Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology, Royalty Edition

But what are the Republican apes and ants like?

Peter:

Now that sciencism is the de facto religious stance of the elite, who else but scientists to give out the proper credentials? I’m sure they’d rather’ve stuck with God, but times being what they are, etc etc.

Strange, you never consider the hazards of the weird gender theories sociologists cook up.

Opposition to evolutionary anything ( psychology or biology) seems primarily ideological in nature, not about rigor. It mostly comes down to which groups completely unscientific theories you want to accept.

How “evolutionary” is Baboon Metaphysics, John? I haven’t looked at it in awhile but it struck me as being more or less standard-issue primate ethology, in line with papers and monographs I’ve been reading off and on since my undergraduate days.

I think the term “evolutionary psychology” was coined specifically to designate an approach to human psychology, one grounded in evolutionary considerations and, among other things, referencing the ethology literature. But students of human behavior were certainly reference animal ethology decades before the evpsych term was coined. Specifically, John Bowlby’s work on attachment behavior and researchers strongly influenced by him (e.g. Mary Ainsworth, with whom I took an independent study in my undergraduate years). Bowlby was coming from a psychoanalytic tradition, and the psychoanalysts didn’t want to have anything to do with him, though some of them have reconsidered in recent years. FWIW, Bowlby is the one who coined the term “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA), which has become standard.

All hell broke loose in the mid-1970s with the publication of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which had a final chapter on human behavior. I’ve never read the book, and never really followed the controversy as it didn’t seem relevant to my interests at the time. The evpsych term came somewhat later and, as I recall, the controversy really got going in the 1990s. Tooby and Cosmides published their anthology, The Adapted Mind in 1992. Pinker’s The Language Instinct came out in 1994. That, as similar stuff, is what kicked up all the ruckus. And the ruckus was mostly about posturing and over-reaching on the EP side. I do think there are ideological components to this mess, both on the EP side and the various oppositions. But, really, there’s a lot of interesting stuff and positions vary all over the map.

On the specific topic at issue in your newest quote, which I realize is just a random example, an important new book has come out about brain size: The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable, by Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Steven Mithen reviews it in the NYRB. A couple paragraphs:

But even though the human cerebral cortex constitutes 82 percent of the total brain mass, the largest when compared to all mammals, it was found to contain only 19 percent of the total number of neurons in the brain, the same percentage as in the guinea pig and capybara, and midway in the 15 to 25 percent range found in most mammals.

How can the human cerebral cortex have expanded so greatly in comparison to the rest of the brain while maintaining a proportion of neurons equivalent to that found in the cerebral cortex of other small-brained primates? Herculano-Houzel’s answer lies partly in the absolute number of neurons in the human cerebral cortex and partly in the fact that different scaling rules apply to the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum.

These rules are constant across all primates: when additional neurons are added to the brain, the cerebral cortex increases in mass at a much faster rate than does the cerebellum. This is because the cerebral cortex requires larger neurons than the cerebellum—neurons that have long-range connections of several centimeters to link different cortical areas; neurons in the cerebellum need to span no more than a few millimeters. As a result, the cerebral cortex becomes proportionally larger even though the ratio of cortical to cerebellar neurons remains the same. So with humans, the 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex result in its forming 82 percent of the total brain mass, despite the human brain’s remaining entirely typical for a primate with regard to the proportions of neurons in the cerebral cortex and in the cerebellum.

As an anthropologist, I have to say that for the most part evo-psych is psuedo-science by people who know nothing about human evolutionary history, the wide range and diversity of human behavior documented around the world, or human neurobiology.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9496621:

“Brain plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change structure and function. Experience is a major stimulant of brain plasticity in animal species as diverse as insects and humans. It is now clear that experience produces multiple, dissociable changes in the brain including increases in dendritic length, increases (or decreases) in spine density, synapse formation, increased glial activity, and altered metabolic activity. These anatomical changes are correlated with behavioral differences between subjects with and without the changes. Experience-dependent changes in neurons are affected by various factors including aging, gonadal hormones, trophic factors, stress, and brain pathology. We discuss the important role that changes in dendritic arborization play in brain plasticity and behavior, and we consider these changes in the context of changing intrinsic circuitry of the cortex in processes such as learning.”

Spiders, deserted by their mothers, know how to spin the complex engineering miracle that is the web. Different spiders, different webs. This would seem to indicate that spiders are born with a large amount of data. The human brain seems to be a computer with little software installed by the manufacturers. The required software is downloaded, through the process we call life. This depends upon which reality one is born into, moderated by the expression of will. The zeitgeist also impacts greatly upon the experience of life, that determined by who or what is shaping the zeitgeist during the experience.

John Holbo –

I do not deny that we have evolved a specific range possibilities, but as the piece I link to indicates, human beings evolved to be flexible and adaptable along as much of our behavior as possible. Evo-psych is grounded in the idea that we have evolved to behave in specific kinds of ways. Those two things are mutually exclusive.

Just toss out the term “evolutionary psychology.” Who cares?

What’s important is whether or not biology has something important to tell us about human behavior. Surely the answer is “yes”. Just what, well, that’s an open question. But we can’t ignore it as though it didn’t exist, as though it’s “all culture.” What does that even mean, “it’s all culture”?

Just toss out the term “evolutionary psychology.” Who cares?

Great idea! Any discussion on the topic between people of good faith (like us! because we are totally of good faith!) better stick to specific claims.

I think there is something to Evo-Psych. But, I don’t think anyone has a clue
about what there is to it. It can make for interesting speculation, but falls into
the category of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Best left to stoned sophomores in their dorm rooms.

John Holbo –

stevenjohnson @ 25 saved me the trouble of responding (and did it much better than I could have). He perfectly encapsulates the anthropological critique of evo psych.

@post 25:
“And if you try to specify what the universal human nature is (the ostensible topic of EP,) there’s no consensus on what that may be. There is practically nothing left to be universally human”

Donald E. Brown claims, at least, to have identified a rather large group of behaviours, etc. shared by all humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals

(and as a set perhaps exclusive to humans).

@steff I reviewed Pinker’s book when it came out, and had this to say about alleged human universals

Thus, Pinker, following Donald Brown, posits a Universal People as a parallel to Chomsky’s notion of a Universal Grammar. This idea is backed up by a long list of cultural universals. The length of this list might seem to refute older claims that with the exception of taboos on incest, rape and murder, there are no cultural universals.

The problem is that it is full of items such as ‘decision-making’ and ‘ambivalence’ that seem to be directly implied by the fact of human intelligence, and others such as ‘childcare’ which are obviously necessary to species survival. If items like this are to be considered as cultural universals, why not, as Gould and other critics have suggested, include eating and excretion as well? Pinker disarms criticism in advance by conceding that ‘not every universal behavior arises from a universal component of human nature – many arise from an interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties of the body, and universal properties of the world.’ But after all items of the latter class are deleted, a cynic might conclude that the only specifically cultural universal added to the traditional set of taboos is ‘tickling’.

Interesting that Royalty requires confirmation of their right to rule from Baboons.

I wonder if it also serves as notice that dominant families are fulla jerks.

There is a deeper problem. To carry out a heritability study, even a correct one, we require differences between individuals. If everyone is identical in some respect, that is, if everybody has exactly the same genes for some characteristic, then there is no way to investigate its heritability, because genetic investigations require contrasts between individuals. Sociobiological theory claims that all human beings share genes for aggression, for xenophobia, for male dominance, and so on. But if we all share these genes, if evolution has made us all alike in this human nature, then in principle there would be no way to investigate the heritability of the traits. On the other hand, if there is genetic variation among human beings in these respects, then on what basis do we declare that one or another manifestation is universal human nature? If it is genetically determined human nature that we are aggressive and like to go to war, then we must suppose that A.J. Mustie, the famous pacifist, lacked this gene and was, therefore, in some sense less than human. If, on the other hand, he possessed the gene but was a pacifist, the genes seem somewhat less than all-powerful in determining behavior. Why are we not all like A.J. Mustie? There are deep contradictions in simultaneously asserting that we are all genetically alike in certain respects, that our genes are all-powerful in determining our behavior, and at the same time observing that people differ.

If there is any biological characteristic which is genuinely universal to any taxon, then the absence of variation indicates that there can be no identifiable gene for that characteristic in that taxon now; but since that characteristic must be a product of the evolutionary history of that taxon, it follows that there must have been a gene for that characteristic (or more than one) at some point in the evolutionary history of that taxon. If featheredness is a biologically universal characteristic of birds, it follows both that there is now no identifiable gene for featheredness in birds and that there must have been a gene for featheredness (or more than one) at some point in the evolutionary history of birds. If bipedalism is a biologically universal characteristic of humans, it follows both that there is now no identifiable gene for bipedalism in humans and that there must have been a gene for bipedalism (or more than one) at some point in the evolutionary history of humans. The reasoning applies to psychological characteristics in the same way as to any other biological characteristics. For example, if the capacity to experience disgust is a psychologically universal characteristic of humans, it follows both that there is now no identifiable gene for disgust in humans and that there must have been a gene for disgust (or more than one) at some point in the evolutionary history of humans. You can’t identify in modern humans genes for homoiothermy, or triploblasty, or multicellularity, but all those characteristics are products of evolution and there were genes for them once.

Since I’m doubtful about how much there is to gain from diving into genetic technicalities (and I claim no special technical competence), I approach from a different direction.

Lewontin writes: ‘There are deep contradictions in simultaneously asserting that we are all genetically alike in certain respects, that our genes are all-powerful in determining our behavior, and at the same time observing that people differ.’

Is there a contradiction (deep or shallow) in asserting that we are all alike in certain respects and at the same time observing that people differ? Surely not. Human beings are both similar and different. For that matter, living things in general are both similar and different. The subject matter of evolutionary biology embraces both individual similarities and individual differences; evolution should provide explanations for both similarities and differences. If humans are similar in their anatomy, shouldn’t we expect those similarities to be partly the result of genetic similarities; if humans are different in their anatomy, shouldn’t we expect those differences to be partly the result of genetic differences? and why should we expect human behaviour to be different, in this respect, from human anatomy?

If Lewontin is saying that human differences in aggressiveness can’t be explained by similarities in our genes, and that human similarities in aggressiveness can’t be explained by differences in our genes, that’s obviously correct; but that argument is insufficient to exclude the possibility that human differences in aggressiveness can be partly explained by differences in our genes, and human similarities in aggressiveness partly explained by similarities in our genes.

For example, I quote an anthropological study HERE (p. 36):
Raoul Naroll (1983, pp. 305 ff.) reports a small study (14 cultures) of aggressive behavior among young boys and girls (aged 2 through 6). The children were rated on aggressive behavior, with girls scoring from 3 to 10 and boys from 4 to 12. In four of the societies boys and girls were equally aggressive while boys were slightly more aggressive in the other ten. There were no societies where girls were more aggressive than boys. The major differences were between societies, with American boys (4) and girls (3) the least aggressive and Colombian boys (12) and girls (10) the most aggressive. Since the aggression scores for boys and girls were close within cultures, but the variation between cultures was high, Naroll concludes that culture is a stronger influence on aggressive behavior than genetics (p. 307). That is to say, while the pattern of male-female difference is the same from one culture to another, the general level of aggressive behavior is strongly determined by culture.

John Holbo @33 –

Actually, that is a complete misreading of stevenjohnson @ 25, who simply argues that even if human psychology/nature is shaped by natural selection evo-psych as currently constructed in practice fails. He explicitly states at the end of the very first paragraph:

There is no evidence that the differences between cultures/societies are biological. Instead there is much evidence to the contrary that all significant differences are indeed learned/historical/”cultural.”

WLGR:

I think it’s reasonable to interpret the lion’s share of “evolutionary psychology” and/or “sociobiology” as ideological gloss on the intellectual output of “evolutionary biology”, “social psychology”, “anthropology”, “sociology”, and so forth, not really rising to the level of a true academic/scientific discipline in the same way as those do

Since the broad brush is out: in view of e.g. the “replication crisis”, it’s not entirely obvious that social psychology, anthropology, and sociology are any more scientifically disciplined than evolutionary psychology.

I would guess that all of these are pretty limited with respect to their ability to make general claims with strong evidence, and in their ability to build general theories study by study. Are there no claims, however small, from evolutionary psychology with strong evidence? Are there no bodies of work in psychology that have been found to be built on air?

J-D:

The heritability of the Rhesus factor can be investigated because there is genetic variation; the heritability of blood can’t be.

It’s hard to know what the “heritability of blood” is intended to mean, but a little googling reveals that there’s substantial scientific studies of the genetics of blood. (Curiously, that study mentions zebrafish, of which PZ Myers is a renowned avid amateur keeper.) The quote from Lewontin gives a remarkably narrow view of what the study of heritability could include.

Kiwanda, absolutely there are similar problems in many disciplines, especially those occupying some boundary zone between “hard” sciences (e.g. molecular biology) and “soft” ones (e.g. cultural anthropology). The question is whether there’s a standardized methodology for studying one’s problems of interest and building on the resulting insights to study next-level problems of interest; to use Zwaan’s example, how would a knowledge of the relationship between seeing a filled/emptied glass and feeling optimistic/pessimistic inform one’s understanding of this as a general mechanism that could be studied in its own right? (The social priming and metaphor stuff has been cliche for a while now, but figuring out where to go from there as a scientist is tricky, which is probably why George Lakoff no longer does much actual research and has been marketing himself to popsci audiences for the past 15-20 years as a “how to use metaphors in electoral politics” guy.)

At the very least it’s hard to imagine an easier scientific terrain for these problems to run rampant than evopsych: stories about evolutionary adaptation can be literally whatever you want it to be, the datasets can as vague and pliable as anything in the softest social psych and often downright impossible to replicate, and our developmental understanding of processes like embryology is nowhere near sophisticated enough to falsify any but the narrowest molecular claims about how particular genes influence cognitive dwvelopment. But since evopsych is often framed as validating some of the farthest-reaching abstract theoretical claims about human nature on the “harder” side of cognitive science (e.g. generative linguistics), and since these claims themselves often mesh well with lay ideological prejudices about “human nature”, it gets depicted as some kind of hard-nosed STEM reality check on the inveterate wishy-washiness of the social sciences and humanities and “[blank] studies” when in fact it’s absolutely nothing of the kind.

DrDick and Z were more successful in interpreting what I meant to say. Apologies for bad writing.

“At the end of the day my view is the one I articulated above: some version of EP is true. That is, flexible as the brain is, it isn’t general purpose computer on which you can install any old software you like – not by a longshot. But the hell of it is: we aren’t empirically in a position to know which version of EP is true.”

If I understood it correctly, in computer science a “computer” which can in principle run any software/execute any program, is properly called a Turing machine. The human brain/mind certainly isn’t a Turing machine. But then, I’m not sure anyone ever thought so.

In daily life, general purpose computers most certainly cannot run just any old software you like. You have to consider processing speed, memory, even the physical nature of the inputting system, magnetic tape or floppy disk or CD-ROM. You even have to think about whether it’s a PC or a Mac. There is no knife that only cuts what you want, nor metaphor. To think that a general purpose computer can take any old program is absurd, a literary conceit purporting to describe something real, but just rearranges words.

But if you do insist on this analogy, EP is an approach that insists the human brain, because of genes naturally selected, is comparable to the kinds of computers that operate games, for instance. The hardware is adapted to a certain kind of input, and the software is designed to handle that input with a limited suite of algorithms specifically tailored to the game for great efficiency, producing an output in specific formats. The software, the game itself, changes the specific content of the output but the format of the output is going to follow certain rigid categories. The whole game, hardware and software, has for example an algorithm for counting character lives. A person’s mind, genes and culture working together, has a module for detecting cheaters. The algorithm for counting character lives has an essential role in game, and the cheating detection module has an essential role in personality.

I believe this picture cannot possibly apply to the differences in personality within a culture, or in differences between various personalities in different cultures. Certain basic emotions seem to be very similar indeed, but even then, sometimes it’s like assuming that red and green always appear the same to everyone. Even more to the point, it is not always clear that personality is causal. In an army, does it really matter whether an individual soldier is brave? As they say in military science, leadership—what we might call the culture—is everything. The bad metaphor of the general purpose computer that can’t take any old software is essential to EP.

Or another way of putting it, is there really a human nature in the sense EP insists? Tooby and Cosmides in their primer on evolutionary psychology abuse the Standard Social Science Model (what Pinker condemns as The Blank Slate.) The problem for them is that, despite their swift assurance to the contrary, this is the Gold Standard for Social Science Model. John Quiggin’s comment above caught this much better than I could.

The relatively recent discoveries of interbreeding between Neanderthal and Denisovan and more or less homo sapiens I think has provided the final blow to any notions about the dependence of cultural differences upon genetically determined mental architecture. The interbreeding shows all three variants (despite the gross morphological differences in Neanderthal and homo sapiens!) were one species. Yet, predecessors species and Neanderthal, despite having the same mental architecture, did not display the cultural change of homo sapiens. The archaeological remnants of their cultures were unchanging over millennia. This is not what human beings as we know them do.

(By the way, one of the many failings of EP is how rarely…I actually know of no efforts… the issue of the origins of language is addressed. This is curious because so far as I know of the many supposed mental modules devised by natural selection, this is the only one that actually has been associated with physical genes and identifiable locations in the brain.)

The best explanation is that “culture” is like language. Feral children do not truly master the tongue. The emergence of language when all the children are feral, so to speak, thus is a difficult problem. “Culture” in general, like the language so hard to distinguish from it, is pretty much the same. Once a full culture, like a full language (as opposed to a pidgin or a stock repertoire of signals,) did finally emerge, then the children could fully master the new tool. Then essentially the same mental architecture could begin the process of endless change, slow by a human life time, but an eye blink by evolutionary time. So, yes, culture is the most important thing. EP says, no.

John Holbo @ 58 –

“I’ll buy this, but I would add that a lot of ev psych passes at least this minimum threshold test pretty handily.”

As stevejohnson, Z, and I have repeatedly pointed out, it simply does not do that, not even close. I at least am a professional cultural anthropologist with 30 years professional experience.

@54
One thing that could be done (but rarely is) is to remember that EP is a new science, and that science is of necessity conservative when it comes to new theories, especially those which pose as being ‘revolutionary’ or ‘paradigm shifting’. There is a useful phrase from the ‘Skeptics’ which is relevant here:

‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’.

Despite what the proponents of EP seem to think, the EP hypothesis is extraordinary, as the reactions to it on many of this thread make clear (not ‘obvious’ as most of them seem to think) and so the evidence to support it must be particularly good, not just what would be required for a ‘common or garden’ scientific theory.

Another thing (and yes yes yes I k now all the problems with Popper but still) is:

is EP falsifiable? What tests, or results, or data, could disprove it, do we think, in the minds of the proponents? Do we think there is an experiment or dataset that could persuade Steven Pinker: ‘Gosh what was I thinking? It is all nonsense after all.’

If the answer to this question is ‘no’ then perhaps something else is going on, other than ‘pure’ science.

Finally, there is the problem of underdetermination (there’s also the problem of overdetermination but that’s another story).

What quantitative, falsifiable, replicable results have been produced in labs that were predicted a priori by EP (and which were ‘surprising’ in some non-trivial sense, not statements of the bloody obvious) and which could only be explained by EP?

I’m not aware of anything, but I could be wrong.

Remember: in science the burden of proof lies on the person making the claim: it is the proponents of EP who have to ‘do all the work’ , not those who oppose it.

I enjoy making these points as proponents of EP love to pose as being all ‘sciencey’ but the basic rules that would apply to any other ‘new’ or ‘controversial’ scientific theory seem to be declared null and void when it comes to EP: at least in the popular media.

@Hildari, #64: is EP falsifiable? What tests, or results, or data, could disprove it, do we think, in the minds of the proponents?

How about the somewhat weaker question: Does EP produce falsifiable hypotheses?

John Holbo, #61: Arguments here are rather speculative – on both sides. That doesn’t mean only philosophers get to play. Far from it! But it does mean that a lot of people are straining their narrow, technical scientific competences.

Yes. And a lot of the kicking and screaming is that the OTHER FOLKS aren’t playing by the rules and we want our nice comfortable rules back.

On cross cultural validity, then there’s the argument that social science, not merely EP, but social science in general, studies WEIRD subjects. “WEIRD” = “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” Most social science research is done on WEIRD people, but most people in the world aren’t WEIRD. So maybe that research is rather parochial in its findings. Check out, e.g. Joseph Henrich’s work.

@M Caswell: Not at all. Sexual selection is standard among EPists. Check out, for example, Geoffrey Miller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)

stevenjohnson 56:

The relatively recent discoveries of interbreeding between Neanderthal and Denisovan and more or less homo sapiens I think has provided the final blow to any notions about the dependence of cultural differences upon genetically determined mental architecture. The interbreeding shows all three variants (despite the gross morphological differences in Neanderthal and homo sapiens!) were one species. Yet, predecessors species and Neanderthal, despite having the same mental architecture, did not display the cultural change of homo sapiens. The archaeological remnants of their cultures were unchanging over millennia. This is not what human beings as we know them do.

It seems dubious and highly speculative to say that the ability to interbreed implies having the “same mental architecture”. It seems highly speculative to claim that Neanderthal culture did not change over millennia; it would be very interesting to see clear substantial evidence of such unchanging culture. Conversely, if Neanderthals had the same “mental architectures” as us, why do our cultures change but the Neanderthals’, as you claim, did not?

A review by Confer et al. discussed the state of evopsych in 2010, and Jerry Coyne discussed that review here. They point out the falsification of a “kin selection” claim related to homosexuality, and claims about sexual preference and rapes. They point to some positive results:

Among those [hypotheses] that have been confirmed by multiple methods in multiple samples by multiple investigators are anti-free-rider adaptations in cooperative groups (e.g., Price, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2002); cheater-detection adaptations in social exchange (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 2005); female superiority in spatial location memory as part of a gathering adaptation (e.g., Silverman & Choi, 2005); functional attributes of male and female short-term mating strategies (e.g., Greiling & Buss, 2000; Schmitt, 2005; Schmitt & International Sexuality Description Project, 2003); sex-differentiated deception tactics in human mating (e.g., Haselton, Buss, Oubaid, & Angleitner, 2005; Tooke & Camire, 1991); antipredator adaptations in children (e.g.,
Barrett, 2005); and dozens more (see Buss, 2008, for a recent review).

These may suffer from the same failures that have laid low the social sciences in recent years (e.g., the collapse of the beautiful “ego depletion”), but this work looks a lot different from “just so” stories to justify racism and sexism.

Bill Benzon at 53 –

“So, when you guys (stevenjohnson, DrDick, WLGR) are rejecting this evpsych thing, are you implying that John can put Baboon Metaphysics aside because it is, eww! primate ethology (a kind of biology), and so of no possible relevance to human behavior and psychology?”

We are very much saying that he should not use baboons as analogs/proxies. That is because social organization, mating strategies, and many other aspects of primate behavior differ widely and baboons are very different from humans or our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (who also differ from each other in important ways). Human behavior, and what we know of our distant ancestors, represents elements similar to each of those species, as well as elements uniquely our own. Modern human behavior also differs from what we can ascertain from our more distant human/protohuman ancestors (australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelberginsis).

Hidari:

But at a cursory glance it simply did not look to me like specific hypotheses had ‘been confirmed by multiple methods in multiple samples by multiple investigators’. Instead, to me, it looked like individual hypothesis had been confirmed by single investigators (or single investigators in collaboration with others). (I am willing to be corrected about this).

It’s true that I’ve relied on the good faith of the authors, but: the Price, Cosmides, & Tooby paper has 355 cites; Cosmides/Tooby is a review of its topic, with 358 cites; Silverman/Choi is a review with 51 cites; Barrett 2005 is a review, with 218 cites. If you know positively that the papers /reviews themselves, together with the literature citing them, do not satisfy the “multiple methods/samples/investigators” claim, then your knowledge of this field is remarkably comprehensive. (I haven’t been able to see the papers/reviews themselves, they’re behind a paywall.)

He doesn’t have to make a case. The burden of proof lies on those making the claim.

He makes a strong claim (more or less, that all evopysch studies fail to consider the role of culture, or maybe that the role of culture cannot in principle be untangled from other conditions), that surely requires some evidence other than “The brain changes, and I’m a cultural anthropologist”.

Kiwanda@70. “It seems dubious and highly speculative to say that the ability to interbreed implies having the ‘same mental architecture’. It seems highly speculative to claim that Neanderthal culture did not change over millennia; it would be very interesting to see clear substantial evidence of such unchanging culture. Conversely, if Neanderthals had the same ‘mental architectures’ as us, why do our cultures change but the Neanderthals’, as you claim, did not?”

In principle EP claims that the mental modules are biological functions of the physical brain, laid down by genes selected by nature. The mental architecture is a neurological architecture as well, even if EP in practice never actually bothers to try to live up to those flow charts in that primer, which runs from “neurophysiological basis” to “cognitive program” (aka mental module) to “adaptive problem,” (the fatal dependence on a mythical EEA.) EP, unlike Kiwanda, accepts that mental architecture is also neurophysiological architecture.

I don’t think Kiwanda would be well advised to argue with them on this point, because genetic neurophysiological abnormalities are strongly associated with loss of mental functions or abnormal development, often leading to early death. (I witnessed the autopsy of a three year old child who died suddenly from no obvious cause, until the pathologist found brain abnormalities, so this point was made to me with great impact.) It is dubious and highly speculative to claim that hybrid neural architecture nonetheless produces the same purely mental architecture.

It’s true that most reconstructions of Neanderthal culture suggest a way of life strikingly different from the modern human (the sexes spend most of their time segregated from each other? they spent most of their time foraging, more like cows than hunter/gatherers?) But those things are more speculative, and beyond my personal capacity to judge. But again, if similar views are to be affirmed by the judgment of time, such dramatic differences in the way of life in members of the very same species, once again shows that it’s culture that’s more important than genes.

As to the unchanging nature of Neanderthal culture? That is simply the fact, to the best of my knowledge, based on the persistence of the same suite of remains. The culture associated with homo erectus is the Acheulean and it was unchanging for even longer than the Mousterian culture associated with Neanderthals. A quick wikipedia search says the Mousterian ran from about 160 000 to 40 000 BP. And the only suggestions of significant changes in Neanderthal culture seem to be related to the advent of humans. It’s true the necessary emphasis on surviving remains means we don’t have an ideally random sampling. But it seems excessively speculative to insist there was indeed a succession of Neanderthal cultures that we just don’t know about.

As to why archaeologists find an endless succession of cultures associated with modern humans but not Neanderthals? A culture is the way of life, which is among other things an economy (and an ecology.) Perhaps a culture is like modern economies, it has to accumulate a certain amount of technique before it can reach a necessary critical mass. Perhaps it was simply a matter of sufficiently high population density for a long enough period to allow enough innovators and their innovations to arise and persist instead of dying within a human life. Perhaps, but this is admittedly speculative, the Neanderthals lacked a full modern language.

But if it is permissible for EPers to ignore the evidence from anthropology, history and other social sciences that their notion there is an elaborate genetically determinate human nature with a large suite of neurophysiologically based “cognitive programs,” aka mental modules, aka faculties on the grounds they are working on demonstrating the existence of said human nature? Then surely it is permissible for others to base themselves on the evidence on hand, rather than the evidence to be determined.

DrDick again read correctly: I don’t think Baboon Metaphysics is useful for knowing what people are like. Maybe you can get some clues as to what people aren’t like and why they aren’t like baboons, but it’s hard to see immediately how useful that could be.

My apologies for the length, but I’m not a good writer and every effort to compress just ends up cryptic.

Kiwanda @ 76 –

“He makes a strong claim (more or less, that all evopysch studies fail to consider the role of culture, or maybe that the role of culture cannot in principle be untangled from other conditions), that surely requires some evidence other thanHe makes a strong claim (more or less, that all evopysch studies fail to consider the role of culture, or maybe that the role of culture cannot in principle be untangled from other conditions), that surely requires some evidence other than “The brain changes, and I’m a cultural anthropologist”.

Firstly, that is not the claim I am making at all. What I am saying is that they ignore the high levels of variability in human behavior, especially cross culturally, as well as the very strong evidence from biology that human behavior is not strongly programmed by genetics (which is what neural/behavioral plasticity is about). I am also saying that they do not reference what we actually know about the evolution of the human brain from australopithecus to modern humans, which runs counter to many of their arguments. I have also provided links to support these. That is a much stronger case than your characterization. To date you have provided absolutely no evidence or logical argument to counter that and merely dismiss it. As stevenjohnson says, the burden of proof is on the evo-psych people and they have failed that so far.

@78 Is it just me or did that Mercier and Sperber paper not seem to be particularly EPish?

Does there exist somewhere a stronger defense of the anti-EP side than presented here?

There must be someone out there who actually understands the EP programme, can write a whole paragraph without making obvious errors of logic or fact, and has a plausible argument against it being true.

@stevenjohnson # 69:

EP is the one which actually rests upon a picture of the mind as a computer with hardware specifically designed for very detailed tasks, preset to accept only inputs delivered in a pre-designed format. […] try explaining the adaptive value of a suicide “module.” If that seems like a crazy task, remember that it’s EP that insists on these mental modules in the first place.

This qualification of “very detailed tasks” strikes me as your own straw man emendation which allows you to propose nonsense modules like a suicide module and say: See, how silly! I’m not aware of any standard metric of granularity which EP or anyone else has used to specify just how specific modules are supposed to be. There’s an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that makes a useful distinction between modest modularity and massive modularity. The former is what Fodo proposed in his 1983 is seems mostly about peripheral systems. Massive modularity extends to central systems as well and this is what EPers argue. However, the ” central systems are modular, but in a considerably weakened sense.” The article does not, however, provide a convenient list of the proposed central modules. What’s your list of “detailed” modules that have actually been proposed?

As Bill Benzon notes, the Chomskyan language acquisition device is the classic mental module. The difficulties in generative linguistics and its revisions by Chomsky himself do not suggest the mental modules approach is the royal road to knowledge.

The difficulties of generative linguistics have little to do with modularity. They have to do with the specific nature of the formal machinery used for characterizing a grammar – for some, indeed, the use of any formal machinery at all is problematic, and with the handling of empirical evidence.

This doesn’t make much sense to me:

Then there was the very widely touted (by prominent evolutionary biologists like Jerry Coyne) article by Pinker attacking group selection, in which Pinker basically relied on the inability of groups to replicate faster than natural selection could weed out individually maladaptive traits. It didn’t take long to wonder why a linguist (insofar as Pinker is actually qualified at anything it’s linguistics, [his dissertation & early work was on visual perception]) would neglect first of all to wonder whether there is such a thing as a group trait. It’s not clear to me that a child making a racket all the time is adaptive. Talking isn’t such a useful thing unless there’s someone to talk to. And if people didn’t talk something, even babble, however can nature select for an unexpressed trait? I conclude even a linguist EP isn’t much interested in the language instinct.

Pinker also neglected to consider that groups can form faster than by simple reproduction by splitting. Or that new groups formed by reassortment of like individuals. So he was wrong anyhow. Still, notwithstanding his article (which I haven’t heard of before) it’s not clear to he’s actually interested in the origin of language.

So, back in 1990 Pinker and Bloom publish an article on language as a biological adapation, and in Behavioral and Brain Science, thus guaranteeing it a wide audience. It becomes a much discussed and much citied (over 2300 citations so far). But you’ve not read it, which is OK, and nonetheless doubt that Pinker is interested in the origins of language because of what he’s said in a recent article about group selection, a somewhat different topic.

You seem to think language requires group selection. So you think language is a biological adaptation?

Anyhow, what’s group selection? You seem to think it’s selection for traits useful for living in groups. That’s not my understanding, though my understanding may be faulty.

Some years ago I published an essay-review of two books, Darwin’s Cathedral, by David Sloan Wilson, and Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, by James L. Pearson. Here’s what I said about group selection in that piece:

Given that religion functions as Wilson says, why invoke biology to explain it? Religion varies tremendously from group to group in ways that are clearly cultural. Wilson freely admits that “culturally evolved mechanisms are absolutely required for human society to hang together above the level of face-to-face groups” (p. 119). During his discussion of Calvinism he even suggests that the “protestant Reformation may be regarded as a large number of social experiments with may failures for each success” (p. 122). He is thus recognizes that cultural mechanisms surely play a major role religious behavior and institutions. What is at issue is whether or not these behavior patterns require a specific and dedicated genetic basis or whether they have been knit together from behaviors common to the hominid behavioral tool kit.

Behavioral patterns flow from the operation of psychological mechanisms. Thus we must account for the existence of those psychological mechanisms if we are fully to account for the behavior. That is what Wilson asks biology to do, to account for the existence of some critical portion of the psychological mechanisms needed to sustain human life in groups larger than those typical of our primate relatives—I’m thinking of the argument about recursion and syntax that Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) make with respect to the biology of natural language. Since it is the unusually large size of human groups that must be explained, Wilson suggests that group selection is the way to explain those psychological mechanisms.

What we observe, in animals as well as humans, is that individuals often do things that benefit the group but that cost them individually. As an example Wilson considers a hypothetical group of birds where individuals will emit calls warning the group of predators but also attracting the predators attention to them as individuals. These individuals are likely to attract the attention of these predators and so are more likely to be killed than others in the group and less likely to reproduce. Conversely, individuals who never emit warning calls nonetheless benefit from the calls of those who emit warnings and are thus more likely to reproduce. How can the genes favoring warning behavior reliably survive from one generation to another if individuals are less likely to reproduce than “free-loading” individuals?

Darwin’s solution to this problem was to imagine that we have many groups and that those groups are in competition with one another. Groups containing altruistic individuals are more likely to survive than groups without them. Thus, we now seem to have a way of explaining how altruism can be inherited from one generation to another.

This solution, known as group selectionism, requires that the group be a real entity, rather than just some arbitrary collection of individuals. And that is where the problem is, figuring out the conditions in which this is possible. The problem was readily solved in the special cases of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, but a general solution has been more elusive.

The problem is that groups must be relatively isolated breeding entities, for that is the only way to keep genetic variance between groups large enough for selective forces to work on whole groups rather than directly on individuals (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Leigh 1999). There is little reason to believe that human groups are sufficiently isolated from one another for group selection to be effective. Let us consider one of his example, that of a Christian congregation serving Korean Americans in Houston, Texas (pp. 165 ff.). This congregation tends to serve Korean immigrants; their sons and daughters generally leave the congregation, finding it too constraining. The congregation thus requires a constant influx of Korean immigrants to maintain its membership. As long as the influx continues the congregation can maintain itself as a stable social group. That group does not maintain its long-term membership through breeding; it does not consist of lineages that are relatively isolated from other lineages. Thus we certainly cannot expect such a congregation to be a vehicle for maintaining a group-selected biological faculty.

While I am inclined to think that this particular congregation represents an extreme case, it is not clear to me that it is so extreme that we can dismiss it. I suspect that most congregations in contemporary America are somewhat like this. Many children born into the congregation will leave it in adulthood when they move to another region. Have human beings generally lived in the sort of breeding groups necessary to maintain a group-selected moral faculty? Wilson doesn’t present any evidence that we do or have done so. Nor does it seem likely. The reproductive isolation requirements are fairly strict, and human population structure is relatively fluid (cf. Richerson and Boyd 1999, 2001). I am thus disinclined consider biological group selection an evolutionary source of the psychological mechanisms underlying human group behavior.

Nor, I should add, do I grant much significance to that disinclination. It is clear that humans have a considerable behavioral legacy from their animal forebearers and this legacy is surely active in the behaviors Wilson describes. The respective roles of the genes and social learning in developing the underlying psychological mechanisms are obscure, as Wilson freely acknowledges. I am rather inclined to believe that we will not understand those roles until we have a deeper understanding of the mechanisms themselves: what neural structures are involved, what external cues do they sense, what actions can they initiate, how do they develop? Until these matters are more firmly in hand, trying to apportion adaptive credit between genes and learning seems premature.

Kiwanda @ 85 –

You do realize that what they are saying is that the development of the brain is not strongly coded by genetics for any specific actions, but rather it has huge genetic potential for variable outcomes in response to environmental factors? That is directly counter to the the central EP assumption that we are genetically predisposed to particular kinds of behavior over a broad range of domains.

@John Holbo, #88: I guess it depends what one means by EP. I think some people in this thread are using it narrowly – in a way that might exclude M&S – but it seems to me more sensible to use it broadly, to include them. M&S apply the term to themselves without qualms.

For some time now it has been common to distinguish between “narrow school” EP (with the Cosmides & Tooby primer as a convenient quasi-manifesto) and “broad school” ev psych, which is more or less the general use of evolutionary insight in the investigation of human psychology. However, you go on to cite Mercier, who notes “Dan took this idea further, in the direction of massive modularity, and he applied it quite successfully in a variety of domains.” “Massive modularity” is a defining characteristic of narrow school EP – this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Phil has a useful discussion of modularity in this context, where “massive” is opposed to “modest” (Fodor) modularity.

So, is M&S EP or not? More important, though, is whether or not it is a good argument.

Still I can see why Hidari raises the question. Regardless of what reasoning is for, do M&S present any evidence that ‘reason’ – whatever that is – is a biological adaptation at all? Color me skeptical.

I take is as given that human culture as a whole is adaptive. It’s what allowed us to populate every continent on earth (including, now, Antarctica, if one calls manning scientific stations and high-end tourist excursions populating). I believe that we’re the one of the few primates, perhaps the only, to make it beyond the tropics. Some aspects of culture are obviously biologically useful, e.g. tools. But some are not, e.g. music and story telling – hence Pinker’s infamous argument that the arts are “cheesecake for the mind,” delicious but not nutritious. Well, maybe ‘reason’ is just one of those things that comes along with human culture, but we really can’t assign it to any specific function that can tied to a biological function.

No one doubts, for example, that writing is terribly useful. But no one tries to argue that writing is a biological adaptation because writing clearly emerged completely with the cultural sphere. The same with arithmetic. Very useful, but not universally present in all cultures. I’m suggesting that ‘reason’ is more or less like that, though I certainly don’t mean to suggest that ‘reason’ is exclusive to literate societies. But I do mean to suggest that I don’t know just what this ‘reason’ thing is that they’re investigating, hence the scare quotes.

And here I must confess that I’ve not read the whole article. I’ve known about the argument probably since it was published because I read about it on the web, perhaps at The Edge, though more likely at Sperber’s ICCI. It thought the idea was, well, odd, but downloaded the article for later reference. So, now is later, but I approached the article more or less with the above argument in the back of my mind (an argument I first articulated in a review of Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories).

And thus as I began reading around, I was looking for something to tie their article to biology, something more specific than the general notions of adaptation and purpose. I wasn’t able to spot anything. I read the abstract, starting reading the article, skipped around here and there, reading some passages closely, but skipping most, and then I read the abstract of every single comment. I didn’t spot anything that smelled like something more specific than a general sense of usefulness (in communicating, arguing) for ‘reason’.

Reasoning is one of many things humans can do, some do it better than others, and it seems that to do it really well, that requires specific training (see the comment by Maralee Harrell). Language evolves and reason comes trailing along. Is it reason that ‘pays’ for the biological cost of language, alone or in conjunction with communication or, why not, story telling? I don’t know.

As to my gigantic messed up sentence…In the effort to keep readers from forgetting (or equivocating) on what EP really claims, I had to put in numerous clauses. Being a bad typist and bad proofreader as well, the phrase “is missing,” referring to the actual evidence for all the propositions of EP, is missing, lost in the thicket. Nonetheless, despite my incompetence at writing, I shamelessly insist a view based on the evidence at hand is sounder than the one based on prospective evidence.

The rest is more or less about rebutting Kiwanda, who is at best confused. No doubt I’ve contributed enough confusion (see first paragraph!) But trying to sort it out is incredibly lengthy. My apologies.

Kiwanda’s claim that Neanderthal and homo sapien can have different mental modules/cognitive programs/mental architecture despite being members of the same species makes no sense. The whole point of EP’s chatter about genes is because genes->
neurophysiology-> cognitive program-> solution to adaptive problem. EP promptly forgets this, and operates in reverse, despite not knowing what EEA produces the adaptive program, but still: This is the logic that EP relies on for its claim to be scientific unlike anthropologists, etc. (By the way, neurophysiology is the term in the primer, as is cognitive program.)

Kiwanda clarifies that no implication Neanderthals had a different neurophysiology was meant. Remarks about hybrids etc. trying to address the possibility thus were an inadvertent irrelevance. Again, the discovery of genetic admixture tells us Neanderthals and modern humans are merely variants, races. The notion that different extant races have different neurophysiology and cognitive programs is not well supported. (To say the least!) I still differ with Kiwanda that it is speculative and dubious to see no reason for extinct races of humans to be any different in neurophysiology and cognitive programs. Thinking so seems to me to be speculative and dubious.

At this point I am baffled as to what Kiwanda could have meant by “It seems highly speculative to claim that Neanderthal culture did not change over millennia; it would be very interesting to see clear substantial evidence of such unchanging culture,” if it wasn’t to claim the persistence of Mousterian culture is not a fact, or at least one that doesn’t prompt questions. Hence the discussion of that point. It’s true that the evidence we have is limited to durable physical remains like tools, but that does not mean we can say nothing. This aspect of human culture did remain pretty unchanging for thousands of years, very unlike the durable remains from humans in the last 50 000 to 100 000 years before present. (The population bottleneck circa 70 000 years ago may marked, somehow caused even, the change in humanity?)

Kiwanda wrote “if the claim is that the social disciplines give strong evidence that there are *not* “mental modules”, it would be very interesting to hear what that evidence is.”
At this point I have to refer back to the self-professed principles so admirably laid out in the primer. The cognitive programs, or mental modules as they are more often called, are genetically pre-programmed learning frameworks, innately given crib sheets for coping with adaptive problems of the EEA. As such people would be learning the same thing in every culture. (I myself suspect that instinct, pre-programmed knowledge is the opposite of intelligence because the ability to fulfill an innate hereditary behavior seems to require an indifference to outside stimuli not pre-designated in the hereditary behavior, i.e., forbids the organism to learn differently, which would by definition be a failure of heredity.)

Well, it appears that people in all cultures have learned to forbid incest (yet not so well that it isn’t necessary to forbid it! Or why there have been conspicuous exception even to this rule!) With this observation we are already starting to run out of universally pre-programmed learnings, at least without Donald Brown style nonsense. Even more to the point, with these congenital cheat sheets, how is that so many amazingly different things are learned when we’re reading from the same page? The insistence the same mental module is at work in, say, learning marriage customs like polygyny, polyandry, dowry, bride price, levirate marriage, exogamy, endogamy, concubinage, the Oneida colony’s mating schedule, definitions of incest that do or do not include first cousins etc. etc. etc. is extraordinary.

Piaget may not be in style, but modern learning theory (however prone to fads it is) still holds that actual learning is highly dependent upon experience, play, interaction with environment social and physical. If instead the learning were due to genetic enabling, then the time table of physical development would be highly determinitave. Except it’s not.

But most important of all, anthropology tells us that we don’t know what the EEA is. This is not a little detail. Without that knowledge, starting with the adaptive problems is an insane procedure. Any detailed study of primitive life quickly reveals how essential an understanding of the local ecology is.

Without disgorging from personal memory both the memory and life experience of years, it is impossible to briefly answer this superficially reasonable request to prove the human brain isn’t massively modular. Of course, if the claims of EP are reduced to something like, cognitive programs merely incline, then I can only say, astrologers tell us the stars only incline, but do not compel, too. Insofar as EP claims to “explain” human nature, like parapsychology “explaining” ESP, or like astrobiology, it, like them, is a “science” without a subject.

It might be a little disingenuous to retort that EP doesn’t explain actual human natures the the universal grammar of learning, so to speak, a la Chomsky. Well it is true that there is a current fashion for proclaiming Chomsky dead. My personal belief that anarchism is fundamentally an epic confusion that covers reaction ashamed of itself leads me to sympathize, so I’m reluctant to leap to agree. It may turn out to be like all those people who were sure Margaret Mead was refuted as a gullible fool because some grandchildren claimed their grannies told them they didn’t sleep around as young people, nosiree! without being clear as to how they knew the grannies were lying then but not now.

But the thing about the LAD, a mental module if ever there was one, is that unlike every other mental module hypothesized by EP, there really are identifiable genes such as FOXP2 and identifiable neural structures (partly localized in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, but also a global function,) and an identifiable critical period in development. Other phenomena like vision have also had genes and specific brain structure associated with them. This is not social science evidence to be sure, but the neurological and genetic evidence simply does not support the massive modularity required by EP.

It is a fairly simple idea in evolutionary theory that the more intense the natural selection for a trait, whether physical or behavioral or cognitively programmatic, the universally found it is. The less intense the natural selection the more likely for there to be variation. Skipping over EP’s ignorance of variation, its own subject matter tells us that the differences in the occurrence of genes, in variations, is essential even to its own alleged program. Instead, the primer explicitly says EP has nothing to do with behavioral genetics!

I think Bunge got that sort of thing exactly right. Refusing to accept well established results from other fields or blithely contradicting them without evidence is symptomatic of pseudoscience.

Even if it marks me as a hopelessly old fashioned Baconian, I think science is about finding out how things really are, not about doing controlled experiments to refute hypotheses. Michel Gauquelin did an experiment to test an astrological prediction (Mars effect, if I remember rightly.) I don’t think that’s good science any more than EP.
EP is not scientific because it invokes “evolution.” That can serve as a substitute for “God-given.”

This is all running too long, even for a hobby. Good-bye.

1: OK here is what Pinker states: ‘According to How the Mind Works (pp. 24–27; chap. 2), mental life consists of information processing
or computation. Beliefs are a kind of information, thinking a kind of
computation, and emotions, motives, and desires are a kind of feedback mechanism
in which an agent senses the difference between a current state and goal state and
executes operations designed to reduce the difference. ‘Computation’ in this
context does not refer to what a commercially available digital computer does
but to a more generic notion of mechanical rationality, a concept that Fodor
himself has done much to elucidate (Fodor, 1968; 1975; 1981; 1994).
In this conception, a computational system is one in which knowledge and goals
are represented as patterns in bits of matter (‘representations’). The system is
designed in such a way that one representation causes another to come into
existence; and these changes mirror the laws of some normatively valid system
like logic, statistics, or laws of cause and effect in the world. The design of the
system thus ensures that if the old representations were accurate, the new ones are
accurate as well. Deriving new accurate beliefs from old ones in pursuit of a goal is
not a bad definition of ‘intelligence’, so a principal advantage of the computational
theory of mind (CTM) is that it explains how a hunk of matter (a brain or a
computer) can be intelligent….mental life—internal representations
and processes—appears to be more lawful and universal than overt behavior,
which can vary with circumstances. This is behind Chomsky’s idea that there is
a single Universal Grammar that applies to all the world’s languages despite their
differences in overt words and constructions. Much of HTMW extends this idea
to other areas of human psychology, such as the emotions, social and sexual
relations, and humor.’ (http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/so_how_does_the_mind_work.pdf)

So first off, mea culpa. I was writing early where I was and shouldn’t have said ‘Turing Machine’. I should have said ‘computer’ because what was being discussed here was our old friend the Computational Theory of Mind. (http://www.iep.utm.edu/compmind/).

So what I should have said was ‘the mind must be, in some non-trivial sense, a computer’. Apologies again. However, this is a difference that doesn’t make much of a difference, as Pinker (and, I believe, most proponents of EP) are still committed to most of the beliefs above, if not all of them. And they must believe that they are literally true, not just a metaphor.

2: As for the rest: EP requires what one might call ‘not so massive modularity’ to be true, because it makes ‘massive modularity’ so much more likely. It could, I suppose, be argued that so-called ‘low level’ cognitive functions are not modular and ‘high level’ cognitive functions are. But that would seem to be a bizarre opinion. At least I don’t know anyone who holds it. It makes more sense to assume that if low level cognition is modular, then the idea that high level cognition is modular is more likely. So that’s why the evidence that low level modules exist (e.g. Chomsky’s Language Acquiring Module) is so important to EP. If they do (and this is unarguably true) it makes massive modularity more likely.

3: But EP really does need massive modularity to be true, as it is precisely the existence of such modules that the empirical data (mainly experiments) tests. In other words: EP assumes such modules exist. What is at issue is: do they exist in precisely the shape and form predicted by EP?

If they don’t exist at all, then all the experiments are moot.

4: Fair enough, and I stand corrected. But a little bit of thought shows that this is a difference that makes no difference. Insofar as it does make a difference, it makes things worse for EP. In other words, Pinker is claiming that we evolved for ‘pre-modern’ times: in other words, roughly, at or before 8,000 BCE (or maybe earlier). To be fair, this does not limit us to the Savannah, but we are then faced with the question: well for what environment were we ‘evolved’ for? By that time, homo sapiens sapiens was living in lots of different environments, with lots of different cultures and ways of living. So which one do we pick as the one that we were ‘really’ adapted to?

In any case, EP assumed that we stopped evolving, biologically, in ‘pre-modern’ times. We now know this to be false. EP then claims that the changes since then were only ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’. This may be true, but it’s definitely a step back from the ‘hard line’ position, and by no means obviously true.

In any case: EP asks a question: ‘why are people essentially the same, across time and space?’ and gives an answer: ‘because the cognitive architecture of homo sapiens sapiens, conceptualised as a massively modular information processing device, is the same. This cannot change no matter how far people’s cultural surroundings change’.

To repeat, this answer only makes sense if the question makes sense.

Whoops! In my 92 above the following paragraph should be set in italics as it is part of the quotation from stevenjohnsfn’s #69:

Pinker also neglected to consider that groups can form faster than by simple reproduction by splitting. Or that new groups formed by reassortment of like individuals. So he was wrong anyhow. Still, notwithstanding his article (which I haven’t heard of before) it’s not clear to he’s actually interested in the origin of language.

@stevenjohnson #103

Somehow I’ve missed Bill Benzon@92. There, I see that he’s published in EP, so a response may not be desired, the real point is for me to shut up.

1. It got lost in moderation.

2. LOL! Published in EP, shocking isn’t it? If you read the article you’d see it has little to do with either narrow or broad school EP. Though I do have a quote from Dread Pirate EO Wilson in the beginning, quickly followed by a quote from Good Guy Weston La Barre.

3. Not shut up, just stop acting like EP is riding all four horses of the Apocalypse.

As for the Mercier and Sperber, you might want to read my comment on it (# 96). I’m quite skeptical that it has anything to say about biological adaptation. But I don’t see that the publication of that article (and others like it) threatens the future of rational discourse about the mind.

Bill Benzon objects the existence of Chomsky’s LAD has nothing to do with Chomsky’s difficulties in finalizing the universal deep grammar. I contend that the difficulty of finding the hidden structure of language is evidence the LAD might not exist at all.

I’d like to see more than a contention. I’d like to see an argument.

Bill Benzon seems offended that a twenty six year old article by Pinker isn’t deemed proof of his interest in the evolutionary origins of life [language]. It seems to me that language is a group trait. The cases of feral children certainly suggest it’s not an individual one in the ordinary sense. The special relevance of group selection to the evolutionary origins of language is hypothetical, of course. The primary point I was making about Pinker’s attack on group selection was that a linguist wasn’t even interested in the topic!

People need to learn language from others and at least some song birds learn their songs from others. Language requires social learning, as do other things.

As far as I can tell “group trait” plays little role in discussions of group selection. FWIW the Wikipedia article on Group selection doesn’t use the phrase at all. And when I run an Ngram query on two phrases, “group selection” and “group trait”, the second phrase almost doesn’t show up while the first shows a steep and steady rise starting in about 1960 to 2000 (the cut-off date for the query).

Finally, Dan Everett has just published a long article on the evolution of language in Journal of Neurolinguistics (the link is to a prepublication draft that is open to the public) and doesn’t mention group selection at all. Should he have? In any event, the fact the Pinker rejects group selection doesn’t mean the subject doesn’t interest him. On the contrary, the fact that he bothered to write a piece rejecting it implies that it interests him a great deal, but he thinks the idea is mistaken.

stevenjohnson, various:

<blockquote.
Nonetheless, despite my incompetence at writing, I shamelessly insist…..The rest is more or less about rebutting Kiwanda, who is at best confused.

Don’t worry, your clarity of expression is entirely consonant with your clarity of thought.

Again, you make two speculative claims leading to an irrelevant conclusion:

1. The ability of Neanderthal and homo sapiens to interbreed implies that they must have had identical “mental architectures”
2. We positively know that Neanderthal culture did not change across millennia, unlike homo sapiens culture
3. Therefore, the claim (said to be made by EP) that cultural differences must be due to different “mental architectures” is false

Absent a population of Neanderthals to interact with, we cannot know about (1). Given the current estimates of lineage separation, they may not be as related to us as we are related to each other, your speculations about them as a “race” in your recent effusion notwithstanding.

Regarding (2), like (1), any strong version is unresolvable in principle, absent a time machine. Ancient physical remains from a hundred-some sites are surely some evidence regarding some aspects of culture, but they’re not exactly definitive. Could Neanderthals have developed different cultures, with appropriate populations and material conditions? We don’t know.

So your speculative nail in the EP coffin remains speculative. Indeed, I’m clear what the point is, given that (3), “mental architecture implies all of culture” is not, as far as I can tell, a tenet of EP. Perhaps your notion here is related:

At this point I have to refer back to the self-professed principles so admirably laid out in the [EP] primer. The cognitive programs, or mental modules as they are more often called, are genetically pre-programmed learning frameworks, innately given crib sheets for coping with adaptive problems of the EEA. As such people would be learning the same thing in every culture.

You have a remarkably narrow idea of what a “mental module” might be. Your notion seems to suggest that a mental module for language would result in everyone being born only able to learn a particular language. Do you think that EPers believe the obviously false idea that people learn “the same thing in every culture”?

Piaget….Chomsky…Margaret Mead…LAD…

There’s a tight cogent argument there, but I’m not clear yet on it.

The whole point of EP’s chatter about genes is because genes-> neurophysiology-> cognitive program-> solution to adaptive problem. EP promptly forgets this, and operates in reverse, despite not knowing what EEA produces the adaptive program, but still: This is the logic that EP relies on for its claim to be scientific unlike anthropologists, etc.

As best I understand, it does operate that chain in reverse, to *generate hypotheses*, those hypotheses then evaluated in a variety of ways, ideally experimentally. Can you supply specific EP papers of the last decade that just make such “reverse” speculations based on unknowable conditions, then declare victory and go home?

On language: I think Chomsky (and Pinker) are operating on the engineer’s assumptions that it’s basically communication, and that it can be usefully analysed in terms of grammar, lexicon etc. Both assumptions are radically incomplete. Language comprises more than grammar and lexicon – it also takes in knowledge of the world, the social situation, the local context, the speaker and the spoken too, and it does this in even the simplest exchanges.

Consider the following everyday “conversation”:

“Noise of annoyance/surprise”
“(Grunt) It’s right there” (tilt of head)
“I’m NOT stupid”

Grammar does not get you far in parsing it.

Language is a loose set of systems of classification, socially generated and transferred from minds to mind. So an LAD needs to take in and construct the “grammars” of visual attention, selective environmental concerns, expressions of attitude/status and the rest as it does on formal linguistic categories. And the evidence (from neurological studies of sign-language users and feral children) is that it does so. The genome, being parsimonious, has outsourced much of this aspect of development to the (generally predictable) social environment.

DrDick 99:

Kiwanda @ 94 –

“While I personally subscribe to the general idea that people are the same, wherever you go, I can’t unpack “Why is human behaviour essentially the same..?” into a meaningful scientific question.”

Interesting, since that is exactly what you would expect if human behavior were strongly genetically conditioned (as EP mandates). Behavior in many species (dogs for instance) essentially the same between individuals and groups, though even here there is some minor variability.

This shows an extremely limited view of what “strongly genetically conditioned” might mean, as well as the puzzling ascription both that “mandate” and that limited view to EP. All I understand of EP comes from a few reviews and surveys, and a few articles by EPers; where are you getting this?

Bill Benzon@104 asks “Should [Dan Everett] have [considered group selection]?” Group selection is a phenomenon hypothesized to explain why some traits that are maladaptive to individuals are nevertheless preferentially reproduced. Dan Everett plainly believes that language is at all stages of its evolution adaptive, therefore selected by nature. He has no need to consider group selection.

It is not clear to me how noisy offspring are adaptive in hominin groups with a very limited physical culture to protect them. Dan Everett and people who share the view that language adaptive do need to demonstrate this is true. Thus it is a question is how significant their language was to the success of homo erectus, and by what standard of success, whether population size, geographical distribution or duration of species existence. Like the human brain, the adaptive value of human language is not quite so obvious as may seem at first glance. (And also show multiple origins of language families world-wide, as opposed to a Greenbergian-style proto-Human.)

Bill Benzon, with “I’d like to see more than a contention. I’d like to see an argument…” is implicitly questioning the relevance of the difficulties in specifying and confirming the universal grammar/deep structure/Chomsky to the notion of mental modules. Very well, with permission I’ll try to spell out the contention.

The idea of cognitive programs is that they enable people to learn tasks. The brain is like an iPhone in the EP picture. If you want to do certain things with the phone, like book a hotel, then you download an app. The cognitive program is the app, which is downloaded by the genes, by natural selection for the solution to an adaptive problem. Chomsky’s universal grammar is the app. The actual spoken language is the workings of the app in a particular society, just like the results of real world apps on real world phones are determined by the individual user, which cities’ hotels are searched and which hotels books varying endlessly.

Difficulties in confirming the existence of the cognitive program for language, the app, Chomsky’s universal grammar, therefore most certainly do call into question the basic picture of human psychology as a congeries of cognitive programs. There is at least neurological evidence for biological adaptations for language. All the other cognitive programs so freely hypothesized by EP are therefore, well, it’s the opposite of a fortiori.

Bill Benzon also writes “As for the Mercier and Sperber, you might want to read my comment on it (# 96). I’m quite skeptical that it has anything to say about biological adaptation. But I don’t see that the publication of that article (and others like it) threatens the future of rational discourse about the mind.” The article essentially argues that rationality is an illusion, a genetic construct designed for dominating other people, a biological fact, acceptance of which makes you more scientific. I don’t know whether you think these propositions have no consequences, or whether they cannot prevail. Both attitudes strike me as nonsense.

What I do understand is that somehow you think criticizing their approach on fundamental principles is a threat to rational discourse. Obviously we’ll never agree on that. I think when in casual conversation you can hear a woman claim men are genetically programmed for promiscuity and women aren’t, then EP is powerfully affecting rational discourse, for the worse. Now I’ll go back to knocking down straw men for exercise, in lieu of walking the dog.

Kiwanda@106 asks “Do you think that EPers believe the obviously false idea that people learn ‘the same thing in every culture’?” When did you stop beating your wife? I believe EPers think everybody in every culture for example learn the same universal grammar. That would be why it’s been called a universal grammar, among many other things. That particular idea is not obviously false, though it is by no means well-established either. As per the usual confusion, I’m not sure what the point of this is. It’s too confused to work well even as mere rhetorical hostility.

Kiwanda also asks “Can you supply specific EP papers of the last decade that just make such “reverse” speculations based on unknowable conditions, then declare victory and go home?” Maybe it’s just me, but when an interlocutor demands a literature review, they’ve lost the debate.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about during this whatever-it-is is Konrad Lorenz and the goslings. He hypothesized that “goslings will follow the first large moving object that they see after hatching” rather than rejecting that first thing in favor of their mother. And he proved it in a field experiment. Thus we have the charming image of Lorenze be followed about by a bunch of goslings (at about 49 seconds into this video). And thus the idea of imprinting was born, and that proved crucial in John Bowlby’s somewhat later thinking about human attachment.

So, to use the computer metaphor, goslings are born with a program that has a variable in it, a variable named “first large moving object.” Under normal conditions that variable gets bound to the gosling’s mother, as that is the first large moving object it sees. Lorenze produced a situation in which he was the first thing the infants saw. For those goslings, then, the variable became bound to Lorenze.

So, now we have “narrow” EP with its “massive” modularity (so yuge! the biggest!). How many of those programs have variables that only become bound to specific objects upon exposure to the environment (where an object could be some specific physical object, or class of objects, animate or inanimate, or it could be another program, perhaps innate or entirely learned)?

@109
If you can’t ‘unpack’ what ‘essentially’ means then why not quote from the Pinker article you linked to?

‘The other … empirical fact (is) that human races and ethnic groups are psychologically highly similar, if not identical’.

Remember this phrase (which Pinker wrote: it’s not an off the cuff remark from an interview), when EPers claim that ‘of course’ they are aware of cultural variation or ‘obviously’ they are not denying it etc.

Please note the logic incidentally. Pinker downplays the facts of recent human biological evolution because of the ‘fact’ that human beings are (nearly) ‘identical’, everywhere. If that second claim is not true, then it need not necessarily be the case that such changes in human evolution that have occurred over the last 12000 years are necessarily trivial. (see @111 for more on this).

And if they are not trivial this poses rather major problems for EP, at least in its current form.

stevenjohnson @112:

Kiwanda also asks “Can you supply specific EP papers of the last decade that just make such “reverse” speculations based on unknowable conditions, then declare victory and go home?” Maybe it’s just me, but when an interlocutor demands a literature review, they’ve lost the debate.

The common meaning of “literature review” entails the citation of a great variety of sources. (stevenjohnson, please see here for example.) I asked for “specific EP papers”, and I certainly intended to mean “just a few”, which I hope would be the natural interpretation. stevenjohnson, how about one such paper?

I could invoke the simplistic rule “People who invoke simplistic rules to claim that they’ve won a debate have only shown that they just care about “winning” and not about the truth”, but I won’t.

Another Nick 101:

Kiwanda: “Googling a bit, I find that the changes detected don’t seem so relevant”

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking

“Are you suggesting that we’re still evolving, mentally?”

http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(04)01143-2.pdf

Thanks, those are very interesting. Although: the second article does not seem to be talking about “recent”, as in, the last fifty thousand years, but “recent”, as in, the last twenty million; it’s about primate nervous system evolution, humans and macaques. Or so it seemed to me.

The difficulty with the first article is that such results are vulnerable to mis-interpretation and mis-use, just as are over-blown versions of EP; people might use them to make claims of racial or gender or etc. superiority. This is why it surprises me that some here seem eager to claim that it can’t be the case that “people are essentially the same”.

DrDick 119:

Kiwamda @ 110

“All I understand of EP comes from a few reviews and surveys, and a few articles by EPers; where are you getting this?”

That is pretty obvious, actually. I get that from 30 years of teaching anthropology, extensive field research with a non-Euro-American population, and extensive research on gender systems and race/ethnicity, as well as discussions with my biological anthropology colleagues, whose specialties include human evolution and human genetics. Their critiques of evo-psych are harsher than mine (they roll their eyes if you mention it).

Ah, invoking your own authority again.

Where my question came from:

I said: “While I personally subscribe to the general idea that people are the same, wherever you go, I can’t unpack “Why is human behaviour essentially the same..?” into a meaningful scientific question.”

DrDick 99 said: “Interesting, since that is exactly what you would expect if human behavior were strongly genetically conditioned (as EP mandates).”

I said “This shows an extremely limited view of what “strongly genetically conditioned” might mean, as well as the puzzling ascription both that “mandate” and that limited view to EP. ” And then the question quoted: where is he getting this?

OK, DrDick, with your self-proclaimed vast and long endowments of experience and erudition, it should be the work of moments give scholarly sources for what your statements. How about it?

>> Kiwanda’s claim that Neanderthal and homo sapien can have different mental modules/cognitive programs/mental architecture despite being members of the same species makes no sense

Doesn’t the same argument ‘prove’ that Neanderthals and homo sapiens couldn’t have different skeletal structures? Also, it must be theoretically impossible to identify which of two dogs is which, given only the knowledge one is a dachshund and one a St Bernard.

Species boundaries are simply where reproduction stops working, nothing more. Lions and tigers can very nearly viably reproduce, so they are only a whisker from being a single species.

http://animals.mom.me/difference-between-ligers-tigons-3506.html

How far do you want to push this, stevenjohnson (#112)?

Difficulties in confirming the existence of the cognitive program for language, the app, Chomsky’s universal grammar, therefore most certainly do call into question the basic picture of human psychology as a congeries of cognitive programs.

It seems to me that pretty much calls into question the general purpose computer as well “one which can accept many different kinds of programs compatible with the hardware” (#64). The failure of Chomsky’s account is simply the failure of Chomsky’s account, no more, no less.

Back in 1968 Charles Hockett published The State of the Art, in which is critiqued Chomsky. This is a summary of most of those arguments.

DrDick 127:

That you cannot understand the difference between what you are saying and what we have been saying says a lot about you.

Goodness me!

What we are arguing for is that much/most human behavior is NOT strongly genetically determined, but represents a much larger, complex interaction between a broad range of genetic potentials (within the same individuals/populations) and exogenous environmental factors which profoundly shape the outcomes and produce many radically different outcomes.

So you would probably agree, unlike those racists or misogynists or EP, that “Every aspect of an organism’s phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes.”

Indeed, as I’m sure you’d agree, “…genes are simply regulatory elements, molecules that arrange their surrounding environment into an organism….There is no aspect of the phenotype that cannot be influenced by some environmental manipulation”

Nice article at the link, by the way. Indeed, the evidence so far suggests that women and men are pretty much the same in brain anatomy. You might even say “essentially the same”, whatever that means.

> That does not necessarily mean that there are no innate differences, just that the evidence is inconclusive and the case for such innate differences has not actually been made.

Are you unaware that the link you posted directly contradicts that statement? There are unambiguously measurable statistical differences. The point being made, which seems to be true, is that those differences are not sortable into a strict binary male/female classification, but form a range of overlapping tendencies. More like height, less like facial hair length. Which is what you would expect to be both necessary and sufficient as the evolutionary basis for the range of different sets of gender roles anthropologically observed.

It’s like genetic tendencies are a multi-dimensional space which culture attempts to partition in a way that minimizes inappropriate assignments. In other words, people who are unhappy, and so ineffective, and sometimes, in survival-challenged societies, dead.

I do not seem to be expressing myself very well here. Nobody is denying that genetics plays a role in shaping human behavior. The question is whether genetics is determinant or to what degree. Clearly genetics plays a role, but the available research in biology, medicine, psychology, and anthropology shows rather starkly that environmental factors play at least as great a role. Human behavior is clearly highly variable, both within and between populations. Given our very low levels of genetic diversity compared to other animal species, this would not be the case if genetics played the primary role in determining our behavior, as asserted by EP.

I would not generally disagree that we generally are much more similar than different at birth. However, what happens after birth is just as important, if not more so, as genetics. We also have a huge amount of research on the profound effects of environmental factors on human capabilities and behavior. All of this undermines the basic premises of EP.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188235/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621015/

https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/ttb_aces_consequences.pdf

https://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf

John Holbo –

“But if someone out there is trying to come up with an evolutionary hypothesis as to why all humans (apart from anomalous specimens) think a certain way, or have a certain pattern of cognitive response, then that is not obviously nuts. ”

There in lies the rub. That is not a given and has seldom been demonstrated by EP and most of their research has been based on European derived populations, making it difficult to separate cultural from biological influences.

“Arguments from authority are sometimes good to make, even though they are, of course, always hazardous. But I think in this case the hazards outweigh the benefits. (The proponents of EP make arguments from authority, too, and I try to ignore those arguments, too, whenever possible. It isn’t just you.)”

I generally agree, which is why I have included links to scholarly material making those same points, which you have not addressed. Again, the scientific research on human evolution, genetics, and behavior, both in anthropology and other disciplines, which I and they have read and which I have provided links to, does not support the premises of EP.

Dr Dick, #134:

Nobody is denying that genetics plays a role in shaping human behavior. The question is whether genetics is determinant or to what degree. Clearly genetics plays a role, but the available research in biology, medicine, psychology, and anthropology shows rather starkly that environmental factors play at least as great a role.

From Confer et al. 2010 (PDF), linked in Kiwanda #72 above:

The framework of evolutionary psychology dissolves dichotomies such as “nature versus nurture,” “innate versus learned,” and “biological versus cultural.” Instead it offers a truly interactionist framework: Environmental selection pressures shape evolved mechanisms at the phylogenetic level (Fraley, Brumbaugh, & Marks, 2005). Environmental input influences their development at the ontogenetic level (e.g., Belsky, 2007; Bjorklund & Pelligrini, 2000; Ellis & Bjorklund, 2005). And the environment provides cues that activate psychological adaptations at the immediate proximal level (e.g., Buss, 1995; Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). Thus, it does not make sense to ask whether calluses or mating decisions are “evolved” or “learned” or due to “nature” or “nurture.” All evolved mechanisms require some environmental input for their activation, be it repeated friction to the skin in the case of calluses or observable cues to mate value in the case of mating decisions.

I have another question, regarding variation. Isn’t it true that any sexually reproducing species conserves a reservoir of latent variation? And, that latent variation helps the species survive sudden changes in environmental demands or ecological eruptions such as epidemic disease? That’s not a group trait, of course, but it is important to species survival. Have I misunderstood this?

DrDick, using that prodigious pillar of scholarship and seasoning
of his, of which he informs us so proudly and frequently, has shared some links to
articles (or searches for articles) in a couple of his recent comments.

It’s an interesting collection that includes studies of anatomical correlates
and genetic influence on mental modules…or rather, I mean, mental characteristics;
human genetic homogeneity; the mental health value of growing up in a good
environment, and the damage from not; and the relation of social cues to
behavioral flexibility.

It’s relevance to the current discussion: not so clear. The implications of some links
seem contrary to his arguments. I hope he’ll elucidate.

I give some excerpts, intended to be summaries.

—-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1855137/

Some areas of the genome are more susceptible to environmental effects than others.

“Our study demonstrated chromosomal location effects on variations in gene
expression. Surprisingly, environmental components were able to account for most
of the positional variation in gene expression changes. Genetic variation,
although responsible for much expression variation, does not seem to contribute
to the regional biases in it.”

—–https://psmag.com/genes-affect-our-behavior-but-so-does-the-environment-11c5a526684f#.fr6utspe5

“The often indistinguishable effects of genes and environment are important to
keep in mind especially when we read about genetic studies of behavioral or
mental traits, which, unlike many physical traits, can be directly transmitted
from parents to offspring, independently of genes.”

—-http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/8/1843.full

“Although RI-related regions do not appear to support inhibition of prepotent
learned associations, a subset of these regions, dACC and rIFG, guide actions
consistent with current reward contingencies. These regions and lateral OFC
represent distinct neural components that support behavioral flexibility
important for adaptive learning. ”

—-A google scholar search for “behavioral flexibility in humans”

The first two hits describe anatomical correlates of mental
phenomena. The third studies social cues and behavioral flexibility.

first hit:
“We review our recent work examining activity of LC neurons in monkeys performing
a visual discrimination task that requires focused attention. Results indicate
that LC cells exhibit phasic or tonic modes of activity, that closely correspond
to good or poor performance on this task, respectively.”

second hit:
“The present experiments investigated the role of the prelimbic–infralimbic areas
in behavioral flexibility using a place–response learning paradigm.”

third hit:
“We tested the prediction that social information can increase the propensity of
human participants to change their behavior, by exposing individuals to social
cues of either low or high performance (“low cued” versus “high cued”), or to no
cues (“without-cues”).”

—-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188235/

Specific genes that affect the characteristic of temperament.

“After a brief review of behavioral genetic methodology, this paper will examine
research exploring the etiology of individual differences in infant and child
temperament. Behavioral genetics research, however, has much more to offer the
study of temperament than estimates of genetic influence. To that end, this
paper will also examine the nature of environmental influences on temperament;
the etiology of continuity and change in temperament; links between temperament
and behavior problems; and the merging of behavioral and molecular genetic
techniques to identify specific genes that affect temperament.”

—-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621015/

“…we describe the key features of nurturing environments; summarize the evidence
about how each feature influences development; and describe the kind of public
health movement needed to increase the prevalence of nurturing environments.”

—-https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/ttb_aces_consequences.pdf

“This study of more than 17,000 middle-class Americans documented quite clearly
that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can contribute significantly to
negative adult physical and mental health outcomes and affect more than 60% of
adults.”

https://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf

“Human genetic diversity is substantially lower than that of many other species,
including our nearest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Genetic diversity
is a function of a population’s “age” (i.e., the amount of time during which
mutations accumulate to generate diversity) and its size. Our genetic
homogeneity implies that anatomically modern humans arose relatively recently
(perhaps 200,000 years ago) and that our population size was quite small at one
time (perhaps 10,000 breeding individuals).”

@DrDick 127 and John’s answer @128 What we are arguing for is that much/most human behavior is NOT strongly genetically determined, but represents a much larger, complex interaction between a broad range of genetic potentials…

Specific claims, guys, specific claims…

I am grateful to Z, upthread, for the cogent critique of M&S, but that is very different from saying we know, a priori, that M&S couldn’t […] be doing science.

Thanks for the gratitude. I’ll add that I did point out that I had many good things to say about M&S but was concentrating on the critic. Already in the actually existing article, they are doing good and interesting science in my opinion.

stevenjonhson 103 I contend that the difficulty of finding the hidden structure of language is evidence the LAD might not exist at all.

As far as I know, I am CT’s resident Chomskyan (though I actually dislike the term) so I feel compelled point out that science is hard and that no one should hold linguistics to standards that physics does not meet. Since 1666, simple and extremely strong empirical arguments in favor of the existence of a force accounting for the movement of planets around the Sun have been known yet we don’t know the inner structure of gravity and the Higgs Boson was identified only in 2013. Likewise, it is true that even the most fervent believer will readily admit there are a lot we don’t know about the inner structure of the LAD. The existence of simple and extremely strong empirical arguments in favor of its existence, however, is not in doubt (I gave a trivial one in a previous thread but other deeper ones abound).

@108 Peter T On language: I think Chomsky (and Pinker) are operating on the engineer’s assumptions that it’s basically communication

FWIW, this is possibly the maximally possible misreading of Chomsky: the one sentence summary of Chomsky’s thesis about the relation between language and communication is that there is no relation between them.

@ John 133 Sorry, I am ignorant of the biology of swim bladders

Swim bladders evolved from primitive lungs (breathing sacs connected to the guts). So they evolved to help fishes breath. Since Darwin, they have the go-to example of an organ which, well, I can’t do better than quote Origin of Species “shows us the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely, flotation, may be converted into one for a widely different purpose, namely, respiration” (note that Darwin thought that lungs evolved from swim bladders while we now know that the reverse happened, but the logic is impeccable).

M&S operate under the general assumption that the current main and optimal function of an organ (in their case mental) gives insights about its evolutionary history or (perhaps, I don’t find them awfully clear on this point; then again, if they had been, they would probably have noticed their mistake) that the evolutionary history of an organ gives insight on its current function. Swim bladders show that this can’t be, or at the very least that any such kind of argument must be conducted with extreme care.

Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

Kiwanda @144

None of that actually supports your position or that of EP. Indeed, neural plasticity refers to physical changes in the structure of the brains and neural metabolism as a result of environmental stimuli. None of those quotes argues that those differences are genetic. You may want to brush up on your biology a bit before you go insulting others.

Z 146:

M&S operate under the general assumption that the current main and optimal function of an organ (in their case mental) gives insights about its evolutionary history or (perhaps, I don’t find them awfully clear on this point; then again, if they had been, they would probably have noticed their mistake) that the evolutionary history of an organ gives insight on its current function. Swim bladders show that this can’t be, or at the very least that any such kind of argument must be conducted with extreme care.

As read them, they don’t exactly do either:

Here we want to explore the idea that the emergence of reasoning is best understood within the framework of the evolution of human communication. Reasoning enables people to exchange arguments that, on the whole, make communication more reliable and hence more advantageous. The main function of reasoning, we claim, is argumentative…

As most evolutionary hypotheses, this claim runs the risk of being perceived as another “just so story.” It is therefore crucial to show that it entails falsifiable predictions. If the main function of reasoning is indeed argumentative, then it should exhibit as signature effects strengths and weaknesses related to the relative importance of this function compared to other potential functions of reasoning. This should be testable through experimental work done here and now. Our goal now is to spell out and explain what signature effects we predict, to evaluate these predictions in light of the available evidence, and to see whether they help make better sense of a number of well-known puzzles in the psychology of reasoning and decision making. Should one fail, on the other hand, to find such signature of the hypothesized argumentative function of reasoning, and even more should one find that the main features of reasoning match some other function, then our hypothesis should be considered falsified.

That is, they say the “right things” about falsifiability. They regard what they are doing as a prediction about the limitations of human reasoning, mostly in relation to confirmation bias. They then go on to “test” this prediction by explaining various fallacies in its light. This is too close to after-the-fact interpretation, I feel; I didn’t see any classical “here’s a *new* prediction, which we tested”. So that’s a weakness, albeit one sometimes shared by theoretical physics and elsewhere.

Hidari 145:

Y’see this starts to sound to me like the problems I have with neoclassical economics in which (e.g.) perfect rationality etc. are ‘assumed’ and then when it’s pointed out that these assumptions aren’t true, then we are told ‘well it doesn’t really matter ‘cos they are just working hypotheses’. But it’s amazing what is being posited as a ‘working hypothesis’ on page 3 of the textbook has mysteriously turned into an objective scientific fact by page 46.

Sure, that’s a danger. (We’re thrashing here; I’ll try a variation.) You’ve claimed, I think, that EP *cannot proceed* without *requiring* that people are the same [1], and that almost all human evolution occurred occurred 50K BP. I said, no, these are just working hypotheses; you might say, well, but those become enshrined, or vary in their status according to convenience.

Well, OK, what if these tenets *are* enshrined as gospel in EP: suppose EPers believe them right down to their very mental modules. We can still evaluate individual studies in EP, and evaluate EP as whole, regarding it as a collection of studies. Does the particular hypothesis hold cross-culturally? Does it imply multiple effects that can and were tested, in behavior and/or physiology? Are there genetic correlates? Are there untested alternative explanations? And so on. None of this requires us (or indeed, EP) to accept any gospels.

[1] Wherever you go. Sorry.

Bill Benzon @ 155 –

I have no idea what your point is supposed to be there. That definition you give does not make sense in terms of biological understandings of the phenotype. All you have there is just so stories which cannot be proved or disproved, i.e., nonsense. It also does not correspond to what EP actually does by claiming very specific universal behaviors in human.

DrDick 150:

Kiwanda @144
None of that actually supports your position or that of EP. Indeed, neural plasticity refers to physical changes in the structure of the brains and neural metabolism as a result of environmental stimuli. None of those quotes argues that those differences are genetic. You may want to brush up on your biology a bit before you go insulting others.

My apologies, I won’t engage in any silly mockery again, unless you invoke the towering girth of your own authority once more. (OK, after this I won’t.)

As my quotes at 130 from the Cosmides/Tooby EP primer show, as well as the quote from the Confer survey at Bill Benzon’s 140, you are incorrect to think that EP discounts the effect of environment. Papers discussing environmental effects are not in general supporting an anti-EP position.

However, since you gave some links to some papers (and a web search) that you think are relevant, let’s have another look. (It would be helpful if you pulled something of the specifics of the papers out yourself, and discussed them, instead of just giving links without comment or discussion.)

A study on environmental effects on gene expression, and the variation of such effects by genetic region, is of course concerned with differences that are genetic. A popular science article saying the environment and genetic effects are sometimes indistinguishable is concerned with differences that are genetic. Three papers studying brain region correlates with adaptive learning, visual discrimination, and behavioral flexibility are not much concerned with whether differences are genetic or not; one of them is of course related to the undisputed fact that brains change when people learn. A paper relating behavioral flexibility to social cues has no particular relevance to whether differences are genetic. A paper that does a “merging of behavioral and molecular genetic techniques to identify specific genes that affect temperament” is indeed discussing genetics, as well as some environmental influences; a couple papers about growing up in good or bad homes are about environment, sure; limited human genetic diversity implies that, well, “people are the same” if it implies anything relevant.

So far, I’m not seeing that your links are particularly germane; I hope you’ll elucidate.

Dr. Dick, 156: What are you talking about? What definition?

I guess maybe you’re referring to 140, but there’s no definition there. Just a statement about EP practice I quqoted from a 2010 review article of a decade plus research in EP. Are you telling me that the people who wrote that article and claim to be doing EP (including David Buss) aren’t in fact doing EP because you know EP better than they do? Did you actually look at the article or are you just talking about the section I quoted?

Jerry Coyne, who is a biologist critic of EP, seemed to think they had results worth thinking about:

If you can read the Confer et al. paper and still dismiss the entire field as worthless, or as a mere attempt to justify scientists’ social prejudices, then I’d suggest your opinions are based more on ideology than judicious scientific inquiry.

* Here are a few fields in which I think interesting and worthwhile evolutionary psychology is being done:

* Incest avoidance, especially in those societies that haven’t made a connection between incest and birth defects. Also, the proximate cues for avoiding incest, as in the failure of children raised in a kibbutz to marry.

* Humans’ innate fear of harmful creatures or features, as in spiders and heights, and the lack of innate fears of more modern dangers.

* The variance in offspring number between males and females in various societies, and the differential “pickiness” of males and females when choosing mates.

* The evolution of concealed ovulation in humans as opposed to other primates.

* The use of odors and immune-system matching (i.e., MHC genes) as cues for mates.

* The cause of sexual dimorphisms (e.g., size differences between males and females).

* The cause of physical and physiological differences between human ethnic groups (was it sexual selection, drift, or something else?).

* Gene-culture coevolution, as in the evolution of lactose tolerance.

* The evolution or morality using comparative studies with other primates.

* The evolution of language (see The Language Instinct by Pinker).

* Parent-offspring conflict, and cases in which kin are favored over nonkin.

* Why we like food that is bad for us (e.g. fats and sweets), and why we feel disgust at certain foods or odors.

Now in many of these areas we’ll never get definitive answers, but that’s characteristic of many areas of evolutionary biology, for ours is a historical science.

I don’t care whether or not you agree w/ Coyne’s assessment – heck, don’t even know whether or not I agree with it – but to say that’s not EP, that doesn’t make any sense.

Holbo@113 Of course I’m referencing the Mercier and Sperber paper. Equally of course the paper is not very convincing. They clearly state their thesis that false reasoning such as confirmation bias has conferred an evolutionary advantage because it helps win arguments. They offhandedly claim that groups whose members are “interested in truth” are capable of effective reasoning (presumably about the real world,) but without any context as to why such people would exist, the concession doesn’t mean anything. It’s just lip service. Their final observation properly warns that the success of human reasoning is a matter of “epistemic luck.”

Perhaps my reading of their bottom line, or the real thrust of their argument in the social context, or of their implications in the real world context of the popularizations of EP, or however you put it, well, maybe it is undiplomatic. Maybe it’s even unkind. Even though you really do believe that the ability to win argument is so important that even an irrational confirmation bias therefore confers an evolutionary advantage so great it has become an aspect of the reasoning mechanism of the human brain, i.e., part of human nature, all your objection really amounts to is the insistence that you can’t call such an emphasis on the importance of winning argument “dominating people.” I don’t think that’s an issue of accuracy about the article, but the propriety of my language.

RichardM@124 “Doesn’t the same argument ‘prove’ that Neanderthals and homo sapiens couldn’t have different skeletal structures? Also, it must be theoretically impossible to identify which of two dogs is which, given only the knowledge one is a dachshund and one a St Bernard.” No. Not having a chin or a notch in the brow ridge, and having heavier bones and an occipital bun are not differences in vital organs. The notion Neanderthals and modern humans could have had different brains and still interbreed is wildly speculative. There aren’t many differences between lion and tiger skeletons but they aren’t really capable of viable interbreeding. Your own example suggests viable interbreeding depends more upon sufficient similarities in vital organs and processes.

Bill Benzon@126 Yes, there are difficulties in the computational models of the mind. Individual neurons may be considered digital but if the brain is a computer it is analog. Also, perhaps even more important, the “wiring” in the brain is not insulated. This doesn’t affect the impulses traveling along the axon so much, but all the neurons are affected by changes in all those neurotransmitters (and there are more than the four main ones, too.) And if the brain is a computer, it has/is a massively parallel one, so much so I’m not sure the experience with our computers are not misleading. Further, there’s the role of the brain in regulation of physiology (why encephalization tends to be associated with longevity I suspect) which is more about homeostasis than information processing of the kind associated with computers. I suppose you could model a thermostat as a computer/Turing machine, but is it helpful?

DrDick@134 I’m not at all sure anyone’s having trouble understanding you. It seems more likely to me that, like the primer, there’s an equivocation between human nature and human behavior. EP does claim human nature is rather closely detailed by natural selections, genetically determined in a rather strong sense. When confronted with the lack of evidence from anthropology etc. about what this human nature might actually be, its proponents then retort they have always acknowledged that human behavior is not just genetically determined. I don’t know whether that formally counts as a non sequitur but it’s not good thinking.

John Holbo@135 EP dismisses whole disciplines as lacking authority. It’s like a parapsychologist dismissing physics for saying signals can’t travel faster than light. Don’t think that’s the same thing as what you’re talking about here.

Bruce Wilder@142 As long as there’s mutation, there will be variation. In the end then, the question is why natural selection cannot eventually create a perfect DNA replication machinery. The brief answer is that natural selection is not all powerful. (An error EP holds as a fundamental principle.) As a result the perfection of the replication machinery is limited by random genetic drift. Since natural selection works best in larger effective breeding populations, the error rate in replication (aka mutation, the ultimate cause of genetic diversity,) is lower in those populations. And higher in species with small effective breeding populations. I you’re interested, see http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2016/12/learning-about-modern-evolutionary.html#more By the way, the blogger who cites this actually thinks race is a valid scientific category, so real he can personally identify which race a person belongs to! So no one can dismiss him as some rabid lefty.

PeterT@143″It’s not just that EP is hard to test, it’s that neurological and other evidence strongly suggests that it’s not worth testing unless and until it can come up with specific, significant, testable propositions consonant with other research.” In one sense I wholeheartedly agree. But I feel compelled to add that EP rejects in principle the results of other research if it supports the Standard Social Science Model, which doesn’t find much of a Human Nature to be genetically determined. Some (including sea lions?) of course want to have the nonexistence of a Human Nature demonstrated to their satisfaction.

Some also believe, as Karl Popper of the Mont Pelerin Society has instructed us, the test of scientificity is experiments that falsify hypotheses. So if EP does experiments, it therefore is science. Just like Gauquelin testing astrology. Mario Bunge wrote ”
“In short, tell me what philosophy you use (not just profess,) and I’ll tell you what your science is worth. And tell me what science you use (not just pay lip service to,) and I’ll tell you what your philosophy is worth.” He may have been right.

Z@146 Yes, although the LAD might not exist, it might exist. I think it might be the only real cognitive program in the EP sense. It’s not clear that any other evolutionary adaptation was necessary for modern humans, though, a possibility EP rejects.

I am a little puzzled as to what you found good in the Mercier and Sperber article. Unlike Hidari I thought it was very typical of EP in its badness. Mercier and Sperber talk about evolution. You yourself commented very cogently on how bad their handling of that was. To me it seems like saying the article was nevertheless good is much like saying the cheesecake was delicious except for the poison. If you share Bill Benzon’s distinction between a narrow and a broad EP, I can only ask, “Is a broadly construed EP both coherent and naturalist? Is an EP that accepts there is no evidence of a tightly specified universal human nature at all compatible with its popularizations?”

Another Nick@147 “By contrast, I haven’t seen any evidence to show the evolution of the human brain has stalled, or even slowed. And sorry, why would it exactly? What’s the underlying assumption here?” I disagree about one thing: EP doesn’t have an underlying assumption that evolution stopped in EEA, wherever or whenever that was. Generally they are very explicit that people have stone age brains, nothing buried about it at all.

Of course evolution has continued, continues still. When EPers do note this, they are usually very much new Social Darwinists, producing things like The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence or the Gregory Clark book A Farewell to Alms. That blends into things like Charles Murray and Philippe Rushton and others. When we talk about how there must be something to EP, we are including that stuff too.

Bill Benzon@160 Jerry Coynes is a critic of individual EP studies that are too blatantly wrong. He is not a critic of EP in general. In fact he endorses the alleged principles, especially the adaptationism despite co-authoring a standard work on speciation, which certainly mentions random genetic drift, etc. In his popularizations, though, he is always adaptationist. (By the way, Coyne is another guy, like Nicholas Wade, Steven Pinker, Larry Moran, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan who think race is a valid scientific concept.) Looking at the list, I wonder what Coyne could possibly be thinking when talking about differences in male and female “pickiness” in choosing mates, given the many, many instances in which there was no choosing, often not for the male either? Does EP really shed light on female choice to enter a nunnery in medieval Europe, to be a temple prostitute in ancient Babylon, be one of many concubines in ancient Luoyang (or to be the Empress Wu instead!) etc. Seriously?

Kiwanda@118 wrote “The common meaning of ‘literature review’ entails the citation of a great variety of sources…. I asked for ‘specific EP papers’, and I certainly intended to mean ‘just a few’, which I hope would be the natural interpretation. stevenjohnson, how about one such paper?” Since I’ve already done that by citing and quoting Cosmides’ and Tooby’s primer, which explicitly laid out the strategy, the natural reading here is that Kiwanda has lost it completely. At any rate, I had also quoted the Mercier and Sperber article. But for good measure I can add “The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” as a crappy paper. And for popularizations, which do count as examples of EP by the way, try The Survival of the Prettiest.

The natural interpretation is that Kiwanda has lost it completely, not noticing I’ve already cited literature, since the only alternative is that Kiwanda wants details. I suppose when I find some time I’ll post a genuinely long comment on the Mercier and Sperber article, instead of a bunch of short comments to many posts.

stevenjohnson @162

That really is my read on the criticisms as well. I have also come to the inescapable conclusion that Kiwanda is not arguing in good faith, for the very reasons you cite.

NB: “The quote from Jerry Coyne mentions several under study”
–> “The quote from Jerry Coyne mentions several *possibilities* under study”

Rushing out, so don’t have much time to talk about this, but just a reminder that Jerry Coyne is not reliable on EP (or on anything that relates, even tangentially, to politics. On straightforward evolutionary biology, of course, he is very good).

Few of these points are original with me.

‘ Incest avoidance, especially in those societies that haven’t made a connection between incest and birth defects.’

But incest avoidance is not a universal (as is well known in Ancient Egypt the royal family practiced incest). You can call it a tendency, but that doesn’t fit easily into the EP paradigm, which attempts to explain universals.

‘Humans’ innate fear of harmful creatures or features, as in spiders’

But this makes no sense. Spiders (as most of you will know from personal experience) are not particularly dangerous on the whole. Other animals (like buffalo, lions, tigers) are far more dangerous but no one has a phobia about that.

‘ the lack of innate fears of more modern dangers.’ Excuse me? You are claiming that people aren’t afraid of flying?

‘ The cause of sexual dimorphisms (e.g., size differences between males and females).’

Interesting, but little to do with EP.

‘ The cause of physical and physiological differences between human ethnic groups (was it sexual selection, drift, or something else?).’

Who knows? In any case, nothing to do with EP.

‘The evolution of language (see The Language Instinct by Pinker).’

But Pinker’s theories of language are probably wrong.

”Parent-offspring conflict, and cases in which kin are favored over nonkin.’

CF Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (a book I am surprised to see has not been mentioned). The evidence for this is not as good as Coyne thinks it is.

‘Why we like food that is bad for us (e.g. fats and sweets).’

Well last time I checked that idea that fat as such is bad for us is highly controversial at the moment. In any case, my understanding is that there is good evidence that this is a learned response (I don’t have time to check this and could be wrong about this. But my first point definitely stands).

Proponents of EP would do well to keep their hypotheses ‘hard’ and ‘tight’ and concentrate on getting replicable experimental evidence for a small series of tightly argued set of propositions. This ‘scattershot’ account just makes them look like idiots.

But incest avoidance is not a universal (as is well known in Ancient Egypt the royal family practiced incest). You can call it a tendency, but that doesn’t fit easily into the EP paradigm, which attempts to explain universals.

Having recently met a sister of mine, for the first time, it has come home to me that it is possible that familiarity alone is what produces incest avoidance.

stevenhohnson @162 I am a little puzzled as to what you found good in the Mercier and Sperber article.

The evolutionary part is weak (the logic is wrong and I don’t believe in the premises, myself) but the psychology part is OK, I find. I do agree with them that the standard assumption in western philosophy is that reasoning is a self-oriented process and I like the change of perspective their article provide. I also buy into the so to speak applied part of their work, that is to say the idea of examining pedagogical practices, problem-solving techniques, decision-making and political deliberation through the lens of their theory.

More generally, I am a big believer in the research program outlined by Bourdieu (“sociology and psychology should combine their efforts (but this would require them to overcome their mutual suspicion) to analyse the genesis of investment in a field of social relations, thus constituted as an object of interest and preoccupation, in which the child is increasingly implicated and which constitutes the paradigm and also the principle of investment in the social game”) and I find M&S a modest step in that direction, with the social game being here social argumentation.

I mean, and I apologize for the volley of comments, if we are looking for a clearly emotional process that has quite undoubtedly evolved as the result of natural selection, I would nominate the mutual emotional attachment which develops when a mother and her nursing child cross eyes (this has been shown to stimulate the emission of oxytocin in both baby and mother) before looking for snake-recognizing neurons.

Kiwanda @169 –

I’m not sure what’s being referenced here by Coyne; I think it’s likely DrDick doesn’t, either.
Actually I do know exactly what they are talking about, as race and ethnicity are among my areas of expertise. That you do not understand that perfectly clear passage disqualifies you from claiming you know what you are talking about.

Do we really think that arranged marriages and marriage politics played a dominant role in sexual relations 50K BP? I suppose it’s possible.
Of course their evidence is actually based on the behavior of modern humans, not those living 50K bp, since nobody knows much about what people were doing at that time. It is also the case that human evolution did not stop 50k years ago and we have many examples of much more recent adaptations (the east Asian epicanthic fold emerges about 10K bp and lactase persistence emerges in several different places after about 3,000 years ago. Once again you reveal a complete lack of understanding of the issues and knowledge of the data.

If we were interested in evolutionary analysis of the human eye, we would not just declare the function of the eye is to spot danger or food on the savanna circa 20000 BCE and move on. Presumably, we would be interested in the details of how eyes worked. Theories of how cameras work would be relevant; knowledge of optics would be informative; information processing theories of how visual sense data from the eye are processed would be a core concern. How good are human eyes plus visualization in detecting motion or judging distance and guessing the 3d from perspective? We would be vitally interested in variation: near-sightedness, color-blindness, rates of congenital blindness and the effect on reproduction. Also, the defects or limitations of “design” evident in the anatomy of the human eye — the blind spot created by blood flow to the retina, the different nerve systems involved in bright light and low light vision — would be duly noted.

My point, expressed in the implied standard of this analogy, is that serious inquiry quickly becomes 1.) complex and 2.) oriented to accounting for variation and “defect”. No one would think twice about the relevance of optics or information processing; of course, these are relevant areas of knowledge to be sought out and applied in understanding and interpreting what can be observed.

There is something wrong with a method of inquiry that seeks to collapse “biological function” into virtue, as M & S rather unthinkingly did, or to erect disciplinary boundaries as barriers on the strength of vague nature v nurture heuristics. (Attributing some political outcome to biological evolution while disposing of all knowledge of political science, economics, sociology, anthropology seems like a misuse of occam’s razor, no? Ditto, for tabula rasa, if that matters.)

On snakes & spiders, I would think it would be possible to relate our reactions to the processing of signals thru brain structures. On incest, I would think the logic of strong cultural taboos would count against the hypothetical notion of reliable biological speed bumps. My casual observation is that parents are always strongly interested in the sexual attractiveness of their offspring, so my hypothesis, if I were to propose one, would run in the direction of taboo countering instinctual impulses that might otherwise go awry.

On smells, I wonder if humans have not had to cut themselves off from some of those instinctual triggers, to permit conceptual thinking to have some sway over behavior.

There is something in human psychology that draws people to teh stupid qua ideology like moths to flame. I would like M & S to test their ideas about the “function” of arguments on the ground of my family’s holiday dinner political eruptions. Or, open the explanatory door to, say, hypnosis. If they were serious, I think they would. That is what science looks like: looking for mechanism.

When you look for mechanism, you are guided in curiosity by variation, failure and shortcoming. You look for tradeoffs and limits. In M & S, the paradoxes of rationality form a kind of beginning place for this, but it is confused about how to fix a steady gaze on mechanisms.

Just to give an idea of where the innate universal language module argument can lead in terms of hypotheses about the mechanisms of psychological evolution, here’s Chomsky himself in 2005 on the origins of language:

Within  some  small  group  from  which  we  are  all  descended,  a rewiring  of  the  brain  took  place  in  some  individual,  call  him Prometheus,   yielding   the   operation   of   unbounded   Merge,   applying  to  concepts  with  intricate  (and  little  understood)  properties. Guided  very  likely  by  third  factor  principles  [principles  not specific to the language faculty], Prometheus’s language provides him with an infinite array of structured interpretations of the kind illustrated:  duality  of  semantics,  operator-variable  constructions, unpronounced  elements  with  substantial  consequences  for  interpretation  and  thought,  etc. Prometheus  had  many  advantages: capacities  for  complex  thought,  planning,  interpretation,  and  so on. The  capacity  would  then  be  transmitted  to  offspring,  coming  to  predominate  (no  trivial  matter,  it  appears,  but  let  us  put that aside). At that stage, there would be an advantage to externalization, so the capacity might come to be linked as a secondary  process  to  the  system  for  externalization  and  interaction,  including  communication — a  special  case,  at  least  if  we  invest  the term “communication” with some substantive meaning.

At least he used “Prometheus” and not “Adam”…

In an ironic way the debates over issues like modularity and Turing completeness are already quaint, since the very fields of cognitive science and AI within which they originally came to predominate have by now largely moved on to diametrically opposed theoretical assumptions (e.g. parallel distributed processing, dynamical systems, neural networks, connectionism, embodied cognition, etc.) that descend more directly from enculturation-focused perspectives like late Wittgenstein or even Heidegger than from the tidy algorithmic computationalism of the mid-century cognitivists. To borrow an analogy from Žižek, for exponents of older paradigms to migrate their ideas over to evolutionary theory and treat them as striking new insights into the origins of what makes us human is like the moment where Wile E. Coyote keeps running forward over the cliff — all we need to do is look down.

Difficulty posting comment on Mercier and Sperber.

DrDick 180:

I’m not sure what’s being referenced here by Coyne; I think it’s likely DrDick doesn’t, either.

Actually I do know exactly what they are talking about, as race and ethnicity are among my areas of expertise. That you do not understand that perfectly clear passage disqualifies you from claiming you know what you are talking about.

I’m sure your authority on race and ethnicity is turgid and swollen, but that was not the main point under consideration; rather it was: what was the EP work related to differences between human ethnic groups that Coyne had in mind in his list?

Do we really think that arranged marriages and marriage politics played a dominant role in sexual relations 50K BP? I suppose it’s possible.

Of course their evidence is actually based on the behavior of modern humans, not those living 50K bp, since nobody knows much about what people were doing at that time…..Once again you reveal a complete lack of understanding of the issues and knowledge of the data.

Oh, DrDick, DrDick. Coyne noted work on “The variance in offspring number between males and females in various societies, and the differential “pickiness” of males and females when choosing mates”. You countered that such a question “assumes that individuals make their own choices”, noting marriage politics and arranged marriages. But the data on “pickiness” is not concerned only with marriage, and the “pickiness” propensities are hypothesized to be due to evolutionary pressures occurring before such elaborate social arrangements seem likely. As to the variance of offspring question, this article has interesting discussion; it is not particularly supportive of the some EP hypotheses, but has some points of agreement.

I await your illuminating discussion, not just of my remarks, but of the articles I linked to and quoted at some length in that comment: Walter Scheidel’s review, Lobue et al, Buss.

@WLGR #184

…(e.g. parallel distributed processing, dynamical systems, neural networks, connectionism, embodied cognition, etc.) that descend more directly from enculturation-focused perspectives like late Wittgenstein or even Heidegger …

There was a time when I spent a great deal of time studying late Wittgenstein, but I never saw anything in there that looked like parallel distributed processing, dynamical systems, neural networks, or connectionism. Never read any Heidegger, but read a good deal of Merleau-Ponty and, while I understand that some dynamicists like phenomenology, can’t see that there’s anything there from which they can descend in any direct way. The Peter Norvig article you link to mentions Claude Shannon and statistical processing, but not Wittgenstein or Heidegger.

And now, how about something a bit different from this tit-for-tat.

One of E. O. Wilson’s well-known conceits is that “genes hold culture on a leash.” I’ve always thought that a bit odd.

We’ve got this ancient and venerable trope that humans have a higher, rational, nature and a lower, passionate, nature. We share this lower nature with the beasts. It’s the job of the higher nature to keep the lower nature in check. We can’t let our passions get out of control. (And, I believe Plato constructed a little story about a charioteer and two troublesome horses around this notion.)

If we project Wilson’s conceit onto this trope, he’s got it upside down. He’s got the lower nature, biology (represented by the genes) riding heard on the higher nature (culture). Why’s he worried about culture being out of control?

In any event, I don’t much like the conceit and prefer a different one, that of a board game, such as chess. Biology supplies the board, the pieces, and the basic rules of the game. But it’s culture that develops the tactics and strategies.

If you’re going to play chess, you need to know the rules. But knowing the rules isn’t sufficient to play even a poor game of chess. To play the game with even a poor opponent and have a chance of winning you need to know a bit more than the basic rules. You have to have some capacity for inference and reasoning within those rules. That takes practice and learning over many games, etc.

If human life is like such a game, and we’re trying to develop account of how it all works, how do we go about it? How do we partition what we observe into the rules of the game, on the one hand, and culture-specific tactics and strategies? How do we figure out the basic rules of the (behavioral) game if we don’t explicitly look at biology?

So, @Z, 175, on incest avoidance:

A typical case of EP that I find quite vapid without anthropology. As Jim Buck remarks, two impulses may have been selected among humans: repulsion of people with whom we grew up and assortative mating. What their contrary effects amount to is largely a matter of anthropology.

The issue isn’t whether or not biology accounts for everything, but whether it accounts for anything (or perhaps anything “significant”, though I’m reluctant to insert such a weasel word into the discussion). Saying “it’s all culture” doesn’t seem very helpful.

Following on from Hidari, the popular proponents of EP erect this straw man of the SSSM, which they assert assumes a “blank slate”. But no sensible person assumes a totally blank slate any more than they assume physical plasticity, and there are lots of interesting findings about innate human behaviour (babies’ focus on faces, crying when afraid, interest in walking, innate assumptions about the expected behaviour of the physical world…).

These are not what EP is talking about. Their claims are to do with much higher level behaviours. It’s here that they run into problems. If you won’t pay attention to disconfirming evidence, and instead hand-wave about general tendencies, you are already a long way from genetic inheritance.

Take incest avoidance as an example. Incest within the nuclear family was “normal” for large populations over quite long periods (Roman-era Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Trobriand Islanders among others). These populations are not in any way genetic isolates and abandoned these practices when the cultures changed. They are not exceptions in the genetic sense. So the EP explanation fails at a basic level.

Ditto the LAD. The abilities of users of sign languages, the dependence of linguistic understanding on reference to understandings of the social and natural worlds and the neurology all point away from a LAD and towards a CAD – a culture acquisition device. And a CAD is much more likely an extension and amplification of primate sociality than a module.

Again, on mate selection, hunter-gatherer populations have a wide variety of marriage practices. But very few, AFAIK, involve free choice. Clan, totem, moiety, age-class and family alliances all narrow choice to a very small selection indeed. Australian aborigines arrived here at least 35,000 years ago from, presumably, quite a small founder group not far removed from the African diaspora and yet have a diverse range of marriage practices (and a range of genetic adaptations to local environments). EP would not predict this at all.

@Bill Benzon “The issue isn’t whether or not biology accounts for everything, but whether it accounts for anything. […] Saying “it’s all culture” doesn’t seem very helpful.”
@John “I was going to try to work you up to [mother-child bonding]”

Hold on a minute! My first sentence on this thread has been “I take the the broad tenets of evolutionary psychology to be quite obvious” and in my comment 47, I gave a long list of psychological features of human beings (some quite involved) about which I believed nobody serious could doubt there were genetically encoded. So I don’t think I need any working out to such obvious conclusions nor do I believe we need to discuss if biology explains “anything”. John also wonders why I wanted to “tease the Venn diagrams apart.” Well, first of all, I’ll remark that I wrote that I was actually fine with conflating them if that was important to anyone (as long as we are discussing specific claims) but the reason is quite simple: complex imitative behavior, I take to be obviously genetically and neurologically encoded (and thus the product of evolution through natural selection); that acquisition of core syntax is likewise genetically and probably neurologically encoded, I believe to be one of the most spectacular achievements of cognitive science in the last 60 years; the argumentative theory of reason, I find interesting psychology, especially in its applied aspects, but I believe it fails completely (as written) as evolutionary psychology and finally Buss’s article Kiwanda helpfully linked to (thanks for that), I find so hopelessly weak that I felt a genuine touch of pity when I read the last sentence of the abstract (“The study of human mating is one of the “success stories” of evolutionary psychology” repeated as the final sentence of the article, lest we missed it the first time). With success stories like this, who needs failures? Given my markedly (to say the least) different evaluation of the scientific content of these 4 claims-all uncontroversially psychology with an evolutionary approach-I am reluctant to discuss them as a lump, that’s all.

Before giving a few short pointers about Buss’s article, I would like to draw attention to Bruce Wilder’s comment 147. He helpfully recalls that any serious study of the evolutionary history of biological phenomenon X (for X mate-selection, verbal behavior, auto-immune response or spatial orientation) requires a precise characterization of the actual properties of actually existing X. That’s a low standard, but one very few evolutionary investigations of mental X ever clear (and also the reason why neurobiologists tend to believe for instance that most such evolutionary investigations of dedicated neural networks are premature; we just don’t know enough about them yet).

Onto Buss’s article. Specific claims, great (thanks again Kiwanda). To me, it is the pitch-perfect example of the tendency I singled out in my first comment and again in my comment 47: the article analyzes a bunch of data (the collection of it would merit a severe anthropological critic in itself, but I’ll let it pass) and show that they are in (actually rather weak) empirical agreement with the principle that (well I’ll quote myself) “the object of such cognitive capabilities (here mating selection) and particularly the social behaviors that flows from them are biologically constrained.” So far so good, the empirical part is weak, but the logic is OK. The problem is in what the article doesn’t do. I don’t know how I could insist enough: the article never even mentions the possibility that what has been selected is not a mating selection device, but a complex imitative acquisition device so that women and men alike tend to select their mates according to the criteria others use as far as they can tell. Yet, just like for the argumentative theory of reason but in spades, this is closer evolutionary to what we know (so again Buss’s article fail on many levels, but most ironically on the evolutionary one), much closer to the actually observed psychological, pre-social and social behaviors especially during the relevant “formative” years in terms of mate-selection (adolescence) and much much much (add a couple more) more in agreement with the very own data provided, as it not only explains the observed statistical regularities (for instance “Men universally preferred younger partners, whereas women universally preferred older partners”) but also the drastic cultural variations in these statistical regularities (why, for instance, chastity before mariage has moved in the span of a couple of decades from a crucial social feature to an irrelevant one in the Netherlands and why it is now equally irrelevant for men and women there).

At this level of scientific inquiry, I must say I agree with Hidari: we are in full tooth fairy science. Put a hypothesis, gather arguments and data in favor of it, disregard completely alternative explanations, declare victory (pardon me, “success story”).

No problem. Again I’m not too hung up on the terminology (what is or is not psychology, what is or is not evolutionary…) as long as we are discussing specific claims. FWIW, I really know hardly anything at all about it but I am very willing to believe that primates have specific snake-detecting neural networks just as I would be very willing to believe that social primates have powerful imitative acquisitive mental devices specifically dedicated to the learning of what should trigger fear (an anecdotal token of evidence for the latter is the attraction/repulsion feeling fearful things have on us, and especially on young children).

How about you tell us what you like especially about M&S or any piece of evolutionary psychology you particularly enjoy (but maybe that would require another post; subtle hint)?

@Z, #194

My first sentence on this thread has been “I take the the broad tenets of evolutionary psychology to be quite obvious” and in my comment 47, I gave a long list of psychological features of human beings (some quite involved) about which I believed nobody serious could doubt there were genetically encoded.

Sorry about that. I forgot & I’ll try to do better.

…that acquisition of core syntax is likewise genetically and probably neurologically encoded, I believe to be one of the most spectacular achievements of cognitive science in the last 60 years…

You realize, of course, that this is under dispute. I have no interest in discussing that in any detail, but I’d like to ‘calibrate’ your meaning here.

What’s core syntax? It’s my understanding that as of 2002 Chomsky was willing to consider that the faculty of language, in the narrow sense, consists of nothing beyond recursion. That’s something, but not much, and certainly far from what was being imagined in the early days of GG.

Up in #153 I posted the abstract of an article proclaiming the “death” of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas as the exclusive and only locus of language. The article is behind a paywall so I’ve not read it, but if, following well-established precedent in this discussion, I may invoke a long, if somewhat sporadic and selective, acquaintance with the technical literature in neuroscience, on the surface the argument seems plausible to me. That abstract doesn’t appear to get at anything approaching “core syntax”, but, as I say, I’m calibrating. Is your belief in core syntax consistent with that?

And then there is genetic encoding. How might that go? Let me offer a purely made up example. It seems that the human brain has about 86 billion neurons. How might that be genetically encoded? In the abstract one might imagine a little bit of genetic machinery that counts neurons and stops the production line when 86 billion have been produced. That seems highly unlikely to me. More likely, once the (developing) brain gets established within the (developing) skull, neurons proliferate until there’s no more room (perhaps neuronal cell division is sensitive to some pressure gradient and when the pressure reaches a threshold, division stops). This is a very different kind of mechanism, much less specific.

Just for there shear silliness of it, let’s place these two neuron count mechanisms on a continuum from 1 to 10, where the explicit cell counter has a value of 10 and “fill the available space” has a value of 1. Where would you place the genetic encoding of core syntax on that continuum? I’m inclined to place it nearer to 1 than 10, but possibly/probably not at 1.

Let me offer a point of comparison: gavagai. As you know, that purely made-up word figures in one of the best-known thought experiments in analytic philosophy, Willard van Orman Quine’s discussion of translation (most of the rest of this comment is from a recent blog post on Dan Everett’s new book, Dark Matter of the Mind, which I recently reviewed for 3 Quarks Daily).

Quine broaches the issue by considering the problem of radical translation, “translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people” (Word and Object 1960, 28). He asks us to consider a “linguist who, unaided by an interpreter, is out to penetrate and translate a language hitherto unknown. All the objective data he has to go on are the forces that he sees impinging on the native’s surfaces and the observable behavior, focal and otherwise, of the native.” That is to say, he has no direct access to what is going on inside the native’s head, but utterances are available to him. Quine then asks us to imagine that “a rabbit scurries by, the native says ‘Gavagai’, and the linguist notes down the sentence ‘Rabbit’ (of ‘Lo, a rabbit’) as tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases” (p. 29).

Quine goes on to argue that, in thus proposing that initial translation, the linguist is making illegitimate assumptions. He begins his argument by nothing that the native might, in fact, mean “white” or “animal” and later on offers more exotic possibilities, the sort of things only a philosopher would think of. Quine also notes that whatever gestures and utterances the native offers as the linguist attempts to clarify and verify will be subject to the same problem.

As Everett notes, however, in his chapter on translation (266):

On the side of mistakes never made, however, Quine’s gavagai problem is one. In my field research on more than twenty languages—many of which involved monolingual situations …, whenever I pointed at an object or asked “What’s that?” I always got an answer for an entire object. Seeing me point at a bird, no one ever responded “feathers.” When asked about a manatee, no one ever answered “manatee soul.” On inquiring about a child, I always got “child,” “boy,” or “girl,” never “short hair.”

Later:

I believe that the absence of these Quinean answers results from the fact that when one person points toward a thing, all people (that I have worked with, at least) assume that what is being asked is the name of the entire object. In fact, over the years, as I have conducted many “monolingual demonstrations,” I have never encountered the gavagai problem. Objects have a relative salience… This is perhaps the result of evolved perception.

Everett says nothing to justify his guess about evolved perception, and I have nothing specific to say on that score, but it sounds plausible to me.

For the sake of argument let’s say that Everett’s guess is correct. I’d think the “genetic encoding of” core syntax is rather like that, whatever that is. Vague? Sure. But if we’re looking for specific mechanisms, vague is what we get.

@Z, #194: Concerning Buss 2006:

So far so good, the empirical part is weak, but the logic is OK.

Let’s see, so, on the basis evolutionary considerations EP predicts that the mating preferences of men and women should differ in various ways. They present cross-cultural data (admittedly, as you point out, not many different cultures, though Buss was limited by the existing body of research) that confirms these predictions. You’re agreeing with that, yes?

But you object that they haven’t considered the possibility that people are imitating current practice. But just what would THAT explain? That wouldn’t explain why male-female differences are almost all in the same direction across cultures. All it tells us is that if people of generation X in culture-Punch and culture-Judy exhibit a certain behavior, then people of generation X+1 will exhibit the same behavior.

So, let’s assume that imitation is what’s going on. That in and of itself doesn’t tell us anything about the direction of the differences between men and women, and that direction is consistent with Buss’s EP premises. Although, not, it seems for China and chastity. China and Netherlands are the exceptions (2 out of 6).

While chastity is more important in China than in any other the other cases, it’s slighly more important among Chinese women than among Chinese men, which is the wrong direction for EP. In the Netherlands, as you point out, it’s not very important at all, but men and women seem to rate it the same. So, in these two cases imitation works where EP doesn’t. But why is chastity very important in both China and India and not so important in NL and Croatia? EP doesn’t speak to that. But neither does imitation.

You’re claiming that imitation accounts for “drastic cultural variations in these statistical regularities”. But it doesn’t do that at all.

Moreover, you assert that “chastity before mariage has moved in the span of a couple of decades from a crucial social feature to an irrelevant one in the Netherlands”. I didn’t see anything in the article about cultural history in NL, but perhaps I missed it. In any event, assuming that that is what has in fact happened in NL (which I can believe), how would imitation explain it? Imitation says GenX+1 will be the same as GenX, but that’s not what we see. GenX+1 is different from GenX. Imitation fails right along side EP.

If Buss is engaged in “full tooth fairy science” then your proposed alternative looks like the tooth fairy gives up the reward without demanding a tooth.

Z 194:

I don’t know how I could insist enough: the article never even mentions the possibility that what has been selected is not a mating selection device, but a complex imitative acquisition device so that women and men alike tend to select their mates according to the criteria others use as far as they can tell.

I’m not following here. Your alternative overall hypothesis is that people are good at imitating how other people behave, and so whatever was done before continues to be done? That is, people select mates a certain way, because that’s what other people do? Except for the times, as when big changes in social attitudes happen, that they don’t?

While “people do what they do, because they do” is a perfectly reasonable description, it lacks some properties we might look for in a theory. Surely I’m missing something here.

@stevenjohnson, # 199:

…but omit all consideration of a collective activity like science and technology (conceptually distinct, but not practically.) To me that seems like a confirmation of the individualism of western philosophy…

Yes to collective activity. Coming to grips with collective creativity is very important. And not just in science and technology. Movie production is an obvious artistic example.

@Z, #201: Fine. Obviously we think very differently about these (horrendously complex) problems. But if you like my framing of issues in #198, then we can talk and maybe even make progress.

Oh, BTW, concerning my remarks about imitation in #200, I’m certainly not against imitation as a general mechanism in social behavior. On the contrary, I’m very much in favor of it; don’t see how we could have cultural evolution without it. But, in the specific context of Buss 2006, I don’t see that imitation gets us all that much.

But just what would THAT explain? That wouldn’t explain why male-female differences are almost all in the same direction across cultures. All it tells us is that if people of generation X in culture-Punch and culture-Judy exhibit a certain behavior, then people of generation X+1 will exhibit the same behavior.

and

Imitation says GenX+1 will be the same as GenX, but that’s not what we see. GenX+1 is different from GenX. Imitation fails right along side EP.

Oh come on, you and Kiwanda both came to this conclusion but seriously? Do you deny that children imitate their parents and siblings? Do you then infer that all children are the identical to their parents and siblings? Besides, I specifically wrote that what was imitated (in this particular case) was high status seeking strategies. So there you have it: the obvious cause for change is change in what defines high status. Now I feel a bit stupid having to write this down but apparently this is necessary: the reason why attitudes about female sexuality changed drastically in the last century in the Netherlands is that what defines social status for women (and men, but the change was more drastic for women) changed radically in the last century in the Netherlands.

But why is chastity very important in both China and India and not so important in NL and Croatia? EP doesn’t speak to that. But neither does imitation.

Of course it does. The variance simply indicates that what defines high social status in Croatia and the NL differs in a significant respect related to sexuality from what defines high social status in China and India. Now we have to figure it out what (doesn’t seem like too deep a mystery to me).

Z 210:

Do you deny that children imitate their parents and siblings? Do you then infer that all children are the identical to their parents and siblings?

No, and no. Of course imitation and random drift are important, and culture and behavior have historically contingent elements. But: “people do what they do” or more generally, “shit happens”, are sort-of baseline, fall-back hypotheses; it’s more interesting if it’s possible to go further.

I’m not sure if some of the discussion re chastity and the Buss 2006 article is referring to the article or attempting to rebut it. The article says:
“Cultures varied tremendously in the value placed on some characteristics. The desire for chastity or virginity (lack of prior sexual intercourse) proved to be the most cross-culturally variable, as shown in Figure 2. Mainland Chinese placed tremendous value on virginity, as did participants living in India and Iran. At the other end of the scale, the Dutch placed little importance on chastity. Those from Western Europe, especially Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and German also placed little importance on virginity. Overall, 62% of the cultures showed a significant sex difference, always in the direction of men valuing virginity more than women. There were no reversals of this pattern. On the other hand, 38% of the cultures showed no significant sex difference. These findings suggest that the importance placed on chastity is highly susceptible to cultural input, with cultures differing from each other both in the absolute value placed on chastity as well as in the presence of absence of sex differences.”

So EP (here) is not trying explain chastity preferences.

I’d guess that some part of changes in very recent changes in attitude are related to more advances in birth control. But whatever.

Re cousin marriage, I can’t resist quoting Scheidel’s review yet again.
“…Moreover, marital fertility is often somewhat higher in cousin marriage.

This means that we cannot postulate significant selective pressures against consanguineous unions at this level of genetic proximity, an intuition that is fully borne out by the global empirical record. About half of the societies surveyed in the Ethnographic Atlas permitted or even favored cousin marriage. About one-sixth of the current world population lives in countries where between 20 and more than 50 percent of all couples are related at the level of second cousin or closer, and one in ten persons on earth is part of such a union. The incidence of consanguineous marriage varies massively both geographically (with heavy concentrations in the Middle East and South India) and over time, as most societies have witnessed declines as a corollary of urbanization and development. Its popularity is highly context-specific, as it may appeal to rural and uneducated groups (by reducing the need for dowries) as well as propertied elites (whom they help maintain privileged status). All of this demonstrates the complete lack of universal constraints that might be associated with inherited behavioral adaptation.

Reproductive relations within the nuclear family—between parents and children and between full siblings—differ dramatically in genetic terms.”

So an EP argument against cousin marriage would face some tough empirical headwinds. In my limited reading, I haven’t seen any such argument, however.

Oy.

“I’d guess that some part of changes in very recent changes in attitude are related to more advances in birth control. ”
–>
“I’d guess that some part of very recent changes in attitude is related to advances in birth control.”

@Bill Benzon I cannot see anywhere in 194 that you said anything about high social status.

I see you are right, my apologies. With the automatic moderation comment system, it is not so easy to know what others have already read when their answers finally appear. I will point out, however, that I did mention social status seeking before in the thread (@89) though of course you cannot be expected to have read and remembered it and (more importantly) that there is a strong asymmetry going on here: I am commenting in a blog, Buss is writing a research article. “Not much worse than the typical blog comment” is not the standard we want in a scholarly publication so I am entitled to be maximally intellectually critical of Buss while you have to be maximally charitable in the interpretation of the criticism, those are the rules of the games.

This, of course, relies on your assertion that what’s being imitated is the behavior of those with high social status

That is not my assertion (and thank god, because it is almost as ridiculous a contention as Buss’s). My assertion (already way up at 47 but again at 207) is that what is being imitated are the strategies to seek high social status.

What we need to account for is that initial difference, and that is (logically) prior to the imitation.

I understand the impulse, but it is empirically very contestable and logically reductionist. If you accept a framework of imitative acquisition of strategies, then the search for the “initial difference” is intimately interwoven with a precise understanding of the current state and of the historical evolution of the topic in question (for instance, sexual mores). In particular, we should expect the “initial difference” to be quite remote not only historically but also from the topic in question (because social status mediates between the two).

You seem to think you know what that difference is and that it’s no mystery. Whatever that not-mysterious-thing is, that’s what accounts for the difference. Not imitation. Imitation just ensures that the variance is passed down from one generation to another.

No. The imitative acquisition of strategies does not “just” ensure that variance is passed down (and again you wouldn’t make such an assertion for any other kind of imitation, starting with basic parent/child one). In addition, it explains (of course in conjunction with the study of the strategic environment) how an “initial variance” (usually quite unrelated) morphs into the current state of the topic in question. But I don’t think we should discuss this too much, after all you yourself used a chess metaphor that seems perfectly suitable to me: everybody gets the same bord, pieces and rules; everybody learns how to play by imitating players around them.

Now about the non-mysterious thing. Are we actively trying to unlearn all we know as soon as natural selection is mentioned now or do I really have to point out that the kinship system, especially with respect to the status of young women, is a tad different in the Netherlands, Estonia, China and India (though of course one would need to be much more precise than reason about national entities encompassing billion of inhabitants, the reason for my scathing evaluation of the data collection of Buss)? Does anyone doubt, for instance, that patriarchal features are much more pronounced in central-north China and northern India (two parts of the world where they are actually historically among the strongest in the Eurasiatic world) than in the Baltic states and north-western Europe (two parts of the world where they are actually historically among the lowest in the Eurasiatic world)? In addition, does anyone doubt that these patriarchal features and their temporal evolution is the proximate explanation for attitudes towards chastity and the differences between them (a point driven home by the fact that populations living closer to the adaptive environment of Homo Sapiens typically have a very relaxed attitude towards chastity, as DrDick recalls)? As for the “initial difference” in that case (why did people from the North Alluvial Plains of China and Uttar Pradesh adopt more patriarchal kinship systems than people from Frisia?), I believe we know quite a lot about it now but that would be for another topic.

The lesson to bring home is the always the same: “any ev. psych. argument about anthropologically significant behavior (so anything beyond core cognitive and emotional functions) which jumps directly from evo-devo reasoning (here “it is selectively beneficent to parentally invest into one’s own offsprings”) to actually observed human behavior (here “attitudes towards chastity or more generally sexuality and mate-selection”) while ignoring the anthropological level (here “strength of the patriarchal features of the kin systems” among others) fails (and I still couldn’t insist enough) on its own evolutionary terms (just compare the expected genetic success of two agents; one operating under Buss’s mate-selection device, one operating under the one I briefly outlined).”

Um, err, John, does M&S speak to what’s going on in this thread, or in many blog threads?

On p. 72 they assert: “…people are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate.” What’s the difference between truth mode and debate mode? I should think that a shared common base of knowledge is necessary, though not sufficient, for collective truth-seeking. Without that shared base, there’s not much to reason about. Even with it, of course, debate can take over.

Up there in 78 you talk about squishiness: “With so much empirical uncertainty, it’s very hard for either side to win a decisive intellectual victory in the squishy middle (seems to me.) This means there is a strong polemical temptation to argue by trying to push the other party out of the squishy middle, because that would be victory.”

@stevenjohnson: Now that I’ve looked at M&S I see that they are aware of collective activity (72-73:

Here, one might be tempted to point out that, after all, reasoning is responsible for some of the greatest achieve- ments of human thought in the epistemic and moral domains. This is undeniably true, but the achievements involved are all collective and result from interactions over many generations (on the importance of social inter- actions for creativity, including scientific creativity, see Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer 1995; Dunbar 1997; John- Steiner 2000; Okada & Simon 1997). The whole scientific enterprise has always been structured around groups, from the Lincean Academy down to the Large Hadron Collider. In the moral domain, moral achievements such as the abolition of slavery are the outcome of intense public arguments.

Z 216:

any ev. psych. argument about anthropologically significant behavior…which jumps directly from evo-devo reasoning…to actually observed human behavior (here “attitudes towards chastity or more generally sexuality and mate-selection”) while ignoring the anthropological level …fails …on its own evolutionary terms…”

As I noted above, Buss 2006 discusses chastity as cross-culturally variable, and Scheidel describes the very widespread phenomenon of cousin marriage (vs. the very much more limited mating by siblings). Since EP doesn’t seem to make claims about chastity or cousin marriage, or need to, their use here as “counter-examples” is not very interesting.

(A better version, sorry.)
stevenjohnson 162:

RichardM@124 “Doesn’t the same argument ‘prove’ that Neanderthals and homo sapiens couldn’t have different skeletal structures? Also, it must be theoretically impossible to identify which of two dogs is which, given only the knowledge one is a dachshund and one a St Bernard.” No. Not having a chin or a notch in the brow ridge, and having heavier bones and an occipital bun are not differences in vital organs. The notion Neanderthals and modern humans could have had different brains and still interbreed is wildly speculative. There aren’t many differences between lion and tiger skeletons but they aren’t really capable of viable interbreeding. Your own example suggests viable interbreeding depends more upon sufficient similarities in vital organs and processes.

Many varieties of cats interbreed, and many genera of Felinae are interfertile with each other, including housecats with others. I think it’s likely that housecats don’t have quite the same “mental architecture” as wild cats.

More telling is canid hybridization, in particular, dogs with wolves; I think it’s clear that dogs and wolves don’t have the same “mental architecture”.

There is also the wikipedia article on hybrids, which mentions Africanized “killer bees”, not the same “mental architecture” as non-Africanized, and (just to mention), the “Higgs bison”.

But again, even without these obvious and well-known examples, stevenjohnson’s claim that interbreeding of Neanderthals and homo sapiens is strong evidence of having the same “mental architecture” is dubious and speculative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnQEo4bazIo (1:10-1:30)

It’s a real mystery, Kiwanda. I mean, where could a fear of heights possibly come from?

(to cite one of a million examples…thanks, Hitchcock)

Surely we’re not taught it.

Bill Benzon @218 cites this: “one might be tempted to point out” that collective reasoning in science and technology have produced many triumphs. This rather implies Mercier and Sperber have risen above the temptation, or they would have written, “of course, collective activities” etc. I don’t think they meant to be funny or ironic. The thing is, by their theory, it is in fact hard to explain how such collective activity has succeeded in objective terms, rather than just giving the victors in the Darwinian struggle we call reasoning more offspring. I think they tacitly concede this by bringing up the “epistemic luck” argument in the conclusion. At any rate, again, if they have no notion where a group whose participants are interested in truth rather than Darwinian success comes from, then we need not take their awareness of collective activities like science as part of their approach. I suppose I shouldn’t go further lest I stray into forbidden territory?

Kiwanda@221 confuses interfertility with admixture within a species. If housecats could be measured to have 5% bobcat genes, then that would be a parallel to what we’re talking about with Neanderthals and modern humans: The same species with local variations, races, with an easily discernible phenotype (unlike putative “races” within modern humans, where the most distinct phenotype, the so-called pygmies, are never categorized as a race!) Nonetheless, the difficulty of distinguishing the behavior of feral felis domesticus from other wild living cats rather undercuts the conviction that even simple interfertility is no guarantee of the same or even similar mental architecture. Ditto the notion that domestic dogs can assuredly be relied upon not to engage in wolf-like aggressive behavior, because wolves and dogs have such different mental architectures. Tell that to a pit bull.

The assumption that species variants, aka races, of homo sapiens like modern humans and Neanderthals is every bit as dubious and speculative as the notion that different races of modern humans have different mental architectures. I don’t think it’s an accident that so many proponents of EP have such dubious views on race.

On Buss: Buss’ claim that differences in parental investment in offspring drive their behavior is not strictly speaking correct, even if he cites Trivers for the hypothesis. It’s the Darwinian benefit from offspring that drives the behavior. If a man dies younger because he has no loving children dedicated to his welfare, instead leaving resentful bastards, EP says nonetheless he will choose the option of siring far more children than he personally can care for.

Of course it’s not a bit clear how in a truly primitive society more than 100 000 years ago how this is supposed to work, starting with whether the low population density really leaves many options for mate choice at all. Or whether fatherless children even survive to reproduce, i.e., become Daddy’s Darwinian success. Or whether people associated sexual relations with parentage, which implies female promiscuity could have been adaptive then, not male promiscuity. Or whether concealed ovulation is evolutionarily advantageous because it confuses paternity and/or does away with sex guaranteed (more or less) to produce offspring.

There is no way to have a genuinely meaningful theory in EP I think, without specifying an EEA, except that no one actually knows what that is. That’s one thing that makes EP a pseudoscience. Z’s program of taking specific claims leaves a Kwanda free to conduct a literature review for yet more evidence to knock down, even evidence that suffers the replicability crisis, does not seem to be very effective.

Lastly, on the LAD? It occurs to me there is likely no real way to distinguish language acquisition from language creation. Young generations creating a creole from pidgin, deaf children creating a sign language, siblings creating an idiolect, isolated populations creating a new language (albeit one related to the parent tongue,) to a degree the emergence of cant, jargon and slang, perhaps even the emergence of writing. Not to mention Helen Keller?

The general picture in EP of human behavioral skills requiring fairly extensive genetic programs for learning is not so compelling for language in this perspective perhaps. (Maybe not for Chomsky either? Uncertain… Chomsky’s views are not just complex but have evolved over time.) Looked at in this light, language creation appears to be well within the intellectual competence of people. The thing there is, why then is it so difficult for the large majority of people to learn another language after childhood? This seems to be a genetic feature because it’s a behavioral trait that seems to emerge as an mostly inevitable result of development.

Humans and animals learn to fear things. Or they learn not to fear things. We all have the capacity to feel fear. Our fears may be rational or irrational. No one given fear is innate.

stevenjohnson @226 –

Well said and I admire your tenacity in the pursuit of truth, but Kiwanda is impervious to data or reality and Bill Benzon appears to be a well intentioned true believer who really does not understand the fundamental issues.

stevenjohnson 226 and 229 now pretty much calls it racism not to join in a speculation regarding the mental processes of Neanderthals and how similar they *must* be to that of homo sapiens. At the same time, the EP hypothesis that people (homo sapiens) are pretty much the same in mental processes puts EP, per DrDick 127, into a bucket with racists and misogynists.

Kiwanda@232 has confused EP’s peculiar notions of “mental processes” with anything in reality. People raised in different cultures tend to have different thoughts for approximately the same sorts of reasons than, for instance, a highly educated, literate person who lives an entirely differently life from an illiterate person in the very same society. Individuals have the same kinds of feelings but even in that regard, there’s much more variety in feelings in people in the very same society than EP acknowledges. And an overlap with animals too.

Kiwanda@233 doesn’t notice Confer et al. are shaky on consideration of alternative hypotheses. In the case of daughter-guarding, for instance, perhaps daughters are more likely to be guarded if raising a child is more of an economic burden. When women could afford children, on the other hand…There seems to be some confusion about the very concept of a reproductive strategy.

I must suggest that contra EP there is a human reproductive strategy, one of intense care for a limited number of children, as opposed to little care for large numbers of children, with remarkable cultural variations in how this works out in practice. EP pictures two species, male and female, with different reproductive strategies. How this could possibly explain variations in infanticide from culture to culture is anybody’s guess.

(By the way, if EP had anything to contribute on that topic Pinker missed a chance to actually treat infanticide in his nutty book Better Angels. He actually has no idea about homicide rates throughout history but still has all those stupid graphs. The presentation of such illusory certainty though is EP through and through.)

Bill Benzon, in case you are still reading.

Still, and all, you’ve not convinced me that there’s nothing to Buss’s argument. He doesn’t claim to account for everything nor was I expecting him to and I really don’t need you to tell me that.

Ah, but see, I’m not trying to say there’s nothing in there. There is only one thing I’m trying to convey: that positing a mechanism, showing it more or less fits some data and then declaring victory is bad science. Appalling science, really. It is not my job to convince you that “my” model is better, it is Buss’s job to convince me (and you) that his is better, and for that the most usual steps are to at least mention competing alternatives and see how they fare on the empirical data and/or derive a really unexpected prediction of the model and see it is verified. That’s what he doesn’t do. At all. And that’s why I was mentioning an asymmetry: in order to show that he didn’t do his homework, it is not necessary that I do mine.

Nor have you convinced me that “imitative acquisition of strategies” is all that’s necessary to account observed behavior.

Again, I am not trying to convince you that the imitative acquisition of strategies explanation is better (could I do it? probably not in fact, even if you were favorably disposed: science is hard and I’m a rather lazy person), all I’m pointing out is that there is a perfectly valid alternate explanation to all data presented by Buss (in fact, an explanation that better fits the data) and that he never considers it. It is especially damaging as it is trivially easy to come up with contradictory predictions of the two models. I mentioned one above already, but if you want another one, think about his observation that women universally prefer older men while men universally prefer younger women. If that is mostly due to social imitation within a patriarchal society, the mean difference in age should be sensitive to the level of patriarchal features and to the range of opportunities offered to women. If that is mostly due to a dedicated mental mechanism, it should be relatively independent of these features. Which prediction do you think obtains? (In my country, women under 30 outcompete men economically and select partners of the same age or younger more often than older ones.)

[Explicative deleted] I don’t really know what “imitative acquisition of strategies” is.

Perhaps this is an issue of translation, but I mean nothing fancy: people look around them, see some other people using strategies to achieve some goals, imitate the strategies they believe are working. All great apes are very proficient at this task. Or perhaps I do mean something fancy, something like the habitus of critical sociology, but in first approximation this is not needed. Note also that you probably also don’t know what the “mate-selection module” of Buss is and that, again, he is writing a research article, I am writing a blog comment.

@WLGR, #237:

… there will be a massive amount of research into processes for which formal symbol systems are largely irrelevant before we get to a point where neural-network simulations can develop true fluency in the complexities of human culture, including our formal symbol systems.

Will be? That’s the last 30 years. GOFAI ran and reigned from mid-50s through mid-80s (and is still chugging along, though in the background). Connectionism was conceived back in the 1960s, if not before, and statistical techniques (at least in language) were conceived in the 1950s. But these techniques, along with machine learning, didn’t come to the fore until the mid-80s. So, we’ve had a three-decade run for GOFAI and we’ve now had a three-decade run for neural-nets, etc.

Time for another paradigm shift?

David Ferrucci, who headed IBM’s Watson project, has already been calling for a recapitulation, if you will, of GOFAI, and Martin Kay made the call some time ago (PDF, and see this discussion at Language Log). On paradigm shifts, you might want to take a look at a short chronology I did about a decade ago; it starts in the late 1940s and runs literary theory in parallel with cognitive science. Note much in there about AI (never more than a secondary interest of mine), but you might find something there.

You might also want to look at a paper David Hays and I published some time ago, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence. Here’s the abstract:

The phenomena of natural intelligence can be grouped into five classes, and a specific principle of information processing, implemented in neural tissue, produces each class of phenomena. (1) The modal principle subserves feeling and is implemented in the reticular formation. (2) The diagonalization principle subserves coherence and is the basic principle implemented in neocortex. (3) Action is subserved by the decision principle, which involves interlinked positive and negative feedback loops, and resides in modally differentiated cortex. (4) The problem of finitization resolves into a figural principle, implemented in secondary cortical areas; figurality resolves the conflict between pro-positional and Gestalt accounts of mental representations. (5) Finally, the phenomena of analysis reflect the action of the indexing principle, which is implemented through the neural mechanisms of language.

These principles have an intrinsic ordering (as given above) such that implementation of each principle presupposes the prior implementation of its predecessor. This ordering is preserved in phylogeny: (1) mode, vertebrates; (2) diagonalization, reptiles; (3) decision, mammals; (4) figural, primates; (5) indexing. Homo sapiens sapiens. The same ordering appears in human ontogeny and corresponds to Piaget’s stages of intellectual development, and to stages of language acquisition.

The discussion of finitization (4) involved some mathematical work by Miriam Yevick that dates back to the late 1970s and is about the counterpoint between symbolic and statistical processes.

I need to clarify the opening remarks of my previous comment to WLGR, whatever number it turns out to be. He asserted, “there will be a massive amount of research into processes for which formal symbol systems are largely irrelevant before we get to a point where neural-network simulations can develop true fluency in the complexities of human culture, including our formal symbol systems.” I replied, “Will be? That’s the last 30 years.”

That is, we’ve already had that massive amount of research; that’s what’s been going on over the last 30 years. There’s no particularly good reason to believe that simply by continuing with more of the same that we’ll get anywhere near “a point where neural-network simulations can develop true fluency in the complexities of human culture.” Connectionist models aren’t going to handle symbolic computation simply by scaling up.

stevenjohnson @229:
Neanderthals and modern humans are not just interfertile, they are the same species. It was and is dubious and speculative to assume different races of the same species can have different “mental architecture.”

I think the modern tendency is to classify Neanderthals as a separate species — Homo neanderthalensis — rather than a subspecies of Homo sapiens. And fertile hybrids produced by cross-breeding between different species do exist — e.g., not just domestic dogs and wolves, but wolves, coyotes, and golden jackals can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, as can domestic cattle and American bison, Scottish red deer and Japanese sika deer, etc.

The suggested divergence date between the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans is, very roughly, about 600,000 years ago. This is about an order of magnitude older than the dates for which modern human lineages plausibly start separating (and there’s presumably been a lot more interbreeding between different modern human groups than there was between Neanderthals and early modern humans). So it’s a lot more plausible that there could be differences in mental architecture between humans and Neanderthals than there would be between different groups of modern humans.

There is some evidence for consistent differences in brain structure between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. E.g. Pearce et al. 2013, “New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans”:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1758/20130168

… our findings tie in with the suggestion that the Neanderthal and AMH [anatomically modern human] lineages underwent separate evolutionary trajectories. Starting from the brain size of their common ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, we suggest that Neanderthals enlarged their visual and somatic regions, whereas AMHs achieved similarly large brains by increasing other brain areas (including, for example, their parietal lobes).

Z 241:

Oh come on, how many times do I have to write it? It is Buss’s job to show that his proposal is better than alternatives, not mine to come with a better one. Otherwise, it is poor science, which is all I’m claiming (I’m not claiming there is nothing there).

Again: saying that “people do what people have done before, except when they don’t” is so weak an “alternative hypothesis” as to be nearly nonexistent. My theory “shit happens, man” is an alternative hypothesis to general relativity, and clearly superior in key ways: its conforms perfectly with observation, and it doesn’t have any issues to reconcile with quantum mechanics (indeed, it subsumes both general relativity and quantum mechanics).

Z – this has gone on way too long, but – look at this way. Imagine that Buss hasn’t actually conducted the research. Rather, he has a research proposal and has come to the Crooked Timber Research Foundation for funding. He proposes a research design that’s like the one he actually used. He’s sent us his proposal and we’ve invited him in for a chat. In that context, sure, you can point out your default preference and ask him how he intends to discriminate between that and his EP proposal. We can discuss it with him and proceed from there.

But that’s not the situation we face. The situation we face is that the research has been done. It’s now up to you to establish that your default can account for phenomena that his proposal cannot account for.

To clarify a bit the last point in my previous comment – even in those cases where we *are*, indeed, acting precisely in such a way as to maximise our offspring (which is far from always the case), a not-unreasonable explanation for that might still be that we are, well, deliberately trying to do exactly that (say, because we want our clan to be powerful, or because we have been told that only losers don’t maximise their offspring, play basketball and listen to rap, or because it sounds like fun to have small versions of ourselves to scream at), and not that we are guided by an innate urge, produced by evolution, to pursue a course of action that objectively results in the maximising of our offspring.

stevenjohnson: You’ve brought up Chomsky’s anarchism twice. Why? Yes, sure, I know he’s an anarchist, but we’re discussing linguistics (and related matters) here. Two different spheres. Or are you of the view that they aren’t distinct?

David Golumbia devotes the second chapter of The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard 2009) to Chomsky and does minor back-flips over the relation between Chomsky’s linguistics and his politics. Golumbia’s general argument in the book, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is that “computationalism” is rationalist/conservative/neoliberal. His argument about Chomsky’s linguistics is that it is rationalist/conservative/neoliberal. But Chomsky’s politics are quite different. Thus one of the core ideas of Chomsky’s linguistics is something that’s come to be known as the Chomsky hierarchy. What’s an anarchist (in one sphere) doing with a hierarchy as central to his thinking (in another sphere)? Golumbia’s suggested resolution of this conundrum is to point out that Chomsky’s “institutional politics are often described as exactly authoritarian, and Chomsky himself is routinely described as engaged in ‘empire building’” (p. 33).

It’s not very convincing and, as far as I’m concerned, unnecessary. I see no reason to think that people are so coherent that everything they do in whatever sphere is patterned on the same template.

Note, I don’t intend to argue this. I’m about to exit this conversation as other things have become pressing. But I’m just curious about why you seem to be looking for a connection between his anarchism and his linguistics.

[Note: Golumbia’s discussion of Chomsky’s linguistics is terrible. Looking for political ideology in technical linguistics strikes me as a dicy business at best, but if you’re going to do it, at least get the linguistics right before you undertake the cultural critique. Golumbia’s treatment of the linguistics is incompetent, which I argue at some length in a working paper, Cultural Logic or Transcendental Interpretation? Golumbia on Chomsky’s Computationalism.]

BTW, as an aside, Tyler Cowen interviews Joseph Henrich on Cultural evolution, WEIRD societies, and life among two strange tribes

For example:

COWEN: Now, another feature of your model, if I understand it correctly, is that you get more rapid or more complex or more interesting cultural evolution when you have a larger number of moving parts: more people, or more wealth, or more complexity. Is it kind of increasing returns to scale to cultural evolution? Is that fair to say?

HENRICH: Yeah. There’s a couple of different ways that that comes out. I think the simplest and clearest one is this idea that I call the collective brain. This is simply the idea because we’re so dependent on learning from each other in order to do innovations and to construct increasingly fancy technologies, larger and more interconnected populations tend to have fancier tools and technologies.

Humans really don’t think as individuals. We don’t innovate as individuals. We innovate as groups. Groups that, for whatever reason, are able to create more social interconnections produce fancier tools and technology, and they’re able to maintain larger bodies of know-how.

There are these great cases in the ethnohistorical record of groups like the Polar Inuit who get cut off from the rest of the Inuit population. Then they begin to lose valuable tools and technology because their own brains remain the same size, but their collective brain became severed. They’re not able to maintain as much know-how in the population.

COWEN: That connection between size and speed of cultural evolution, that’s true at most margins? Say, India evolves culturally more rapidly than Denmark because it’s larger?
HENRICH: There’s lots of pieces to this puzzle. The key is to create interconnectedness. To explain the difference between Denmark and India: of course, Denmark is interconnected with many other populations, but the flow of information is much less constricted.

What happened in the scaling up of human societies in many places is societies get built on complex kinship structures in which you don’t have very much relations between different families and between different tribes. That constrains the flow of social information among these groups.

The trick the West pulled off is to manage to make individuals so that information could freely flow among individuals.

F Foundling 231, in reference to Confer et al discussion of “daugther guarding”:

The preferred evopsych approach is to instead choose the hypothesis (without giving the other, previously mentioned explanations serious consideration) that Homo Sapiens parents are somehow biologically ‘hardwired’ to treat their female offspring in a certain way specifically with respect to sexuality, because savannah;

Confer et al’s discussion of “daughter guarding”:
“…[EPs] suggest that socialization theories will become more powerful if informed by evolutionary psychological analyses.
The daughter guarding hypothesis —the idea that parents have evolved adaptations designed to socialize their daughters and sons differently in the sexual realm — exemplifies one approach to evolution-based theorizing about socialization… …..we can already see that evolutionary and socialization explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive; in some cases, they can be usefully integrated to provide novel predictions…”

Here the parents’ “evolved adaptions” does not seem to be referring to something “hardwired”. A paper on the topic of “daughter guarding”, with two co-authors who were also co-authors of the Confer et al review, also does not seem to make any claims that parental behavior is “hardwired”.

That is, F. Foundling’s use of “daughter guarding” as an example of EP conjectures of “hardwiring” is off the mark.

F. Foundling 247:

In general, giving an ‘evolutionary’ explanation for perfectly conscious and culturally informed choices is begging the question.

If such an explanation is subject to evaluation and testing, if it suggests hypotheses that can be tested, in a variety of ways, then it has some value and interest.

stevenjohnson @ 249:
According to the biological species concept, organisms that routinely breed together are the same species. The percentages of Neanderthal genes/DNA in population where admixture was geographically possible average 2% as I understand it, and range up to 5%. (With none of course in other populations, such as in Africa.) This isn’t occasional hybridzation between two species, it is admixture between two demes or races of the same species. Unless you’re suggesting the work done by Svante Paabo with Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is somehow wrong, or has been flagrantly misinterpreted?

No, I’m relying on the work done by Pääbo and colleagues. Some of the most recent research on Neanderthal DNA in non-African humans suggests that human-Neanderthal interbreeding showed characteristics of inter-species breeding, with probable sterility for male offspring and systematic selection against Neanderthal DNA in the descendants. (This is very unlike the situation for interbreeding in modern humans.)

E.g.,
Were Neanderthals a different species?:

… this suggests that the male hybrids might not have been fertile, whereas the females might have been fully fertile,” Svante Pääbo told Richard Harris of National Public Radio…. We might have inherited most of our Neanderthal genes through hybrid females, he said.

Another author, David Reich of Harvard Medical School, told reporters that we and Neanderthals “were at the edge of biological compatibility.”

“This underlines that modern humans and Neanderthals are indeed different species,” Fred Spoor told New Scientist. Spoor is also at the Leipzig Max Planck but was not a part of the Neanderthal research. Other scientists are more cautious about making so firm a declaration, but it’s clear that many lean toward that same conclusion, that Neanderthals were not Homo sapiens neanderthalensis but, rather, Homo neanderthalensis.

and

Neanderthals and humans: an interspecies affair to remember:

Many of our living primate cousins interbreed naturally in the wild: estimates show more than 10% of primate species do it!

Doesn’t this run counter to the very definition of a species? Not unless you take an overly simplistic, or iconoclastic, approach to defining them. Even the man credited more than anyone with developing the “biological species concept” based on reproductive isolation – the late Ernst Mayr – recognised that interbreeding sometimes occurs between them.

The latest findings from genome comparisons reinforce the status of Neanderthals and modern humans as distinct species.

Moving temporarily away from psychological characteristics for a broader perspective:

Evolution by natural selection has produced the phenomenon of lactase persistence, and this has happened during the period since humans were confined to their presumed original savanna environment, and has created marked differences between human populations.

Evolution by natural selection has also produced a decrease in the size of human teeth during the period since humans were confined to their presumed original savanna environment, an effect observed across different human populations.

These observations suggest the power of evolutionary explanations for human characteristics, both those shared by different human populations and those which distinguish human populations from each other, and the role of selection pressures deriving not from the presumed original savanna environment but from more recent conditions.

This suggests to me that it’s likely that human psychological characteristics have been influenced to some extent by evolution by natural selection.

If the question is whether evolutionary theory predicts that human psychological characteristics should reflect the selection pressures characteristic of the presumed original savanna environment, the answer is No, at least not uniformly so, since other biological human characteristics shaped by natural selection do not all reflect the selection pressures characteristic of the presumed original savanna environment.

If the question is what prediction evolutionary theory makes about the universality of human psychological characteristics, the answer is that it predicts both uniformity and diversity, since natural selection has influenced other biological human characteristics of human populations both uniformly and diversely.

If the question is whether evolution by natural selection can explain anything about human psychology, the answer is Probably, but given the history of people being obviously swayed by their pre-existing preferences in developing hypotheses about the biological evolution of our species, any individual hypothesis about the evolution of human psychology by natural selection should be approached with a cautious regard to the likelihood of self-serving bias.