Evo-psych factoids

Critiques of evolutionary psychology are overdue, but the critics, ever since the sociobiology days, have consistently lost ground because of their inability to go the full mile and critique the core doctrine of Darwinism, adaptational selectionism. Some of the nonsense here is amazing, e.g. Dennett’s claim that free will evolves from an adapataional scenario. The left especially, which should be screaming about the obvious ideological connection to neo-liberalism, is paralyzed by its own confusions stemming from Engels. Once your assume the basics of natural selection, the evo-psych confusions can’t be far behind. In fact no decent account of the descent of man has ever been offered, and the clumsy stupidities of standard theory are mostly speculative scenarios.
The idea of a fixed ‘human nature’ evolved in the Paleolithic is one of the more absurd dogmas here and produces belly laughs among Buddhists, and one wonders why noone considers that the influence of emerging civilizaton could have changed that behavior.
The attempt to invade history with sociobiology produce some of the dumbest fallacies and the plain fact is that standard evolutionary explanation can’t handle the evolution of ethics. Check out my http://eonix.8m.com/2nd/intro1_2_3.htm on “Botched Theories and the Coefficient of Murder”.
In the current Intelligent Desing scam environment all critical thinking seems to been sidelined to maintain the front lines, but the critique of evo-psych won’t really succeed in isolation and needs to break through the monumental denseness of the whole field of Darwinian preconceptions.

From the citation, it looks as if Professor Buller’s critique itself makes an elementary mistake. He says that the data that suggest greater violence by stepfathers is biased and should be ignored. But he then advances the contrary proposition that therefore the rates of viloence by biological and step-fathers are equal. Not so. All his argumant could show is that we don’t know.
Incidentally, the evo-psych explanation does not depend on whether the stepfather or the natural mother in the new relationship actually commits the abuse. The shift in affection to a new mate by the mother could weaken her attachment to the child of a previous one.
What happened to evil stepmothers? Folklore gives them just as bad a press as stepfathers.

“What happened to evil stepmothers? Folklore gives them just as bad a press as stepfathers.”

The idea that tales of evil step-parents are all over folklore, and that this represents an important understanding of something about human nature, is just one example of the many problems with the sort of fact free just-so-stories spun by evolutionary psychologists.

Folklore isn’t full of tales of evil step-parents. It’s full of tales of evil parents. When these stories were collected by the Grimms (and others) as the first fairy tales, to make them more palatable the evil parents were taken out and the evil step-parents were put in. The reason for all the wicked stepmother stories is because of a 150 year old marketing decision.

This whole “debate” frustrates the hell out me. Purveyors of untestable just-so stories on one side, people who make demonstrably stupid statements about there being “no such thing as human nature” on the other, and in the middle- science, having the life squeezed out of it. Ugh.

From a cursory reading Buller’s view seems fairly nuanced. There’s nothing anti-evolutionary in his view, nor is he, despite what Steve Labonne seems to be claiming, denying that biology can provide us with explanations for human behaviour.

He’s simply claiming that a very specific set of principles avowed by a particular group of scientists working on human pyschology and sociology don’t simply fall out of the relatively uncontroversial basic facts about evolution. The EP advocates need to back up their claims with evidence, evidence that may in fact be lacking.

“Nobody with sense … imagines that human nature is “uniform” or dictates behavior in fine detail.”

I’ve read Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” recently. And I never really got my head around what he meant by human nature. It seemed an enormously variable term that encompassed lots of different types of behaviour. If a trait isn’t universal and doesn’t occur absolutely everywhere, then surely it doesn’t have much of a claim to be part of human nature.

“A Stone Age man who focused his care and support on his biological children, rather than kids his mate had from an earlier liaison, would do better by evolution’s scorecard (how many descendants he left) than a man who cared for his stepchildren. With this mindset, a stepfather is far more likely to abuse his stepchildren. One textbook asserts that kids living with a parent and a stepparent are some 40 times as likely to be abused as those living with biological parents.”

Surely the more telling question is, if killing stepchildren is adaptive, why is it so uncommon? The argument is not that this is one of a mix of evolutionary stable strategies, but that the behaviour is adaptive, yet we have very very many stepfathers nowadays, and not that many cases of infanticide. Why aren’t the other stepfathers killing their offspring?

It seems unwise to claim that families with stepfathers don’t have higher rates of abuse than families without, on his rather flimsy argument – you would think that stepparents, who are less likely to have bonded with a child, are more likely to elicit resentment from a child, who enter families probably with more problems on average (either parental break-up or single-parenthood), would be more likely to abuse children under any model, biological or social.

Well, I’m as Foucauldian as the next entry-level social scientiste, but it’s helpful not to attribute obviously stupid claims to Foucault, especially ones he didn’t make.

The introductory section of the Penguin Foucault reader makes it quite clear that his approach is not to “deny” the existence of human nature, but to sidestep the question (to put it, as the Penguin editor neglects to say, in phenomenological parentheses) to look at how various discourses around “human nature” operate, which is by no means the same thing.

I don’t know if Steve Labonne’s heroic quest for a strawman worthy of his +3 Lance of Indignation will ever succeed — although there may well be American “Foucauldians” dim enough to suit — but he isn’t going to unseat many literate Yoorpean windmills.

This is a slight digression but I remember a speech by Patricia Hewitt (I think?) in which she cited evidence that the rates of stepfather-abuse were skewed by a small number of highly abusive men who had a terrible effect on multiple chaotic step-families. I’m sorry I can’t point to the detail, I only remembered it because it seemed to have intuitive plausibility.

There could be two types of step-father: those who attempt a father-like long term role, and those who form unstable sexual relations with single mothers, and have incidental contact with the children of those mothers. I would imagine that the abuse rates of those two groups would be very different.

In terms of evolutionary biology I think we would have to show that the abuse rates of biological fathers and those in father-like roles were different, in order to show that biology is over-riding social role. I’m not sure that would be the case.

“So what we should see is, going up the quintiles, is an increasing number of children (who survive to adulthood) for each potential parent. By the top quintile, where the amount of wealth required to enable a child to reach comfortable adulthood is abundant, we should see very large families.

Do we see this? No. Why? My theory is that people are reproducing social class.”

I seem to remember, and this is from a lecture a long time ago so I could easily be just making it up, that, if you stratify rich countries by social class or somesuch, you then get an increase in offspring with wealth or income within each group – even though there is no overall trend. Or something like that.

RS, that could well be true (sounds like ANCOVA). In which case the non-wealth between-country differences are swamping the wealth effect, which is not what would be expected under an ev psych view.

_Finally, nothing in or out of EP would have to predict that rich families will have more children. Reproductive fitness isn’t simply measured by how many offspring you produce._

Quite so, both that and kimmit’s point (that cognitive modules which evolved to do one thing for hunter-gatherers may have effects in our very different environment that are difficult to unravel) are highly important points, non-obvious to many in the general educated public, which are too often lost in popularizations produced by both the pro- and anti-evo-psych camps.

By the way, I highly recommend not coming to conclusions about the arguments of a 500+ page book that covers a very wide range of topics and addresses a wealth of empirical research (save when it discusses theory-of-mind, of course) from one and two-paragraph blurbs about the book. Buller’s arguments about the stepparenting data are much more nuanced than any of the summaries would lead one to believe, as are his arguments against the other sex stuff.

I suppose this warning is unnecessary for most CT readers, but some have already begun to address Buller without having read him.

The interesting thing to me is that the sensible, reserved and supportable points that some evolutionary psychologists want to make don’t really support any sociological conclusions at all, whereas the silly, unsupportable ones that other evolutionary psychologists make support very specific views in sociology and even support specific social policies. I think that this supports my original intuition that it was a bad idea to allow the term “evolutionary psychology” to develop; the sociobiologists ought to stand and fight (and lose) their ground, while the sensible type of “evolutionary psychology” ought to just be called “psychology”.

Btw, despite Steve Labonne’s points about, there is no very strong evidence to suggest any of the following

1) that interesting behaviour is controlled by modular structures in the brain
2) that these modular structures evolved during a particular period (the Pleistocene)
3) that they have not changed since.

1) From systems of the brain which are not modular or discrete structures.
2) Does not logicall follow at all; there have been numerous mass extinctions since the agricultural revolution, which itself more or less did for the hinter-gatherers
3) One single generation is enough time for major biological changes if, for example, malaria has just crossed the species boundary and only a few people have the sickle-cell gene.

“1) that interesting behaviour is controlled by modular structures in the brain”

What about Cosmides and Tooby’s original Wason selection test experiments? My impression is that there’s fairly strong evidence for functional adaptation with regard to human behavior.

And it seems strange to me to claim that Steve Labonne’s critique of the anti-EP side is setting up a strawman when we have John Landon’s comment as the first one in this thread.

Labonne expresses my sentiments exactly: this debate is extremely tiresome to me because the partisans, particularly the anti-EP crowd, are motivated by ideology. They also assume an opposing ideology on the part of all pro-EP persons, when it’s the case that while this is certainly true for many, it’s not true for many others. You might say that I’m making the same mistake in generalizing about the anti-EP crowd; but even here among the CT bloggers, who try very hard to make their criticisms only against method and overreach, there’s a discernable ideological bias underneat. In my opinion.

I’m culturally very progressive and I have no interest in validating a reactionary cultural view via evolutionary psychology. If anything, I’d like to see the opposite. But I’m offended and deeply annoyed with the anthropocentric exceptionalism in the anti-EP crowd which, it seems to me ironically, is itself deeply conservative and in its own way reactionary. And, I think, this entrenched anthropocentric exceptionalism has in so many ways strongly contributed to the very worst, most harmful ideologies that exist and have existed. I always find it very odd to see the social progressives standing right there side-by-side with the Christian fundamentalists in viewing Man apart from nature. Or worse, above.

1) Plenty of interesting behaviours are controlled by modular structures in the brain. Just not necessarily sociologically interesting ones like rape or killing your kids off.

3) I doubt there has been substantial change in the hard wired aspects of human neural systems in recent times – but the interplay of the development of neural systems and their environment, mean that rapid changes in the environment of humans may have had great changes in the neural organisation of human brains (e.g. reading is modular to some extent, but didn’t evolve to be so).

_Plenty of interesting behaviours are controlled by modular structures in the brain. Just not necessarily sociologically interesting ones like rape or killing your kids off._
I think that’s a very fair statement. All I really ask is that people not assume a priori that “not necessarily” = “necessarily not”.

I suppose this warning is unnecessary for most CT readers, but some have already begun to address Buller without having read him.

Sorry, Chris. I should’ve phrased it better. But I can’t, dammit: this is how modular structures in my brain evolved. It’s not my fault, really, I’ve always been like this.

Not just an admittledly partisn source, but not even one worth taking seriously at all in a purely scholarly sense. Methinks you may want to do a little more reading before making confident, yet nebulous pronouncements. There are plenty of sound, nonideological books about cognitive sciecne written for the general educated public- Amazon is your friend.

” ‘From systems of the brain which are not modular or discrete structures.’
I know of nothing in the contemporary cognitive science literature which would help me even make sense of this point, and would welcome pointers to such information.”

“Module” means a lot of different things these days, but as applied to evolutionary psychology it means that the mind is a set of computers that are each specialized for a particular task, and contain proprietary databases that supply the information to solve a unique adaptive problem. (The sociobiologist Don Symonds has the best version of the slogan: the mind could not be a general purpose problem-solver because there is no such thing as a general purpose problem.)

This is not the claim that the brain contains component structures that specialize in particular tasks. The relationship between psychological modularity and the functional anatomy of the brain is a theoretical battlefield. Many people take the profusion of connections in the brain (especially backward connections) to refute modularity. But EPers do not argue that the modules are identical to particular brain structures. Any given module could be, as Pinker puts it somewhere, spread around the brain like roadkill.

As far as the psychology goes, even some modularity theorists (like Fodor, who started the modularity craze but thinks EP is rubbish) insist that some non-modular structures are necessary to integrate information from different modules and combine information about the world with utilities. He restates the case in his book on Pinker, “The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way”.

Last, people who work on neural nets have traditionally argued that domain-general learning rules, rather than rules selected for particular problem, can model our psychology adequately, and so the mind might be a general purpose problem solver after all.

Also, EP is strongly innatist. So Karmiloff-Smith, for instance, thinks that modularization occurs during development via “representational redescription”. EPers generally insist that the modules are hard-wired in the sense that information about theory of mind (say) is innate. In that sense, Karmiloff-Smith does not believe that modules are hard-wired.

And also, Steve, if you are going to have an argument about evolutionary psychology with me, please could you do so on the basis of claims I actually make, and forswear the phrase “you seem to be arguing”. You have just said:

the extreme form of non-modularity that you seem to argue for

on the basis of my actual words:

there is no very strong evidence to suggest […] that interesting behaviour is controlled by modular structures in the brain

I’m clearly, here, making the claim that it is an open question whether interesting behaviour (meaning, in context, interesting from the point of view of sociology, sorry if this wasn’t clear) is determined by discrete modular structures (I think that Pinker is making a non-point in his “roadkill comment, btw; a structure is no less discrete because it has a complicated shape). I really don’t see how this could be interpreted as “extreme non-modularity”. I am not attempting to portray you as an extremist of some kind or other and would appreciate it if the courtesy was returned.

On a sociological note, I’d mention that every single time I have discussed sociobiology on the internet, my interlocutor has a) tried to pretend I am defending a position which I clearly did not hold and b) claimed that I am entirely motivated by ideological concerns. I don’t know what’s behind this stylised fact, but I suspect it is not a structure in the brain coded by DNA sequence.

“Finally, nothing in or out of EP would have to predict that rich families will have more children. Reproductive fitness isn’t simply measured by how many offspring you produce. It’s also measured by how many offspring your offspring produce, and how many offspring your offspring’s offspring produce. It might very well be the case that you can have higher reproductive fitness by producing fewer offspring, taking better care of them, and thus increasing the likelihood that they will all survive and produce offspring, take good care of them, and so on.”

Posted by Chris

Old news, Chris – the r vs k reproductive strategy. Except is there any proof that the multi-millionaire with two children will have any more (insert ‘great-‘ as needed)grand-children than the poorer person who has several children?

If one is short of resources it might well make reproductive sense to have fewer offspring, making up for numbers with greater probabilit of survival. However, in the industrialized world today, and for several generations back, the probability of survival with greater resources doesn’t seem to be that much greater than the probability of survival with somewhat fewer resources, for a larger range of family sizes than we see in the upper and middle classes.

How large a family have to be before the addition of one more child does not increase the expected number of suriving offspring?

This can be taken on to further generations, as well. 2 children * 2 children of theirs = 4 grandchildren. 3 children*2 children of theirs = 6 grand-children, a 50% increase. (and 3 by 3 gives 9 grand-children; if family size culturally transmits, that’d be critical).

Is there any sociological[1] analysis which would indicate (again, for modern middle/upper-class people in the industrialized world) that people are having the optimal number of children which would maximize the number of surviving offspring (and great-offspring)?

Anecdotally, and subject to the ecological fallacy, note that the USA and Western Europe are only kept from shrinking populations by fresh immigrants, due to their numbers, and the higher fertility rates for first-generation immigrants.

[1] Or any other field of science, outside of evolutionary psych?

Reproductive fitness isn’t simply measured by how many offspring you produce. It’s also measured by how many offspring your offspring produce […]

This seems crucially important to me. How is reproductive fitness defined? You seem to be saying here that what’s important is the “limit as g becomes infinite” of O(F,g), the offspring F has in generation g. I’m not convinced there is a meaningful way of estimating this: the future course of human history may be too much of an unknown.

But it seems reasonable to suppose that O(F,g+5) say would be relevant. And it’s hard to see why this wouldn’t be increased by F’s having more immediate offspring. Finding the relationship between O(F,g) and O(F,g+5) for past values of g is an empirical question and I wonder what the answer is. It seems to me likely that it would confirm that O(F,g+5) has been correlated with O(F,g+1) for reasonably small values of O(F,g+1).

I’ve a suspicion that some advocates of EP are not using this definition, but as a proxy for reproductive fitness are tacitly using something like number of offspring * average wealth of offspring, thus ladening the theory with the assumption that wealth matters.

Daniel, since your sources of “information” evidently are heavy on politicized polemics like Rose and Rose, your presumption merely amuses me.

By the way I did not say I knew nothing about modules, I said I know nothing about your line that behavior is influenced by “systems of the brain which are not modular or discrete structures.” Since you force me to be less polite, your form of words is either a truism to which nobody could object (if “not discrete” is interpreted in a non-extreme way- I hope you realize that nobody imagines that some modern equivalent of phrenology is true nor, as Dominic Murphy mentioned above, that integrative structures are not also required) or else is false, if interpreted in such a way that it really makes any substantive claims. Either way it’s uninteresting.

_On a sociological note, I’d mention that every single time I have discussed sociobiology on the internet, my interlocutor has a) tried to pretend I am defending a position which I clearly did not hold and b) claimed that I am entirely motivated by ideological concerns._
And, oddly enough, this is _exactly_ the same thing- as has been more than amply documented!- that people like the Roses indulge in from the other sideline. This unproductive polarization is exactly what I object to.

“I do think that anyone claiming that the brain is a collection of computers, if they are also going to claim that those computers are (in some way) genetically coded, is committed by logical implication to the proposition that each of those “computers” has some (set of) neurophysical object(s) within the brain which is identical with it, and that, properly defined, each of these “computers” is identical with a different such neurophysical object. I don’t really see any other way in which the claim that there are modules could be given meaning at all.”

I also tend toward this view. Unfortunately, EP’s use of the term ‘module’ derives from its use in cognitive psychology, and ultimately what has been termed ultra-cognitive neuropsychology. Because cognitive psychology is a phenomenological, rather than explanatory, science, many advocates have claimed that it not only makes sense, but is actually the case, that the cognitive domain is separable from the neurological, and that cognitive modules are somehow real, yet unconnected to neurological modules. This is basically psychology as metaphor, and is untenable in my opinion. It was used as justification of the box-and-arrow style of cognitive psychology. But I don’t think it means anything scientific to claim that, because two things are -conceptually- separable, this tells us anything about whether things are separate ‘modules’ (just as Descartes didn’t prove that mind and matter are different, just because he thought so).

What is interesting is how advances in neuroscience have lead advocates of the modularity view to try and use these findings to boost their modularity thesis, when it is antipathetic to neuroscientific modularity.

Daniel, since your sources of “information” evidently are heavy on politicized polemics like Rose and Rose

Combining an unsupported and unjustified assertion with an ad hominem smear.

I said I know nothing about your line that behavior is influenced by “systems of the brain which are not modular or discrete structures.

So in other words, you weren’t being honest.

Since you force me to be less polite,

I certainly do not; quite the opposite, I *insist* that you start being more polite.

Either way it’s uninteresting

Dominic seemed to understand me perfectly, and since his ratio of actual comments on science to content-free insults is, to say the least, somewhat higher than yours, I take it that my point was not, in fact, uninteresting and was actually neither a truism nor obviously false.

[…] people like the Roses indulge in from the other sideline. This unproductive polarization is exactly what I object to.

Well, could I please remind you that you are not atually having an argument with “people like the Roses” on the subject of their debating tactics, then? You are on the website “Crooked Timber”, discussing, with me, the subject of whether there is any particular reason to believe in the underlying model of the brain that is presupposed by many kinds of EP. In this discussion, you have so far engaged in every single one of the tactics that you claim to object to, while not having actually made any arguments about the scientific points you claimed to care about. Please could you buck up your ideas, as as far as I can see, you are currently quite chronically embarrassing yourself?

Neil: Strange things do happen to cognitive functions in brain injury cases, but they’re usually to do with the kind of cognitive functions I’ve sweepingly dismissed as “not interesting” (ie, not the sort of thing upon which you could base a theory of social behaviour). I don’t agree that the brain damage cases show the kind of systematic variation in social-type behaviour which would support a kind of modularity which would support sociobiology. In any case, brain injury cases would only prove matters if the “modules” involved were exactly the kind of big contiguous brain-structures that Pinker says they’re unlikely to be.

There are some broadly psychological functions that are clearly (in a loose sense) modular and clearly developed through inheritance; colour vision is located in a specific place and colour-blindness is inherited, and sex drives and violent behaviour are related to testosterone levels in a way which is well understood at least at a broad level. What I’m denying is that there is any good evidence to believe in modules for things like “an unlearned preference for large breasts” or “an unlearned ability to detect cheaters” or “a preference for representative art”. These look to me like (in some not very well defined sense) very much more complicated kinds of behaviour, and kinds of behaviour for which a much simpler explanation (that they are learned) is available.

In response to rs, here is a good brief essay on a well-studied test case- face recognition. Conclusion: “It is a plastic expertise-specific module.” It is well to lose sight of neither the partial domain-specificity, _nor_ the plasticity, of modules. Such, of course, are the subtleties that get bleached out of politicized debates.

“Response” was really not the right word, “more info on the general subject raised by rs” is closer what I meant.

Daniel, you have a bad habit of provoking people with condescension, then calling them uncivil when they express their annoyance. I’ve been reading you for a long time. I no longer think you argue in good faith. You argue to win.

“Because cognitive psychology is a phenomenological, rather than explanatory, science, many advocates have claimed that it not only makes sense, but is actually the case, that the cognitive domain is separable from the neurological, and that cognitive modules are somehow real, yet unconnected to neurological modules.”

This somewhat mirrors the word “gene” with regard to ecology and molecular biology.

Anyone who is pretty well informed about evolution who is still giving this book the benefit of the doubt should read the full review linked at the top. It lists howlers from the book so bad I honestly wonder how the author possibly managed to research the claims of evolutionary psychology without correcting them.

For example:

“On a lighter note, evolutionary psychology claims that men prefer fertile, nubile young women because men wired for this preference came out ahead in the contest for survival of the fittest. The key study here asked 10,047 people in 33 countries what age mate they would prefer. The men’s answer: a 25-year-old.

“But the men were, on average, in their late 20s.”

“The empirical basis is no better. On average, 25-year-old women say they prefer 28-year-old men, even though 50-year-old men have much more of the high status and resources that evo psych says they are wired to lust after.”

Read the whole thing. Unless the reviewer has appallingly misrepresented this book, it’s on a par with Steven Rose’s Not In Our Genes.

” No, it shows a desired age difference of three years has increased to a full decade – exactly what evolutionary psychology has long maintained.”

I don’t think this is at all what ev psych has long maintained. Buller cites numerous EP theorists who argue that men should seek, as long-term mates, women who are of peak reproductive age, and have evolved a mate choice system to detect features that correlate with reproductive potential. These include (to quote David Buss) “full lips, clear skin, smooth skin,clear eyes, lustrous hair, good muscle tone and body fat distribution.” The argument concludes that these are most likely to be present in younger women, which is why men (of all ages) prefer them. If 50 yr old men prefer partners who are 40 rather than twentysomething then this really is bad news for people like Buss. Women of 40 are not visibly in their reproductive prime – and were even less likely to have been so on the savannah.

If the claim is just that as men age they prefer women who are progressively a bit younger, then wouldn’t you predict that 70 year old men prefer post-menopausal women? If so, what happens to the fundamental position that male mate choice is driven by a search for optimally fertile women?

The above post is exactly the sort of thing which gives Evolutionary Psychology a bad name. I’m sure you can (and Steven Pinker probably has) come up with post hoc rationalisations like this to fit almost any set of facts. Statements like

It’s not that optimal fertility isn’t a guiding star, isn’t the basis of attraction. It’s that other factors are going to impinge.

are great for holding a Maginot Line defence in debates but have the drawback of making the theory so vague as to be completely untestable.

“The above post is exactly the sort of thing which gives Evolutionary Psychology a bad name. I’m sure you can (and Steven Pinker probably has) come up with post hoc rationalisations like this to fit almost any set of facts.”

That is exactly what I was thinking. While it is conceivable that the post hoc rationalisation could be right, we have no particular reason to believe it. That is indeed one of the core flaws of much EP reasoning, appeals to poorly defined ‘social’ factors to rationalise why things aren’t the way you’d predict them to be. If the data suggest that men of all ages don’t actually prefer women of prime reproductive age (another weakness, of course, is the flimsiness of their research methodology – questionnaires indeed!) then the prime bit of evidence for your theory goes begging, you can’t use it both as evidence for your theory and post hoc rationalise why it doesn’t actually fit it.

“This somewhat mirrors the word “gene” with regard to ecology and molecular biology.”

Yes it does. With one crucial difference. Whereas in ecology they believe that although there is not a tidy one-to-one mapping of their units of selection onto molecular biologists’ genes (and to be fair, molecular biologists don’t think that genes are the only units of selection because they know that there is more to genetics than simply protein conformation), they still believe that their genes are embodied in, and explained by the DNA. [We have to remember that the molecular biology use of the word gene is actually different to the ecologist use].

On the other hand, modularity means pretty much the same thing in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, modularity in cognitive psychology is often asserted to be totally independent of brain modularity, the metaphor is that of software and hardware (people like Pinker were into this before EP came along), to them the brain is very much to be thought of as a microcomputer style machine running our cognitive software. So modularity at the cognitive level is logically independent of modularity at the hardware level. Of course brains don’t work like this, but it was a convenient assumption for the psychologists to work under, and claim their autonomy and independence from the brain scientists.

With modern cognitive neuroscience the disicplinary walls have broken down somewhat, but it is a good idea to bear in mind the origins of these modularity ideas, especially when people start asserting the autonomy of the cognitive level.

“in all likelihood, the brain has and continues to adapt after the end of the Pleistocene era”

And does that commit you to a belief in the very real possibility of racial differences in the cognitive domain?

“then the fact that the last three hundred years have seen the extinction of any of them who were not able to function in a capitalist economy run by white people might be considered a kind of adaptation”

I presume you’re taking the piss.

Well, sort of; I think that any intellectually consistent EP more or less has to accept that it can be used as a scientific basis for racism, and I don’t want to commit the fallacy of arguing against it for that reason. But you are entirely right that if a certain kind of EP type wants to be taken seriously then they should admit that this is the game they are in, rather than throwing their toys out the pram and screaming about the PC police. So a certain amount of rough mockery is entirely appropriate.

I don’t think that there’s any evidence at all that anything of the sort has happened or that the biological substrates exist in the right kind of way. But my point was that there have been mass extinctions of human populations in the historical era, and that mass extinctions are the sorts of things that alter the composition of populations in favour of traits posessed by the survivors. And the Aborigines and American Indians were, basically, offered the ultimatum of fitting into white society or dying, so I would not rule it out a priori that there was some difference between those who found themselves able to take the first option and those who didn’t which could be explained genetically. Another thing that I’d like EP to get away from is the implicit metaphor of “good genes” winning out through gradual improvement in a fair competition, like small businesses in the software industry.

“And the Aborigines and American Indians were, basically, offered the ultimatum of fitting into white society or dying”

I don’t think the Tasmanians were even given the choice.

Do you really think this is what happened to australian aborigines and native americans?

Not so strongly that I would be prepared to argue the point with a historian who knew his stuff but likewise I wouldn’t want to make anything important hang on its contrary.

“Those who have read into the subject will know that what Fuller is presenting as studies disproving the science are in fact an integral part of its findings.”

But sholdn’t that make you just a teensy bit worried that the studies you regard as ‘an integral part of its findings’ are not quite so persuasive if someone else can use them to argue against it.

“But my point was that there have been mass extinctions of human populations in the historical era, and that mass extinctions are the sorts of things that alter the composition of populations in favour of traits posessed by the survivors.”

Mass extinctions are important in evolution, defined sensu stricto as change in gene frequencies, because they do in fact change the frequencies of alleles by changing the species composition. However, they tend to be neutral within species. That said, Homo sapiens has never experienced a mass extinction in the paleontology sense of the word.

But you appear to mean bottleneck, of which a few have certainly occurred. (Bubonic plague in Europe for instance – this is not an extinction because no species went extinct because of it, as far as anyone knows). This can also change gene frequencies, this time within a population, so Homo sapiens has in fact evolved in the historical era, and incontrovertibly so. However, all this sort of evolution does is eliminate certain phenotypes in favor of other already existing phenotypes. It rarely creates new phenotypes (the probability of a new allele arising during the brief duration of these bottlenecks, which are often shorter than a generation in a long lived species like humans, is astronomically small). Culling some alleles in favor of others does not change the fact that both those alleles already existed before the bottleneck.

Now, one could certainly make the claim that recessive alleles, formerly rare, were brought to fixation by these bottlenecks. Thus there was a fundamental change in the nature of expressed traits meaning ‘new’ phenotypes were seen. AFAIK, there is no evidence of this sort, and the genetic architecture necessary is relatively rare, and thus unlikely to be true often enough to have had a profound impact on human phenotype. Therefore, almost any phenotypes expressed post-bottleneck was expressed pre-bottleneck.

So we’re left in the situation that modern phenotypes evolved before the bottlenecks, and were perhaps selected for by the bottlenecks. But it doesnt change that they already existed, and thus evolved during the pleistocene, or whenever earlier time you wish to invoke.

That said, sexual selection is a powerful selective force, so rapid evolution is in principle possible, especially as it relates to mate choice. Unfortunately, humans are constrained by Fisher’s Law, that response to selection is limited by the genetic variance of a trait. Homo sapiens has notoriously low genetic variance, implying that there isn’t much ability to respond to selection, even if strong selection is present.

As to EP or not? I’m mostly agnostic, my own expertise being invertebrate evolution and ecology, but i can’t help feeling that at some level how we think must be governed by the box we think in (the brain), which is necessarily built by gene-coded proteins and gene signalling during development. This implies that there are constraints dictated by biology on the way we think, though how those constraints manifest is something that is likely to be an open question for the foreseeable future.

(assuming my previous comment survives moderation)…

I should probably note that by ‘experienced a mass extinction’ i mean were in danger of going extinct. So while humans have caused at least one, and are possibly causing another right now, we certainly weren’t in danger of going extinct (and are unlikely to be now). Hence we havent experienced the risk of extinction during a mass extinction.

Daniel, you seem to be confusing me with Steve. I didn’t raise modularity of the brain myself at all. And there’s nothing to be drawn on. My point on Margaret Mead’s Samoan hoax was simply that the reason that, as you claim, you are accused of being motivated by ideology is that it is plainly true. There aren’t respectable, serious scholars any more who still believe Samoa is some island equivalent of Star Trek’s planet Risa where hedonism is everything and promiscuity blessed.

rs, you’re absolutely right to distinguish between short-term and long-term partners, but either way, Fuller emphatically does not damage any claim EP has actually made. I suspect one thing not yet appreciated in this thread about the questions is that in the surveys I have seen they tend to ask for an age range rather than a preferred age. So even assuming the preference for youth lasts, as long as people your own age are also attractive, then someone aged 30 will likely list women aged 20 to 30, while someone aged 40 will list women aged 20 to 40. A preferred average age of 25 becomes an average age of 30, without that preference for young women changing at all.

And to answer you directly, no, I’ve never seen a claim in EP as strong as the one Fuller ‘refutes’. What I’ve seen countless times is that men prefer women an average of three years younger, that women prefer men an average three years older, and that men’s preferred age gap increases with his age while women’s does not.

What I’ve seen countless times is that men prefer women an average of three years younger, that women prefer men an average three years older, and that men’s preferred age gap increases with his age while women’s does not

This is data, not a prediction of EP. It is, as rs correctly points out, actually very difficult to reconcile it with the typical pop-EP claim that preferences in sexual partners are shaped by what was an optimal reproductive strategy on those mythical African plains.

“These findings – males look for women older than themselves before they reach the age when women are approaching their reproductive peak, and younger and younger than themselves the further and further they age from women’s reproductive peak – are both consistent with the idea that men are looking for reproductive fitness.”

But, women are at their reproductive peak 20-25. So if men are looking for reproductive fitness they are not doing a very good job outside of the 18-28 range. Now there may be other factors serving to attenuate the desire for 20-25 year old females. But, the problem for the EPer, is that the data do not even establish that men are going for 20-25 yr old females in the first place – you are having to explain away, by post hoc rationalisation, why the evidence you are claming supports your hypothesis, doesn’t actually concur with your hypothesis!

“…are both consistent with the idea that men are looking for reproductive fitness.”

CONSISTENT, but not particularly good evidence that it is in fact the case.

Peter, let me try and put this another way.

Let us say we take a very naive measure of how accurate the theories are by comparing their accuracy in prediction, judged very crudely in years different.

So, our two theories, men want women of optimum reproductive age, or they want women of the same age as them.

16yr old. Let us say they fancy 18yr olds. That is 2yrs out for the same age theory (SAT), and 4yrs out for the optimum reproductive age theory (ORAT).

20yr old. I guess we’d call this one a draw.

30yr old. So they fancy 27yr olds say. ORAT is out by 2, SAT by 3.

40yr old. Say 35yr olds. ORAT is out by 10yrs, SAT by 5yrs.

50yrs old. Say 40yrs. ORAT is out by 15yrs, SAT by 10yrs.

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

D^2 protests too much,

Perhaps so, but I also contribute original material

and is in no position to do

Sitting on arse in front of computer; the perfect position.

so given that he touts Alas, Poor Darwin,

A quick review of the thread will reveal that I actually recommended one chapter of the book, as a summary of the state of play on modularity for someone who (dishonestly, it turned out) claimed to be totally ignorant of it. And I described it as “admittedly partisan”. It never ceases to amaze me why someone would bother to make a claim that could be falsified so easily.

a book riddled with exactly the kind of tactics- for example blatant, easily documented attributions to opponents of views which they do not in fact hold which he complains of in the proponents of EP.

I have not, in fact, complained of this.

He also seems to some difficulty with reading comprehension

An aside; the phrase “problems with reading comprehension” is an absolutely infallible indicator of someone who is floundering and has decided to get nasty about it. Please stop.

since he appears still not to have noticed that I clearly stated several times in this discussion that I am neither a propenent nor an opponent

Steve, whether you were a proponent, opponent, exponent, component or pleniponent, I would still ask you to concentrate on the issue at hand, address points made rather than strawmen and not randomly draw in unrelated people in order to abuse them. I haven’t, in fact, asserted even once that you were a proponent of EP and nor have I made any point which would depend on your being one.

, but merely one who would like to see research proceed without interference from ideological public pissing matches.

How do you think that this wish of yours would better be pursued by slagging me off for citing the Roses? How was it helped by bringing up Margaret Mead?

Steve, look back. I made three points disagreeing with you about modularity and the Pleistocene development of the brain. I said:

Btw, despite Steve Labonne’s points above (corrected), there is no very strong evidence to suggest any of the following

1) that interesting behaviour is controlled by modular structures in the brain
2) that these modular structures evolved during a particular period (the Pleistocene)
3) that they have not changed since.

This just isn’t an “ideological pissing match”. Even when you responded with “where else do they come from? The arse?” I remained polite and answered your question. I only got annoyed when you did something which appeared to me to be dishonest – pretending to have no knowledge of what I was talking about. Then I mentioned the Roses’ book. That was where the ideological pissing match began, because you claimed that the Karmiloff-Smith chapter was worthless because it was contained in a book by the Roses (who you have continued to insult) and told me to read some “nonideological” sources.

I guess that’s his real beef though, since the latter appear to be his main stock in trade (and not only in this discussion).

See above. I honestly believe that an impartial reader would look at this thread and see 1) polite discussion between me and nearly everyone else I discussed with 2) insults between me and you (and Keith Ellis) and 3) insults between you (and Keith Ellis) and nearly everyone else you discussed with. And draw conclusions.

Like I say, I really don’t know why these things get so damnably nasty. I’m certainly open to the possibility that I’m causing it all by being condescending and passive-aggressive, but I am presumably equally condescending and passive-aggressive on other topics, and it’s only ever evolutionary psychology that seems to stir people to this kind of anger.

Peter, searching through the thread I found that the intrusion of Mead and Samoa into a thread on EP was made by you. Now, I know you’re a real big fan of the Blank Slate, and if Pinker devotes time to it, and Pinker likes EP, it must consequently be relevant to EP. But it ain’t. There may be a discussion in which the two come up together, but you haven’t started it – hell, you’re not even working in that direction.

Alongside my Dennett and Pinker (the harder stuff is at the office along with the Scotch) sits my remaindered copy of the Rosesquared book; flicking to the Karmiloff-Smith chapter I find nothing particularly ideological and much sensible. But as I’m based in the same uni perhaps that’s just the partisan talking. Anyway, I fear we are retreading very similar ground over and over: Crooked Timber » » The Garbage Gene September 21st, 2004 Crooked Timber » » Moral Relativism October 18th, 2004 Crooked Timber » » Pursuing the Truth February 14th, 2005 and on and on. I feel no real need to repeat myself; rather, I will self-plagiarise:

First, some critics of EP that I would hope no-one is prepared to render ‘ideologically suspect’ (honestly, this is Brass-Eye ‘Bad Science’ level):

Heyes – (2003, in psychological review, 110(4), 713-727 – I seem to be hawking this around the internet in a campaign of putting EP in its place….)
Abstract and possible full text here (you will need to have a password for full text) here

Or equally a Panksepp paper, which is a bit older so some of the crit may be obsolete. But its worth checking out.
here

You will find no sensible scientist grumbling about research into the evolutionary basis for colour vision. Quibbles, sure.Yet a fair few will deride work on the evolutionary basis for standing in queues, or a phenomena as complex, wide-ranging and ephemeral as religion. I think it should be fairly self-evident as to why. And the key point is that EP is all the stuff about queues and religion, sulking and modern art, and NOT the other stuff. I’m not playing a definition game here: EP is a fairly specific research program, and those researching visual area V4, the role of the hippocampus in spatial memory or failures motor coordination are overwhelmingly not part of it.[I’ll now add that therefore the argument that I’ve heard Peter make previously that this shows how the Left is as bankrupt as the Creationists is mind-blowingly wrong: evolution underpins many aspects of mind and brain research, but only one school – the Nativist strong-modulist savannah crowd – is trying to oftentimes run before it can walk, into areas that cannot help but to have public policy implications, with a reckless and disreputable past behind it – and not too far behind either; read Kitcher’s Vaulting Ambition.]
…
I agree…that in the future Evolutionary Psychology may BE psychology, or at least one strata of explanation, and if it was really delivering we would all be evolutionary psychologists now. It’s not, in the main, so we don’t. Not to say there isn’t good work coming out of it -as in many areas of psychology, a young science of a hugely complex subject; just that we should apply our skepticism, especially when people are making big claims about immutability, or being designed for anything.

Can I go back to the stepfathers a second – it is after all an issue where testable predictions can be made.

barry writes (on my tentative speculation that mothers might become detached from the children of an earlier mate): “That seems far from likely or obvious. Born children are far more valuable as a ‘genetic investment’ than potential unborn children.” Point taken.

rs writes: “Surely the more telling question is, if killing stepchildren is adaptive, why is it so uncommon?” Male lions taking over a pride will kill the cubs sired by the previous males, to bring the females back into estrus quickly. But do any primates follow this pattern? For most of human history, children have been a valuable economic resource to their parents (as well as a genetic investment). The most indifferent parent would still value children at least as much as slaves or livestock. Killing human children is on any account pathological and rare (leaving aside abandonment of newborns, which has been common, vide Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers). It has to be read as (inevitable) aggravation overcoming quite strong inhibitions against violence. All ev-psych is saying is that these inhibitions are constitutionally somewhat stronger in natural parents. Ditto for time-consuming care and its obverse neglect. Is this really controversial?

nikolai writes: “Folklore isn’t full of tales of evil step-parents. It’s full of tales of evil parents. When these stories were collected by the Grimms (and others) as the first fairy tales, to make them more palatable the evil parents were taken out and the evil step-parents were put in.”

Source please for the generalisation and the attribution of motive. The shift is certainly there between the 1812 and 1857 versions of Hansel and Gretel by the Grimms. But is this really a general pattern? And could not the Grimms have been responding to an ambiguity in the source material, rather than to prudish criticism of their first version? After all (vide Laslett) typical pre-modern households were as broken and recomposed as those of today, mainly because of high rates of death of women in childbirth. Perrault left Tom Thumb abandoned by straight parents, and was very successful, so I have difficulty accepting the marketing story without evidence.

The conclusion of the Panskepps’ paper is worth highlighting for those who haven’t troubled to click Alex Fradera’s link. I think one could hardly ask for a fairer summary of the state of play than this:

“Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are
such attractive scientific views (e.g., FREEDMAN 1979;SCOTT 1989; SEGAL et al. 1997) that they need to be carefully cultivated and constructed as accurately as possible, continually constrained by genetic and cross-species brain evidence from our fellow animals rather than by the sea-swell of imaginary neuropsychological possibilities in humans. If we continue to proceed without considering all the available evidence, we will only produce more of the polarized views that have been endemic to this troubled corner of evolutionary thought. Now that we have a real chance of bringing serious evolutionary views to the study human mind and behavior, we should proceed in as disciplined a manner as possible. If we do not pursue such reasonable courses of action, we may become mired in myth making rather than remaining on the shores of sound scientific inquiry.”

Ah, looks like it was the ubiquitous Daly & Wilson that wrote about this stuff, and they do mention lions – haven’t read it myself. And I think at least Emlen suggests that fathers have a conflict of interests (the extra-children are a drain on resources that could be concentrated on their biological offspring) implying an adaptationist argument.

“All ev-psych is saying is that these inhibitions are constitutionally somewhat stronger in natural parents. Ditto for time-consuming care and its obverse neglect. Is this really controversial?”

That is a very interesting thing to say. It seems that Daly & Wilson think they are saying something original and interesting. Something over and above that truism. But somehow I can’t see exactly what, unless they are really making the point that there is something -adaptive- about the abuse (hence the lion reference).

Once we get past the truism, the evidence appears a little thin.

“I think for the step-child/biological child issue to carry any force for EP, it wouldn’t be sufficient to demonstrate that, say, biological children are more loved/less harmed.”

But it’d be nice if they could at least show that, rather than just pointing to higher rates of abuse in families with a step-parent versus families without a step-parent – as if somehow the only difference between the two situations is genetic relatedness.

I didn’t know the EP fun was here. These threads are great. Those who oppose EP consistently reveal they are ideologically biased while proving they aren’t. Captian Queeg stuff.

How can anyone who believes in culture whatever, in whatever iteration, complain about Just So stories? Who is zooming who? Who tells the biggest Just So whoppers of all?

EP has the upper hand because it insists on starting with the organism. All of EP’s threatened political opponents start with their contingent history. EP, in contrast,is trying to do science.

One example from above:
105 “…is trying to oftentimes run before it can walk, into areas that cannot help but to have public policy implications, with a reckless and disreputable past behind it – and not too far behind either;”

So, the people that worry over what bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas do (yeah, some kill the young uns of others), and when and whether homo sapien became homo sapien sapien, and how things had changed from homo erectus, and, why that period of stasis for hundreds of thousands of years before the shit hits the fan, and what happened to our Neadertal brothers and sisters, and whether and how social altruism exists along with the rational capacity to reject social altruism, and how brain size scales to group size, these people are guilty by association with a “reckless and disreputable past”? The people concerned with a 6 million year back past, who include all creatures as part of one story?

In terms of a fraudulent but recently eminent school of thought, that is projection.

EP has no good theory – which makes critising it easy, but at least it is following the evidence and trying to come up with a theory that fits the evidence by doing science. Then, there are the others.

razor, the whole point is that taking seriously the neurophysiological basis of behavior- even “sociologially interesting” behavior, _pace_ d^2- and taking seriously the need to understand the evolutionary history of that basis, does not at all entail being happy about people who blithely weave just-so stories and retail them to the popular press without worrying about whether they’re testable even in principle. More intellectual responsibility and humility, and less chasing after publicity, could do nothing but improve the reputation of “EP” (though probably that name has been permanently spoiled and a new one is needed.)

“Of course, the fact that brains continue to adapt doesn’t imply that brains adapt to their historical era. Brains don’t evolve that fast, and no one who notes that evolution is ongoing is committed to the position that they do.”

But if they’re adapting, what are they adapting to?

“…of “EP” (though probably that name has been permanently spoiled and a new one is needed.)”

Posted by Steve LaBonne

That’d only buy some time. After all, what was the previous name – sociobiology? EP was, IMHO chosen to avoid well-based suspicions.

116. “You’ve just listed a whole range of questions in the biological sciences regarding humans. None of them are the sole or unique purview of EP and there are any number of scientists working on thise problems who’d dispute some or all of the EP program and yet who don’t do so for spurious political reasons.”

Matt please let me know which of the things I listed are not necessarily about evolutionary psychology. And, what is the justification of your creation of a catagory, and the characterization of those you associate with it? Before the term emerged I told a barfly that I was interested in psychological anthropolgy, and he asked me if I counseled dead people. The fight isn’t over the label, or those who give the label a bad name, the fight is over power and authority.

“…does not at all entail being happy about people who blithely weave just-so stories and retail them to the popular press without worrying about whether they’re testable even in principle.”

Steve. This is a problem. But what does it have to do with what it is that some serious people are trying to do that has become labeled EP? I think my attempt at brevity has caused confusion.

There is an academic turf war going on. Always is. This one is between those attempting to do the real science, associated with what is being called Evolutionary Psychology, and, the threatened social science disciplines, and the believers in exactly the theory of gradual evolution, recently proven false, of human evolution over the last million years, a false theory that dovetails with a certain view of cultural relativism and evolution. Entire departments are going to lose power. They ain’t going quietly.

_those attempting to do the real science, associated with what is being called Evolutionary Psychology_

Are there really very many apart from Tooby and Cosmides themselves who can, even charitably, be described that way? (I don’t even include Pinker- I don’t feel that he writes as a professional at all when he ventures beyind linguistics.) And how successful is _their_ attempt, really- isn’t there a heck of a lot of question-begging in their publications and a paucity of real empirical support for their nice stories? And how about all the people doing serious work on the biological bases of behavior, and the evolution of those bases, who would run as fast as possible from the “EP” label? haven’t you just dissed those scientists pretty badly? This is not, or at any rate shouldn’t be, about some holy war between the enlightened and the Luddites. That sort of thing does nothing to advance knowledge.

engels… you aren’t at all familiar with evolutionary psychology… Those who have read into the subject will know that what Fuller is presenting …

Perhaps they will also know that the name of the author of the book you claim to have read is Buller, not Fuller.

Razor, they don’t generally proceed under special names. Evolutionary plausibility is thrown up all the time in the neurosciences – e.g. less costly memory representations are considered to be more plausible than highly costly ones – but that doesn’t require a discipline called ‘evolutionary neuroscience of memory’ or some such. And I’m sure that some people are modelling how visual systems evolve; again, that likely doesn’t need a special name. Most neuroscience and much cognitive/behavioural psychology takes evolution as one of its constraints, they just don’t feel the need to put a special hat on to do so. Again, just my neuroscientist 2 cents, well outside of any disciplinary wall.

And please, read one or more of the papers I cited upthread as they provide fine examples of people not just “understand homo sapien sapien in light of their biological engineering”, but taking an explicitly evolutionary route to do so, who do not endorse the EP program, in part because it is far more narrow than your characterisation suggests.

““Sociobiology” was itself an alias, adopted after “Social Darwinism” ran out of friends.”

Really? Was social darwinism not a political ideology that rather liked committing the naturalistic fallacy? And sociobiology covered a whole range of scientific studies that included not only crude EP like reasoning in humans but the original highly succesful study of ‘social’ behaviour in animals that was used as the inspiration for it.

rs (starts quoting someone else):”“Of course, the fact that brains continue to adapt doesn’t imply that brains adapt to their historical era. Brains don’t evolve that fast, and no one who notes that evolution is ongoing is committed to the position that they do.”

But if they’re adapting, what are they adapting to?”

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.

razor – you clearly don’t know anything about the social sciences, and what stories are or are not beloved in them. Blustering that those who don’t agree with you on evolutionary psychology are clearly driven by ideology makes you look Very Silly Indeed.

Other forces are at work

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

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.

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!

“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.

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 co-evolved 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.

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 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!