of the human individual to the group is probably much more than that "the group takes on a life above the individual members" (Hardin 1995, p. xii). The tendency to the formation of groups, from the very small to the very large, seems to go way back in the evolutionary history of the species. "It appears altogether sound to grant the existence of a biologically ordained social nature to man" (Thorson 1982, p. 143). "The evidence shows that it [sociality] is an extremely ancient phenomenon..." (Wynne-Edwards 1986, p. 11).
It may have originated simply in the family group, the parents and children, which became necessary because of the altriciality, the helplessness and very partial development of the human infant - which in turn seems to have been the consequence of the disproportionately large brain and head of the human infant. Then the question how the large brain and head might have emerged - possibly from the synchronous development of language: 12. "What selective force did lead to our larger brains? It is conceivable that the relevant factor was the evolution of language" (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, p. 276) and the selective advantages of an ever larger cerebral store, organized through language, both for social interactions and initially for the ability to manipulate 'mentally' perceived, remembered and projected aspects of the environment.
With language came the birth of the self. Damasio argues that subjectivity came before language: "Subjectivity emerges ... when the brain is producing not just images of objects, not just images of organism responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.... This basic neural device does not require language. The metaself construction I envisage is purely nonverbal... using the elementary representational rules of the sensory and motor systems in space and time. I see no reason why animals without language would not make such narratives" (Damasio 1994, p. 242).
Similarly Llinas:" 'self' is clearly a neuronal computational construct in every way similar to all other perceptual states fed by our sensory inputs, and has no separate existence from other perceptual realms" (1987, p. 355). But Damasio goes on to assign a vital role to language: "Humans have available second order narrative capacities, provided by language... The refined form of subjectivity that is ours would emerge from the latter process. Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the 'I'" (Damasio 1994, p. 243). Mead contended that: "The transformation of the biologic individual to the minded organism or self takes place through the agency of language" (1934, p. xx). I ascribe a greater importance to language because language allows one to objectify oneself and through the objectivation of self to objectify the self of others. I agree with Vine when he emphasizes "The profound significance of this latter capacity for self-objectification, as stressed by the 'symbolic interactionist' theories stemming from the ideas of G.H.Mead... Degrees of subjective identification of the self and its interests...with the group as a symbolized collective object... then become possible" (Vine 1987, p. 65).
Group sentiment depends upon the recognition of others as similar selves to oneself, analysable and predictable for this very reason. "By showing each and every one of us how our own brain/mind works, consciousness provides us with an extraordinarily effective tool for understanding - by analogy- the minds of others like ourselves" (Humphrey 1987, p. 380). Tajfel relates individual self and social self: "social identity will be understood as that part of an individual's self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership" (1981, p. 255)and Tonnesmann takes up the point: "Tajfel and his colleagues have drawn the conclusion that psychological group membership is first of all a perceptual and cognitive affair... Group memberships are real for the individual in that they become part of the self... personal identity and social identity can both be treated as subsystems of the self" (1987, p. 184).
The formation of societies is not a peculiarly human thing. There are the astonishingly successful societies formed by ants, bees and termites;: the vast number of different ant societies, "the number of all existing ant species... lies somewhere between 12017 and 14000 species" (Dumpert 1978, p. 10), offer similarities and contrasts with human societies as reflected in the title of Forel's famous book "The social world of the ants compared with that of man" (1928). Consideration of the properties of ant societies allows one to think more coolly about the features of human societies; surprisingly, as E.O. Wilson has commented: "Ants and other social insects have been underutilized in.. literature on behavior and ecology. Ants are premier organisms for research in behavioral ecology and sociobiology.... The shaping of the organism and the development of societies by natural selection" (Hölldobler and Wilson 1990, p. 3).
ANT SOCIETIES
Ant societies contain highly morphologically and behaviorally differentiated individuals, resulting from very specific reproductive23 and developmental patterns: "Being social insects in the true sense of eusociality, one is describing a situation in which several generations live together and in which the offspring are reared by a caste itself unable to reproduce, so that one is able to distinguish a division of labour" (Dumpert 1978, p. 1); ants make use of a whole array of functional communication devices for the benefit (without obviously any deliberate intent) of the society as a whole: "The ability to communicate is one of the essential preconditions for social behavior... ants possess a particularly full repertoire of possibilities for mutual understanding" (p. 64).
Ant societies are organized to achieve the fundamental objectives of reproduction, development, feeding, defence, warmth, shelter, and so on. Dumpert describes features of any societies relevant for this : the ant hills of our indigenous ants have a plethora of internal subdivisions and conceal their inhabitants in an ordered structure of chambers and passages... intelligent and technically accurate constructions which, in their position and structure, fulfil the various temperature and moisture conditions for the development of the brood. Ant societies include individuals with very different reproductive roles; some which work, others which do not; over a third of all workers in a wood ant colony remain idle in the normal way of things, seem to have specialized in 'doing nothing'" some contribute, some do not; research on wood ants contradicts the idea of an equal distribution of food brought into a colony to all the members. Frequently there are individual ants who only take food and never hand it on; some individual workers may receive over 500 percent more than others. Ants acquire their communication system by shared upbringing, the culture of the nest. The chemical signals of the brood are not recognized by the workers from 'birth' onwards, but are learned during a sensitive phase shortly after hatching, probably irreversibly (Dumpert 1978, pp. 109, 116, 117, 1999).
The same is the case for bees: "Many eusocial hymenopterans can recognize nest-mates.... a bee learns the genotypes of other bees in its colony, and accepts them as nest-mates, but does not know its own genotype.... there is no convincing evidence that eusocial insects can distinguish lineages within a colony... the ability of bees to recognize others by their genotype is of a kind that helps the survival of the colony, but not of particular lineages within the colony..." (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, p. 267). Ants repel strangers, defend one another. The ants' pattern of societal organization has been successful over millions of years; it has allowed them to cope with major environmental changes, to colonize every part of the planet, every climatic region, innumerable specific niches; to form thousands of different species: "their attainment of a worldwide distribution across nearly all climatic boundaries, through the development of variations in behavior patterns [rather than through morphological adaptation]" (Dumpert 1978, p. 4).
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