Evolution of Sociality: PSYC Call for Commentators

PSYCOLOQUY Commentary is invited on: Caporael on the EVOLUTION OF SOCIALITY Qualified professional biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to submit Open Peer Commentary on the target article whose abstract appears below. It has been published in PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association. Instructions for retrieval and for preparing commentaries follow the abstract. The address for submitting commentaries and articles and for requesting information is psyc(a)pucc.princteton.edu The URLs for retrieving articles are: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1995.volume.6 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- psycoloquy.95.6.01.group-selection.1.caporael ISSN 1055-0143 (51 pars, 1 table, 1 note, 44 refs, 999 lines) PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) Copyright 1995 Linnda R. Caporael SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS Linnda R. Caporael Department of Science and Technology Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180 caporl(a)rpi.edu ABSTRACT: Human interaction, as opposed to aggregation, occurs in face-to-face groups. "Sociality theory" proposes that such groups have a nested, hierarchical structure, consisting of a few basic variations, or "core configurations." These function in the coordination of human behavior, and are repeatedly assembled, generation to generation, in human ontogeny, and in daily life. If face-to-face groups are "the mind's natural environment," then we should expect human mental systems to correlate with core configurations. Features of groups that recur across generations could provide a descriptive paradigm for testable and non-intuitive evolutionary hypotheses about social and cognitive processes. This target article sketches three major topics in sociality theory, roughly corresponding to the interests of biologists, psychologists, and social scientists. These are (1) a multiple levels-of-selection view of Darwinism, part group selectionism, part developmental systems theory; (2) structural and psychological features of repeatedly assembled, concretely situated face-to-face coordination; and (3) superordinate, "unsituated" coordination at the level of large-scale societies. Sociality theory predicts a tension, perhaps unresolvable, between the social construction of knowledge, which facilitates coordination within groups, and the negotiation of the habitat, which requires some correspondence with contingencies in specific situations. This tension is relevant to ongoing debates about scientific realism, constructivism, and relativism in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge. KEYWORDS: developmental systems theory, group coordination, group selection, hierarchy, human evolution, social cognition, social identity, teleofunctionalism ------------------------------------------------------------- These files are also on the World Wide Web and the easiest way to retrieve them is with Netscape, Mosaic, gopher, archie, veronica, etc. Here are some of the URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/psyc.html gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1995.volume.6/ ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1995.volume.6/ To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1995.volume.6 To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): mget *.1.caporael When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit ---------- Where the above procedure is not available there are two fileservers: ftpmail(a)decwrl.dec.com and bitftp(a)pucc.bitnet that will do the transfer for you. To one or the other of them, send the following one line message: help for instructions (which will be similar to the above, but will be in the form of a series of lines in an email message that ftpmail or bitftp will then execute for you). ------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS FOR PSYCOLOQUY COMMENTATORS Accepted PSYCOLOQUY target articles have been judged by 5-8 referees to be appropriate for Open Peer Commentary, the special service provided by PSYCOLOQUY to investigators in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, cognitive sciences and philosophy who wish to solicit multiple responses from an international group of fellow specialists within and across these disciplines to a particularly significant and controversial piece of work. If you feel that you can contribute substantive criticism, interpretation, elaboration or pertinent complementary or supplementary material on a PSYCOLOQUY target article, you are invited to submit a formal electronic commentary. Please note that although commentaries are solicited and most will appear, acceptance cannot, of course, be guaranteed. 1. Before preparing your commentary, please read carefully the Instructions for Authors and Commentators and examine recent numbers of PSYCOLOQUY. 2. Commentaries should be limited to 200 lines (1800 words, references included). PSYCOLOQUY reserves the right to edit commentaries for relevance and style. In the interest of speed, commentators will only be sent the edited draft for review when there have been major editorial changes. Where judged necessary by the Editor, commentaries will be formally refereed. 3. Please provide a title for your commentary. As many commentators will address the same general topic, your title should be a distinctive one that reflects the gist of your specific contribution and is suitable for the kind of keyword indexing used in modern bibliographic retrieval systems. Each commentary should have a brief (~50-60 word) abstract 4. All paragraphs should be numbered consecutively. Line length should not exceed 72 characters. The commentary should begin with the title, your name and full institutional address (including zip code) and email address. References must be prepared in accordance with the examples given in the Instructions. Please read the sections of the Instruction for Authors concerning style, preparation and editing. PSYCOLOQUY is a refereed electronic journal (ISSN 1055-0143) sponsored on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association and currently estimated to reach a readership of 40,000. PSYCOLOQUY publishes brief reports of new ideas and findings on which the author wishes to solicit rapid peer feedback, international and interdisciplinary ("Scholarly Skywriting"), in all areas of psychology and its related fields (biobehavioral science, cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, etc.). All contributions are refereed. Target article length should normally not exceed 500 lines [c. 4500 words]. Commentaries and responses should not exceed 200 lines [c. 1800 words]. All target articles, commentaries and responses must have (1) a short abstract (up to 100 words for target articles, shorter for commentaries and responses), (2) an indexable title, (3) the authors' full name(s) and institutional address(es). 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However, except in very special cases, agreed upon in advance, contributions that have already been published or are being considered for publication elsewhere are not eligible to be considered for publication in PSYCOLOQUY, Please submit all material to psyc(a)pucc.bitnet or psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu Anonymous ftp archive is DIRECTORY pub/harnad/Psycoloquy HOST princeton.edu