Fast Food Explanation

I wasted part of my holiday reading one of the more dreadful books I’ve come across recently, Catherine Salmon and Donald Symon’s _Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality_ (published in Weidenfeld and Nicholson’s “Darwinism Today” series). It’s a grandiose title for a rather slim volume, which purports to apply Darwinian theory to the understanding of ‘slash fiction,’ fan-written stories in which various characters from popular fiction have passionate sex and declare their undying love for each other (Kirk and Spock are favourites, and have their own subgenre). Not that fan fiction mightn’t be an interesting subject of study, but you won’t find many insights in Salmon and Symon’s mercifully short monograph.

This said, the book is a handy encapsulation of the reasons why I (and many other social scientists) are unconvinced by the hard Darwinist program for the explanation of human social behavior. Salmon and Symon are unabashed functionalists – they argue that functional explanations provide a powerful tool for understanding human motivations. Our behaviour is shaped by functional imperatives stemming from our evolutionary history; just as the eye can be explained by the functional need to see (so as to find food, avoid predators etc), so can our sexual behaviour be explained by our functional need to reproduce.

Now obviously there’s quite a lot to this as a general explanation; human beings don’t have a free pass from evolutionary forces. Nonetheless, functionalist explanations have fallen out of fashion in the social sciences, and for good reason. Social scientists, typically, are interested in explaining variation – we ask questions such as why does country x have a democratic system of government while country y is authoritarian, and try to come up with generalizable causal theories that can predict these different outcomes. We often aren’t very successful, but that’s another story. Salmon and Symon, however, aren’t really interested in causal factors at this level – in a rather revealing aside, they argue that

bq. the essential ingredients of universally popular fast food (sugar, salt and fat) provide clearer insight into evolved human gustatory adaptions than do the world’s great cuisines (with all their complexities, idiosyncrasies and historical contingencies)

In other words, specific differences in outcomes (such as the various great cuisines that have emerged historically) don’t count for much. It’s the grand evolutionary imperative to gobble up lard that matters.

This is a reasonable starting point if, for example, you want to explain why human beings universally tend to eat more fat than is good for them when they get the chance (although you still should provide rather more empirical evidence for your claims than evolutionary psychologists are in the habit of providing). It may even explain some differences between males and females (Salmon and Symon grossly overstate their case on this). But it doesn’t work at all if you’re trying to explain a rather particular and localized phenomenon, such as why some women read and write stories about what Starsky and Hutch get up to in their spare time. If you want to explain this properly, you need to give a good account of why most women don’t read and write this stuff, and would probably give you odd looks if you suggested that they should. Salmon and Symon simply have no way of explaining why some women do, and some women don’t, because their version of evolutionary theory isn’t cut out for finely grained explanations of this sort; instead, it rests on very general claims about the Way That Women Are. The authors do a bit of vague handwaving to the effect that slash fans might be former tomboys, who somehow combine masculine and feminine patterns of thought – but they don’t bother to provide either empirical evidence or decent arguments to back up this suggestion.

Biological functionalist explanations may tell us interesting things about certain universals of human psychology. But they usually do a rotten job of explaining the specifics and the differences – why some people adopt this pattern of behavior, other people that pattern. This theoretical inadequacy all too frequently tempts the empire-builders of evolutionary psychology into imperial overstretch, explaining specific and local patterns of human behaviour as manifestations of some greater evolutionary imperative, without bothering to detail the intermediate mechanisms through which overall imperatives translate into particular outcomes. And thus, the profusion of “just so” stories, “ad hominid”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/blog19.html#201 arguments and other intellectual bad habits in the evolutionary psychology literature.

It doesn’t need to be this way – Jared Diamond’s _Guns, Germs and Steel_ is a great counter-example, a book that takes biology and physical circumstance seriously – but doesn’t resort to boil-in-the-bag explanations. Unlike Salmon, Symon and their ilk, Diamond knows just how far his theories can go in explaining local outcomes, and doesn’t try to push them any further. Most evolutionary psychologists command nothing like this level of nuance and level of attention to detail. And as a result, their explanations are a little like Big Macs – appealing on first glance, but with a tendency to leave you dissatisfied and nursing a nasty feeling in your stomach, if you make the mistake of swallowing them.