How evolutionary psychology went viral
thenation.com
thenation.com
> Evolutionary psychology does draw on empirical data and laboratory studies, and those data are falsifiable. But the adaptationist explanations that evolutionary psychologists offer are not.
If an explanation fit all current observations and predicted future experiments why is it not correct?
I'm having trouble expressing what I want to say, and some cursory googling for sources was met with paywalls but I wasn't a fan of some of the author's arguments.
Even if EP somehow explained that some very nasty behaviours were actually evolutionary adaptations that would not make the behaviours correct, and it would not make the explanation incorrect.
Human behaviour is complex and influenced by factors both societal and biological. While current pop sci has swung the needle way too far into the "biological" side of the argument I feel like the author has swung a bit too far into the "societal" side.
In order for anything to count as a "future experiment" with respect to something that takes as long as evolution does, the predicted phenomena would have to occur at least thousands of years from now, and you would have to control for all the socio-economic-cultural-political differences between now and then. Which would begin to sound like an impossible task, even you embarked on a millennia-long research project, because humanity is quickly approaching (and may already have gone beyond) the point where technology overtakes evolution.
Evolution of the regular type at least has billions of years' worth of fossil records to compensate for its lack of predictions for the future. The only thing EP has going for it, on the other hand, is a bunch of surveys, small-N experiments, and beloved-by-Cosmopolitan stereotypes about the contemporary courting behavior of affluent, predominantly white college students. That's like analyzing a tub of ice cream and then making bold claims about the fate of the Antarctic ice cap.
There is other evidence also. EP for example would suggest males would tend to massacre their neighbours and grab their females as this would be a genetic benefit. To study that experimentally you could look at the historic record of conquests and the genetic results, study uncontacted human societies, the stuff ISIS is doing now, chimp studies such as those recently in the news (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/science/lethal-violence-in...) and such like. You could also run MRIs on people brains to try to understand the mechanisms and so on. It's not college surveys and just so stories.
Indeed the fact that ISIS massacring the Yazidi's and rounding up women fits the evolutionary chimp style raiding hypothesis better than the loving God hypothesis is significant and might discourage the guys from doing if they realised that. Then maybe the massacres could stop through scientific enlightenment rather than us reluctantly having to go bomb them. Again it's more than Cosmo type stuff.
"Looking for historical and contemporary events that seem to fit your curve" seems to be the definition of deliberate confirmation bias.
Aside from their hyperfocus on a specific part of what they claim to be their subject of interest, my main problem with evolutionary psychologists is that they keep the "evolutionary" part of their argument (too often) to a vaguely-plausible story that has exactly no biological substance whatsoever. I would be more interested if they even went so far as to use comparisons with other species or actual ethnographic research rather than elaborating about their idea of prehistoric human societies.
I also find strange that it's accepted in psychology to derive conclusions on human nature from a study of a single class of Western freshman psych students that have probably been recruited via spam email. I think even focus groups are more scientific.
Since it's already difficult enough to produce falsifiable conjectures about an aspect of human psychology (sex/gender) that is directly related to those factors, it's not surprising that most EP researchers haven't even bothered to branch out into less closely related things.
I agree that current EP research seems unlikely to ever manage to produce falsifiable conjectures (let alone actual hypotheses and experiments) on e.g. suicidality, social competition, or other subjects related to selection, but those questions are also interesting (even more interesting, I would say, that the question of whether women evolved to wear high heels). I would like to see an "evolutionary psychology" article linking studies of depression with, for example, studies of the effect of loneliness on the behavior of non-human social animals, or theorizing as to how depression continues to exist despite being on the face of it a negative trait for the purposes of reproduction and survival. As an added help there have been studies on genetic and metabolic associations to depression, whereas near as I can tell exactly zero molecular biologists are interested in the high heel connection.
Sometimes I get the (rather cynical) sense that there's an inverse relationship between the merit of an idea and its virality.
Such as?
>This isn't scientific, but if I don't have another philosophy to go off of then I will at least reference that model for ideas on how people will behave.
I don't understand your point. If you say it's not scientific, what exactly are you "verifying" ?
Unfortunately, as science becomes the hegemonic source of authority in our world, pseudo-science becomes the preferred language for demagoguery and bullshit.
The greatest crime of the modern scientific community(in some disciplines at least) is to viciously betray the skeptical roots of scientific thought by ignoring the value of understanding and admitting what we DO NOT know.
My personal bias is that a shitty model with 0 statistical validity should not be treated as gospel because 'It's the best we've got.' I believe that it is better to accept ignorance and act with according caution in some areas of life. But then again I have no scientific justification for that, anymore than people do for the reverse.
Very well put.
The development of male features in foetuses is triggered by a massive release of testosterone. The second stage of gendered differentiation, puberty, is similarly driven by the release of sex hormones in both men and women. Noticeably, adolescent boys with a malfunctioning endocrine system do not display typical male features (lowered voice, facial hair, etc), lesser tendency to masculine psychology (like risk taking and aggression), and don't develop sex drive (straight or gay) unless they start taking injections for life. It should be uncontroversial to say that sex and gender differences, both physiological and psychological, are tied to hormones.
Next up, the brain: the most complex and expensive organ we have, a complex system of feedback loops, again driven and regulated by secretions of hormones and peptides and so on. To say that evolutionary psychology is false and just anecdotes, you'd have to argue that, despite all the other visible changes that sex hormones make, somehow, the brain is entirely unaffected by all of that. That gender is mostly (or as some claim, entirely) a social construct, determined by something as subtle as a tone of voice or the presence of 'patriarchal gender roles'. Even though studies show children and teenagers are more affected by their peers' behaviours and attitudes than their parents'. Even though there is no culture where gender roles are truly swapped, and the 'Norwegian Gender Paradox' remains true.
Not only does the science show nature plays a significant role in the "nature vs nurture" debate on sex and gender, but policies based on denying it have failed to work.
I'm not an evo psychologist, or a biologist either. But it seems a lot more reasonable to me than what's coming from the supposed equality camp.
What I'm being skeptical about is that we can take that all the way out to surface characteristics and then make blanket statements, or that we can concoct untestable fables based in current evolutionary models and then use those to justify those blanket statements.
There certainly is gender dimorphism (the right term) in humans, but it's also very hard to separate genes/development, environment, and culture. It's also very hard to go from the cellular and hormonal level all the way up to, say, how people tend to behave in job interviews.
The reason I get so skeptical in these areas is that history teaches us that human beings will rationalize their prejudices using whatever system of belief they find around them. Historically that's usually been religion, hence it use to rationalize gender and racial stereotypes. Now we live in a scientific age (supposedly), so we should be on guard for pseudoscientific attempts to do the same with scientific-sounding language. Indeed the "social Darwinists" were on that beat a century ago already. So whenever I smell an attempt to explain or justify a social prejudice or a class system, my skeptic hat goes on.
That was rambling... need coffee..
That's all right as far as it goes, but you need to consistently remember that what you're doing is not science, it's philosophy.
NB I'm male, white, 31 years old, born poor, raised isolated, computers brought me out of poverty, and people--specifically women--brought me out of isolation.
Geeks are my original people, my first clan. I believed that The (dial up, text based) Internet was the great equalizer--that it was a medium which made it impossible to see race or sex or creed or weight or shape, that each entity could only be judge by its character, choice of moniker, and actions. The people you'd fall in love with were the ones that would create amazing things and share them... Remember?
Ok, I've set the stage, now I've gotta ask...
I gotta ask the people who say that women are different from men: are you trolling? Was there some great internet convention that I missed at which it was agreed by consensus to all act like idiots for a few years for some greater good?
Seriously, what am I missing?
You do know that women are people, right? Like, half the people, 3.5 billion women.
[Update: Thus far the responses have indicated that I probably haven't asked the right question. In my country, the question as to whether or not a given entity "is a person" is an important, well known, well discussed question and the answer always carries a great number of implications. Pardon me, I'll try to improve the question, but it's unlikely that I'll make any progress on the timescale of days. These things are hard.]
[Update: I should not have said "the people who say that men and women are different" when I meant to say "the people who use 'men and women are different' as a euphemism for something more insidious".]
I don't understand misogynistic guys who say awful things about how dumb / shallow / whatever women are and then in the next breath talk about their sexual interest in them. I mean... if I thought all those demeaning things about women, I'd have a tough time being sexually interested in one. I'd have to go asexual or gay.
Let's examine two claims:
1. "Group A is genetically predisposed to different behavior than Group B, to which I belong."
2. "Group A is culturally predisposed to different behavior than Group B, to which I belong."
You claim that making statement (1) indicates that I disbelieve in the personhood of people in Group A. I assume that you do not believe the same about statement (2)--that is, it's possible for me to notice that men are more likely to be murderers without claiming that women aren't people, as long as I accept "culture" as the only explanation for the difference.
I claim that both statements (1) and (2) are compatible with a belief in personhood of people in Group A. And this is much firmer ground, ideologically speaking. If presented with strong evidence of genetic differences between two groups, I am not forced to either deny the evidence or give up and accept that some groups aren't people anymore. I can simply say "even if the two groups are genetically different, this doesn't change a thing: personhood is not determined by someone's genetic similarity to me, people deserve respect, and prejudice is wrong even if it is somewhat predictive." Finally, in a situation where genetics clearly affect behavior or personality--for example, Asperger Syndrome--I don't need to shift around my values to claim that yes, autistic people are still people.
Okay.
As I've indicated in a few places so far, I don't think I expressed my question as I'd intended to.
enoch_r, you seem like a methodical sort of person, maybe you can help me think this through.
I've jotted down some notes.
1. Basically I want to address internet misogynists, including but not limited to those that don't believe they are one. (I would like to exclude those who believe they are wrong and do it anyway. That's a whole 'nother conversation that might as well be had over a bottle.)
2. I believe that being a person is basically an excuse to get away with a lot of stuff, and an entitlement to receive the benefit of the doubt a lot.
3. I believe that one effective way to communicate is to present your own point in unfavorable terms. It's polite, saves a ton of time, and reminds yourself to avoid being defensive. Sometimes people even help you improve your point!
4. I believe that point 2 is true, most people believe it, and everybody benefits from it, and you're usually not aware that you're benefiting from it. But most people probably phrase it in more favorable terms. "The Golden Rule" is pretty catchy.
5. There's a comment here which states:
> I don't think you can find a lot of sane individuals who believe women aren't humans.
...I believe that it's tragically easy to find otherwise sane individuals who don't really, in their heart of hearts, in their innermost thoughts, believe that women are people in the same way that they believe that they themselves are people. I can't imagine that misogyny would be so common otherwise...
6. To the group described in 1., with 5. in mind: You know they are. Knock it off!
I often think that sex differences people perceive are exaggerated and/or misattributed to biology (including, but not limited to, genetics) when they are more likely cultural, but, believing that X (e.g., women) are different (either on average or categorically) from Y (e.g., men) is not inconsistent with believing that X and Y are both subsets of Z (e.g., people.)
My argument is thus: what really makes me a person is some quality which both men and women posses, some quality which nothing else possesses--and that having that quality calls off all other bets.
Women and men are different, both physically and psychologically. That might not mean women are less capable or inferior, but saying there are no differences between the genres is just silly and disingenuous.
Both men and women are sentient (self-aware, conscious).
You know, human. :)
...oh! Ipso facto: they aren't sane. :)
On the one hand, this says that EP is wrong, and on the other, that there is a more radical and more interesting approach, more true to Darwin's thinking.
First, to say "EP has not gotten us any closer to understanding “human nature”" is a joke. At worst, it has at least eliminated some options. But the worst is very unlikely. Even if much of EP is wrong, many of the results appear to be solid. To so discount an entire field of science, done by very smart men and women, is completely unfair.
Second, the hint at a more "true-to-Darwin" approach of faster evolution, seems odd - just an attempt to say "EP is wrong, and boring - check this out!" First, if evolution is faster than we expected, then EP will adjust to that. It already has - we now know that things like lactose tolerance arose quite recently, and mental traits would not be surprising as well. Faster evolution will only make what these critics don't like about EP stronger, not weaker.
But more importantly, while the "frozen at the Pleistocene" approach is false - and already known to be false, no serious scientist believes that literally nothing changed since - it is also true to large extent. The Pleistocene is a huge amount of time, and in the short amount of time following it humanity diverged quite a bit - yet, we find humans extremely similar, mentally. From aboriginal Australians to Africans to Europeans to native Americans, mentally humanity is extremely close. That is very strong support that while clearly evolution continued after the Pleistocene, major things were already set by then.
Indeed. I've seldom come across a model that has given me more understanding of human nature. There are a lot of other dubious bits in the article and its a bit of a job to wade through 4200 words of it. I think part of the issue is that on a quick googling the authors fields appear to be Film Studies, the History of Art and Comparative Literature. Evolutionary psychology is a fundamentally a science subject and I'm not sure they really get it.
While this is undoubtably true, this is one aspect of the criticisms of EP where I can understand where they are coming from. This is due to the history of EP. I do capitalize EP to distinguish the strain of psychological thinking and research primarily flowing from a relatively small group of researchers who owe much of their intellectual heritage to researchers at UC Santa Barbara from the generic view of placing psychological findings into an evolutionary perspective.
The critics were right that EP is _basically_ rebranded sociobiology. Now sociobiology flamed out very quickly due to the backlash that EO Wilson received after the publication of his book Sociobiology in the mid 1970s. No only had adaptationist perspectives in biology not entirely taken hold, there were numerous academic disciplines almost fundamentally opposed to the idea that culture (and humanity) was not entirely arbitrary. Hell, in 1983 after Derek Freeman published his debunking of Margaret Mead's claims about the Samoan people, the American Anthropological Association passed a motion declaring his work unscientific and _irresponsible_.
This milieu where EP formed was absolutely toxic to any claims about a (universal) biological influence on behavior and held nearly to an axiom that talk of genetic variation which influences behavior was inherently racist, sexist, etc. Take the controversy over the Bell Curve, published in 1994. The entire book, save one chapter, dealt with claimed genetic factors which influence behavior that broke down by class or socioeconomic status. A lone chapter dealt with race. Yet the initial controversy and the book's legacy is that of being racist. Nevermind the fair more numerous claims about the role genetics played in arranging people into social and economic classes. The mere mention of biological variation influencing behavior was a tactical move that virtually no scientist would touch.
With this backdrop, EP was developed. Honestly, marginal scientists trudging away in the relative backwoods of academia began to synthesize a perspective on human nature that took our biological past seriously. The obvious route, and probably the most common route, focused on human universals. Anyone with a basic understanding of biology will understand the general thesis of this strain of EP. All humans everywhere dealt with a shared set of problems: (1) finding food and shelter to survive (classic selection) and (2) finding a mate so that you can pass you genes to the next generation (sexual selection). There are derivative issues which arise from our shared experience like being able to cooperate with non-kin to form basic societies or being able to detect cheaters in all realms where there is a risk of someone being a free rider.
Taking these basic claims about shared human experience, you can begin to apply them in slowly expanding circles to many facets of human behavior and psychology. But the core will always be about human universals. There will always be variation, but they are variations on universals. This is precisely why many who are unversed in the actual work of EP have the instinctual worry about EP focusing too much on the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene is a safe refuge for a perspective that develops in a hostile intellectual climate. It is also tactically a wise strategy. Focus on universals to gain credibility like say with David Buss's 1989 paper "Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures". Go broad or become smeared.
As you say, there is unlikely any researcher in EP who gives any sort of credence to the notion that our psychology was 'frozen in the Pleistocene', but especially historically, there was little place else to go. Beyond that, there are mounds of fascinating findings which only need to focus on how much our psychology has _not_ adapted that it has kept researchers busy for quite some time.
That intellectual heritage along with the fact that the gold standard in EP (legitimate cross cultural work) is extraordinarily hard and expensive combined with our infantile understanding of genetics makes doing serious work in understanding the ways that post-Pleistocene environments have shaped our psychology very, very difficult indeed.
Please. I don't know about Spencer's unnamed "followers", but he was not quite what you would call a fan of the colonialism of his day:
> That a government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out.
> Moreover, colonial government, properly so called, cannot be carried on without transgressing the rights of the colonists. For if, as generally happens, the colonists are dictated to by authorities sent out from the mother country, then the law of equal freedom is broken in their persons, as much as by any other kind of autocratic rule.
From Social Statics, Chapter 27, Section 1 (available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spencer-social-statics-185... ).
> The philosopher Herbert Spencer famously argued that competition among men for survival was not only inevitable but good. [...] In retrospect, it is easy to recognize his theory of nature as an unacknowledged description of nineteenth-century England... It was only natural that colonial regimes brutally extracted resources from Asians and Africans unable to resist their guns. Those who survived at the expense of others were simply proving their own fitness, and their enemies’ weakness.
Or, as I specified in my original comment, "the colonialism of his day".
[1] http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/evolutionar...
A psychologist with a contrasting point of view is Janet Hyde,[4] a psychologist well trained in human behavior genetics. She has published papers suggesting that most supposed innate gender differences between men and women are shaped mostly by culture rather than by biological inheritance.
See what you think after reading some of the key documents. I'm still making up my mind.
[1] http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
[2] http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html
[3] http://www.dianafleischman.com/epap.pdf
http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/evolve/evolmenu.html
I was trying to make sense of some feminist arguments and this provided answers for me as well as lots of other fascinating ideas. He also made a series on YouTube about the stone age man in a modern world.
I agree that EP has a low SNR ratio but I don't buy that every difference is socially constructed.
Women are also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace and cry in the boardroom, just like the social structures in the cave population as extrapolated from these two bone needles. Being too successful will increase women’s testosterone, giving them hairy nipples and male-pattern baldness. Females joining the hunt may also explain the end of the Neanderthals.
IQ test studies show that women have lower IQs on average than men, undoubtedly from lesser need for environmental variation while taking care of the cave. Tests on little boys prove that testosterone correlates with a sense of humour, which is why women just can’t take a joke. Housework has been shown to cut the risk of several fatal diseases, and dressing up nicely around the house is psychologically healthy as it uses the Homo erectus clan maintenance abilities of the female of the tribe.
Men are naturally predisposed to sleep with as many women as possible, as proven by lions, whereas women are naturally predisposed to stay loyal to their man and their spawn. Women who sleep around are at increased risk of parasites and death, as proven by cheetahs, who are a pack of catty sluts.
In a final crowning achievement, the team has shown that daily fellatio greatly reduces the incidence of breast cancer. Furthermore, regular sexual intercourse is essential to feminine health, but may be injurious if prolonged for more than two minutes or conducted while the man is sober.
“In conclusion,” says Professor Hunt, “all of this is top-notch science that you can absolutely rely on. Now get your knickers back on and make me a cuppa.”
from http://newstechnica.com/2008/10/23/science-reveals-evolution...
(And, please, don't think that we can change evolution in 10 or 20 years. Or even 1000. Or even 10,000. We are talking millions of years for changes to occur.)
Jumping from this to "therefore evolution" is exactly as specious as jumping to "therefore culture." Actually moreso, because it's cultural by definition; the question is what sparked the culture.
The culture may, indeed, be rooted in biological predisposition toward the topics involved. It could also be rooted in biological predisposition toward shoving others out of a social club, and/or allowing oneself to be shoved out -- metaphorically or through literal physical force.
Or it could be rooted in a long history of self-serving decisions which have nothing to do with biology whatsoever, only people in power working to concentrate and maintain that power. Disqualifying half the race is quite a coup.
Yes, we have significant gender dimorphism in our hormones and neurotransmitters. It's very likely that at some level, that's relevant. But claiming it as the root cause is arbitrary non-sequitur. Causation has to be demonstrated, it can't simply be inferred.