Victoria Pendleton

I think this is where we'll end up differing. I base my understanding of society on social stratification and social constructs, with little or no reference to biological difference.

I don't think it's possible to ignore biology, if you're trying to do explanatory work of understanding how people work as a society. the point of sociobiology is that it grounds social stratification and social constructs in biological explanations, which then provide a foundation for the more human-led understandings (sociology, philosophy, political studies etc). many species of animals have quite complex social behaviours and social structures, without invoking social theory.

There may be a biological or psychological foundation to these developments - i.e. the instinct to reproduce, the human as a social animal etc. but that's not what interests me - what interests me is the sheer (social) diversity in the species that can't be reduced to a few consituent (biological) parts.

to be honest, i'm fine with you being interested in social diversity, but i think you'd have a better understanding if you were also interested in the root causes of it. if you can show me a society where beards, big muscles and deep voices are considered feminine, i will concede that there might be more social variation than i am admitting, but you seem to want to reduce biological explanations to some sort of behavioural determinism, which is not the right approach.

I may have misunderstood what you've been saying, but there are too many social variations to suggest that a biological response is the key determiner for someone's actions.

Yeah, you have misunderstood. Suggesting that human behaviour has biological causes is not the same thing as saying that our actions are determined by the way our genes are expressed. it's obviously far more complex than that, but I'm just saying you can't ignore biology as you seem to want to do!

seriously, go and do some reading in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. my supervisor at uni was a lesbian political/ethics/gender studies philosopher with an enormous interest in all of this stuff (along with cognitive psychology). she's the person who put me onto this stuff, and she was fucking ace!