Is this the same Steven Pinker?

I think this is his defensive posture. That is, like most sociobiologists he’ll agree that of course society should do x y and z to improve the human condition – we’re not condemned to act like we’re on the veldt. But the essential violent self-interest remains there as the basis of human nature, the raw material with which society must always contend. That’s my take anyway.

The broadcast has a transcript which is great for those of us who prefer reading to listening.

The assumption that I would rather watch/listen than read also bugs me no end.

Last sentence should read: “It’s a field…”

I had a much longer answer which I managed to delete, but Steven Pinker’s section here

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_8.html

might help to answer your question.

Despite his hopeful gloss on the findings, they clearly blow EP (at least in its ‘strong’, ‘Old Skool’ variety) out of the water.

just noticed this quote from john’s review of the Blank Slate:

‘Even more common in the debate is the tendency to put forward a strong version of a theory but, when it comes under attack, to retreat to a version so moderate and reasonable in its claims that no one can seriously object to it. ‘

This is the point i was making in my autodeleted post. Pinker does this all the time.

Pinker appears to me to change sides almsot completely, from pessimist to optimist and from genetic determinist to social improver

Steven: pinker?

Even more common in the debate is the tendency to put forward a strong version of a theory but, when it comes under attack, to retreat to a version so moderate and reasonable in its claims that no one can seriously object to it.

When the facts change, I change my ideas – what do you do?”

Actually, this is a big one for Pinker to have swallowed:

[Co-operation] may also be powered by cosmopolitanism: by histories and journalism and memoirs and realistic fiction and travel and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life; the sense that “there but for fortune go I.”

because it’s very close to the dreaded realtivissses! and the postmodernisssses! and also female circumcision! viewpoint that a lot of his mates have built quite a lot of their personalities and careers on being nasty about. If he’s genuinely changed his position this is very welcome, although as Hidari and John note, he’s got a lot of past form on retreating to a sensible position when challenged, and then returning to the old provocative one when he thinks nobody’s looking.

‘I’m not quite following the complaints here because in my experience Pinker has always had a rather nuanced view on nature/nurture.’

Oh really?

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/The_Blank_Slate_General_Psychologist.pdf

I read your Blank Slate review and found it both unimpressive at a substantive level and overtly ideologically biased. The old nature-nurture war is over. The outcome? Our behavior is both explained AND constrained by our genes and our environment. Pinker and the other “sociobiologists” as you like to call them get this. As do most cognitive scientists, behavioral geneticists, neuroscientists, etc. Mocking them for adapting their views to the advancing science seems very odd. BTW – the Blank Slate is 7 years old. It’s a little late to be nitpicking it, given the speed with which the science behind it is advancing. Perhaps you should read something more recent. I also recommend Judith Harris’s No Two Alike and the reissue of The Nurture Assumption.

You conclude with, “Ultimately, whatever contribution our genes may or may not make to our nature, there is not much we can do about them. Unless we are prepared to embark on large-scale genetic re-engineering, our only hope is to focus on those aspects of our condition that are amenable to nurture.”
This is quite true, and serves as an excellent argument in support of figuring out what aspects of our nature are and are not amenable to modification by environment and experience, and at what point in our development they are so amendable. So it seems counter productive to mock and deride those whose work is focused on making these distinctions.

I’d be interested in what you think those aspects of our condition are, what revisions to them you would propose, and on the basis of what valid data you believe such revisions would work. I don’t think the resulting picture will be a very rosy one, mostly because I think the revisions that would work would be considered intolerable by many, for reasons of cost, intrusiveness, etc.

When the facts change, I change my ideas – what do you do?

When I change my ideas, I try to mention that they are changed, and also try to show a little more more modesty about my new ideas than I may have had about my old ones.

It turns out that my Nature/Nurture hyperlink seems to have not, ahem, linked. I was trying to reference this paper which I guess is pretty explicit and where the language example comes from.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/nature_nurture.pdf

lemuel pitkin

I think Tom S has answered your question (#23).

soru

‘And from the liked review, this seems particularly hard to place in the argument that seems to being made:

‘others such as ‘childcare’ which are obviously necessary to species survival’

It’s not just that lots of species (e.g. sharks) survive perfectly well without childcare, it’s that that is apparently being used to argue against there being any significant evolutionary influences on human behaviour.’

I am not trying to put words in John’s mouth here, but I think what he is talking about is what Daniel Dennett refers to as the ‘pointy spear’ problem. What he means is that in every tribe that has ever existed since the dawn of time, warriors throw the ‘pointy’ end of the spear forwards, not the other end. It is, therefore, a universal. But just because something is a universal, it doesn’t follow that it’s a cognitive universal. The fact is that because of the basic laws of physics it just makes more aerodynamic sense to make and throw spears in this way.

In the same way, ‘childcare’, viewed in the absolute broadest sense, simply means that that animals take care of their children such that they don’t die. But, given the ‘selfish gene’ that’s just a statement of the bloody obvious. It doesn’t follow that there is a universal cognitive module, located in the human brain, that is programmed for ‘childcare’, which is what Pinker wants to prove. It’s like saying ‘the need to breathe oxygen’ is a cultural universal. It is, but so what?

The fact is that because of the basic laws of physics it just makes more aerodynamic sense to make and throw spears in this way.
Isn’t it at least as important that the pointy end will stick in the mammoth, whereas the blunt end will bounce off?
/NITPICK

The “pointy end” comments remind me (semi-relevantly) of a summing-up of Graham Hancock’s pop diffusionism by an archeologist called Tim Taylor – along the lines of “the astonishing fact that civilisations thousands of miles apart designed buildings that are narrower at the top than the bottom and boats that don’t sink”.

Cultural universals are hard.

Psychology 1002: Morality and Taboo Harvard Law School 47212A, pdf.

‘It’s like saying ‘the need to breathe oxygen’ is a cultural universal. It is, but so what?’

Still not getting it – how is the, presumably universal, panic reflex when being suffocated not a cognitive thing? If people didn’t need to breathe (perfectly biologically possible, given different biology ) then it would be strange if that was universal.

If human childcare is different from shark ‘childcare’, just like human breathing is different from shark breathing, then that’s a consequence of a specific human evolutionary history, not a general principle of biological physics.

In other words, are humans a spear that has one pointy end? And is the way we tend to get thrown to some degree a consequence of that?

And is that idea supposed to be false, logically incoherent, trivially obvious, or what?

As an evolutionary biologist, I find reading Pinker an exhausting task I am not up to at the moment — I am just finishing up Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms”, and I’m currently inclined to insist that no-one gets to use the terms “genetic basis” or “selection” about human behavior without a license. Write us and see if you qualify (Dr. Clark, you don’t).

Generally speaking, I find Pinker both biologically and anthropologically stupid, and EvoPsycho as a “scientific field” is riddled with unexamined assumptions, logical leaps, perverse premises, wretched statistics, and a bottomless well of smug sexism.

… and now that I’ve actually read the talk I’m even more puzzled. There’s literally not one word in it about genes or evolution. No biologically-determined human nature at all, let alone important differences between races in intelligence or other genetic determinants of behavior. In fact, by showing how radically social changes have reduced the place of violence in human life, it’s a very powerful refutation of evolutionary psychology.

Is it possible there’s a missing link somewhere — an article from the past couple years where he talks about how his ideas have changed?

Well, it’s not at though evolutionary psychology is or ever was a tightly structured body of observations and explanatory models, no more than cognitive science (or, for that matter, Theory). It’s a loose affiliation of intellectual themes and interests.

As for Pinker’s recent writing on violence, as far as I know it’s based mostly on observations of various sorts and is not something he deduced from theoretical propositions of some sort. On the contrary, Pinker’s trying to figure out just why we see this long-term drop in the frequency of death by violence. As I recall, he entertains four lines of thought on this issue, though I can’t name them off the top of my head (except for Robert
Wright’s Nonzero notion of the increasing prevalence of nonzero-sum social interactions). I believe Pinker’s working up a book on this material. Maybe that’ll say more about what he thinks is going on and how that is related to the biology of “human nature.”

Now, if you’re on the hunt for some sneaky subtext, well, the notion that we’ve all got this shared human nature is a venerable humanist idea and so is the idea of long-term historical progress. Well, the drop in violence sure looks like human progress.

‘how is the, presumably universal, panic reflex when being suffocated not a cognitive thing?

A reflex is by definition not cognitive—there is no chain of logic or other thought that generates it, that’s what makes it a true reflex.’

This is absolutely the point. To prove the basic tenets of EP Pinker has not only to show that Behaviour ‘X’ is

1: Genuinely a Universal (i.e. manifests itself in all cultures, at all times, in all situations).

2: Is not just ‘one of those things’ (i.e not one of the ‘pointy spear’ or the ‘boats that don’t sink’ kinda things).

3: And most fundamentally, cognitive not behavioural.

Since the whole point is that Pinker wants to create a cognitive evolutionary psychology he has to create a chain of causation that goes:

Evolution (causes) cognitive feature (causes) behaviour.

Just

Evolution (causes) behaviour

won’t cut it because that’s something that Skinner or Watson or any of the other dreaded behaviourists could agree with.

@29, 32: ISTM that the syllabus does not come anywhere near supporting your claim. That course calls for a variety of controversial (taboo) subjects to be *examined*. Uncritically accepting any particular point of view discussed in the syllabus would be just as contrary to the apparent purpose of the course as uncritically rejecting it. Torture and infanticide are listed in the same list of taboo subjects, so why not accuse Pinker of supporting that too?

It’s quite possible to rationally examine the possibility of using torture and then reject it. That would be consistent with the apparent purpose of the course and therefore, your claim that Pinker intends the opposite result is speculative.

But isn’t this all a little ad hominem anyway? Pinker supports talking about whether or not torture is moral, therefore he supports torture, therefore he’s wrong about the role of genetic influences in human cognition? Surely I must be misunderstanding this?

I’m not Pinker and have no particular stake in defending him, but the quality of “criticism” being aimed at him here seems extremely poor.

 
#26: What [Dennett] means is that in every tribe that has ever existed since the dawn of time, warriors throw the ‘pointy’ end of the spear forwards, not the other end. It is, therefore, a universal. But just because something is a universal, it doesn’t follow that it’s a cognitive universal. The fact is that because of the basic laws of physics it just makes more aerodynamic sense to make and throw spears in this way.

This analysis seems incomplete. Why do we care whether the spear sticks in the mammoth or not? Because a spear that sticks in the mammoth is more likely to make it stop moving. Why do we want it to stop moving? So we can cut slices off it and eat them. Why do we want to eat slices of mammoth? Because we’re hungry.

Why are we hungry?

It’s tempting to say “We’re hungry because we need nutrition to live.” But how do you get from our needs to our motivations? *Through the programming of our brains.* We both feel hunger, and react to it by trying to eat or acquire food, because… why? If our genes don’t predispose us to that behavior, what does? We get hungry and eat to relieve our hunger because genes for brains that drive that sort of behavior are more likely to be propagated than genes for brains that don’t. Were there once a variety of cultures that reacted to hunger in other ways or not at all, up until they starved to death in perfect apathy? The idea seems absurd (especially in light of the similar hunger->eating connection in pre-cultural species).

You could argue that eating when we’re hungry is just another case of throwing the spear pointy end first – we eat when we’re hungry because we’ve noticed that it relieves our hunger – but that doesn’t really answer the question. Why do we perceive hunger as something we want to be relieved of? Why is the sensation of hunger accompanied by the desire to be less hungry?

Also: why can we engage in the chain of reasoning and goal-seeking behavior in my first paragraph at all? How do we have the capacity to notice that the blunt-end-first approach isn’t working? We don’t have entire cultures of blunt-endians, because effectiveness is noticed and applied sooner, preventing an obviously ineffective method from being adopted as a cultural trait in the first place. (Subtly ineffective methods are another matter, of course. We have lots of those.) But what gives us the capacity to recognize the ineffectiveness of our methods and revise them? Is there a culture of people who don’t care whether or not their plans achieve their goals, or try to find more effective methods for doing so? (Or maybe there was one, but they all died because their plans were ineffective and they didn’t care?) Surely this is just as absurd as the culture that doesn’t care about hunger.

ISTM that these are the kinds of things Pinker argues are not blank on our slates.

 
#38: In fact, by showing how radically social changes have reduced the place of violence in human life, it’s a very powerful refutation of evolutionary psychology.

This seems to me like it can only make sense using a ridiculously strawmannish caricature of “evolutionary psychology” that requires it to make claims like “social environments have no influence whatsoever on human behavior” (when all Pinker is claiming, ISTM, is the far weaker thesis that social environments are not the *only possible* influence on human behavior). Is it that hard to believe that there could be more than one influence on the same observed outcome? We can fast for cultural reasons, but does that really mean we have no inherent predisposition toward eating when we’re hungry, or that the fact that we have that predisposition rather than the opposite one or no predisposition at all doesn’t have anything to do with our evolution?

Re: the syllabus.

Racism, torture, and disbelieving rape victims are all taboo? I guess I’m not smart enough to get into Harvard, because I really can’t figure that one out.

‘A reflex is by definition not cognitive—there is no chain of logic or other thought that generates it, that’s what makes it a true reflex.’’

‘Evolution (causes) cognitive feature (causes) behaviour.’

That looks to me to be circular logic: you are implicitly defining the word ‘cognitive’ to exclude types of information processing that happen to be universal (or near-so, defaults that can only sometimes be overcome by martial-arts style training, or perhaps freak brain injuries).

That seems a pretty idiosyncratic definition: wikipedia doesn’t share it:

The term “cognitive” in “cognitive science” is “used for any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms”

There are a lot of cognitive tasks that most people can’t do at anything like the speed at which they can catch a ball, react to a smile, or get a joke. It would be pretty surprising if the set of such natural competencies/incompetencies was nothing to do with human evolutionary history.

On tickling, I know that Jaak Panksepp, a physiological psychologist, has argued that rats laugh. & he discovered this by tickling rats, recording their ultra high frequency vocalization, and then electronically altering those vocalizations so that we humans can hear them. I know there are videos on YouTube where Pansepp demonstrates this, though I don’t have URLs at hand.

In this casel, of course, humans are tickling the rats, which is entirely different from rats tickling rats.

‘That looks to me to be circular logic: you are implicitly defining the word ‘cognitive’ to exclude types of information processing that happen to be universal (or near-so, defaults that can only sometimes be overcome by martial-arts style training, or perhaps freak brain injuries).’

Actually, reading back over what I wrote, I realise that I greatly under-rated how difficult the (self-imposed) task that Pinker had set himself. Again, John’s original review article is worth reading because it makes the point that even if Pinker managed to prove that behaviour ‘X’ was Universal, and that it was cognitive (not a reflex or a learned response) he also has to prove that it wasn’t a ‘rational’ response to a specific situation based on General Intelligence.

For example: everyone, looking back at human history, can see that there has been a lot of war in the past, a lot of violence. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that violence is a Universal. But that doesn’t prove Pinker’s case, because one could argue that violence is a Universal because people have worked out that it is in their interests to be violent in specific situations. And that, therefore, if you changed the situation, people wouldn’t be violent any more.

To quote John:

‘In fact, the most interesting parts of Pinker’s book do not relate to human nature at all, but to his restatement of a pessimistic view of the human condition. In the process of this restatement, Pinker abandons his evolutionary psychology model without realising that he is doing so.

Take, for instance, his observation, following an approving citation of Hobbes, that ‘violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology”, except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms’. This is backed up by the work of political scientiist who claim that war has generally benefited the aggressors.

Pinker may well be right, but his argument is inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges specific to males. If the Hobbesian view is right, violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence, such as that which evolutionary psychologists impute to women.

On the other hand, an environmentalist theory of violence such as that of Pinker in his Hobbesian mode has optimistic corollaries which he partly recognises. If the environment is such that violence is costly, a rational organism will choose the path of peace. Whatever political scientists may argue about the broad sweep of history, aggressive war has not been a profitable policy from World War I onwards. The aggressors lost both wars, and the victors reaped nothing but grief in their attempts to extract benefits from their victories. More recently, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic have ruined their countries and, in all probability, themselves by playing the politics of war. The real threat today is neither the rational use of force in the manner of Clausewitz nor aggressive genes inherited from the Pleistocene past but the culturally-generated craziness of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. ‘

‘But then, of course, we are back to the point about the difficulty of proving it.’

This, of course, has always been the Achilles’ Heel of EP.

You think it’s pretty plausible that there are pre-built modules for social interactions?

What are Asperger’s/high functioning autism if they are not disorders of those social interaction processors?

True, but that doesn’t mean that software for these processors is pre-built, genetic. But hey – what do I know.

all Pinker is claiming, ISTM, is the far weaker thesis that social environments are not the only possible influence on human behavior

When social environment is responsible for the reduction in violent death rates from over 100 per 100,000 annually to less than 1 per 100,000, then social environment is, indeed, the only influence on that important category of human behavior. There isn’t any variation left for non-social factors to explain.

Also, I don’t think it’s “ridiculously strawmannish” to think that evolutionary psychology involves claims about, well, evolution, and about specific biological determinants of human behavior — things which are nowhere present in the TED talk. Now, you can say that’s ok, the talk isn’t evolutionary psychology — but that’s exactly what prompts the “is this the same Steven Pinker?” bafflement in the first place.

How much behavior can be explained by reference to a few simple rules like “avoid death,” “follow the habits of people around you,” and “use your Reason?”

About as much as the origin of the universe can be explained by divine creation. It’s not much of an explanation when you’ve hidden all the interesting bits behind the curtain. Why do you have any reason to use? Why do you prefer to avoid death? Why do you follow the habits of people around you? (Which ones? The successful ones. Why them? Because they’re succeeding. OK, now how do you judge success?)

If you’re an ev psychic you think behaviors that emerges in lots of different societies each need their own particular explanation, that there’s “massive modularity”: thus there’s a specific “module” for detecting whether your mate is cheating on you; whatever.

This is a nonsensical strawman. You find out whether your mate is cheating on you the same way you find out any other question; by looking at the evidence, by consulting a diviner, by meditation and prayer, or whatever other methods you have picked up by experience and/or imitation.

Why do you care? *There’s* your modularity. Means are left up to using your reason; it’s the ends that are genetically programmed.

It’s the same for the mammoth hunter; he wants to eat because he has a hunger instinct, he makes spears and throws them pointy end first because those methods have proved effective (for him and others in his social environment) for obtaining meat. I have the same hunger instinct, but my methods of satisfying it involve microwaves, refrigerators, grocery stores, and restaurants, rather than spear-throwing. Clearly my ability to microwave a TV dinner isn’t genetically programmed. But my motivation for doing so is.

But that doesn’t prove Pinker’s case, because one could argue that violence is a Universal because people have worked out that it is in their interests to be violent in specific situations. And that, therefore, if you changed the situation, people wouldn’t be violent any more.

Aside from the people who are violent when it *isn’t* in their interests, which might require another explanation (or are they just mistaken)…

The fact that changing the circumstances changes behavior *is* (part of) Pinker’s case, as has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread. What you say Pinker’s case is seems to be quite different from what Pinker says Pinker’s case is.

Pinker may well be right, but his argument [that rational analysis shows that violence often benefits the violent] is inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges specific to males.

No, it isn’t. In a stable environment, irrationally reaching the right answer is just as good as reasoning it out, and probably faster. Bees don’t study engineering to decide that hexagons are a good shape for honeycombs; but their success is dependent on the fact that hexagons *are* a good shape for honeycombs. Bees have primitive, irrational urges – that just happen to lead to effective, functional honeycomb shapes, not because they reasoned them out, but because they evolved. (There is some ambiguity in the word “irrational” – “proceeding by methods other than reason” vs. “reaching a result contrary to reason”. Irrational(1) urges are rarely irrational(2) in the common environment of the organism that possesses them, because a frequently-irrational(2) urge is maladaptive and usually selected out.)

Similarly, if in a certain situation aggression is beneficial, the organism who studies it rationally and then acts aggressively may not be any better off, and may even be slightly worse off, than the one who acts aggressively out of instinct. (This holds even for creatures who are already bothering to grow a large, metabolically expensive brain – but AFAIK, Pinker would not reject the idea that some human instincts are preserved from prehuman species who might not even have been capable of reasoning out some of the problems for which their instincts short-cutted to the solutions.) So even rational beings may benefit from having some instinctive shortcuts.

It’s when the environment changes that the rational conclusion (which can be redrawn in each generation based on its circumstances) and the instinctive urge (which can’t) come into conflict.

‘What you say Pinker’s case is seems to be quite different from what Pinker says Pinker’s case is.’

Actually, as has been pointed out, what Pinker says Pinker’s case is changes quite frequently between books, and sometimes within books as well. Indeed, I believe that that was the point of the original post.

Evolutionary psychology has gotta be about something more complicated, something a bit more psychology-like.

Hm, that’s a distinct and somewhat familiar style. You didn’t use to comment here under another name, did you, Henri?

Actually, as has been pointed out, what Pinker says Pinker’s case is changes quite frequently between books, and sometimes within books as well. Indeed, I believe that that was the point of the original post.

Except that when examples of such are provided, they actually say literally the same thing, down to using the same anecdotes and supporting data.

It’s almost as if some people have a hard-coded _disagree with Pinker_ module that produces a certain ‘good enough’ result very quickly without all the bother of working through the detailed reasoning….

‘further to Henri’s #67, I would note that the fact that there is a hunger drive and a sex drive, and that the reasons for the existence of these drives are to do with evolutionary natural selection, are there, in so many words in the work of Sigmund Freud. If “evolutionary psychology” is going to have any specific content, then surely to God it has to be the case that Freudians aren’t part of EP.’

Precisely. Pinker often hints (without explicitly stating it) that before he, Cosmides and Tooby came along, no one realised that human beings have to eat, breathe oxygen or reproduce*, or that if they did, ‘mostpeople’ were under the impression that humans had to be laboriously taught this.
But of course, to admit the contrary would be to admit that the extreme form of the Blank Slate theory which Pinker spends much of his book of the same title arguing against, never really existed except in his imagination.

Incidentally I am no Locke scholar, but I laboriously just went and looked up the first chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Google Books. As I thought, Locke was primarily arguing against the idea that ideas (and he does mean ideas, not ‘cognitive modules’…i.e. what we would term ‘beliefs’) were placed in the human brain by God before birth…most of the discussion is about moral precepts or principles. And, again, as I thought, Locke does explicitly state that ‘hunger and thirst and warmth’ (i.e. ‘drives’) are probably innate and not at all what he is talking about.

It’s incredibly important not to force Enlightenment era thought into early 21st century categories: Locke, of course neither believed or disbelieved in genetic determinism because he knew nothing of genes, DNA, natural selection, cognitive psychology, or any of the other things you would need to know before the arguments made any sense.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YxwGAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=An+Essay+Concerning+Human+Understanding&ei=nyZ7SqLVB5KgygS4uYjEDA#v=onepage&q=&f=false (page 37).

* I mean as a species.

#67: Chris, but hunger and the hexagon thing belong to (unless I’m missing something) evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychology has gotta be about something more complicated, something a bit more psychology-like.

It seems to me that this is drawing an unjustifiably bright line between human behavior and nonhuman behavior (and even human behavior that is shared with nonhumans). The study of human behavior has a lot to do with the study of animal behavior because *humans are animals*. And the fact that evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology have 50% of their names in common ought to suggest that some overlap in subject matter is not unthinkable.

@68: That has been claimed. My standard for “pointed out” is a bit higher, involving evidence and stuff.

In particular, AFAIK Pinker was never a genetic determinist in the “human behavior is really just as rigidly fixed by genes as insect behavior” sense (I’m not sure there are any such, actually), so the idea that human behavior could change in response to changing conditions isn’t actually inconsistent with his earlier-expressed beliefs.

Indeed, complex conditional strategies are what big complex brains are *for* — the whole feedback loop of “this isn’t working, what else can I try?” is something you don’t see in small-brained organisms in general — so it’s hardly surprising that a species with a complex brain changes its behavior in response to changes in its surroundings.

It’s possible that at some time Pinker actually did subscribe to the massively simplistic, obviously crashingly stupid views that are being ascribed to him (and EP in general) in this thread (and that would be necessary to be inconsistent with “Changes in the environments humans live in have produced changes in human behavior over time, specifically in the direction of reducing the frequency of deadly violence”). But I haven’t seen any evidence of that, including from reading _The Blank Slate_. I think the real inconsistency here is between Pinker and straw-Pinker.

Yeah but, Chris, Pinker gave a long talk explaining rates of violence in human society *without talking about evolution at all*. How can that be EP?

Seriously, read (or listen to) the talk and then tell me what in it depends on claims specific to EP.

f you talk to a climatologist about the weather forecast for tomorrow, your take-away point can’t really be ‘he said nothing about global warming, he must have changed his mind’.

Sure, but if you talk to him about the next 50 years and he or she says nothing about greenhouse gases or anthropogenic climate change then, yeah, actually, it can be.

If evolutionary psychology is not relevant to basic questions about human behavior like the prevalence of violnce, then that’s an argument against EP.

But let me put the question to you, Soru, and you, Chris: what are the specific, concrete claims about psychology or society that are distinct to EP? What do we know about human behavior thanks to EP, that we didn’t already know from non-evolutionary social sciences?

Sure, but if you talk to him about the next 50 years and he or she says nothing about greenhouse gases or anthropogenic climate change then, yeah, actually, it can be

Yes, but that’s clearly not the case here: what is being talked about can’t plausibly manifest on that scale. Global warming can’t plausibly make tomorrow ten degrees warmer than today. Gravity can be ignored in a discussion of whether two people will stay together.

By what mechanism do you propose it to would make a big difference to aggregate statistics about human societies if parent-child psychological-characteristic transmission was:

1. genetic
2. in-womb environmental
3. pre-age 6 educational/cultural?

(There might well be an issue where child soldiers forcibly recruited into cult-like groups like the LRA behave differently than those who grow up within a more normal society then join the army at 16+. But I don’t think even they recruit that young).

If you want to look at the areas where an answer to that would make a difference, you have to focus appropriately, as in:
http://www.guilford.com/cgi-bin/cartscript.cgi?page=pr/ellis.htm&sec=reviews&dir=pp/dp&cart_id=208191.21056

Results doesn’t have to be positive and completely novel to be scientifically interesting: Darwin speculated about much of this stuff.

The trick is proving, or disproving, it. Which is something that gets done as a result of a scientific program, not as a pre-requisite for it.

If you accept that humans have any nonlearned instincts at all that influence our behavior, even hunger, then evolution must act on them, because an influence on behavior is an influence on survival rates. That’s what makes it so baffling to me when people say they’re opposed to EP – either they’re creationists, or they don’t understand it, or they believe in (what I thought was) the strawman version of the blank slate that there are no unlearned human behaviors whatsoever. Because if we have instincts, and evolved, then our instincts evolved, just like if we have hands and evolved, then our hands evolved.

Yes. But that’s ridiculously trivial. EP is not the claim that psychology is a product of evolution, although of course it requires us to accept that claim (which no one except Creationists etcetera disputes.) To be meaningful EP requires that contemplation of the likely etiologies of our behavior allow us to make conclusions about our psychology. It’s a specific research program with a lot of assumptions and practices, and we don’t fit all of those things into the name of that bundle of assumptions and practices because, well, that’s the whole point of naming things.

All it proves is that in all societies, some people have worked out ,or learned, or both, that in some situations their aims can be achieved by violence (as long as they don’t get caught).

I think you are in danger of backing yourself into the position that, for those people who _haven’t_ committed violence, that’s only because they are too stupid to realise it is a smart idea…

The universal, or near-universal, that needs explanation is that some do violence, some, in similar circumstances, don’t. This is not true of eating, or running (but is of sex, given homosexuality).

The conventional explanation for that is that there are psychological-level variations in humans (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy). (Disagreeing with this would be a straw man, no?).

If EP is applicable, those variations are at least somewhat subject to evolutionary pressures, which may (or may not) put interesting constraints on what their ranges and distributions can be.

1) One might wonder just what’s so evolutionary about evolutionary psych. FWIW, as far as I’m concerned, not a whole heck of a lot. I’m inclined to think that there’s a smidgeon of intellectual substance that’s been rhetorically inflated to cast a shadow over the whole field mostly as a of intellectual branding.

To be meaningful EP requires that contemplation of the likely etiologies of our behavior allow us to make conclusions about our psychology.

Something like that.

Early in How the Mind Works Pinker asks you to imagine that you’re rummaging around in an antique shop and you find a strange little contraption, which Pinker then describes. After he’s got puzzled he tells you what it is; it’s an olive pitter. Now that we know what it’s supposed to do, the physical design of this contraption makes sense. Pinker’s point: A mechanism may be deeply mysterious until you know what it’s for.

What’s that have to do with psychology? Well, perhaps the reason the mental mechanisms (the brain?) are so mysterious is because we don’t know what they’re for. How do we figure out what they’re for? Evolutionary biology. How did the mechanism in question serve the genes back in the Pleistocene? It’s not at all obvious to me that asking this question has led to marvelous new insights that we didn’t have before and couldn’t have gotten any other way.

In any event, biologically based psychology of one sort of another predates both evolutionary psychology and sociobiology by decades.

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2) I’ve read quite a bit by Pinker, but not The Blank Slate, so I don’t know what he says about violence there. Given that ignorance, this puzzles me a bit:

“Pinker may well be right, but his argument 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. If the Hobbesian view is right, then violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence.”

Is Pinker asking us to judge rationality from the point of view of the acting individual, or from the point of view of the genes? Is Pinker switching between the two levels of explanation without so indicating?

Hobbes would have been judging rationality from the POV of the thinking and acting individual. But an evolutionary psychologist might well be judging rationality from the POV of the genes, which is very different. Violence might well be genetically rational while being experienced as irrational by the acting individual.

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3) Finally, with respect to the long-term diminution of deadly violence, it would be one thing to assert that the biologically-based psychological disposition to violence has become less prevalent in the population. It would be rather different to attribute that diminution to the creation of social mechanisms* that curtail the expression of that disposition. It seems to me that the former would cause considerably more difficulty for EP than the latter. The former could be taken to imply a substantial change in human biology during historical time while the latter could be taken as the construction of clever social mechanisms from dispositions inherent in human nature.

*E.g. The institutions of the Weberian state with its monopoly over legitimate violence.

All it proves is that in all societies, some people have worked out ,or learned, or both, that in some situations their aims can be achieved by violence (as long as they don’t get caught).

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.

I think that when the murder rate get low enough, the remaining murders can be more convincingly explained by malfunction, pathology rather than “human nature”.

-It would be nice if Bill Benzon would show up and- Scratch that, hi Bill! (Thanks for those reading suggestions a few months ago.)

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).

Sometimes not murdering someone can be very risky, even in rich countries.

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.

Psychopaths have faulty brain connections, scientists find

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.”

Donald Knuth once said that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but I have wondered if what he should have said is that premature intellectual certainty is what is the real problem. That, as far as I can see, is Pinker’s crime. Not much has been discussed here about his previous works, such as The Language Instinct. Hasn’t that work been contributive to the field? Some of the ideas there seem solid enough. Pinker’s mistake might have been to stretch that argument well beyond where it should have been taken in later books.

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.

You all want to fight 1990s intellectual battles. Pinker, however, has long been moving away from 1992-style “era of evolutionary adaptation” evolutionary psychology toward Gregory Cochran-style “continuing evolution.”