What are they?
The ongoing meltdown in Thunderdome and the departure of Chris tell me we’ve got something that needs to be fixed. I don’t quite know how to fix everything, so let’s crowdsource it — you people leave comments here telling me what rules you think might work to get the knifey-bitey-smashy atmosphere to lighten up a little. Just a little.
This is Bill Whittle, some weirdo far right nutbag I never heard of before. He is spinning out some metaphor about America and popular TV.
You see, once upon a time, we all loved Superman, and America was super-powerful. And then there was a transitional period when Gilligan’s Island was popular, and we didn’t learn the lesson that Gilligan ought to have been executed. And now we’re living in a Family Guy world, which is all “anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-morality”.
I think it’s actually a pretty good metaphor, he’s just reading it wrong. Conservatives think the ideal is to be an invulnerable, superpowerful brute who can solve all of his problems by punching them out; they don’t seem to be aware that the Almighty Superman was boring and a dead end, and everyone who wrote for the comic struggled to make the story interesting, and usually failed. The message of Gilligan’s Island was always…listen to the Professor. He can make anything given enough coconuts.
I don’t know about Family Guy. I’ve seen bits of a few episodes and didn’t like it much at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to fill in the proper interpretation of that part of his metaphor for me.
But ultimately, the most important message from Mr Whittle is that the proper place for right wingers is sitting in their E-Z Boy recliner, shouting at the TV.
This webcomic was just too sad, and it reminded me of my childhood a little bit. Only it wasn’t my father, but my grandfather. And he’d drive me over to the Eagles Club and tell me to wait there or play on the sidewalk while he had a few drinks.
But he never gave me a couple of dollars to get some pop while I waited. That kid was so lucky.
As many of you know, Chris Clarke has decided to leave Pharyngula. This is mostly an amicable decision on his part, although he’ll also tell you that the sharks’ teeth and knives and snarling comments section here was taking a toll on his soul, which is more of a bunny rabbits and adorable puppy dogs sort of place.
I would hope you’d put down the weapons now and then and visit his blog, Coyote Crossing, and I also recommend all of the blogs on his network, coyot.es.
Don’t say goodbye here. Go there and be appreciative.
I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece. He disagrees with the anti-EP piece I linked to yesterday, which is fine, but I expect better arguments than this. He completely mangles the story.
An example: he cites a section of Annalee Newitz’s story like this, as the one substantive argument she presents against EP:
Humans evolve too fast to bear behavioral traces of ancient evolution.
I agree. That statement is total nonsense, simply not true, an absurdity on the face of it. Unfortunately for Coyne, Newitz said nothing of the kind! And most strangely of all, Coyne goes on to quote the relevant section of Newitz’s piece, and it’s obvious that she said nothing like that.
This is all part of [Miller’s] and many other evopsych researchers’ project to prove that humans haven’t changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it’s unlikely that humans’ early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych’s biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time.
There’s no denial of ancient attributes in there. There isn’t even anything about the rate of evolution. It’s more specific than that: the kinds of questions we see most evolutionary psychologists exploring (dating or writing dissertations) represent novel challenges that aren’t easily explained by simply citing ancient tribal organization or food gathering practices, especially since all those ancient properties are unknown to us, and are often simply invented by evolutionary psychologists to put an imaginary evolutionary gloss on modern behaviors.
And then, to back up his assertion that we retain relics of our evolutionary history (which no one seems to be arguing against), Coyne lists a collection of morphological traits — wisdom teeth, bad backs, goosebumps, etc. — which, again, no one is saying don’t exist. I’ve read Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, too, and agree completely that what we are now is a product of a long evolutionary history.
But please, none of these are subjects of evolutionary psychology. It’s simply irrelevant, except possibly to shoot down a passing zeppelin carrying a cargo of straw.
Coyne does do something promising: he lists some psychological attributes that he considers worthy of an evolutionary psychology approach.
Higher variance in male than in female reproductive success due to differential behavior of the sexes
Weaning conflict between mothers and their infants
Preference for relatives over nonrelatives (kin selection), and xenophobia (useful for when we lived in small groups)
Fear of spiders and snakes
I agree! Those do look like phenomena that would have a deep evolutionary history and would affect modern humans in interesting ways. If that were the kind of thing evolutionary psychologists study — and I’ve said this multiple times now — the deep generalities of human behavior, rather than the parade of nonsense about foraging for berries and its effect on women’s shopping preferences, I’d have no complaint at all about EP. But those are hard questions. You generally can’t answer them with a quickie survey of your intro psych college students (let’s not even pretend that that isn’t what evolutionary psychologists do, ‘k?).
I’ve read some on his second subject, conflict between mothers and infants. I really recommend Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature as a great study of the issue — but it’s also a very anthropological topic. If you want to say something about common elements of human nature, you really do need to survey something broader than American college students.
I thought the last topic is a good one, too, and when I was trying to find worthwhile EP papers, that was one I focused on. It seems reasonable and complicated, and definitely psychological. I’ve also got a personal interest, because I have no obvious fear of spiders or snakes (other than an intellectual wariness…but otherwise, I find myself feeling attraction rather than aversion), but I do have a fear of guns — point one at me, and my heart rate goes up and I feel a lot of anxiety. So how do we sort out cultural vs. genetic predispositions? I’m assuming I don’t carry a “fear of guns” gene.
One review I found by Öhman and Mineka, “Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning” seemed to be an exercise in ambiguity and vague explanations. They actually compared fear of spiders and snakes vs. fear of guns and electrical outlets. The answers were confusing: some studies find a greater resistance to extinction in spider phobias, others can’t replicate it. It seems to be a subtle phenomenon. It left me wondering more about how EP can say anything about more detailed behaviors when they can’t even nail down this rather fundamental one. I was also deeply put off by one of their interpretations.
Finally, even if true selective associations could be demon- strated with pointed guns, we would not consider this very damaging to our account, because ontogenetic and phylogenetic accounts of fear relevance are not inherently incompatible or mutually exclusive.
I can agree completely that fear responses can have multiple causes, and finding that one response is conditioned by experience does not rule out the possibility that another has a significant genetic component. But isn’t that the question? If you’re trying to claim that there is a heritable psychological pattern, shouldn’t you be designing your experiments specifically to distinguish conditioning from instinct?
So yeah, Jerry, you’re right, there are a lot of good questions that evolutionary psychologists could be studying. Which only highlights the strangeness of all the crap we do see published.
Wait…another blimp full of straw floats by. How do they stay up in the air?
It’s simply nonsense to dismiss the field on the grounds that there’s no way that human behavior could show traces of its deep evolutionary past.
Which no one has claimed. Done.
So now we get down to the really offensive part. The one where the proponents of EP deny that there are any structural problems in their field, and instead all of their opponents are ideologically motivated. Let’s go imagine some intent!
The real reason why people like Newitz and others (that includes P. Z., I think) dismiss evolutionary psychology in toto is because they find it ideologically unpalatable: they don’t like its supposed implications. They presume that evo-psych somehow validates misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities. They will deny this to their dying breath, of course, and pretend that it’s purely a scientific issue, citing a few anecdotal studies that are indeed laughable. But I think we know where these people are coming from. Evolutionary biology itself has been used to justify racism or the sterilization of supposedly “defective” humans, but we don’t dismiss evolutionary biology because of that. Likewise, we shouldn’t dismiss evolutionary psychology just because some cranks draw “oughts” from “is”s.
When you read a statement like this:
“Developmental plasticity is all. The fundamental premises of evo psych are false”,
then you know you are dealing with ideology rather than science. The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is simply that some modern human behaviors reflect an ancient evolutionary history. It would be odd if that were completely false. And developmental plasticity is not all. If that were the case, then why do we still have wisdom teeth and bad backs?
It doesn’t seem to matter how often we point out bad science or lousy protocols or unjustifiable interpretations — the criticisms will be dismissed with this “Oh, they’re just leftist ideologues!” baloney. Yet somehow the converse never seems to be brought up by the EP defenders: that somehow, these EP papers almost universally seem to find rationalizations for the status quo, that they take existing behaviors in our culture and slap on a just-so story to claim women’s roles or the place of minorities is biological or natural or genetic or determined by 100,000 years of selection. If I were to turn this argument around, and say that supporters of EP are all ideologically driven fellow travelers of Kanazawa and Murray and Herrnstein (which I am NOT doing here, by the way), we’d immediately recognize this as a beautiful example of poisoning the well.
But somehow, it’s acceptable for Coyne to claim on no evidence at all that our objections are tainted by ideology? To dismiss criticisms of the premises and procedures of evolutionary psychology as unfounded because we’re not right-wing nutcases?
I will concede that my quoted sentence was poorly worded and prone to misinterpretation, and that that is entirely my fault. (It was a quick comment on an article made while I was at a con, so don’t get too worked up about it.) The context is that I’m talking about human behavior, not wisdom teeth or bad backs (although, actually, developmental plasticity does play a huge role in both of those). Every aspect of human psychology carries a huge load of cultural and psychological conditioning; even the genetically determined elements of our behavior (note: I do not deny that those exist) are going to be heavily layered with non-genetic baggage, and every biological predisposition is going to be swimming in an ocean of plastic responses and environmental reactivity. I expect that evolutionary psychologists should be especially sensitive to and appreciative of the problems that confers on analysis, and that they seem to be more often dismissive of the most important element of their field is grounds to reject the discipline.
And now I expect that the fact that I actually do oppose misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities will somehow be used as an excuse to claim I’m ideologically driven. Of course, I suspect that Jerry Coyne also opposes misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities; maybe he ought to say so more often so we can use that as a reason to reject his opinions.
Oh, joy. The defenders of Evo Psych are crawling out of the woodwork to nibble on me.
Heeeere’s Preston:
@pzmyers So our brains are evolved in form, but not in function. Riiiighhhht.
With Robert Bentley following right along.
@pzmyers Do you believe that, unlike all other animals, our behavior isn’t influenced at all by our evolutionary past?
And then W. Benson makes this lovely comment:
PZ is also hates recapitulation (along with my favorite German evolutionist (flawed in other ways) Ernst Haeckel), and maintains that both are discredited and dead. Haeckel’s recapitulation (not the Freddy variety portrayed by SJ Gould, PZ and fundies) and modern EvoPsy have indeed become tinged with voodoo-ish ‘species memory’ cultism, and when subject to strawman distortions can be made out as evil fabrications that oppose the Pharyngula-certified ‘feel-good’ street view that man arose, POOF, shiny, good, and untainted by monkey business. I think that this denialism, infused with a heady yet unmapped dose of Naturalistic Fallacy, may be the drug driving PZ’s ideological warp.
Recapitulation, even (or especially) Haeckel’s old sans-genetics view, is dead. Sorry to break the news to you, W.
But what is it with all these illiterates who read this post and think I’m denying that human behavior evolved from a primate substrate?
Oh, wait. One more. My favorite, from someone named JT:
PZ Myers is my bête noire; I can’t help myself.
Who the hell are you, Johnny Snow?
It’s the end of summer, and it’s a slow news time, so the newspapers are dredging the bottom of the fecal lake for material, but this is ridiculous. How about Syria? Come on, that’s important stuff. Instead, though, we get op-eds like this one in the Globe and Mail from Zander Sherman, proposing a solution to a nonexistent education problem by making education worse.
His problem: there are too many educated people.
As an entry point for the middle class, our institutions of luminous knowledge have lost their efficacy.
This is an economic consequence of oversupplying the market with similarly educated labour. Too many graduates have the same qualifications, resulting in a loss of competitive edge in the workplace.
To stay relevant, students are reaching ever higher in the pursuit of more specialized degrees. It used to be that a high school certificate was all you needed to get a decent job. Now even a bachelor’s degree is often insufficient. In this credit inflation spiral, we have devalued both our labour market and the institutions we’ve relied on to populate it.
This is a strangely twisted view; it’s about using education as a tool to promote hierarchical stratification; “The more available and abundant something is,” he says, “the less it’s worth.” We should reduce the number of college graduates, because then the few will be worth more and get paid more…leaving unsaid the corollary, that more will be worth less and can be paid less. It’s a blatantly anti-egalitarian perspective.
Furthermore, it only looks at education from the economic side. There is a real problem, that too many look at college as a magic formula for a certificate, rather as a path to greater knowledge, and it’s fueled by cheesy exploitation — I’ve seen the late night TV ads touting ways to get your bachelor’s degree in 6 weeks! Part time! By mail! I’d like to see those outfits shut down cold, but they say nothing about a real education, in which you invest time and effort in learning. Education is a path to self-knowledge and broader understanding of the world around you. It makes you a better person and a wiser contributor to society.
And yes, if you must put it that way, it creates a more educated workforce that is better able to handle challenging new jobs. If your economy is built around serfs and laborers, I guess you wouldn’t need more education.
But Sherman, who was home-schooled, could use a little education himself. He completely distorts the history of education.
The link between school and work was connected in the mid-20th century by the president of the University of California. Clark Kerr envisioned a large middle class, and saw the postsecondary certificate as a way of achieving it. By influencing the Basic Educational Opportunity Act, Kerr effectively commoditized social mobility. If you could afford to go to college – or fill out the paperwork required for a bursary – you could effectively buy your ticket to the middle class.
But Kerr didn’t predict the perverse ramifications of such a decision. By putting degrees in the hands of anyone who could pay for them, he made the work those graduates performed less valuable. A measure that was designed to mobilize society has ground it to a standstill.
Oh, nonsense. The previous system was one in which you bought your degree: even now, those most prestigious institutions in our midst, the Harvards of America, have been and are finishing schools for the rich. You do literally buy your Harvard degree. But the University of California changes were to remove most financial barriers and make a college degree an actual measure of merit. You couldn’t just pay your way through, you actually had to earn passing grades in a curriculum to get a diploma at the end of it all.
Does it even make sense to declare that students were paying for their degrees when the whole point of the institutional changes was to make a college education as close to free as possible?
So far, Sherman is just stupid. But brace yourselves, he’s about to explain his fix for the problem.
The solution to our present predicament lies in the past. In medieval times, university attendance was extremely rare. This was at least partly because school environments were so hostile. Freshmen students spent every coin they had just to get in the door, at which point they endured a hazing ritual that included dagger attacks and assaults with buckets of scalding water.
Provided they reached their dormitories alive, students slept in dank quarters, awoke before sunrise, and attended lectures in the dark (where they memorized nearly everything they learned – paper was prohibitively expensive).
When it came time to demonstrate their knowledge, students were called upon to recite epic poems in both Latin and Greek, perform a variety of musical compositions on a variety of instruments, and then bow to the same panel of judges and examiners who had made their lives intolerable for the last several years.
It’s this model we should be adopting.
You know, I didn’t go into teaching because I’m secretely an afficionado of sadism. How do dagger attacks, living in misery, and memorizing epic poetry in Greek contribute to my goal of giving students knowledge of biology?
To turn this trend around, fewer people should be furthering their educations. With fewer people furthering their educations, value will be restored to the university degree. And with value restored to the degree, the workplace will function as it should: as a powerful, competitive meritocracy.
While a privileged few fret about the problems of philosophy, the rest of us will go happily unschooled, living student debt-free, making our own jobs, and being living exemplars of the age-old axiom that ignorance really is bliss. Rarefied in such a manner, we might then find that knowledge takes on a special luminosity.
Then, finally, we’ll have a truly enlightened society – just like in the Dark Ages.
That makes no sense. The university is already a competitive meritocracy — how does it improve that to throw up additional obstacles to entry? I can predict what those obstacles would be, too: money. The same as they already are. Something that has nothing to do with intellectual merit at all.
Sherman’s entire proposal is so insane and so irrational, yet so closely in alignment with what a good American Republican would endorse, that I at first thought it had to be some kind of clumsy attempt at Swiftian satire. So I dug a little deeper into this guy’s views…and discovered that he’s completely incapable of expressing himself with clarity and coherence. He has a book called The Curiosity of School, and I first tried browsing it for clues for what he really advocates. It was nearly impossible. Here’s a snippet from a Q&A, for example.
Were people better educated before the modern education system came into existence?
The case could be made that institutionalized education–what we’re now calling school–has negatively affected people’s sense of passion and wonderment. In The Curiosity of School I was less interested in making this argument myself and more interested in providing the means by which it could be made (along with plenty of other arguments) by other people.
Passion and wonderment are good things to encourage in school. But blaming the loss of those senses on modern institutionalized education (which definitely does have flaws) while praising the cruelty and rote memorizations of the scholastic system of the Dark Ages is bizarre. And he’s not interested in making an argument? What? So I read the preview of the book on Amazon to try and figure out what the hell he’s talking about (it’s a bad sign when you have to struggle so hard to understand a writer — lucidity is not Sherman’s strength). And yes, again, he starts out with a long section describing the horrors of a medieval school, and talks about the Prussian system of using education to shape students for the military, for instance, and then switches to a litany of terrible things that have been done in the modern school system and announces that that will be the focus of the book.
What a mess. Even without his silly op-ed, I’m able to read between the lines here.
And worst of all, he ends his introduction with a vacuity.
Finally, discerning readers will notice this book has no thesis. It doesn’t argue that school is bad, or that homeschooling is good, or any such similar thing. My intention is to simply present the story of school, and let you take away what you want.
Wait, that’s not an empty statement — it’s a lie. When you present a series of selective examples and distortions, when you focus on treating education negatively and call elitism a “meritocracy”, when you subtitle your book “the dark side of enlightenment”, you clearly do have a thesis — you’re just too great a coward to come out and state it openly.
