I’m doing some sort-of local (on the other side of the state, that is) talks in April, so my Minnesota pals will have an opportunity to stop by and argue with me. The first is on Sunday, 17 April, in the Rondo Library in St Paul, at 2pm. It’ll be a slightly updated version of a talk I gave a few times last year.
Bad Biology: How Evolutionary Psychology Corrupts Evolution
The most powerful and versatile tool in your toolbox is the adjustable wrench. Not only can it tighten and loosen both nuts and bolts of all sizes, but it also makes an excellent hammer, can be used to punch holes in objects, and it also performs as a serviceable canoe paddle.
If that lack of respect for tools makes you cringe, now you know how PZ Myers feels. Natural selection is one of the most powerful concepts in evolutionary biology, yet many people use it excessively and inappropriately as a kind of quasi-miraculous explanation for everything. Most biologists know better, though, and realize that there are many other forces operating on evolution.
The dangerous aspect of the abuse of natural selection is that it allows the naturalistic fallacy to run rampant. If selection inevitably optimizes everything, then whatever is must be for the best – so human nature must be exactly what allows us to survive. This attitude is used to justify the status quo, whether it’s racism, or the superiority of Western culture, or the inferiority of women. This can only be done by ignoring the multiple forces that drive evolutionary change.
Prof. Myers will be explain what these other forces are, and giving examples of the abuse of science to justify several fallacies: so-called “scientific” racism and evolutionary psychology. He’ll also discuss how lack of knowledge of basic evolutionary biology can lead professional scientists astray.
Yes! Let’s annoy the evolutionary psychologists some more! They deserve it.
Then, the next weekend on Saturday 23 April at 10am, I’ll be joining the West Metro Critical Thinking Club to talk science education for a while.
STEM and the liberal arts: How do we teach science?
There is a constant push to change education from an experience that broadens the mind to one that focuses students on a vocation. We’ve got universities hiring business people with no educational experience to make them more profitable, and people seriously questioning the value of disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, or anything that others disparagingly call “soft” subjects. At the same time, there are advocates of reform who think algebra is useless, and that we waste too much time teaching mathematics that, they think, no one will ever use.
I’ll be presenting an interdisciplinary, liberal arts perspective on science education — we need all facets of human knowledge if we are to adequately comprehend our own narrower fields of interest. I’ll be interested in getting a discussion going about what attendees expect from a college education.
I’m not sure of the location just yet — somewhere near the Ridgedale Mall.
Come on by to either one or both!
Well, that’s somewhat true; however, the antecedent premise is false. It’s more accurate to say selection probabilistically tends to optimize living things over time — which leaves the possibilities for rare statisitical outliers, for somewhat more common neutral variations, and for frequent incomplete optimizations.
“This attitude is used to justify the status quo, whether it’s racism, or the superiority of Western culture, or the inferiority of women.”
I think the stronger relevant point here is not about whether evolution, by natural selection or otherwise, has “optimized” human nature. We are a social species, of course, and evolution has wired us for social interaction, but it hasn’t bestowed social structure or ideologies on us. What we have is a sort of Leggo kit of social behavior and responses that can snap together in infinitely variable forms. Human behavior is highly flexible, and while it has innate components in its ultimate expression it is learned by the interaction of the organism with its environment. Different socialization experiences produce differently behaving, and differently believing, people. To claim the evolution produces male domination is to deny the existence of Iceland, or the more generally (though slowly and imcompletely) rising status of women in societies all over the world in recent decades. As Jared Diamond argues, western culture is superior only in the good fortune of easy conquest of other peoples because of its being blessed with deadlier germs, horses, and steel (horses were actually more important than guns but the title wouldn’t have scanned), that in turn due to accidents of geography.
So this isn’t really about natural selection vs. other factors in evolution, it’s about what evolution does and does not explain.
My mentor in carpentry taught me that every tool in the box is a hammer, except for the screwdriver. That’s a chisel.
What’s the chisel?
“Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”
The adjustable wrench analogy is an interesting one to me because, frankly, adjustable wrenches are junk. The only thing they’re useful for are those oddball square nuts that pop up on sometimes on furniture, and for rounding off all other nuts and bolts.
They are handy when you have a turnable nut on both sides of a threaded rod and you just need to hold one. You might not have two wrenches of the same size. But yes, I wouldn’t use one to turn a nut if I could help it.
abb3w
The good enough is the enemy of the perfect.
Who wrote that blurb? I have an image of evolutionary psychologists rounding off nuts.
Calvin said it well: When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.
Indeed, selection optimizes things: To “good enough.” If it wasn’t good enough, you wouldn’t survive. So yeah, the evolutionary effects upon our psychology have allowed us to survive.
As if that were the best thing there is…mere ability to survive. We have a nature that allows us to survive. That hardly means every action is meticulously molded by evolution to achieve that mere survivability. Evolution gave us hands. And while they are clearly sufficient for us to masturbate with, they weren’t evolved for that specific act. After all, horses don’t have hands and they masturbate, too. Evolution doesn’t dictate every single thing.
Evolution shaped our psychology. It didn’t indicate every single thing about it.
abb3w writes:
And not only that, but the optimization is, metaphorically speaking, trying to hit a moving target. And that target often moves faster than natural selection.