As a biologist, I don't think it is irrelevant. As far as we know, your thoughts and rationality do not have an independent existence. They are, generally speaking, the products of your physical body which is built from a blueprint, your DNA. This blueprint has been naturally selected for and is a product of billions of years of evolution. Your sense of morale, your fondness or not for cooperation, how easily you anger when someone steals from you, what you want for dinner, all that and more is flavoured by your biology. You say we're rational. I agree, but to understand how rational we are, you have to understand where that rationality comes from. Is it rational to send money to a charity supporting starving children in Africa after watching a moving infomercial on the telly? Is it rational to get jealous if your girlfriend flirts with another guy? To make fully sense of that and more, you have to include knowledge of human biology in past and present.
Furthermore, we have learned stuff from watching animals which is or should be relevant to discussions on anarchy. This is something I posted earlier :
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Originally Posted by tore
Something which is important in evolutionary biology and which also is highly relevant to an anarchy discussion is the concept of stable states. Sometimes, the optimal strategy for everyone in a population would be to be nice to everyone all the time. That would benefit everyone the most. However, that can't easily evolve because even if it sounds nice, such a strategy may get exploited. Let's say you have a society where everyone shares food with eachother. If an individual appears in that population that does not share food, but only takes it, that individual would thrive - he or she would get more food than anyone else. Although everyone sharing sounds good, the social environment in that population would greatly reward the exploitive behaviour.
You can apply this principle to groups of people. I think one of the most important things a society should do is increase the living standards of the people in it, now and for the future. To do that, you have to create a societal environment where it is possible for people to be sharers because that is what benefits us all. This is only feasible if society has also created an environment where exploiters cannot thrive, one that punishes exploitation.
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The point here was that although anarchy might sound good to an idealist (like everyone sharing food might), I believe it would be likely to create an environment which would reward exploiters.
Animals evolve in ways that create instinctive behaviours that create social environments where exploitation may get punished (see for example
reciprocal altruism). They do so through natural selection. We have the luxury to do so also through politics and how we choose to construct our societies. Those may look like completely different solutions, but the problem may be the same, generally speaking.
As I wrote earlier, what I presented was a point made against a very specific argument, one which did not come from you. If I was to argue a case against anarchy in general, then I wouldn't start with the social mammal argument. However, it is, as I mentioned, just another level from which you can debate (against) anarchy.