I think it hardly deserves emphasis that just because someone has done excellent work in one area of one field, it doesn’t mean that they are privileged in any way to talk about the field as a whole. But this is something that is generally recognized in most academic institutions. That is why professors in a field talk to other professors. That way they are able to perceive their own views as a strand in a thread of views where multiple other views exist. For this reason alone, it must have been clear to many that some of the argumentation in evolutionary psychology must be flawed. After all, humans are prone to so many biases, and the biases described by Pinker and Dawkins – altruism, for instance – are not even the most significant ones. I wonder if it is true that Harvard disproportionately produces people with premature intellectual certainty. Besides Pinker, Niall Ferguson, David Horowitz and (yes!) Deepak Chopra come to mind. Does it have something to do with the culture at Harvard? In Berkeley, for instance, you can trash Niall Ferguson all day long, and somebody would probably buy you a cold drink. One thing you notice about Cambridge versus Berkeley is that people are likely to blank you (or in worst cases, give you cold hard stares) if you say something that they disagree with for personal or political reasons. Why is it that Berkeley, for instance, doesn’t seem to produce so many of these characters? This is not to suggest that professors at Harvard don’t talk to other professors, but perhaps those discussions are not long and penetrative enough to be meaningfully changing the subtance of their respective views.

And thank you for letting me be comment #100.

Keller, Matthew C. and Miller, Geoffrey. Resolving the paradox of common, harmful, heritable mental disorders: Which evolutionary genetic models work best? Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 385—452.

(link)

In table 2 of the paper, people with many types of psychiatric conditions have fewer offspring relative to the general population. (Or at least, they do in the current environment. This says nothing about what its effect on fitness might have been in the past).

“For a few mental disorders such as psychopathy, frequency dependence may be a plausible model. Mealey(1995) argued, forcefully in our opinion, that psychopathy persists at low base rate as a socially parasitic strategy: it brings high fitness benefits when rare, but becomes less rewarding at higher frequencies because of increased anti-cheater vigilance in the population.”

Personally, I’m skeptical.

Still, I find it interesting that Pinker mostly sticks to an “evolution is very slow” model. Here, you have traits that reduce fitness by as much as 30 to 50%. If there were gene variants involved (and the effect isn’t due to mutation-selection balance), we might even be able to measure their disappearance over a few generations.

LONDON (Reuters) – Psychopaths who kill and rape have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found.

In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had “potholes,” while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.

The study opens up the possibility of developing treatments for dangerous psychopaths in the future, said Dr Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at London’s King’s College Hospital, and may have profound implications for doctors, researchers and the criminal justice system.

“These were particular serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illnesses,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“Essentially what we found is that the connections in the psychopaths were not as good as the connections in the non-psychopaths. I would describe them as roads between the two areas—and we found that in the psychopaths, the roads had potholes and weren’t very well maintained.”

The one thing to add is that the TED talk is actually an extension and elaboration of some of what’s in the Blank Slate. For instance, on page 57, Pinker has a graph showing the decline of male death in warfare over time, and on page 168, he presents various theories for why we are getting nicer—including a discussion of cosmopolitanism that matches very closely with the quote that John gives from the TED talk. So, yes, it is the same Steven Pinker.

That’s true, actually. In US states with the “3 strikes and you’re out” law, a rational individual who is robbing gas stations and liquor stores for a living probably should murder the witnesses.

Murder is not just throwing the spear pointy end first – in a large number of societies it is predictably highly counterproductive for the murderer, and people do it anyway. Making murder counterproductive for the murderer has proven a quite successful social method for reducing its frequency. But not eliminating it. The irrational nondeterrability of the remaining murderers is a clear sign that their behavior isn’t resulting from reasoned analysis of their environment. They have managed not only to throw their spears blunt end first, but then to fall on the pointy ends themselves.

You assume that the remaining murderers are all irrational. Why? They bet big and – if they were caught – lost, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad decision at the time, except in the sense that it’s a decision outside observers want to happen less often. Sometimes not murdering someone can be very risky, even in rich countries.

There are a small number of murderers who probably spilt the blood they did because of some organic disorder or another. Their behavior is so uncommon and so apparently bad for their genetic success that they seem like a very bad model for our evolutionary heritage blah blah blah, although of course you can, as with anything else, hypothesize an EEA in which they were indeed adaptive.

See, if it’s possible for a human child to develop into a wolf, it seems that there must be enough plasticity inside that brain to adapt and develop into pretty much anything

I found Edelman’s book Wider Than the Sky (though not among the aforementioned recommendations) particularly worthwhile in helping me to construct a sensible understanding of brain activity and plasticity. The extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection model accounts physiologically for the experience of consciousness as well as the higher-order mappings and reinforcement of physiological “value systems” (value-category memory) which together could reasonably account for a human being learning to imitate the behaviors of a wolf.

Anyhow, I would recommend slogging through that book to anyone who is enjoying slogging through this discussion of EP (the latter group does include me).

Wooooah…hold on there tiger. Im not trying to explain murder. I’m trying to explain why the fact that murder is a universal does not prove that ‘we’ are therefore genetically programmed to murder. To be more specific, you actually claimed that because murder is a universal that therefore proves that it is actually impossible that we are born a ‘tabula rasa’.

My point is merely that of course we may well be genetically programmed to murder. But you can’t infer it from that.

In any case, it’s not even necessary that murderers benefit from their murders for my argument to hold up. All that is necessary is for murderers to believe that they will benefit from their murders: for example, by believing that they won‘t get caught, or that if they do, their lawyer will get them off. Or (and this is an even more important point in a real world situation) believing that the ‘knock on the head’ won’t actually kill the person they are robbing. Incidentally, to really understand my point here, you have to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of ‘benefit’ and ‘rationality’.

‘Pure’ irrational murderers (the Fred Wests etc.) are so unusual, statistically speaking, it’s not clear what can be inferred from them.

Fair point in theory, but the range of situations between different societies is greater than the range of situations in any one society. So I think you could quite likely demonstrate statistically that individuals have to be non-identical to end up with violence-usage rates always above zero but less than 100%.

In any case, the existence of those variations is not particularly scientifically controversial – psychopathy is both a medical and (in the UK) legally recognised term, with clinical evidence that would require pretty radical scepticism to dismiss (unlike paranoia, which is of course a sinister plot by the Medical Establishment).

One quite plausible conclusion of an EP approach is that those variations can’t possibly be genetically inherited, because if they were, evolutionary pressures would apply, which would lead to extinction or speciation in low double-digit generations. In one of those societies where you have a 65% chance of a violent death, not killing one of your enemies would seem to the kind of impact on your chances of surviving to breed that evolution would be unable to ignore.

Wait… are you saying that in all societies, murderers benefit from their murders?

Actually I think your argument requires even more than that – that personal benefit is the only reason for murder (because even a few irrational murderers would require an alternate explanation for murder that isn’t functional).

Murder is not just throwing the spear pointy end first – in a large number of societies it is predictably highly counterproductive for the murderer, and people do it anyway. Making murder counterproductive for the murderer has proven a quite successful social method for reducing its frequency. But not eliminating it. The irrational nondeterrability of the remaining murderers is a clear sign that their behavior isn’t resulting from reasoned analysis of their environment. They have managed not only to throw their spears blunt end first, but then to fall on the pointy ends themselves.

More generally, “Pinker may well be right, but his argument [that changing social institutions have reduced the rate of violence over time] is totally inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges.” only makes sense if you assume that no phenomenon (even an aggregate one like the murder rate) can have more than one cause (or if you insert a spurious “all” into the claim attributed to Pinker, strawmanning him in the process). Total inconsistency only emerges if you interpret Pinker’s previous beliefs to predict that the murder rate can’t change at all in different circumstances.

Murder could be caused by genetic predispositions to primitive, irrational urges and circumstances. Opportunistically self-interested murderers are easy to deter by changing the conditions so that they won’t benefit from murder anymore. Primitive irrational urge murderers aren’t, which is why we still have them. (Since those urges are themselves conditional behaviors, we might try to eliminate the conditions that trigger them; unfortunately the evidence seems to indicate that some of the conditions are things like “Person A sleeps with person B, and then with person C. This may provoke jealous rage in B, even if A and B have no stable relationship or it had already terminated.”, which seem a little difficult to eliminate, given the primitive irrational urges that probably influence A’s behavior in the same scenario.) This is a pretty basic level of nuance and assuming Pinker wouldn’t or couldn’t engage in it seems unjustified.

Of course, we don’t have another species with different predispositions to plug into the same social structures and observe the result. But we can observe the same species in very different conditions, and EP gives one possible way to explain results that seem both unresponsive to conditions, and not amenable to the pointy-spear explanation because they aren’t actually (or even plausibly) functioning.

P.S. 84 seems a bit like goalpost-moving, but I don’t really care which ideas are called evolutionary psychology and which are called something else. In any case the idea that circumstances can change human behavior isn’t inconsistent with the idea that some human behaviors are resistant to circumstantial (including cultural) influence because of genetic biases, so IMO Pinker is not contradicting himself whether one of his ideas is called “EP” and another “non EP” or otherwise.

According to wikipedia

…When completely brought up by animals, the feral child exhibits behaviors (within physical limits) almost entirely like those of the particular care-animal, such as its fear of or indifference to humans. The term Mowgli Syndrome has been applied. These cases have been investigated by researchers and scientists in the fields of psychology and sociology.