[First Last Name]
English [Number]
[Date Month Year]
Q1. TINBERGEN’S FOUR QUESTIONS AND MORAL BEHAVIOR
Q1.1 Causation (mechanism): How does moral behavior work at the proximate level? Moral behavior acts as a proximate but external manifestation of a person’s inner guiding system, which supports self-regulation. Thus, the inner guiding system regulates moral behavior (Termini and Golden 477).
Q1.2 Ontogeny (development): How does moral behavior develop within an individual across the lifespan? Moral behavior development begins with the child. It begins with the development of the “conscience”, which gradually emerge as an inner guiding system that eventually regulates his or her behavior as he or she advances in age. In the process, the person learn to adopt values, cultural perspectives (and behaviors, too), and specific patterns of effective (or ineffective) relationships with other persons in the family and within the society. This process of ongoing self-adjustment and self-regulation informs adaptive (or maladaptive) behaviors through his or her lifespan (477).
Q1.3 Phylogeny (evolution): Why, and to what extent, has moral behavior evolved in and across species over many generations? Moral behavior evolves in a person’s lifetime his or her inner adaptive and regulation mechanisms. This process of internalization of learned social behaviors and rationale become the basis for intergenerational continuity of values, culture, and social order in the context of specific families and societies (477).
Q1.4 Adaptation (function): In what way (if any) does moral behavior serve an adaptive function? Moral behavior is an adaptive function primarily due to its capability to test social realities that approves or disapproves specific behaviors. Socially approved behavior will enhance better adaptation the higher levels of that behavior; while disapproval initiates revaluation of “conscience” to shed light on the erroneous bases of such behavior so that adaptive changes can be performed to avoid disapproval in the future (477).
Q2. WHAT MAKES BIOSOCIOLOGY CONTROVERSIAL?
Reason 1: It is a common behavior of humanity that any challenge to commonly held order of things, particularly those that potentially initiate dramatic changes, introduce a perceivable dissonance among those who are closely involved with the discipline. The new paradigm introduced by Biosociology is expected to create controversy (Naour 21).
Reason 2: The synthetic paradigm that Wilson proposed in The Insect Societies in 1971 integrated human social behavior with biology, proposing that all behaviors are extensions of the biological brain and that includes human culture. This idea has accelerated the demise of the anthropocentric perspectives of human behavior (22).
Reason 3: The concepts of sociobiology had been misperceived by ideologues as Marxist in nature and as being supportive of racism, misogyny, sexism, and genocide (22).
Q3. WHAT DOES GEERTZ IN HIS ARTICLE MEAN BY STATING “Human Nature Is Unfinished?” WHAT CONCEPTS DOES THIS LINK TO?
The statement means that human beings, and by extension human nature, continue to be evolving, growing, and adapting within a cycle with no end until death. The basic argument for this is the person’s dependence upon human culture to evolve and grow without which he or she cannot exist or continue to exist (Geertz 49). Geertz’s contention is linked to the concept of “moral behavior” as a product of culture in an ongoing state of flux and of “plasticity” as mankind’s great potential to adapt and change in the context of his environment.
Works Cited
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, Basic Books, 1973.
Print.
Naour, P. Wilson and B.F. Skinner: A Dialogue between Sociobiology and Radical Behaviorism.
Berlin, Germany: Springer Science + Business Media, 2009. Print.
Termini, Kristin A. and Jeannie A. Golden. “What Can Behaviorists Learn from the
Developmental Literature?” International Journal of Behavior Consultation and Therapy 2007: 477-493. PDF file.
