I’ve been getting a tremendous amount of pushback from Jordan Peterson cultists on this video about his ‘lobster’ claims — it’s my most popular (or should I say, unpopular) one yet. I’m seeing a lot of “context!” and “strawman!” and “he really meant to say…” and “you need to watch these 6 hours of videos to understand” kinds of comments. No one cares that his reasoning is flawed or his evidence is weak or wrong, all that matters is that he comes to the conclusion they like — they sound exactly like creationists, or Sam Harris fans. It’s more than a little ugly, and rarely have I seen a more unpleasant collection of people using poorly understood evolutionary justifications for bad science since the last time I looked at an evolutionary psychology article.

Interestingly, though, a colleague independently came to the same conclusions and made very similar arguments. He remains nameless, unfortunately, because no one wants that troop of Peterson’s baboons flinging feces at them, but he did allow his arguments to be posted.

In case you want to use this, here’s an updated write-up. You don’t need to attribute it to me (“a handsome biologist” will do) as I don’t care to engage with you-know-who’s fanbois.

The lobster (i.e., arthropod) and human (i.e., chordate) lineages did not diverge “350 million years ago”. They already existed as separate phyla by the Cambrian (~550 million years ago). Molecular divergence estimates are on the order of 800 million years ago. This error jumps out immediately to anyone with even a basic knowledge of evolutionary history.

All bilatarian animals, including all the non-social ones, have serotonin. Some plants, fungi, and amoebae produce versions of serotonin. Serotonin has several functions — in humans, most of it is found in the gastrointestinal tract. It’s not particularly surprising that lobsters and humans both use serotonin as a neurotransmitter, nor that this would be involved in the neurobiology of any particular behavioural system. There are only so many neurotransmitters, and it is pretty likely that any innate behavioural system is going to evolve to be regulated by the same basic ones. Social hierarchies are almost surely examples of homoplasy across phyla, as is the co-option of serotonin in affecting various behavioural systems.

That anti-depressants “work on lobsters” is not very surprising given the pharmacology of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which we might expect to work on any neurons that use serotonin as a neurotransmitter. This does not imply that the neural systems of lobsters and humans are especially similar beyond this, however. For one, lobsters don’t even have brains in the same sense as vertebrates. We share some superficial similarities in neural biochemistry (as do pretty much all animals), that’s about all.

Leaving aside the comparison of deeply divergent lineages, there is enormous variability in social structures even among our closest primate relatives. Bonobos have promiscuous sex and matriarchy as part of theirs. The point is that even where hierarchical systems have a presumed genetic basis, this is a rather malleable trait evolutionarily and the specific forms of social hierarchies can be quite different even among species with brains that are extremely similar.

Of course, innate tendencies and genetic hardwiring are at best only part of the story in a complex, cultural primate like humans. Consider language. The physical and neural structures involved in language use are encoded genetically. Which language we learn is cultural. Social behaviour is similar. Yes, there can be genetic underpinnings based on brain chemistry, but how this manifests in a given human society may be greatly dependent on cultural influences. We could also have a culturally-driven system that is enabled because there is a neurological system that can support it. Nature via nurture and nurture via nature.

Moreover, culture can easily override genetic programming in humans — we see examples of this all the time. One of the great things about human brains and human societies is that we can overcome our most base biological impulses through a combination of personal choices and societal norms. In fact, modern society would not function were it not so.

This is an unremarkable example of convergence. Anyone with any competence and basic training in evolutionary biology would come to the same conclusion.

My first thought was this joke, “WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!” Academics do have bitter fights, sometimes — they’re usually pretty polite, but I have seen a distinguished professor stand on his chair to point and scream at the speaker at a conference, who fired right back in kind. It was loads of fun.

But they’re also fighting over serious issues. This SciAm article is a good summary of ongoing battles among taxonomists. The core problems is that naming a species has a set of rules, and one of those rules is that the species has to be named in a published journal article…and online publishing has removed most of the barriers, and it’s become trivial to snag the preliminary work of a serious researcher and dump it to an online vanity “journal”, stealing credit and getting the privilege of naming it.

Vandals have zeroed in on the self-publishing loophole with great success. Yanega pointed to Trevor Hawkeswood, an Australia-based entomologist accused by some taxonomists of churning out species names that lack scientific merit. Hawkeswood publishes work in his own journal, Calodema, which he started in 2006 as editor and main contributor.

“He has his own journal with himself as the editor, publisher, and chief author,” Yanega says. “This is supposed to be science, but it’s a pile of publications that have no scientific merit.” (In response to questions about the legitimacy of his journal, Hawkeswood delivered a string of expletives directed towards his critics, and contended that Calodema has “heaps of merit.”)

Raymond Hoser also owns his own journal, the Australasian Journal of Herpetology (AJH). AJH has faced similar criticism since it was launched in 2009, despite claims by Hoser that the journal is peer-reviewed. “Although the AJH masquerades as a scientific journal, it is perhaps better described as a printed ‘blog’ because it lacks many of the hallmarks of formal scientific communication, and includes much irrelevant information,” wrote Hinrich Kaiser, a researcher at Victor Valley College in California, and colleagues in the peer-reviewed journal Herpetological Review.

They do propose a solution. The International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which approves species names, is behind the times, so tear it down and replace it with a more modern institution.

…move the code under a different purview. Specifically, they suggest that the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS)—the biology branch of the International Council for Sciences—should “take decisive leadership” and start a taxonomic commission. The commission, they propose, would establish hardline rules for delineating new species and take charge in reviewing taxonomic papers for compliance. This process, they say, would result in the first ever standardized global species lists.

“In our view, many taxonomists would welcome such a governance structure,” the authors write. “Reducing the time spent dealing with different species concepts would probably make the task of describing and cataloguing biodiversity more efficient.”

It may be time to make such a radical change. Raymond Hoser has named over 800 taxa. I’ve seen the work involved in actually thoroughly characterizing a new species and justifying it’s difference from extant species, and I can assure you that Hoser has not done that work 800 times.