I got as far as the first paragraph before I started throwing red flags, and by the second I was ready to call off the whole game on account of dishonesty. Psychology Today (I should have been alerted by the source) defends EP.
The human brain, just like every aspect of every organism on the planet, is the product of evolution. If you accept that evolution is true, you can’t avoid that conclusion. That’s why I often get confused when I hear reasonable people being broadly dismissive of evolutionary psychology (EP).
EP is simply an approach to psychology that explicitly acknowledges evolution as the designer of brains. This approach may sound non-controversial in principle, at least among those who accept evolution. Nevertheless, many non-creationist critics find plenty of reasons to object to EP, or at least to what they consider EP to be. For examples of some such criticisms see Ed Hagen’s Evolutionary Psychology FAQ.
That first paragraph: that’s right, the critics of evolutionary psychology are often well-informed biologists who have zero problems with the idea of evolution. You shouldn’t be confused at all; you should realize immediately that their complaint with the topic can’t be about the idea that brains evolved. Isn’t that obvious?
So why is the whole thing about trying to argue that brains evolved?
That second paragraph doubles down on the bullshit. No, evolutionary psychology is not “simply” about brains having evolved: it includes a whole collection of bogus premises about how evolution works, and that is what we complain about. It’s all that nonsense about modules
, whatever they are — they seem to be inventions by evolutionary psychologists to allow them to pretend that they can reduce behaviors to discrete regions in the genome, or the brain, or something (go ahead, try to pin one down on exactly what a “module” is — there is no clear association with anything physical). It’s about The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness
, the imaginary Garden of Eden in which our brains evolved 10,000+ years ago, which is the reference by which all adaptations must be explained…despite the fact that evolutionary psychologists know next to nothing about that environment.
I’m not making this up. It comes straight from Ed Hagen’s Evolutionary Psychology FAQ, cited above, which has always been my go-to source for oblivious EP inanity.
It’s about deep methodological problems: researchers who make sweeping claims about human universals by studying just the middle class white American population attending their Psych 101 class. It’s about the focus on the status quo — somehow, every study seems to find that current social attitudes just happen to be a reflection of our evolutionary history on the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago, and endorses a kind of naive biological determinism that imagines that the way people are is the way they must be. Because of genes or brain modules or some such sciencey shit.
It’s about this obnoxious disingenuousness of evolutionary psychologists everywhere: that wide-eyed, condescending Oh, you do believe in evolution, don’t you?
response to everyone who points out the crappy ideas rife in their field. Imagine if other cranks tried that.
Oh, but surely you recognize the importance of water to biology, don’t you?
says the homeopath.
Oh, but surely you know that the brain works by transmitting electrical signals, don’t you?
says the psychic.
Oh, but surely you know that there are planets and stars in the sky, don’t you?
says the astrologer.
That’s what I find really appalling about evolutionary psychologists: their defenses are so deeply dishonest. Look at this parade of false alternatives:
Any critique that broadly dismisses the whole EP enterprise—that is, the whole notion that we can use evolutionary theory to understand the brain—is taking a position that is, intellectually and scientifically, very difficult to defend. What is the explicit alternative to ‘evolutionary’ psychology? Creationist psychology? Non-evolutionary psychology? Anti-evolutionary psychology? And if some such ‘un-EP’ approach is the correct way to do psychology, what are the rules of this approach? Would the cardinal rule be that it’s fine to study the brain (and brain products, like the mind, behaviour, and culture), as long as we never acknowledge or identify the process that designed the brain?
He really doesn’t get it. Evolutionary psychology is already non-evolutionary psychology. It’s biggest problem is that its practitioners rarely seem to have any comprehension of evolutionary biology — they have this grossly oversimplified caricature in their heads of a universe in which natural selection is omnipotent and the only force affecting evolution, where every single feature of behavior or physiology, no matter how trivial, must be an adaptation, and the purpose of their work is to identify an imaginary selective force in their imaginary Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation that generated Western Civilization. Just realizing that brains have a lot of plastic properties that are responsive to the immediate environment ought to snap the knees out from the entire edifice of evolutionary psychology, but no…they will persist in their fallacious explanatory framework that we’re all paleolithic hunter-gatherers who have found themselves in the modern world.
And this guy is just the worst.
If a critic is seriously proposing that knowledge of evolution cannot enhance our understanding of the brain, then he or she needs to be clear about why this proposition would be true. Is the critic proposing that human neural tissue, unlike every other kind of organismal tissue, is immune to the process of natural selection? If so, this is a radical scientific notion. It would be one of the greatest discoveries ever and the most important advance in biology at least since the discovery of DNA. It’s an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence before it could be taken seriously.
Jesus fuck, dude. The argument isn’t that neural tissue is magic, it’s that you’re a dumbass who doesn’t understand evolution.
More specifically, it’s almost always about finding that current racist and sexist attitudes just happen to be reflection of a short period of evolutionary history, and are therefore natural and good for us. No need for God to ordain that white people are superior or that women are the chattels of men. Nature did that job
after the Flood/when we were kicked out of Edenwhen we were a more chimplike species/when we evolved into H. sapiens.I see the problem that EP is an invitation to invent just-so stories to explain what is entirely learned behavior.
But one thing that bothers me, not knowing enough about biology, is innate behavior. While most of the brain is blank slate, ready to be trained on environmental correlations, there are some undeniably innate behaviors, and some are complex. It is often said that DNA isn’t a blueprint but more of a recipe, but it seems like those innate behaviors have to lead to some pretty specific neural connections that are ready to work right out of the gate.
In humans there are some simple reflex behaviors, but in some animals the behaviors can be rather more complicated, like flight, or having some instinct of how to navigate from Canada to Mexico (butterflies). It seems (to this ignorant person) that in such cases DNA would somehow have to be rather more specific about how the related neurons are built and connected, unlike most of the rest of development.
Have these people not grasped that the human brain has evolved to be incredibly plastic? Knowledge of evolution does enhance our knowledge of the brain, it just doesn’t lead to so-called Evolutionary Psychology.
Maybe EP advocates should be banned from writing for journals or using computers. Those didn’t exist in the Environment Of It Was A Fucking Ice Age You Dipshits, so obviously none of their modules will be any use to them; they are poorly adapted to the modern scientific environment.
I get that their assumptions and methodology is bunk. I wonder what it would take to do evolutionary psychology properly, if indeed we have the tools to do so? Would studying evolutionary psychology properly be distinct, in practice, from neurology, or related disciplines?
PZ, PZ, PZ, can’t you simply tone it down:
We do not want any EP wankers (or other Wankers from across the pond) coming from here and there complaining about your tone and taking your words out of context in order to hold a martyr’s posse on “The Cross of Civility”, do we?
*/ Sarcasm
Donnie @ 5
“Wankers from across the pond”
Eh?
By the time I got my BA in Psych (minor Phil) I think I realized that psychology was all about making shit up. Ids, Egos, Gestalts & etc. Maybe because they knew that doing actual science on people was fraught with ethical problems. That’s why I was drawn to Skinner’s Behaviorists.
Last night, I made bracelets. My fingers threaded tiny beads on small cords, used small pliers to bend fragile metal rings. How perfectly they were evolved to do just that!
Obviously, the aforementioned skills must have been VERY important on the African savannah and if paleo anthropologists haven” uncovered the vast hoards of prehistorical pliers it’s just a matter of time until they do.
My understanding of the current state of the art of EP is:
Evolutionary psychology. Human subjects. Good science. Pick two.
So if I write an article defending evo-psych, I should charge by the straw man argument.
Got it!
Which is fine, and totally true. What they don’t seem to be getting is that not all behavior is adaptive, despite the fact that it comes from an organ that evolved adaptively. Because brains and people are complicated.
It’s also fascinating how apparently the African savannah was remarkably like Victorian England in its family structures and like a 2010 Toys R Us in gender divide…
@ajbjasus- Donnie’s talking about a certain Nugget in Ireland whose feelings get very, very hurt when PZ uses naughty words.
@microraptor – Thanks for that – it seemed like a curious generalisation as we Brits are generally rather fucking good at swearing. Or I wondered if all EP’s were British, which seemed a bit odd too.
PZ, send me an e-mail & I can tell you all about modules. Tomb of Horrors is one of my favorites!
So, if everything in the brain is just the same in everyone and just as evolution intended it to be, which would be a teleological argument and prove that they don’t understand evolution, then perhaps they can explain this sequence of events.
My late husband had a pretty massive stroke, one so bad they’d give me no prognosis at all. He survived. With a good deal of effort and excellent NHS support he learned to walk, took up reading again, never learned to write script but could manage arabic numerals perfectly well.
All this happened in those parts of the brain which had not been thoroughly nuked – the better part of one half of the forebrain – and previously did something else entirely.
Therefore the brain is not just plastic but mind-bogglingly so. These Just-So-ists have no idea what they are talking about.
Now, how do we persuade them to shut up and learn something?
The term “module” in cognitive science has its origins to philosopher Jerry Fodor. He claimed that cognition can be divided into discreet domain specific functions that are innate (eg. language) that work in conjunction with general purpose systems (eg. consciousness). Indeed, Noam Chomsky has done ground breaking work in what is known as our Universal Grammar that underpins the language module. The real question is whether the term “module” makes any sense in neuroscience. That is, are there neural systems dedicated to specific functions. Of course there are. Vision, language, memory, executive function, facial recognition, etc.. are all handled by separate neural systems and all have genetic underpinnings. So in this sense, Fodor and Chomsky are not off base. Module is a cognitive science term that is real in regards to brain neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. However, module is not the same as brain centers in a phrenological sense. There is no lump in the brain that corresponds to my desire for chocolate.
Let’s take facial recognition. We know that damage to the bilateral fusiform gyrus will result in prosopagnosia and as such, an individual will no longer recognize PZ Myers. Therefore, are there PZ Myer neurons in those regions that are dedicated to everything that was, is or ever will be PZ Myers? Absolutely not. Indeed an individual with prosopagnosia will immediately recognize PZ Myers by listening to his voice. So what exactly are these visual recognition regions doing. My former supervisor, Antonio Damasio’s theory seems to make the most sense. The neurons in the fusiform gyri act as convergence zones that retrieve and relay information to other neural regions. That is, they are part of a distributed neural network dedicated to facial recognition shaped by both genes and environment. And here’s the fascinating part. For a surgeon who can recognize specific surgical tools, those very same regions dedicated to facial recognition are activated. Therefore, it is reasonable to speculate that evolution via natural selection may have resulted in the facial recognition neural network (makes sense to distinguish predator from prey for survival) but because these brain regions are plastic, they can take on new functions eg. recognize surgical tools.
Therefore, I think that the concept of module should not be wholly dismissed. I think the term can be applied if there is evidence of neurobiological underpinning. If evolutionary psychology went in this direction, then it would truly legitimize itself as a science.
Ragdish @ 17,
That’s genuinely interesting but I don’t think that EP as currently promoted has any interest in legitimising itself as a a science.
As currently seen it is a political – small p – project devoted to preserving a status quo which cannot be proved ever to have existed now or in the past. In addition it serves as a protection against thought for those who are disinclined to think, fouling up perfectly good discussions by positing the unproveable as fact.
At the moment it is a pseudoscience though I agree with you that, were it ever to go about the matter scientifically, it could be very interesting. For the moment, I’m defining pseudoscience as an endeavour which begins with a favourable (to them) conclusion and then trawls for supporting data in an unsystematic way. I certainly don’t mean that the marriage of psychology and our understanding of evolution has no potential.
Good summary, ragdish. It is indeed clear that the brain has functionally distinct areas, although how “encapsulated” these functions are (in a Fodorian sense) is somewhat unclear.
But “modules” themselves are no more than processors — they don’t specify the content of those processes. The EP argument is like saying that digestion is made up of discrete, evolutionarily-developed organs, therefore it is clear that we should all eat McDonalds hamburgers.
ragdish
The problem with Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is that it’s not well supported by the evidence. While there are things that are universal to many languages, they are not universal to all. You can always find the odd one out and that’s just looking at the languages we know of today. So far, the only universal in language seems to be that all human societies develop it.
Social psychology, you disingenuous hack. You know, that huge, established field of study with which you must necessarily be familiar if you’ve taken even a single psychology course?
Tellingly, this is exactly how Cdesign proponentsists operate: “modern science just rejects out of hand the possibility that there could be any design involved!”
While I agree that much of EP is just so stories that fall apart upon closer examination, I think it’s a false alternative to say that the only two choices are that EP does not exist at all, or that EP explains everything. Perhaps EP explains some things but not as much as its proponents suggest.
I don’t think it’s a huge reach to say that certain types of behavior (i.e., parental bonding with children, a preference for young and healthy sex partners) will result in offspring that are more likely to survive, and that the people who survive to pass along their genes tend to be people who engage in those types of behaviors, and that at some point those behaviors therefore became hard wired. I also don’t think that acknowledgment means that everything we do can be traced back to the African savannah, or that everything our ancestors did on the African savannah found its way into our hard wiring. In other words, I don’t think it’s an either/or.
Jaybee @ 2
The blank slate sculpted by the environment view is quite updated, modern psychology and neurobiology consider the existence of previous internal models in the brain as essential for its function. As such, 95% of brain activity and energy consumption is dedicated to internal workings, only 5% at best is related to responding or processing externally-related information. Basically, this means that our sensory systems already contain an internal representation of the outside world before receiving any sensory input.
For instance, the cells representing head direction when moving already show their final representations before any visual input could have instructed them to develop. Of course, the representation is coarser and sensory information directs its refinement, but it already exists independently of it.
Fast access to internally available representations (tuned occasionally by the environment) is way more efficient than correlating everything from the beginning.
I will use my favorite animals and study subjects, songbirds, as an example. There is very little completely “innate” or “learned” behavior in the brain (as I indicated before).
1) Let’s begin with crows, the biggest and probably smartest songbirds around. New Caledonian crows are very famous for their skills and can construct specialized tools for feeding. These tools show geographical variation and animals teach each other how to make them.
Ok, you will say, learned behavior!
But it actually is somehow similar to human language, humans are usually born with the innate capacity to understand and produce language, but the final behavior is obviously a product of culture. If you isolate children from any language they will never learn how to correctly produce it. If you isolate a New Caledonian crow from any tutor they will spontaneously attempt to make tools. But these will be very simple tools without the technique or flourishes of socially reared birds.
The important point here is that crows and humans both possess the innate drive to learn, but they cannot do so correctly without the social input. Innate or learned?
2) Several songbird species migrate over long distances at night. White crowned sparrows from america migrate south along the pacific coast. Both juveniles flying for the first time and already experienced adults use the same route, seemingly innate. But things are more complicated. Young birds apparently possess an internal compass compelling them to simply migrate south, but do adults actually learn the correct route through experience?
Yes. If you bring west coast sparrows to the east coast and release them, juveniles will fly south but adults will fly straight southwest towards their real target! Apparently, after their first trip, adults develop a continent-wide mental map while juveniles with their “genetic” information can only fly straight south using a solar compass.
3) Songbirds are divided into two big groups, the “true” songbirds all over the world (think sparrows, tits, crows) and the tyrant flycatchers only found in america. True songbirds sing learned songs, but most tyrants sing innate songs. As songbirds originated in Australia and invaded america last, song learning was most likely lost in tyrants.
That said, the birds that possess an extremy complex circuit for behavior are the true songbirds, not the tyrants. Tyrants lack all or most of the specializd nuclei for song, and some even sing without any brain control at all. That is, their singing is done automatically by the lungs with no neural control of the vocalization muscles!
In a similar way, while wild canaries learn their complex songs, domesticated ones are not only deaf, but can learn their songs without any social stimuli. This is an excellent example of genetic assimilation, where a complex “learned” behavior was turned into “innate” by artificial selection. This shows again how diffuse the real difference between innate and learned in neurobiology and behavior.
I hope it wasn’t too boring or long! >.<
I know all these words and yet I still can’t parse this.
Oh.
Reread the damn post.
1. I know nothing about biology or science in general.
2. The only thing I do recall is “Acquired traits are not heritable”.
3. Wouldn’t behaviour and consequent brain changes be a very acquired trait?
4. Please do not shout when explaining why I’m wrong. Thank you for your patience. You scientists scare me.
It bugs me to no end that these guys think they’ve come up with something brand new and awesome while anthropology constantly gets shit on as “soft science.” Sure, let’s ignore everything that physical and cultural anthropologists have been putting together for years and years, throw out all the methodology, and then just proclaim what the answers are and act really hurt and confused when people say we’re full of shit.
eeyore @ 23
Regardless of sex, fertility goes down with age, while the chances of birth defects go up. Yet modern western society prizes older men as mates to a greater degree than older women, usually because of the acroutment of status in men. The reproductive drawbacks of an older woman as a mate aren’t dramatically different from the reproductive drawbacks of an older man. The current societal preference for young women (and not young men) looks like it has more to do with women not being expected to collect status with age.
That’s sexism. Not evolution.
Fukuda, thanks for the reply, but I think it is talking about something other than my point. You state that there is a mix of innate and learned behavior, and I don’t disagree with that at all.
I can accept that that a recipe is sufficient to generate differentiated tissue and organs — those are all things where the operation of the organ isn’t especially sensitive to the fine details — the recipe ensures that there is a certain density of blood vessels, say, but doesn’t direct the construction of each specific blood vessel. Back to the common recipe analogy, it doesn’t matter where each specific blueberry is in the muffin, just that approximately the right number of blueberries are added and stirred in.
But having a complex innate behavior seems like it would require pretty specific wiring of neurons to work at all. Sure, a bird’s first flight is going to be wobbly and they’ll fine tune things pretty quickly, but that there is enough patterning present in the newborn’s nervous system to successfully fly at all seems like it requires something more like blueprint construction and less like recipe construction.
This. Seriously. The distinguishing characteristic of humanity, what separates us from other animals, is plasticity of the brain, the ability to learn, the ability to shape our culture and environment and in turn be shaped by them. Evolutionary psychology is all about being in complete denial of the most salient properties that human brains have evolved. Evolutionary psychology is very specifically and obviously a fraud based on willful misunderstanding of evolution and psychology.
ZugTheMegasaurus #28
Amen.
Mellow Monkey FTW
Azkyroth, No. 26, I see nothing in the original post that rules out the possibility that EP may explain some things. Being 100% true and 100% false aren’t the only two alternatives.
Mellow Monkey, No. 29, you’re right that that’s sexist, but we’re talking about two different things. If a woman is consciously making a reproductive choice in the real world, it’s not unreasonable to say that an older man with money may be a better partner than a younger man without. But I’m talking about a situation in which that weren’t a factor; in which she has two otherwise equally appealing choices except that one is 20 and the other is 60. In that case, where sexism and classism don’t come into play, and all else is equal, a preference for a young partner would be the smart choice, for the reasons you already mentioned.
And here I thought brains evolved. Nope, it seems that Evolution™ designed brains. So, we’re back to god again, eh?
Though one cannot be **judged** on the people that one’s work attracts, that’s not an entirely bad place to look to see if some serious introspection should be initiated.
Also, apropos of nothing, I recently learned from We Hunted The Mammoth that the “Red Pill Women” subredit bills itself as
Yeah. I’d get going on that introspection thing, EP folks.
@Caine, #35:
I noticed that too.
What an idiot.
What is it you think you mean by “EP” here?
Doesn’t this pretty much sum up the problem with evolutionary psychology?
You’re assuming a perfectly spherical human existing in a vacuum.
It’s nice to see people referring to the idea of Universal Grammar as Chomsky’s idea and not Pinker’s, though Pinker popularized the idea in his book, The Language Instinct. I just read that book recently; Pinker’s discussion of brain modules and language genes as uniquely human adaptations is dismissive of other viewpoints and light on data (FWIW, Chomsky is skeptical of language being an evolutionary adaptation). For instance, Pinker accuses the Spandrels paper as politically driven so he doesn’t have to deal with it. In support of a human specific language gene, he goes on at length about those poorly designed chimp sign-language studies (think Nim Chimpsky) that didn’t demonstrate what the handlers said they did, the ability to learn ASL. He analogizes a Universal Human Grammar to the elephant’s trunk, as an example of the evolutionary possibility for adaptations to be one-off events. Nevermind the tapir. To quote Pinker disparaging Carl Sagan “This could only have come from a writer who is not a biologist.”
Maybe it’s not fair to criticize a book speculating on language genes before the comparative evolution of FOXP2 across species but I don’t think this recent discovery has given Pinker pause at all.
Eeyore: “Azkyroth, No. 26, I see nothing in the original post that rules out the possibility that EP may explain some things.”
Great, but the test of a theory is not whether it explains, but whether it predicts. What does it tell us that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. Without that, you have a whole lot of explanations and no way to sort out which are true. It’s great for sitting around the campfire…not so great if you want to really understand.
Just-so stories are worse than nothing. They fill up your appetite of curiosity with sugary tales that do not nourish it. Stick with science.
Jaybee @ 30
Yes, there are specific circuits (also, you’re not ignorant at all) in the hindbrain of all vertebrates for gait, flight and other rythmic motor behaviors. These circuits are mostly conserved between different vertebrate animal groups and formed by cell groups with specific genetic identities. You are right ;)
The main thing though, is that these nuclei don’t work in a vacuum. The motor cortex and cerebellum, which are waaay more recipe-like (they follow complex rules in bulk to represent lots of different movements) replay the daily movements during sleep and fine-tune the connections and activity of the brainstem nuclei according to experience and feedback from the joints and muscles. This adaptation to the anatomy also allows the use of very similar cicuits to direct very different body shapes and sizes and behavior.
@ 23
I don’t see where anyone is proffering such a false dichotomy, eeyore. What is being proposed is that EP really needs to step up its game if its conclusions are to be taken seriously. The problem is that most of its proponents don’t even acknowledge any issue with the standard methodology, or when they do they hide behind the shield of #notallEPpapers.
Rather than playing this silly game of cat and mouse where we have to narrow down what EP gets right it should be up to people purporting to do actual science to clean their own house – valid controls for environmental factors instead of blithe dismissals of political correctness; participant pools that extend beyond Western undergrads; substantial evidentiary support behind every claim of adaptive behavior instead of a teleological narrative; clear definition of the term module, if they are to continue using it, instead of employing it as a weasel word to simultaneously advance biological hard-wiring of specific behaviors and retreat to the softer claim of biological basis when convenient; actual grappling with criticism instead of straw-manning all critics as evolution-deniers and blank-slaters.
We could pore over the papers to find the things that are technically true for the sake of the booby prize of “not completely unsalvagable”, but we could also instead hold their feet to the fire and demand some rigor if evolutionary psychologists are going to continue to drape themselves in the mantle of scientist.
Azkyroth, No. 38, my understanding of EP is that it claims that certain behaviors became hardwired over time because they had an evolutionary advantage, which does not necessarily mean that the advantage remains today. It is possible that a behavior that was once advantageous is today disadvantageous, but persists because it became hardwired under different circumstances. It also says nothing about whether there might be social reasons for discouraging certain behaviors, even if they were advantageous at one time. That’s all I understand it to mean. Am I missing something in the definition?
Ray, No. 41, that’s well and good except that EP, like evolution, mainly seeks to explain the past. There is no predicting where evolution will lead us in another million years (if we’re still here, which we may not be if someone doesn’t turn off the global warming). To whatever limited extent EP may be true there’s no real predicting where that will take us either.
And when you’re seeking to explain the past, you may have multiple theories, and what you then do is see which one fits with the evidence.
All that said, I suspect that most of what gets paraded about as evolutionary psychology is nonsense. I’m just not willing to completely rule it out in all cases. Parents who don’t bond with their children tend to produce less successful offspring, so is it really a reach to suggest that parental bonding may have become hardwired, if for no other reason because children whose parents didn’t bond with them weren’t as evolutionarily successful?
Mesh, No. 43, it sounds like you and I are probably in basic agreement, and our difference is one of emphasis rather than substance.
Our difference is focus. I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say that we don’t care what is or is not a “huge reach to say”; this isn’t how science is done. As a_ray_in_dilbert_space says there is no scientific utility there.
eeyore:
That’s not a reach. What is, is the suggestion that this trait has anything to do with specifically human evolution. Human behavior (and the “modules” that make it go) in most cases have precursors going back to early mammalian and primate evolution, or even further back in the tetrapod clade; they are not the unique product of some imagined Pleistocene habitat.
And EP practitioners usually aren’t interested in the rather staid claim “[given trait] is hardwired”. In the case of parental bonding, the claim is usually more along the lines of “human mothers bond in a particular way with their children due directly to the exigencies of survival in a prehistoric environment the conditions of which are unspecified and unknown in detail, and, hey hey, what do you know! the consequences of this evolutionary imperative are that it’s totes “natural” for women to stay home and raise the kids while Daddy is out being manly and working to feed the brood.”
eeyore
see, there’s the problem: Where’s the data? How can you get this? Where is that psychologically mature and healthy woman whose ideas about whose a good mate have NOT been influenced by culture? Have you found her? Can you find a few hundred more to get reliable data?
CJO
Also the idea that there is this ONE person who takes care of their own biological offspring alone is godsdamn Victorian. People didn’t use to live in three bedroom flats shared by the nuclear family.
Mesh, you don’t know me very well, but I tend to talk in understatement, so when I say something isn’t a huge reach, it’s not because I don’t understand how science is done. And not being a huge reach is what permits EP a hearing in the first place, which is really as far as I’ve gone. Whether EP supporters are able to actually prove their case is a separate issue. I’ve been completely underwhelmed at some of the stuff I’ve seen from EP, and it’s possible they may not be able to prove their case. But EP’s basic, underlying premise — that some behavior is hardwired because of the conditions under which humans evolved — has enough surface plausibility to allow them to try. Remember, we’re still in the collecting theories stage; nothing has been ruled in or ruled out.
CJO, if someone is a bigot, they will find a way to abuse science, and whether EP might have some validity doesn’t mean that I’m required to accept everyone’s interpretation of it. I’m a Darwinist, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept the social darwinism put forth by libertarians. And even if, once upon a time, there were some social utility to having women stay home with the kids while daddy is out hunting mastadons, those are not the conditions we live under today.
Perhaps my point was too subtle: surface plausibility is not enough. While their basic underlying premise is something to consider as we first formulate our hypotheses it is not a case to be evaluated. It’s not enough for EP to simply be science-friendly and conform to facts; at some point they have to make some effort to substantiate their explanations and generate something scientifically useful. This is what I mean when I say this isn’t how science is done – it’s all about the process, not bits of truth.
They’ve been given ample time to make a case. They simply decided that the utility of EP would be limited to media sensationalism and arming champions of the status quo.
Well, Mesh, maybe we just disagree as to how far along in the process EP is (or should be by now). I agree with you that plausibility without more is not enough, but it is a start. I’m not familiar enough with the EP literature to know if that’s all EP still has. If that’s all EP can come up with, then at some point it will be time to tell it to put up or shut up.
It was passed that point years ago. It won’t admit it is a fraud, and won’t go away on its own. So folks like PZ point out its problems to get the message out.
EP is well past the time where they need to put up or shut up. The fact that they haven’t been able to put up is telling.
@eeyore:
Hmmmm. What does this mean, Google Translate?
Ah. I see.
Imagine that.
Eeyore
In that situation, the optimum strategy would be to “partner” with the older man for resources and shag the younger man on the side for healthy sperm. However, this would require agency on the part of the woman and we can’t have that can we.
militantagnostic #56
dammit
you fool
now everyone knows
@24. Fukuda
Er… sorry, but where did this bit of information come from? I’ve done research with canaries (neurobiology and behaviour), and AFAIK domestic canaries are certainly not normally deaf; in most strains early (induced) deafness has a profound effect on their adult song structure and complexity.
Seconding ibbica here, especially as I’ve personally had them respond to aural stimulae. We had one show up at my work where if you stood out of sight and whistled to him, he’d sing back to you but wouldn’t do it if he could see you. Weird bird.
58 Ibbica, 59 Rowan
My info comes from Paul C. Mundinger (Genetics of Canary Song Learning in The Design of Animal Communication (1999)). It only applies to Waterslager canaries (auditory capacities described by Okanoya-sensei (1985)), not to Harz Rollers, Borders or other more common canaries. Their auditory hair cells undergo nonstop growth and destruction cycles unlike other canaries, but they still retain some hearing at low frequencies.
That said, only low-frequency sound is necessary for song maintenance in other songbirds like the Bengalese finch (Woolley 1997). The jury is still out on song maintenance.
On the learning part, socially isolated Waterslager canaries will develop the correct syllable phonology even if their complex syntax is fumbled, that was the genetic assimilation part.
Sorry, I felt being more specific would be confusing to non-specialists. I shouldn’t write at 3 am.
Haha yes, they usually do that. I have to hide myself and the loudspeakers to get successful playback from Roller canaries. Thy won’t sing if they can see you are not a canary.
Militantagnostic, No. 56, this may come as a surprise to you, but there is such a thing as a woman with ethics, and to such a woman what you’re proposing would not be an alternative. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t have agency; it means she understands that lying to a partner and using him and pretending to love him when all she cares about is his money is shitstain behavior. As I’m sure you would have no trouble seeing if the roles were reversed and a younger man partnered with an older woman for her money while at the same time sneaking out and fucking other women on the side.
eeyore
Or their just poly? Why assume and default to monogamous in these examples? Seems stupid and blinded.
But if the assumptions you’re making in advancing the
thing obtain, why would such “ethics” evolve?
It’s not a matter of EP being behind schedule and failing to meet a quota, it’s about their priorities and goals. Evolutionary psychologists don’t see themselves as doing the preliminary work to get the process rolling but as pioneers who have already been dropping rock hard science on us to the point where they’ll even talk down to biologists who observe the field’s dangerous assumptions and dearth of rigor. They aren’t simply collecting theories and throwing ideas out there, they’re writing at length about the significance of their conclusions and hemming and hawing about how any pushback demonstrates how “politically inflammatory” their research is. They’re the brave mavericks delving into the science that people like PZ are too terrified to touch.
I don’t know how else I can say this: there is no case coming. EP proponents are quite content with how things have been going. They aren’t brainstorming, they’re leading all the other sciences into a bold new future while despairing over how horribly misunderstood they are (but they’ll bear that cross to get to the truth!). Unless you give them a reason to change course what you see is what you get.
The last place you should expect to see a serious case made is a pig pen of confirmation bias and delusions of grandeur.
If EP-type stuff suggests younger partners are better… why do I find men significantly older than me sexually attractive? There are guys in their 60s and early 70s that I find *hot*. For example, Patrick Stewart who is 40 years my senior is goddamn attractive and drool worthy in my personal opinion.
When I was in my teens and twenties, there were very few guys my age that I found attractive. Hell, my ‘crush’ at age 13 was an actor who was 38 at the time. Shee-it, there I go breaking EP personally. I mean sure, it’s probably ‘great’ for the guys, but for those women with uteruses and that also intend to use them, an older guy would probably be not such a hot idea because you’re essentially risking your life and future reproductive potential on sperm that has lost a lot of its spunk. And I would think that female preference and mortality would be a significant factor in the inheritance of such things.
So why then do we see people of all genders middle-aged and up primarily pairing with people in their age range? Sure, there’s weirdos like me, but the idea of ‘young partner’ means that we should see lots of older guys trying to hit up 18+ women and older women hitting up 18+ guys. But we don’t see that. Socially at least it’s seen as kinda creepy for someone in their 50s to be trying to hook up with someone still a teenager. So why then would a woman who is still fertile, but on the ‘decline’ so to speak, pair up with a guy who is also out of the peak range? If she’s still got a baby or two left in her, shouldn’t she be after the young stud, not someone her age?
I can make up just-so stories too:
Young men are in general not to be preferred because they have yet to prove themselves to be fertile, fit partners or to have accrued enough social ‘wealth’ (influence, power, access to resources, stockpiled trade goods, knowledge of best hunting grounds, whatever). Young women are in general not to be preferred either because they have not yet proven themselves to be fertile, nor have they shown themselves capable of surviving childbirth and thus increasing their chances of multiple offspring. ‘Older’ men and ‘older’ women are to be preferred because they have evidenced their fitness, so therefore young men and women aren’t really attractive. Their future potential is attractive, but they actually aren’t. Everyone is actually attracted to people in their 30s and 40s, because fitness and magical reasons.
If I send this to an EP journal, think it could get published?
Rowan,
You need the opinions of a bunch of 19-year old American students on the sexual attractiveness of photos of people of various ages, some incompetently done statistics, a graph of something, a bit more bullshit, and some references to the literature. Then, yes, I’m very much afraid it could be published.
My favorite EP studies are where they wax poetic about how testosterone makes men aggressive or attractive or successful…yet fail to actually measure testosterone.
More of my favorite EP studies are where they describe, in great detail, the inner workings of the menstrual cycle and moods; about how ovulation makes women change how they select mates…yet they fail to actually measure any of the hormones involved in ovulation and fertility.
On the other hand, the field of endocrinology is so restrictive–they will automatically dismiss correlation studies wherein the endocrine target isn’t measured. And they even have limits on the acceptable measurement methods for testosterone, estradiol, progesterone and lutenizing hormone! It’s sooo unfair to expect EP to live up to this high scientific standard!!!
General comment on Gillt #40:
Steven Pinker for mine is the worst purveyor of pseudo-scientific horseshit among the Global Atheist Thought Leaders™. And when you challenge his kooky ideas, then you are attacked as a “cultural Marxist” or “anti-science” or even accused of lying (which is what Jeffrey Guterman did to me when I pointed out Pinker’s shifty use of statistics).
The Leaders have now become the Untouchables.
So then, evolutionary psychology explains phrenology. Now I will ignore EP completely.
I’ve long been puzzled by some of your critiques of EP, and have been slow to respond to them because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about first. Let me try responding to this particular post. I am not defending the Psych Today article nor the FAQ you linked.
“No, evolutionary psychology is not “simply” about brains having evolved: it includes a whole collection of bogus premises about how evolution works”
No, it really doesn’t. I’m not sure what precisely you are referring to here, but I suspect it may be your charge that EP ignores spandrels and the role of drift. The irony for me at least is that, the first time I read Gould and Lewintoin’s paper was in a course I took in evolutionary psychology. If your point is that EP has been too focused on selection, perhaps you are right. Doesn’t mean the whole field is nonsense or that everyone ignores other forces of evolution.
“It’s all that nonsense about modules, whatever they are — they seem to be inventions by evolutionary psychologists to allow them to pretend that they can reduce behaviors to discrete regions in the genome, or the brain, or something (go ahead, try to pin one down on exactly what a “module” is — there is no clear association with anything physical)”
I’ll take up the challenge. A module is not a discreet region in the genome, nor one spot in the brain. Lets use the example of face recognition. Work has been done with newborn children, and even at one hour after birth, they gaze longer and in a more focused manner on faces, vs. scrambled faces and blank control photos. This (and a substantial body of other work) suggests that recognizing a face is an innate ability in humans. Lets just imagine for now that this had/has selective value. Evolutionary psychologists would then call it a module, or mechanism, for this specific task. This module includes everything relevant to the operation of recognizing faces: the eye, optic nerve, various visual nuclei, and the facial fusiform area in the temporal and occipital lobes. Just because something is used in one mechanism doesn’t preclude it from being used in another. A mechanism is simply the neurobiology that works together for any one specific input/output system that was shaped by natural selection for whatever cognitive processing activity it preforms. They are discreet in that a specific domain of input produces a predictable output. There may be general purpose mechanisms, and super specific mechanisms.
“It’s about The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the imaginary Garden of Eden in which our brains evolved 10,000+ years ago, which is the reference by which all adaptations must be explained…despite the fact that evolutionary psychologists know next to nothing about that environment.”
No. The EEA is a concept, not a specific place in time. For language, the EEA is likely the Pleistocene because language is a derived trait. For parental care, the EEA is well before the Pleistocene, as is evidenced by its dispersion among numerous taxa. The EEA is a synecdoche ; it is wherever a specific adaptation in question evolved. Also, we do know plenty about the Pleistocene, unless you want to impeach the fields of geology and paleoecology as well?
“It’s about deep methodological problems: researchers who make sweeping claims about human universals by studying just the middle class white American population attending their Psych 101 class.”
No good anthropologist ignores the role of culture. Thankfully, many of these doing good EP are anthropologists. Here are some examples of work done not on college undergrads. Some of these are cross cultural involving multiple countries.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Fessler_4-11-05.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.015
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027704001453
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677736
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513806000651
“[E]ndorses a kind of naive biological determinism that imagines that the way people are is the way they must be. Because of genes or brain modules or some such sciencey shit.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
“Just realizing that brains have a lot of plastic properties that are responsive to the immediate environment ought to snap the knees out from the entire edifice of evolutionary psychology, but no…they will persist in their fallacious explanatory framework that we’re all paleolithic hunter-gatherers who have found themselves in the modern world.”
This is a massive strawman. See all of the above.
Ian Boucher
I’ve long been puzzled by your refusal to use HTML.
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
If you continue to refuse to use blockquotes, it probably means that you are a selfish, self-centered, inconsiderate arsehole.
Folks who defend that which can’t be defended due to terminal lack of solid scientific evidence are often arrogant assholes. Boucher seems to fit the arrogant asshole stereotype.
Nerd of Redheadss, nice one! Lets add argumentum ad hominem to the list of logical fallacies piling up in here. Chigau, thanks for the tip. I stupidly didn’t see the HTML tags support by the comment system.
It really makes me sad but I think We must just abandon argumentum ad hominem.
The proles have caused the misuse to be standard.
しかたがない。
Just to practice my new skills in HTML, lets dissect your idiotic reply anyways. Are you aware of the numerous, serious, research programs in evolutionary anthropology (of which EP is one paradigm) around the United States and the world? Are all of those who have utilized EP in their research or defended it “arrogant assholes?'” Have you met any of these people? If not, how do you know? Do you make it a habit of dismissing people as assholes because you don not agree with them? Are you an evolutionary biologist or anthropologist? If not, then have you done due diligence on EP before judging it indefensible? Perhaps you just a gullible fanboy/girl who gets all his/or biology from one blog? Amiright?
Ian Boucher
The link in your ‘nym leads to nothing.
Why make it a link?
chigau, perhaps you can enlighten me about which link. There are a few. It could be that you do not have access to the one of the journals that a paper was published in.
Ian Boucher
When one looks at this page, your ‘nym is red in colour, this means it is a link.
When one clicks on your ‘nym (a link), it goes nowhere.
Clear?