Wilkins is about to review a new paper on sociobiology by Wilson and Wilson, but he hasn’t quite done it yet. I’ll be looking forward to it, though.
Wilkins calls himself an unflinching sociobologist. I’m more of a lapsed sociobiologist with a fairly positive view of the field. The book Sociobiology was actually my very first serious introduction to the depth of biology — I picked it up when I was an undergraduate, way back in 1975, and read it all the way through. I was impressed in my naive fashion, and was baffled by the sociobiology wars that raged for a time — I was particularly distressed because I idolized Gould, and there he was treating Wilson like a pariah. But of course human nature, brains and behavior were subject to evolutionary change! Why all the disagreement?
Then, of course, sociobiology morphed into evolutionary psychology, which was very useful: EvPsych extracted all the bad and objectionable parts of sociobiology and amplified them, making it easy for an innocent, budding biologist to see the problems. I don’t think that was the intent of EvPsych, but it’s what it accomplished for me.
Wilkins points out the two glaring flaws of EvPsych: the excesses of panadaptationism and the unwarranted oversimplification of modularity.
Jonathan Eisen has a good example of adaptationist excess. The worst of EvPsych gets carried away with treating every quirk of human biology as an adaptationed honed for some specific function — but that’s an assumption that has to be tested, not taken for granted. As for modularity, well, it’s there…but it’s not as sharp as it’s often made out to be. I’ve got my own take on how the genome hangs together, and it’s not about discrete components, but about deeply intertwined interactions.
But still, I expect human behavior does have a strong biological influence, so I’m going to enjoy Wilson and Wilson’s redemption of the field. Probably. We’ll have to see. Wilkins will have to give us more than a brief introduction, I think.
Meierzz!! Your links don’t work! The first link points to Tara Smith’s article.
There is, unfortunatley, a great deal of prejudice in the humanities against sociobiology. Mostly from post-modernist advocates and philosophical views concerning reductionism. We need more biopsychosocial advocates to demonstrate the validity of this field without being typecast as racists. I think Jim Watson caused most of the stir that lends a wandering eye when the subject is mentioned.
Fixed now. Uh, I was just teasing you. That’s the ticket.
Asking “nature or nurture?” about people is like asking “hot air or balloon?” about a hot air balloon. You have the hyper-balloonists, who insist whenever possible that everything has to do with balloon shape and size without verification. You have the hyper-airists, who go on about how balloons are useless and unimportant tripe, and the malleability of air clearly makes it the only force in hot air ballooning.
Then, you have sane people.
Dan, I concur.
That explains the dollar bills tucked in your g-string, I guess.
Now, can you smash beer cans with your butt-cheeks?
oh goddammit Dan.
Thanks, you’ve given me nightmares now…
What I most object to are claims of cross-cultural validity that rely on subjects from, say, the US and somewhere in western Europe. I am more likely to believe that a behavior is cross-culturally constant if the subjects are from, for example, US, India, New Guinea, Ghana.. and THEN it ought to be subjects who do not come from the same class stratum (which rules out those oh so popular Psych 101 students everyone uses). The combination of grand statements about human proclivities on the basis of very small sample sizes bothers me as well.
That said, I don’t object in principle to evolutionary perspectives on behavior. There are many people in my own field of anthropology who are doing very interesting stuff that is truly cross-cultural, sensitive to environmental factors, and acknowledges the flexibility of human behaviors. One of my colleagues tells me this is properly known as “evolutionary ecology” and isn’t as bad as “evolutionary psychology.”
There has been a lot of hot air expelled and words wasted on the conflict between those anthropologists at the humanities pole of our discipline, and those at the scientific end, where the evolutionary lot place themselves — mirroring the wider humanities/science split noted in comment #2. Unfortunately, the different scale of the phenomena we are interested in (history versus evolution) isn’t understood by most people who just want a pie fight.
While evolutionary psychology is particularly grating with its panadaptationism, computationalism and “massive modularity hypothesis,” the whole idea of evolutionary explanations for behavior strikes me as utterly misguided. To start with, behavior doesn’t evolve, brains do. Behavior may be selected for (one way or another) but, even then, it’s a particularly difficult feature to study selection-wise and is completely reliant on how, precisely, the brain produces that behavior.
Secondly, and more importantly, evolution doesn’t explain things. The whole sociobiology/ev-pysche line of thought seems premised on this idea that evolution explains what a trait is or lends it some sort of meaning or function. Certainly the evolution of human neurobiology is a legitimate field and may illuminate the study of human ethology, psychology, sociology, etc, but it’s not the centerpiece of such studies and I don’t understand why such focus is given to it (other than to stir up controversy).
It seems to me the main reason people have been trying to use “evolutionary reasoning” to explain behavior is because the biology isn’t there yet. Neurobiology isn’t advanced enough to really weigh heavily on sociology yet; in the rush to “scientificalize” everything Wilson and, later, Toobey and the Gang used evolutionary story-telling as a stand in for actual science.
From my viewpoint (having been married to a biosocial anthro person at the time Wilson took off) the problem with Wilson’s Sociobiology and an awful lot of early sociobiology (and it was an awful lot, for the most part) is that they simply didn’t do their hoemwork when it came to humans. Their views of what “we” are were based mostly on the folks around them and a quick and superficial glance through some HRAF stuff. (“We” covers everybody, and not just now but our species throughout its history.) Consequently they tended to make really dumb mistakes. They also had (and some still do, sadly) a tendency — a very strong tendency — to deliberately ignore all cultural anthro and sociology work, which again made for really dumb mistakes.
I found the people who referred to themselves as “biosocial anthro” were almost always extremely good doing what sociobiology said they were doing, and of course they were doing it since before Wison came up with sociobiology. These are people like Jane Lancaster, Wanda Trevethan, Nancy Tanner and others (not all women, but those are my faves). Some fantastic work there.
Some sociobiologists have gotten better (or perhaps it’s that now some people who do better call themselves sociobiologists) but there’s still crap put out under that heading. Same thing of course with evolutionary psych. Pinker, for instance, is pretty laughable, but I’ve liked a guy named Terrence Deacon (The Symbolic Species) and Stanley Coren (The Left-Hander Syndrome). They do good stuff with solid backing, IMO.
very nice comment, poke.
danley: “There is, unfortunatley, a great deal of prejudice in the humanities against sociobiology. Mostly from post-modernist advocates and philosophical views concerning reductionism. We need more biopsychosocial advocates to demonstrate the validity of this field without being typecast as racists. I think Jim Watson caused most of the stir that lends a wandering eye when the subject is mentioned.”
First, “prejudice” is incorrect if you’re applying it to people who are not prejudging but are aware of the, erm, problems in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (which seems to be to sociobiology roughly what Intelligent Design is to Creationism). The same goes for your complaint about “biopsychosocial advocates” being “typecast as racist”; by the way, I don’t think you know what “typecast” means, but the point is that they aren’t assumed to be racists, the racists make it clear that they are racists by what they say and do. Not all scientists are racists, of course, but scientists and racists (or even “science” and “racism”) are not mutually exclusive categories.
“Mostly from post-modernist advocates and philosophical views concerning reductionism.” If so, all the better for “post-modernist advocates”. The most severe criticism of sociobiology has not come from postmodernists but from scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who get smeared by advocates of sociobiology. “Post-modernist” has become a cussword, not only among apologists for scientific racism but in the humanities itself. Using it as such does not establish you as a model of reason and good sense.
“I think Jim Watson caused most of the stir that lends a wandering eye when the subject is mentioned.” Pardon me, I am beginning to suspect that English is not your first language. In any case, Watson did NOT cause most of the “stir” — it has been going on since before he was born. This claim in particular makes it clear that you do not know what you’re talking about. Yet you clearly want to see yourself as a beacon of wisdom compared to those post-modernists in the humanities. The most interesting thing to me about the recent fuss over Watson was how many scientific racists came out of the woodwork to defend his views.
“the whole idea of evolutionary explanations for behavior strikes me as utterly misguided”
So the entire field of behavioral ecology since Lorenz and Tinbergen has been a big waste of time ?
Or is it just that Homo sapiens is extra-special?
“evolution doesn’t explain things”
Allow me to introduce you to Tinbergen’s four questions.
Just because you think that only developmental and proximate mechanisms are interesting does not in any way restrain the rest of us from being interested in the rest of it.
“The most severe criticism of sociobiology has not come from postmodernists but from scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who get smeared by advocates of sociobiology.”
Surely you are aware that Gould and Lewontin’s criticism was/is motivated primarily by political ideology rather than science? This is no smear, it’s empirical.
Sven, it is pretty clear that humans are “extra-special.” Name another species that has come up with digital watches!
I think the mistake is that proponents of EP confuse an ontological claim (“Humans are biological organisms”) with an explanatory claim (“Biology is necessary to explain culure”).
No one, (not not even the hated-but-unnamed “postmodernists”) deny that we are biological animals. What is denied is that biology helps explain human culture. When explaining, for example, why a particular group of people live in the place we do, the biological fact that they must breathe air seldom does any explanatory work.
Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg have a nice paper making this argument here:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=892881
Whatever the sins of the evolutionary psychologists are, why blame them for adaptationism in genome organization? (IMO, the language of the creepiest adaptationists in the latter field comes almost closer to ID than evo psych!)
When explaining, for example, why a particular group of people live in the place we do, the biological fact that they must breathe air seldom does any explanatory work.
…though the biological facts that they need to drink water, eat protein, and maintain a particular body temperature can be very relevant!
Look, I too am uncomfortable with the assumption that all details of human behavior have an evolutionary explanation. I am equally uncomfortable, however, with the idea that the size and complexity of our brains has brought about complete transcendence of the previous 500 million years of animal evolution.
Behavioral ecology is a large and successful field of inquiry, and behavioral predictions based on evolutionary hypotheses have been repeatedly upheld in all sorts of animals, including primates. I just don’t see the rationale for that clear bright line between Us and Them.
Sven DiMilo,
No, I don’t think humans are exceptional. My criticism applies to all animals equally. You can give an explanation of how a behavior evolved (practical difficulties aside) but you can’t give an evolutionary explanation of a behavior. An explanation of how a behavior evolved is of interest to science, and might be of interest to laymen, but it is of no interest to those seeking an explanation of the behavior in question. The explanation of the behavior is given by the description of the object that produces the behavior and its interaction with the environment. This explanation is the same regardless of the details of its evolution and would not be different if the details of its evolution were different (provided its physical description is the same).
Yes, Sven, “drink water, eat protein, and maintain a particular body temperature can be very relevant” but the question is: why are those factors “relevant” and the need to breathe not?
The answer you provide cannot depend on the biology involved since breathing air and drinking water are equally necessary to life. The answer, in other words, is not the ontology of the natural world, but rather in what a particular field of inquiry “counts” as explanatory, which has little to do with the natural world and a lot to do with the background assumptions of the inquirers.
Tooby and Cosmides in there 1992 “manifesto” don’t understand this. They actually start the causal train for human behavior with the Big Bang which would seem to indicate that a “complete” explanation necessarily starts with the Big Bang. Which is nonsense.
THEIR manifesto. Jeez, I must be on fall break.
The main problem I see with evo-psych is that is it extremely easy to introduce bias, much more than in say physics. They are trying to measure things which we hardly have definitions for.(see: intelligence) And when we do have definitions those definitions have huge cultural baggage. This is the main reason the “humanities types,” of which I am one, find evo-psych to be a problem.
Also, if you look at the way that the press uses “studies” about gender roles and their evolutionary basis, I think the reaction is understandable. I’ve seen a regular string of stories about how science has proven that women are evolutionarily programed to act exactly as their traditional gender roles dictate. I know among philosophers this is generally considered damning evidence against evo-psych in practice, if not in theory as well.
Of course breathing air is relevant. An extraterrestrial biologist could use it to explain why a dominant large animal species only lives on around 1/4 of the earth’s surface. It’s just that for ourselves this is so smack-in-the-face obvious that it is completely unnecessary as an explanation.
fardels bear:
I’m afraid I don’t get your distinction. Let’s pick the black egret’s shading the water behaviour. How can its origin not be relevant to explaining it?
Proximate.
Ultimate.
Spot the difference?
poke @#18: While that’s all true as far as it goes, I’d say that evolution can in fact introduce telology de novo, by way of committment to particular strategies.
Once something has evolved into, say, a gazelle, “speed is good” is no longer an opinion, it’s a fact of life. Even if the environment then changes (say, the gazelles escape to a predator-free area), the original survival strategy will have woven its way into things like intragroup dominance and mating conflicts, (not to mention general physiology) to become self-maintaining. Future conditions could overlay that with other changes (say, for living on mountainsides), but “speed” being useful for a variety of situations, it’s not likely to be eliminated entirely.
With respect to behavior, it’s also important to remember the role of learning and (sometimes) culture, and that those have their own evolutionary significance. Most of the cultures were have around today are pretty old — they’ve adapted not only to their prior and current locations, but also to interactions with other cultures. Cultures that couldn’t hold their own in the face of disease, war, trade, natural disaster, or internal changes, are now gone or dying. As with natural evolution, some of that mortality is just bad luck — but over time, selection does tend to pick out the most successful patterns of behavior.
fardel’s bear: Just so you know, I smell a mobile goalpost here.
The difference is that air is equally available across the planet, whereas drinking water and food are found in specific areas, many of them defensible. Therefore no competition for air, but competition for food and water. Temperature is an intermediate case, as weather conditions apply to large areas, but the amelioration of same depends heavily on resources (clothes) and territory (buildings).
I realize this isn’t particularly relevant, but I thought people here might like it.
The bible, translated into lolcat, with pictures.
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
David Harmon: Air is NOT “equally available across the planet” as windy notes, only 1/4 of the planet is not covered by water: air is not available at the bottom of the Pacific. Hence, why is the fact that we need to breathe air not help us in our explanations of our behavior?
windy even provides us with the answer: it is because it is “so smack-in-the-face obvious that it is completely unnecessary as an explanation.” Which is my point exactly. Just because something is TRUE does not mean it helps us EXPLAIN anything.
An explanation is an answer to a “why question.” What counts as an explanation depends on the background knowledge and assumptions of the community of inquirers. Explanatory is a pragmatic virtue, not an epistemic or ontological one. It depends on shared assumptions and tacit knowledge: we don’t need to evoke those things that we share as background assumptions because those assumptions are the things that make our explanations work.
Mayr’s proximate/ultimate distinction is a case in point. He is simply pointing out that for functional biologists one thing counts as explanatory, and for evolutionary biologists another thing counts as explanatory. The adoption of “ultimate” terminology is nice rhetorical move that establishes what Mayr believed to be a hierarchy of science, but there is really nothing “ultimate” about those explanations in any ontological causal chain.
My point is simply that EPers are confusing the ontological causal chain, which indeed goes back to the Big Bang with explanatory power, which has little to do with that causal chain. I don’t think I am moving the goal posts, this has been the point I’ve been trying to make all along.
windy at #22. That second block quotation is not my post.
windy,
If you ask why the Black Egret spreads its wings the explanation might be “to shade the water and attract fish.” That doesn’t involve evolution. Evolution is an explanation of why the behavior came to exist but it’s not an explanation of the behavior itself. (Note that I’m not making an argument about intentionality here. It’s not that the Black Egret has an intention to spread its wings and evolution does not. Intentionality plays no part in any of it.)
In terms Sven might understand: Tinbergen’s “ultimate” causes are not explanations of behavior, they’re explanations of the evolution of behavior. Only the “proximate” causes are explanations of behavior. Studying evolution might lead me to postulate a behavior or a biological mechanism that creates a behavior, sure, but that’s just an example of the normal interaction between related scientific fields. My problem is that evolution is proposed as the centerpiece of studies of behavior when it’s actually peripheral to them.
My response is more or less what coathangrrr said.
I think it’s also worth noting that there is a difference between acknowledging biology as a pervasive and important factor in human psychology and sociology and positions which are not strictly analogous to, but very much resemble, an attempt to define human sociology and psychology (p + s) as the integral of human biology (b).
John Wilkins describes himself as an “aged, eternal student”. Is that aged like wine, do you s’pose, or aged like cheese? And who dares to ask him?!
“Explanatory is a pragmatic virtue, not an epistemic or ontological one.”
uh…
I got nothin’.
“Tinbergen’s “ultimate” causes are not explanations of behavior, they’re explanations of the evolution of behavior. Only the “proximate” causes are explanations of behavior.”
OK, how about this: Proximate explanations explain the behavior as it is manifested in each individual. This is a cause-and-effect mechanism of neuronal firing patterns, muscle contractions, skeletal levers, etc.
Ultimate explanations explain how it is that the behavior is around for us to observe in individuals. This is a cause-and-effect mechanism of mutations, environmental circumstances, and differential reproduction.
Perhaps it’s because I am admittedly no philosopher, but it is not clear to me why one of these deserves to be called an “explanation” and the other does not. Both are necessary (though not sufficient; there are the other two questions of ontogeny and phylogeny) to account for the existence of a behavior in a population. And I find this attitude: “evolution is proposed as the centerpiece of studies of behavior when it’s actually peripheral to them” really quite parochial.
“If you ask why the Black Egret spreads its wings the explanation might be “to shade the water and attract fish.”
I agree, but that is not a proximate explanation–it’s an explanation of utility or adaptive significance, which most biologists would tally over in the ultimate column as part of the evolutionary explanation.
John Wilkins is just aged. He’s less eternal than he appears. He refers to himself in third person.
I think the proximate-ultimate distinction is artificial. Every explanations has proximal and distal causes; there is simply no terminus to explanations, so at best we choose when we have enough in the way of accounting. But is evolution explanatory? Yes it is – phylogeny explains the distribution of traits between groups, or as Darwin called them, “affinities” (not just Darwin at the time, of course) – and selection explains the distribution of traits within groups, but it is not the only explanation (various drift and neutral theories also explain this).
My opinion is that we have to have a reason to apply selectionist explanations, and phylogenetic explanations trump selectionist explanations nearly all the time. We simply cannot appeal to some explanatory scheme like selection without reason for doing so in each particular case.
Anyway, that is what I shall be presenting in subsequent posts.
Right, let’s get some things straight.
First – yes, Evolutionary Psychology is sometimes guilty of going far beyond its remit (‘girls like pink because they evolved foraging for berries’, anyone?), and yes, it’s easy to make up a ‘Just So’ evolutionary story for any old behaviour that you want. Seems like Evolutionary Psychologists can jump to some overblown conclusions fairly quickly, but they need to understand it’s a young scientific field and a lot of care needs to be taken.
Of course, the media has a big part to play in this as well. Evo-Psych explanations, like the above one about girls liking pink (I can’t remember if that was the EXACT conclusion of the study, but it was something similarly ridiculous), are LOVED by sensationalists in the media precisely because they’re such neat explanations of human behaviour that anyone can understand with very little effort or background in science. If this media over-hyping is all people see, no wonder they think Evo-Psych is bullshit. The truth is, most (though not all) Evolutionary Psychologists are a lot less radical than you might think.
If Evo-Psychologists take it easy, don’t jump to conclusions, and gather/assess evidence veeeeery carefully, I really don’t see what the problem is. It’s very hard to believe that our evolution hasn’t shaped our behaviour in SOME ways, and they need looking at.
I suppose it’s a bit like abiogenesis. We don’t know the exact conditions under which human evolution happened, so we can try to work them out and then work out how they apply to how we got where we are today, as long as researchers aren’t carried away. (I realise its not really much like abiogenesis, but you see my point?)
And whoever it was that described Pinker as ‘laughable’ – have you actually read any of his books or is this just a knee-jerk Gould/Lewontin ‘I HATE EVO PSYCH’ reaction? You’re treating Evo-Psych the same way you (rightly) treat Intelligent Design! Surely this is a wee bit of an over-reaction?
Likely. But not necessary.
Likely. But not necessary.
Well, I’ve read Pinker, and in fact, I quite like parts of his book on language. But even in that book, he can’t help himself, and wastes several pages towards the end constructing a ludicrous straw-man of social science which he can’t even demolish particularly successfully. His point is that social science can’t abide the fact that there may be human universals. Yes, well of course we have things in common; the point is what accounts for the variations within the broad commonalities that we see. I don’t see why this makes Pinker hysterical, unless we’re talking about that well-known human universal of drawing attention to yourself so you can sell a lot of books. If Pinker would just stick to his field, and lay off the polemics, we’d all be happier (although he would be poorer).
The argument about humans breathing air, and air’s availability on the planet, reminded me that I have read about some work studying the physiology of Andean Quechua and Tibetan peoples, which mentions that they both have adaptations for living at higher altitude, such as more efficient use of oxygen. I seem to recall that the article also said that there was some evidence that suggested that one of them — I think it was the Tibetans — has been living at high altitude for a longer period of time.
I’m not sure if it’s relevant to any particular side of the argument, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
If Evo-Psychologists take it easy, don’t jump to conclusions, and gather/assess evidence veeeeery carefully, I really don’t see what the problem is.
I agree whole-heartedly, but I don’t see this happening. I think a couple things would have to happen for me to be more accepting of conclusions from evo-psych. First, the people who aren’t evo-psych radicals need to speak up when one of these horrible “studies” gets published, and explain not just what is wrong with the study but also how the field generally doesn’t follow that methodology/theory/whatever.
Second, I don’t think evo-psych is going to do that well when, as far as I can tell, it is based on a behavioralist model of psychology that isn’t fully credible.
Also, it would be great if the evo-psych people actually responded and work with to some of the “humanities types” concerns, as you did, to be fair, in a systematic way. Something I haven’t seen. The reason I point this out as a problem is that the humanities is about studying culture and culture is, in part, what determines what we do and how we do it. I think many times evo-psych people come off as biological determinists, which I doubt all are.
Steven Pinker is ‘hysterical’?!?! Oh for goodness sake. Get a grip, and quote me some ‘hysterical’ passages from The Language Instinct (I assume you’re talking about the Language Instinct – he has written at least 2 other books on language). I’d love to see this.
Pinker is hysterical in exactly the same way that Dawkins is hysterical in The God Delusion.
In my experience, the claim “X is hysterical” usually amounts to “X argues his or her case with a degree of passion AND I disagree with him or her”.
Of course, there is some genuinely hysterical stuff around – try the writings of Leon Kass. However, even Kass may be less hysterical than he seems to me, since I strongly disagree with him about nearly everything.
Two questions. First, does anyone have a link for this particular argument? And second, does the “girls < -> pink” association even hold outside of Western culture?
Right on, Russell – once again, people need to get used to passionate arguments and stop being so uptight.
Azkyroth – Your first question: http://www.badscience.net/2007/08/pink-pink-pink-pink-pink-moan/
Your second question is dealt with in Goldacre’s excellent column. This is the kind of Evo-Psych nonsense I hate, but as I mentioned, the media has a hand in stirring it up.
Might have been this, or something similar.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/imagingthebody/Handouts/alexander_2002.pdf
Searching on (pink girls foraging) on scholar.google.com brought up this, and another paper by the same author which is behind a paywall.
I may be misremembering, but it isn’t even a universal in Western culture. I am pretty sure that I recall something from the turn of the previous century where pink was associated with boys (because it was similar to red, which was considered manly), and blue with girls. Can’t remember quite where that was from.
Again, behind a paywall, but possibly pertinent:
“Clothing and Gender in America: Children’s Fashions, 1890-1920”
“X argues his or her case with a degree of passion AND I disagree with him or her”.
Okay, so Pinker is “passionate.” But when a person directs their passion over and over again at a non-existent target, well, you have to wonder what’s wrong with them. (And yes, Language and the Brain is the book I have in mind. Sorry, can’t give quotes because the book is in the office and I’m not). Pinker consistently accuses social scientists of thinking and writing things that they just don’t do, and it’s silly (can I use that word?) because it detracts from the more interesting and substantive points he makes about language and the brain. My objections to Pinker, though, do not alter my view that there is some really thoughtful and interesting work being done that takes an evolutionary approach to behavior. Slagging off the entire enterprise is as short-sighted as dismissing anything even remotely “po-mo.”
Like Clare, I find Pinker (and Tooby and Cosmides) hysterical in their caricature of the social sciences. Their claims that the social sciences are “incoherent” (T&C) and that EVERY explanation of social behavior or cultural MUST include biology is ridiculous. Tooby and Cosmides go on and on about how the social sciences are unscientific, floundering, incapable of producing any kind of worthwhile knowledge.
They make such claims without any shred of evidence that the social sciences are in any kind of crisis, it is all bluster and assertion. And then they wonder why people are offended when they have basically proclaimed that entire disciplines (like cultural anthropology) have never been able to provide a coherent explanation of anything. Gosh, why ever should people find such claims outrageous or insulting? And if their research program is so powerful, why do they need to create such strawmen to attack?
windy at #22. That second block quotation is not my post.
Whoops, sorry!
I genuinely don’t understand this accusation that Pinker is ‘hysterical’. I’ve read all his books but one, and I just can’t see what you mean. He never says the social sciences are useless, to my memory. His point is that they shouldn’t accuse sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists of ‘justifying’ repugnant actions like rape or war. Every time he mentions this, he accompanies it quotes and references of social scientists (and some hard scientists) saying things like:
‘It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behaviour more than for other kinds of behaviour’ (Seville Statement on Violence, 1986, quoted in Pinker (1997), ‘How The Mind Works’ p.45)
No sociobiologist has said anything of the sort – in fact, they spend a lot of their time working out the evolution of altruism in humans and other animals! Now, unless Pinker is just making up these quotes, what’s the problem? He is objecting to social scientists mischaracterising a new field of science for political reasons, and suggesting that synthesising the disciplines may go further towards explaining human behaviour. What’s ‘hysterical’ about that?
There is a genuine debate to have here about the limits of social science, sociobiology, biology and psychology – can we please stop accusing people we disagree with of being mad, ranting, shrill, hysterical crazies? Reminds me of something…
Death to all who follow the faith of the balloon!
His point is that they shouldn’t accuse sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists of ‘justifying’ repugnant actions like rape or war.
His “point,” unfortunately, is buried under the heaping pile of strawmen he’s built. He insists repeatedly that we’re not blank slates. Great! Of course we’re not! And no one’s saying that we are. But every time anyone questions an evo-psycho’s assertion that a particular trait (whether it’s a liking for pink or a tendency to aggression) is biologically based, Pinker responds by accusing them of believing in a tabula rasa.
Also, the bit about human universals is a red herring, because evolutionary psychology is as much about differences (between populations and between individuals) as it is about universals. And it’s evo-psych’s commentary on differences–whether racial or sexual–that tends to be the worst-informed, and to createa the most controversy. Few people get pissed off when evo-psychs say that jealousy or love or self-interest or altruism are human universals. It’s when they start alleging, sans facts, that observed gender or race or class differences are biologically-based that people’s hackles start to rise.
So this is a battle of True Scotsmen (not)? I personally have had arguments with sociologists (actually sociology grad students) that I would have to characterize as blank-slaters, but of course no true, reasonable sociologist is that way; they’ll happily grant that biological influences on behavior and culture are possible, and then they’ll argue with every single example proposed. Here is an example of the kind of ignorant mockery of an entire legitimate field of study that I think is representative (it actually pissed me off enough that I became a troll). (even though some of it is pretty funny)
On the other side, you’ve got your true, reasonable evolutionary psychologists that seem to spend all their time downplaying the excesses of their colleagues and the media distortions of their own work. Somehow the legitimate scientific questions always seem to be lost in this fog of hostility and mutual misunderstanding.
It’s much less frustrating to study regular old animals without culture.
#46: ‘…because evolutionary psychology is as much about differences (between populations and between individuals) as it is about universals.’
Um, that’s Behavioural Genetics, mate. Evolutionary Psychology is about finding out what makes us all the same.
‘It’s when they start alleging, sans facts, that observed gender or race or class differences are biologically-based that people’s hackles start to rise.’
Gender differences AREN’T biologically-based?! Wow, that’s a fairly strong statement – care to qualify it?
Here is an example of the kind of ignorant mockery of an entire legitimate field of study that I think is representative (it actually pissed me off enough that I became a troll). (even though some of it is pretty funny)
You totally took the hysterical line everyone has been accusing Pinker of. Note how you just jumped in and accused everyone of believing in tabula rasa. I think what also happens is that scientists will jump into a political debate and argue about how evo-psych isn’t all bad even though the only evo-psych research that comes up when discussing politics is the bullshit stuff. Maybe that’s what’s missing here on the part of scientists, an understanding that no one ever uses the “good” science that comes out of evo-psych in political debates, just the bullshit. So I found that bingo to be great, because in the context of political debates it’s totally topical and points out the type of evo-psych claims made all the time.
Stuart Richie:Gender differences AREN’T biologically-based?! Wow, that’s a fairly strong statement – care to qualify it?
Gender refers not to physiology but to behavior patterns, so the vast majority of gender differences, like preference for pink in the U.S., are not.
Hey, I said I was trollin’!
I tried a more reasonable approach in the comments, but it didn’t do much good.
(and believe it or not, I’ve never read Pinker–that blank-slater thing was off the top of my own head, as far as I can tell)
paraphrasing coathangrrr: the vast majority of gender differences in behavior patterns are not biologically based
Kind of begs the question, no?
Kind of begs the question, no?
Well, if you’d like to take a shot a defining sex and gender feel free to, but I warn you it isn’t as easy as it seems. Generally, gender is social behavior and sex is physiology. It isn’t begging the question it’s a matter of definition.
No, I understand that, but much of the whole pro/anti Evolutionary Psychology kerfuffle is over the unresolved question of how much social behavior has a biological basis. That’s what I meant–unless you want to actually define “gender” as those aspects of social behavior that are purely cultural. Problem is, we don;t really know what those aspects are.
Ack, you’re totally right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think that figuring out which parts of behavior are really social should be an important project, I just think that appeals to evolution* should follow not lead the study.
fardel’s bear #26 “Hence, why is the fact that we need to breathe air not help us in our explanations of our behavior?”
I think that we need to look at how our need for air manifests — stick someone underwater without a snorkel or an oxygen tank and they will very quickly rise or struggle to rise to the surface. This is so primitive an instinct that it precedes any area of interest to evolutionary psychology.
Obviously, animals are limited to their particular ecumene precisely because discomfort will cause a retreat from inhospitable areas.
I hardly think that either of these obvious outcomes qualifies as being of interest to sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, as much as anything because they are so trivial. It is not that animals have not benefitted from some ancient selective pressure that favored those organisms that experienced discomfort in an inhospitable setting and reacted accordingly, it is more that the neurobiology must have undergone selection so very early in evolutionary history.
“You’re treating Evo-Psych the same way you (rightly) treat Intelligent Design!”
Or perhaps in the way that creationists — who dismiss anything with “evo” in the title — are wont to do.
Owlmirror #35 “was some evidence that suggested that one of them has been living at high altitude for a longer period of time.”
I think it is the Andean Quechuas. Most humans can adapt to high altitude by increasing red cell production (thanks to erythropoietin released from the kidneys). This is why those athletes who spent time at altitude prior to the Olympic Games in Mexico City (what was the IOC thinking?) performed better. IIRC, the Quechuas exhibit a variety of psysiognomic adaptational features including high lung capacities.
My daughter is 3 years old, prefers to play by herself or with one or two playmates at a time, likes pretty dresses and mermaids, enjoys rough play, seems to have fairly advanced spatial understanding, is fascinated with mechanical toys, is mostly uninterested in humanlike dolls unless they’re biologically weird (IE, mermaids), thinks bugs and other creatures are cool rather than gross, is fascinated with computers (to the extent she can understand them at this point) and loves heavy machinery except when it’s making enough noise to unnerve her. So, she’s simultaneously moderately girly and fairly tomboyish. If the evo-psych perspective has an explanation that can accomodate her, it hasn’t filtered into any of the videos I’ve ever been shown on the supposed biological basis of gender differences.
I’m kinda confused about the difference between sociobiology and evpsych. Is there a nice way of picking out the good things Steven Pinker says in “The Blank Slate” from the bad ones?
Mark P.: Some folks claim there is no difference between the two. IMO, evpsych is not quite as “greedy” when it comes to “reductionist” issues.
(There’s a paper on my website that analyzes some of the debates.)