Comments on: Evo-psych factoids

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 17:00:49 +0000

razor – let me recapitulate the conversation. You made a claim that opponents of evolutionary psychology were misrepresenting what it was. In the same comment, you also made it clear that you bought into Cosmides and Tooby. I pointed out that Cosmides and Tooby had themselves engaged in tendentious misrepresentation of people who they disagreed with when they claimed that such a thing as the “Standard Social Science Model” existed. You then appeared to claim that Cosmides and Tooby were right in their claims about the Standard Social Science Model, and that people who disagreed with ev. psych were either ideologically biased, or trying to defend an exploded SSSM type account of human nature, or both. I suggested that you didn’t actually know anything about the social sciences. You disagreed without providing any evidence – and tried to change the subject. I repeated my hypothesis and challenged you to come up with some evidence to support the claim that the SSSM model actually characterized the things that social scientists believe. You added another few accusations to the heap, but also made it clear that you had no intentions of trying to back up your claims with any, like, evidence. Again, you tried to change the subject. I think I’m pretty safe in concluding at this point that you don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about, and are trying to bluster your way through. As stated – if you want to make big claims about the social sciences, you ought to actually find out what they are. Otherwise you’re liable to make a fool of yourself in public.

By: RS

RS — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:21:45 +0000

“By the way, is it me, or does this explanation make no sense at all as an explanation of how women might have evolved different orgasmic responses? I suspect that the journalist is to blame rather than prof. Spector.”

It also utterly fails as it implies selection pressure for men to be good at foreplay – and that clearly hasn’t happened!

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 13:01:45 +0000

“The theory I prefer is the mate selection theory,” Prof Spector said. “If a man is considered powerful enough, strong enough, or thoughtful enough in bed or in the cave, then he’s likely to hang around as a long-term partner and be a better bet for bringing up children.”

Nevertheless, I maintain that St Thomas & Guy’s is a fine teaching hospital and a top-drawer research institution.

By the way, is it me, or does this explanation make no sense at all as an explanation of how women might have evolved different orgasmic responses? I suspect that the journalist is to blame rather than prof. Spector.

By: RS

RS — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 12:39:57 +0000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1501314,00.html

“The genetic control over how easily women experience an orgasm during sex shows it is subject to evolutionary pressure, which means it must confer a biological advantage.”

I found this line very amusing and thought I’d share it.

By: nikolai

nikolai — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 09:38:55 +0000

James Wimberley;

Hope you’re still out there…

Re: References for the Grimms evil step-parents.

It’s well established in the literature: try the Annotated Brothers Grimm for an introduction. The parent/step-parent shift is general – besides Hansel and Gretel it also occurs in Snow White, for example. The reasons for the change is directly spelt out in the Brothers’ letters.

The Perrault comparison doesn’t work. Perrault was writing for adults, the Grimms went from writing for scholars to writing for children (or adapting their work so it could be read to children).

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 08:46:15 +0000

Just to make a small “logical” point at the bookend of this thread, because we all agree that embodiment and neural processing are necessary conditions of experience, thought, cognition, behavior, etc., it does not follow that such capacities are causally determined by their biological substrate. Whereas it’s perfectly legitimate to inquire into biological constraints on so-called “human nature”, though as yet any results are sketchy, it doesn’t follow that such constraints “constitute” or explain the whole phenomenal field to which they would apply. (There is, of course, a discipline, cultural/social anthropology, ethnography, that has produced a wealth of phenomenal description,- no one would exactly claim that it’s a discipline that produces causal explanations,- which would not readily be reducible to an “universal” substrate, though one would think that careful examination of its data would be a criterion for identifying the adequacy of the phenomena to be explained, rather than regarding its pretentions as a target of strawman polemics. At any rate, the idea that complex social structures and processes can be explained as an emanation of a biological substrate is more than faintly absurd.) And, of course, there’s the issue that explaining, e.g., cognition, by recourse to “adaption” is entangled in the claim of knowledge to be veridical. The demand for a basically mechanistic/utilitarian account of cognition/behavior amounts to a petitio principii. To be sure, all phenomena are structured and therefore constrained, including, e.g., language and human agency. But that does not entail ignoring the differences and layerings of emergent levels of causal or quasi-causal constraints/explanations and their interactions. It does little good to appeal to “the myth of the given” to distinguish science from ideology. To be sure, there are precise technical criticisms that can be made of any hypothesis or proposal, but science is just as much, though no more so, a norm driven enterprise as any other, in search of its own “proper” criteria, hence as susceptible to normative misrepresentation and the concealment of motives, i.e., ideology, as any other. But what interests me about the advocates of biological determination of human capacities, under the rubic of sociobiology, ev. psych. or whatever, is the refusal to entertain alternative hypotheses. If behavior, cognition and the like are products of biological evolution, why aren’t more flexible, learned, or sociable behaviors equally the more or less adventitious product of such natural history? Wouldn’t learned behavior and whatever degree of emergent mental function that it implies have coevolved and inter-nested with instinctually fixed behaviors. A criterion would be the degree to which a species adapts in complicated ways to different ecosystems. Consider the case of African elephants. It would be hard to conceive of the course of paleo-anthropological evolution without an account of the costs and advantages of such divergent evolution and, in particular, it would be difficult to conceive of the emergence of language, the distinctive human feature, without a long prior development of animal sociality. So, by all means, choose your speculative anthropology as you please: don’t be my guest. But just don’t pretend that you’re riding the hard surfboard of science against the waves of history and don’t pretend that your choice absolves your existence.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 07:50:09 +0000

rs: it was meant to be a general comment, but you were the most recent quote. blah. Stupid ‘you’ being both singular and plural in english.

By: RS

RS — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 06:00:08 +0000

“You need to be a lot more anal about how you use the word adaptation and adapt. Its virtually impossible to prove something is an adaptation, or that something is ‘adapting’. Now, responding to selection is easier, since you should be able to point to the selection if you know something is responding. But most graduate students in biology get asked to delete the word adaptation from their thesis because of how controversial it is.”

You may have noticed that the word ‘adapt’ was in the original quotation I was responding to. When talkin about EP, for good or ill, ‘adaptation’ is the word used because EP is a teleological science. In this case the word plays no controversial role as it simply stands for selection pressures within a historical epoch.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 05:26:06 +0000

rs: I’m talking historically. If I remember correctly, “Sociobiology” was suggested by EO Wilson and meant to explicitly continue the program of research of Social Darwinism shorn of the political baggage that had become associated with it. Then “Evolutionary psychology” was suggested as a replacement for “sociobiology”, meant to continue the program of research shorn of the political baggage which had become associated with that. Now we’re looking round for a new name for EP …

Razor: you are wrong on this one. The term “Standard Social Sciences Model” has no referent.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 04:27:26 +0000

Earlier today, when the thread was merely 90% heat and 10% light, I was in danger of learning something new about EP. But now, thanks to razor’s valiant (and successful) effort to turn this thread into 100% heat, that danger has past. Thanks, razor!

By: razor

razor — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 03:26:40 +0000

Engels

Well agent scully, I think that when the evidence consistently shows effects that aren’t being explained, that men of science focus their attention.

Wait. I am dead wrong. The paradigm shift tells us that men of science refuse to pay attention as along as possible. Then, they still refuse to pay attention.

By: razor

razor — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 03:22:42 +0000

Henry

I believe you are a political scientist.

And that is why I am not surprised by your behavior.

You initially made a claim based on my response to a comment above that was flat out wrong. You ignored that error. Then, when I went to the issues that mattered, to try to get out of the jargon war, you had nothing to say about the issues. (What is your position on the fundamental problem of homo sapien sapien’s species specific approach to social altruism works, and, how has it effected your work and opinions, since, the problem is fundamental to every social science, and is of deadly relevanc to political science classics of Mencius, Mo Tzu, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx?) And, in contrast to, for example, dominic above, who pointed out that “Evolutionary Psychology” is a term of art I may misunderstand as used here (The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way is annotated on my shelf, not that I understood it), you did more of the same. Most tellingly for a poltical scientist, you are agitated that an attempt to describe a century of social science, in contradistinction to the needs to do science based on current information, summarized in about 35 or so pages, does not describe all social science and all social scientists. Ya think?

I will go to a journal and pick out an example of SSSM bullshit at sheer irritation at your boorish rudness. What’s in it for me?

For you, Mr. Put up or shut up, who has yet to say anything of substance despite repeated opportunities, give me one opinion you have that wasn’t picked up elsewhere.

An innate opinion I guess that would be.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:46:45 +0000

ummm no razor. Not me who needs to provide cites. As far as I can make out, it’s you who is claiming that there is a Standard Social Science Model that all of us social scientists subscribe to, and that we’re ducking the Way, the Truth and the Light because we don’t realize that we’ve been outcompeted. You see, I’ve got a little hypothesis here, which is that you don’t know anything about social science, and that you’re just repeating regurgitated opinions that you’ve picked up elsewhere. I’m a political scientist – and I’m inviting you to disconfirm my hypothesis by, say, going through the last ten years or so of the dominant political science journals (American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization), and coming back and telling us how many articles conform to this supposedly standard model that all of us social scientists adhere to. Or shut up. Your choice.

By: engels

engels — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:17:27 +0000

Other forces are at work

Good point, Agent Mulder. Maybe they’re the same guys who shot JFK?

By: razor

razor — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 01:55:04 +0000

Dominic:
Fine by me. Modularity to me is no different than any of the theories that attempt to be comprehensive without the mechanisms described by the experimentalists at hand. It is premature, but that is life. Human behavioral ecology is a better term to me. But this still doesn’t address the Cosmides and Tooby take on the Standard Social Science Model, nor, does it t explain the dominant tone and arguments found here and elsewhere. See, Henry. Other forces are at work as well.

Henry
No cites, baby, no cites. All those social sciences out there, and, no cites. What is your view of homo sapien sapien? What is the mechanism that allows social altruism to exist? Why is pair bonding universal?

“you clearly don’t know anything about the social sciences” followed by “Blustering”

Intentional self parody, or, are you teaching me how to do social science?