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Fourth Premise

Genes that have psychological and/or behavioral effects which promote the survival and reproduction of oneself and one's kin in a particular environment will, over time, tend to spread in that environment, while genes that detract from same will tend to die out.

Once again, I don't think that this proposition is seriously dubitable - and it's really all one needs to get evolutionary psychology off the ground. Obviously, it immediately raises all sorts of questions: what particular psychological and/or behavioral effects can be attributed to genetic causes, which such effects promote or detract from inclusive fitness in what particular environments, and so on. Answering such questions is, of course, what the field of evolutionary psychology is all about.

Now I think it's fairly clear that the sorts of psychological and/or behavioral variations that can be linked to genetic causes are going to be of a pretty general character: things like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, general intelligence, and so on. But these are extremely interesting and important things. For example, differences in ancestral environment may well help to explain group differences in intellectual ability and criminality in ways that are wholly at odds with decades of public policy. If so, then that's a big deal.

Blanket complaints about the "poverty" of the whole field of inquiry because it can't offer us detailed explanations for every aspect of what was going on in Edison's mind when he invented the lightbulb or in Beethoven's when he composed the Grosse Fuge strike me as just silly. And complaining that it can't explain the origin of consciousness and solve the mind/body problem strike me as even sillier. Those are jobs for biographers and philosophers, respectively.

Comments (65)

And complaining that it can't explain the origin of consciousness and solve the mind/body problem strike me as even sillier.

Steve, this reminds me of a statement attributed to Darwin (I think correctly, or at least approximately correctly) that begins, "Give me a simple jellyfish with five senses and..." A sentence beginning that should have the reader laughing heartily at the notion that a jellyfish with five senses is simple.

It also makes me think of the story about Richard Feynman and the painter who said he could get yellow by mixing red and white. When he tried to demonstrate and it wasn't turning out yellow, he said, "Well, I always have a tube of yellow and add a bit of yellow to sharpen it up."

So, here. It seems that you want to say, "Give me an incredibly complex species, very much like mankind in fact, with consciousness, personality, free will, and all manner of fascinating personality traits like creativity, drive for perfection, conscientiousness, etc., and that's all I need to get evolutionary psychology off the ground." Well, heck! If _that's_ all you need. Wasn't this supposed to be a theory of origins? Of the evolutionary origins of human psychology?

Lydia, if I had wanted to say *that*, I would have done so. Instead I said something else, which I don't think you've laid a glove on.

"Wasn't this supposed to be a theory of...the evolutionary origins of human psychology?"

Not if what you mean by that is the origin of *consciousness*. Evolutionary psychology tries to explain why, of the various possible patterns of psychological and behavioral traits that genes can influence, some would prevail over others in particular environments. In the case of behavior, it might also be possible to establish particular causal mechanisms connecting genetic input to behavioral output (though I don't think anybody has gotten very far with that). But if you want to know why it is possible for genes - or any other physical entity - to manifest itself in conscious experience, I'm not aware of any evolutionary psychologists who have much to say about that, or who think that they do.

Wait, does the "all one needs to get evolutionary psychology off the ground" mean that this is your final Premise? As I said from the beginning, hardly anybody disputes the fundamental presuppositions of evolutionary psychology. I accept all of your premises so far, but I don't see them getting us much closer to your original paragraph about Thomas Edison and intelligence, creativity, etc., which I don't accept at all.

I also disagree with your claim here that an evolutionary psychological explanation of the origin of racial differences would be a big deal for public policy. What would be a big deal would be conclusive evidence that racial differences are to a large extent genetically influenced. Correct me if I'm wrong about this part, but sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology), at the present state of the art, cannot establish that fact by itself; it can only suggest it, or explain it once it's somehow been established. In any case, it doesn't matter to public policy whether those genetic differences originated by natural selection in an ancestral environment or some other way, only that they're not due to contemporary or recent environment. In other words, what matters to public policy is not sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, but behavioral genetics.

Steve,

I don't buy that your premises are anything like sufficient for a useful field of evolutionary psychology. Your premises show that in *principle*, a field of evolutionary psychology *might* grow up that would produce useful results. They do *not* demonstrate that evolutionary psychology is able (or will ever be able) to distinguish actual genetic effects from societal/historical ones, without demonstrating also the precise mechanism by which those effects are produced—at which point we're more likely to be dealing with neuroscience than with evolutionary psychology. Nor do your premises even begin to address the (heavily value-laden) issues involved in operationalizing such concepts as intelligence or criminality.

In my own experience studying perception, evolutionary arguments applied to psychology are mainly useful as a source of (sometimes fascinating) hypotheses. Evolutionary arguments are generally pretty useless in trying to test those same hypotheses. To talk about “evolutionary psychology” as a field of scientific study in itself—let's just say that I've been hearing folks talk breathlessly about it for a couple of decades now and I haven't seen much come out in the way of solid results. I'll believe it when I see it.

Peace,
--Peter

Not if what you mean by that is the origin of *consciousness*.

But look, Steve, I think dogs and cats and horses are conscious on some meaning of "conscious." Even if I just said, "Oh, bother the problem of the origin of consciousness. I'll give you consciousness," that wouldn't get you much forrarder as far as anything remotely like human psychology! If you are granted consciousness at the level of, say, some of the higher animals (and I'm not at all sure _why_ you should be granted that, since after all, you presumably do believe that _all_ of these things were the result of non-design causes and that evolutionary psychology is just picking up where evolutionary biology leaves off), that isn't going to get you conscientiousness or creativity or religious belief. There's just no bridge from there to here, as far as I can see, and evolutionary psychology doesn't do a good job of providing one.

And of course nobody thinks that one is an adherent to evolutionary psychology if one believes that God created man in his own image, man fell, and everything else has been variants on God-created human nature from there. If you believe all of that you don't have a heck of a lot of use for evolutionary psychology except as a source of largely speculative theories about variations within the already highly developed human species.

"Nor do your premises even begin to address the (heavily value-laden) issues involved in operationalizing such concepts as intelligence or criminality."

Evolutionary theorists like Cochran and Harpending speculated that people who long evolved in agricultural settings (e.g. Europeans and North Asians) would have undergone selection for genes that aid in agriculture: intelligence, decreased aggression, planning, patience, etc. And we have discovered that there are certain genes regulating brain functions that only exist among Europeans and North Asians (see Lahn).

Mind you, aggression is adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies. Looking at various Amerindian hunter-gather tribes in Brazil, anthropologists found that the most aggressive males would mate with the most females (pass on more of their genes).

what particular psychological and/or behavioral effects can be attributed to genetic causes

That is not a question the evolutionary psychology can answer - it is a presupposition that must be answered outside of evolutionary science for evolutionary science to have any foundation.

Of course, that doesn't stop those in the field claiming that they answer that.

Frankly, most evolutionary psyschology falls into the realm of History Channel stories about how the dinosaurs did such and such because of so and so. Stories created that fit known facts "just so" with absolutely no ability to test them and with no predictive power.

"with absolutely no ability to test them and with no predictive power."

Oh yea, because we all know that ID is a veritable fountain of testable knowledge and predictive power.


If you want to see how selection can change genes which in turn change behavior in a testable and falsifiable manner, look at the Russian fox experiment where in only 50 years artificial selection changed the appearance and behavior (from aggressive to passive) of the fox:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text

Aaron,

This statement jumped out at me and quite frankly I can't believe you really mean what I think you mean by it:

"What would be a big deal would be conclusive evidence that racial differences are to a large extent genetically influenced."

Are you suggesting we have no evidence that race is a biological reality? Have you been sipping the Lewontin/Gould Kool-Aid? Don't make me provide you with the links...oh heck, everyone should have this paper in their library so I can't resist:

http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=Race.pdf

However, having said that, and agreeing with Steve that biological group differences are meaningful and should have an impact on public policy, I'm not sure I'm on board the evolutionary psychology bandwagon yet MAR. For example, the esteemed Cochran and Harpending provide us with a theory for why white/Asian people evolved smarter than black people (to put it crudely). Maybe their theory is true*, maybe it's not -- but to go back to Aaron's statement, does it really matter to us here and now if the reality of the problem is what he calls "behavioral genetics". Therefore, what are public policies that we can adopt here and now that might help those on the left-hand side of the bell curve (and/or not hurt those on the right side)?

Sailer has written quite a bit on this topic and one doesn't have to worry about whether or not evolution in all of its Darwinian complexity is true or not -- one just has to except the reality of modern-day gene research and its sometimes uncomfortable conclusions.

*Don't you have to be intelligent and patient to track and kill big game? I guess the idea is less intelligent than those who track crop yields and surplus grain?

"Don't you have to be intelligent and patient to track and kill big game? I guess the idea is less intelligent than those who track crop yields and surplus grain?"

In hunter-gatherer societies, you live by short cycles, sometimes day-to-day. In agriculture, you live by annual cycles. Thus, agriculture requires more planning, patience and forethought. (It also requires more labor.) Imagine the gene selection for those living in agricultural societies for 10,000 years.

It's also possible that colder climates push selection for intelligence as it would have been more difficult to live in them -- you would have had to store up food for the entire winter versus the tropical regions where you can live more day-to-day.


By the way, here's a recent post by Cochran on intelligence and evolution:

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/six-black-russians/


@Aaron: so long as you accept "the fundamental presuppositions of evolutionary psychology," it doesn't bother me in the least if you reject my "original paragraph about Thomas Edison and intelligence, creativity, etc."

Whatever.

But I'm still quite a bit bothered by your apparent acceptance, expressed in a previous comment, of Stephen J. Gould & Richard Lewontin as authorities, here.

Surely that was a mistake?

@Peter Brown: I think that the skepticism you express is quite reasonable.

Please, Steve, just stop trying to go there.

If you want evolutionary psychology off the ground, you need at an absolute minimum, one, (1), ONE, uno, example of the following:

1. Identify a gene
2. identify that it is statistically associated with a "kind of action"
3. (try to define "kind of action" with scientific rigor. You will probably be limited to simple mechanical motions: moving the arm, reflex muscle oontraction, maybe, just maybe something as complex as running if you are incredibly lucky).
4. Identify the specific RNA sequences this gene produces,
5. Identify the specific proteins, enzymes, and other chemicals that spin off - and the genes that control these too.
6. Identify the neurotransmitters that these control. (all of them, not just one).
7. Identify the mechanism by which these neurotransmitters induce a neuron to fire.
8. Identify the precise mechanisms by which the neuron firing causes the action.

There, that's the FIRST part. The second part is establishing ALL of the factors that involve that simple action with a series of other actions that can be called a "behavior", which typically can include at least 10 simple actions and as many as 2000. Then you have to backtrack all these other simple actions to their root neuron firings, neurotransmitters, ...back to genes.

The third part is to inter-relate all of the involved genes so that you can sort out the wealth of genetic influences.

Finally, you get the 4th part: proving with some kind of rigor (rather than a whimsical "seems that way to me" ) that this highly involved complex of causes accounts for the behavior entire, with nothing left over that still needs explaining. Good luck on that, since we still haven't even begun to talk about environment (hormones and other chemicals switching on genes is just ONE of them), as well as conscious thought re-directing actions.

Nobody has come anywhere close to this process. Have they even attempted the entirety of one of the 4 parts? Not likely.

Eveolutionary psychology may eventually be a well grounded science. Right now it is a LOT shakier than a number of other things loosely called science but more in hope than in fact.

By the way, I subjected ID to the same type of criticism last week, so I am an equal-opportunity criticizer.

@Lydia: "you presumably do believe that _all_ of these things were the result of non-design causes and that evolutionary psychology is just picking up where evolutionary biology leaves off"

Well, Lydia, what can I say? You seem determined to attribute to me hardened positions on issues concerning which I am genuinely and honestly uncertain.

Tony: David Hume has an even better argument for the claim that we have no reason to believe that unobserved cases will turn out to be like observed cases.

Where there's a skeptical will, there's a skeptical way.

I assume Tony's post is a caricature of the wiles of the ID / young earther / evolution-denying crowds. Good job. It's funny that these people set a threshold so high for knowledge that barely anything in science could meet it, while simultaneously promulgating an ideology (ID) which isn't even falsifiable. Sure, evolutionary theory is incomplete and details of it may be wrong --- but you know, that's a good thing, because it's real science.

But enough!

I've got fifty-some final exams and fifty-some term papers to grade between now and my departure for Rome on Monday morning.

My hostel in Rome claims to provide free wi-fi. If that turns out to be true, I'll try & check in here, as time permits.

Bye for now.

Have fun, Steve.

"Stephen J. Gould & Richard Lewontin as authorities"

Hopefully Lewontin and Gould's names will eventually become synonymous with PC chicanery, just as Arnold and Ephialtes are with treason.

Don't know whether anyone caught the recent Nature piece on Gould's fraud, but it's too kind:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7352/pdf/474419a.pdf


Hawks does a better job:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2011.html

I assume Tony's post is a caricature of the wiles of the ID / young earther / evolution-denying crowds.

MAR, that's darned careless. You presumably weren't around last week when Tony was demonstrating at great length the falsehood of your characterization. But worse, you're even too careless to read and take into account *his own reference* to that discussion in his comment right here. Pretty amazing.

Lydia,

It was a joke (well, the part about it being a caricature, not the part about the dubious methods of the ID / young earther crowds). You know, "ha ha." The reason I mentioned ID was because of the last sentence in his comment.

BTW, I wasn't around last week. I only started reading these threads a couple days ago.

"For example, differences in ancestral environment may well help to explain group differences in intellectual ability and criminality in ways that are wholly at odds with decades of public policy."

Intellectual ability -- possibly
Criminality -- no way

Sorry, but the reason I don't run around committing crimes has nothing to do with my ancestral environment and everything to do with ethical outlook. It baffles me that anyone could seriously believe otherwise.

Matt,

The 10,000 Year Explosion and other recent works give plausible evidence on why intellectual ability and criminality might be attributable to ancestral environment. What evidence do you have that it's merely "ethical outlook" other than it "baffles you"?

I think that people misunderstand what recent findings will signify. It won't necessarily mean the end of ethics. It's adaptive for groups to have ethnical norms. It keeps peace and order.

What would an evo-informed ethics look like? For starters, we'd probably have to start talking about "human natures" and not "human nature." Otherwise, it might not be too distant from the spirit of Aristotle's ethical writings, where, instead of offering a top-down theory, he makes observations and tries his best to describe humans as they are.

My own experience. I don't know about you, but I think about things and make choices accordingly, rather than follow a genetic code like a robot. When I see a convenience store, I decline to rob it not because my ancestors were farmers rather than hunters, but because stealing from someone else is wrong and I try not to deliberately do things that are wrong. Criminality, representing as it does the free choices of rational humans rather than the instinctual actions of dumb animals, is not "explained" by genes.

I suppose the next step is to tell me why black people (don't kid yourselves, that's what this is all about) aren't actually rational humans. I can't wait.

Matt,

I guess your 10:32 PM comment is direct at MAR -- I know he's a big boy and can take care of himself but that was a nasty piece of work and you should be ashamed of yourself.

MAR and I have our differences, but it seems to me that he shows up on this blog arguing in good faith on these matters so you should show him some respect.

Now, the next step is in fact to tell you that black people exhibit more criminality than white people and therefore we should get all freaked out or worried when more of them wind up in prison. Instead, we should make sure they are brought up in an environment that emphasizes strict rules and structure and the State should make sure young black boys and girls are raised by a mother and father, which is exactly what our public policy has been doing for the past 40 years.

"Evolutionary theorists like Cochran and Harpending speculated that people who long evolved in agricultural settings (e.g. Europeans and North Asians) would have undergone selection for genes that aid in agriculture: intelligence, decreased aggression, planning, patience, etc. And we have discovered that there are certain genes regulating brain functions that only exist among Europeans and North Asians (see Lahn)."


Europeans and North Asians?

And what about South Asians?. Haven't they been farming for ever so long?. And the West Asians?
Didn't farming evolve there?

Also farming has pretty ancient history in Africa and Central America. There are not all Hunter-gatherers over there.

Thanks, Jeff.

Gian: North Asians = Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. People would have had to be farming long and consistently enough for widespread gene selection to occur. As I understand it, people were farming only for a thousand years or two in limited parts of Central America and Africa. Re South Asians, I don't exactly know why on the major tests they tend to score much lower on average than North Asians (see IQ and the Wealth of Nations). I don't have these answers. Apparently the Chinese, who tend not to be as PC as contemporary Westerners, are looking into this.

Matt: And it's not just about ancestral environment. Look at gender. Why are almost all murders committed by males? Is is because of "ethnical outlook"? Or is it because throughout most of human history (perhaps up until 10,000 years or so ago in certain parts of the world) being violent was an adaptive behavior in that violent males were more likely to pass on their genes?

(NB, it's the same for chimpanzees, where the most violent males are more likely to pass on their genes. Of course, there are other evolutionary histories, such as the female hyena, but this history is not ours.)

Regarding the pacification of certain groups, here's an interesting essay:

"The Roman State and Genetic Pacification"

By Peter Frost

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP08376389.pdf

Also, it's probably not farming alone that genetically changed groups -- but a convergence of many factors. Our understanding of such things, bio-history, is in its infancy.

Another good summary of recent, fast human evolution:

"Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally"

Nicholas Wade

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26human.html?pagewanted=print

"Why are almost all murders committed by males? Is is because of "ethnical outlook"? Or is it because throughout most of human history (perhaps up until 10,000 years or so ago in certain parts of the world) being violent was an adaptive behavior in that violent males were more likely to pass on their genes?"

Given those two options, I guess I'll take A. Although I guess B explains why black men are more adapted than white men? It's irrelevant, in any case, because the difference between men and women absolutely dwarfs the difference between any two human races, unless one or more races were actually sub-rational. Is that what you want to argue?

I wouldn't be averse to some combo of the physical and the mental influencing behavior, but the Darwinist right refuses to stop there. Genes 'explain' behavior. A black American is more influenced by the ancestral African jungle he's never known than the Detroit ghetto he actually lives in. Human beings don't make rational choices, but follow pre-programmed genetic codes. This is about as silly as it gets, but this kind of nonsense is parroted all over the HBD blogs as though it were gospel truth. Whether or not Darwinism demands biological reductionism, biological reductionism is always what we seem to get.

...but it seems to me that he shows up on this blog arguing in good faith...

Jeff S., would that it were true. Matt has MAR's number.

Matt: You honestly think that its a difference of "ethical outlook" why males commit almost all murders? Is this ethical outlook causal among male chimpanzees too?


"A black American is more influenced by the ancestral African jungle he's never known than the Detroit ghetto he actually lives in."

It depends. Environment and genetics both are factors for all people, regardless of race. And they often influence each other. Environment can influence genes, which in turn can cause humans to change to reshape their environment.

The genes the black American might have protecting him against malaria are a result of his ancestors in Africa, not his life in Detroit.

My ability to digest milk as an adult is the result of selection in Northern Europe my ancestors underwent, not by anything I've experienced in the USA.

MAR you are equivocating badly. We are talking about behaviors here, and then you shift to traits like lactose intolerance and malaria immunity as though these were obviously or in any way the same kind of thing. Here are the crucial questions: For any behavior X, which gene or set of genes causes X, and why does it appear to the actor as though he is making a rational decision instead of following a genetic calling?

As for men and women, no, I was making fun of your false dichotomy: The approved answer was worse than the unapproved one. Here's another question: What are the relevant differences between humans and chimps?

Steve, we might mean something different by "fundamental presuppositions." Lawrence Auster himself probably accepts all the fundamental presuppositions of evolutionary psychology, including your premises here.

My reference to Lewontin and Gould was just as an illustration, so I'm surprised that it matters to people here. I don't consider them authorities on sociobiology. I do think that some of their criticisms are (or were) correct. Their whole "spandrels" argument is especially to the point of your post.

A lot of what you wrote in that paragraph about creativity, etc., is questionable or just plain wrong, but there's one aspect that hasn't been mentioned yet. You're using sociobiology to explain properties of individuals, or of types of individuals. I don't doubt that natural selection explains why Edison was more intelligent and creative than chimpanzees, but you're at least implicitly explaining why he was more intelligent and creative than us. Turning that around, natural selection also must explain why you and I are uncreative and unintelligent, relative to Edison. How would one formulate the ev-psych explanation for that? How were the traits of stupidity and lack of creativity adaptive? (And to anticipate your objection that it was not those traits but traits coextensive with those: see the argument by Jerry Fodor.) More precisely, why were our own stupid and uncreative genes so darn adaptive in the exact same environment as were Edison's intelligent and creative genes?

Jeff, the key word in my post was conclusive. I was actually going to use Charles Murray's word, "dispositive," but I decided to sacrifice precision in order, well, not to be using words like "dispositive." For policy, it's perceptions that matter of course, in this case the perceived strength of the evidence.

I think the evidence for hereditarianism is stronger than that for environmentalism, but not overwhelming or conclusive. I think that it should have enormous importance for public policy, as Michael Levin argued convincingly, contra Hernstein and Murray and very many others, in Why Race Matters.

"because the difference between men and women absolutely dwarfs the difference between any two human races"

It depends. All women share reproductive functions with other women, and men with other men. But men and women are symbiotic. European women evolved with European men over the past 40,000 years, not with Chinese women. Mothers pass genes onto their sons, and fathers onto their daughters. Many things (disease resistance, IQ averages, lactose tolerance, ancestry markers, appearance (such as skin and eye color, hair texture), etc.) track more by race, not by gender.

"unless one or more races were actually sub-rational"

As far as I know, no one here has stated such. I know I haven't. As far as I know, all humans (unless severely mentally retarded) are capable of rationality.

I'm not claiming I'm the epitome of advanced human evolution. I know there are tons of people much smarter, better looking, more athletic, etc. than I am. I just find bio-history interesting. But I get the feeling you're trying to turn this thread into a PC inquisition of sorts, which is probably why I won't respond to you again.

You need not fear for your honor. I don't find your beliefs evil, I find them foolish and against all common sense.

"It depends."

Well there you go. Impassable chasm, I guess. But my question is which are closer together, a white man and black woman, or a white woman and a female chimp?

"And complaining that it can't explain the origin of consciousness and solve the mind/body problem strike me as even sillier. Those are jobs for biographers and philosophers, respectively."

Gonna have to disagree again, at least conditionally. While a theistic evolutionist can escape this problem via divine intervention, if you believe that evolution is the sole cause of the diversity and development of life on Earth, then it absolutely has to explain the origin of consciousness and of the mind. Evolutionary psychology, depending on how narrowly the field is defined, may not have to do this, but if not it rests on a foundation that does require it.

I think this study may be useful if you want to consider a concrete example.

Gian, I was thinking along the same lines. In addition to the non-starters in the other peoples, there never was a time before modern era where ALL of the people were farmers, no hunter-gatherers around. And given that, then hunters and farmers were competing within the same groups for survival and for passing on their genes, and the fact that the social group survived indicates that BOTH hunting and farming, at one and the same time, could have been providing genes that were useful. So, the conclusions cannot distinguish without a record as to how many there were of each group, and how the sub-groups grew in proportion to each other. And is there any evidence as to how much one group was leaching off the other?

(e.g. Europeans and North Asians) would have undergone selection for genes that aid in agriculture

See, it's that kind of sloppy, leaving-out-9-middle steps kind of hopeful hypotheses that would be laughed out of the room if an IDer or young earther tried it. It isn't a real, honest to goodness well-backed up theory, it is a hypothesis that is waiting for tons and tons of support. When it gets it, I will call it science. Until then, it is approximately like phrenology was 120 years ago.

More precisely, why were our own stupid and uncreative genes so darn adaptive in the exact same environment as were Edison's intelligent and creative genes?

Aaron has an excellent question here. Unlimited similar examples could be given. Suppose one knows a man who is highly intelligent and also has poor eyesight. Evolutionary theory purports to be able to explain (if all were known) both of these facts. Isn't that a bit odd? Isn't it even more odd when one considers that poor eyesight is pretty obviously not terribly adaptive, especially in a rougher world (even an agricultural world, for that matter, in which one has to defend one's domestic animals against predators)? Maybe we can write some highly speculative and mildly interesting story about how this person's extremely high intelligence, high enough to do Calculus and modern Physics, and his interests in this subject, are a result of the adaptiveness of such high intelligence. Even so, it will be a rather shaky story, because it's fairly obvious that such extremely high intelligence wouldn't confer any clear survival advantage in anything but a highly technological society such as our own. But where did the poor eyesight come from? And what if it turns out that the poor eyesight is not independent of the high intelligence, that the two are genetically intertwined?

I have a minor genetic anomaly that is likely to make one rather funny looking. Not terribly adaptive. In my own biological family history it appears somewhat plausible that it is correlated with high intelligence. No one knows whether there's any causal connection. Maybe there isn't. But what if there is? What's the evolutionary story that would explain a genetic disposition to be ugly and smart, especially for a female?? I've no doubt that someone could think one up, but isn't that just the problem?

Matt says,

Evolutionary psychology, depending on how narrowly the field is defined, may not have to do this, but if not it rests on a foundation that does require it.

Right. And as I've been trying to point out throughout the thread, there's no clear cut-off between a theory that explains the origin of consciousness and a theory that explains the origin of high-level consciousness. It would be highly arbitrary and exceedingly strange for the evolutionary psychologist to say that we must grant him the existence of creatures possessing a level of consciousness exhibited by dolphins and chimpanzees. For one thing, that's a pretty huge admission: What it amounts to is saying that he doesn't actually have a good theory of the origins of dolphins and chimpanzees! For another thing, I have real doubts that he can well explain from there the purely natural evolution of the distinctive intellectual capabilities that are part of distinctly human consciousness. And for a third thing, it seems that the only reason for cutting off the demand at high-level animals would be to leave some work to be done. Most of the examples given here that, in my view, are speculative and implausible but at least mildly interesting (such as agriculture giving rise to higher intelligence in some human groups) have already given themselves mankind to work with! Convenient, that. If one were convinced by these speculations (and I don't know why one should be really convinced) does this mean one is to take this as a promissory note for telling us how the whole of human psychology developed from the approximate level of chimpanzee intelligence and abilities? That's one heck of a promissory note.

Evolutionary theories, like most general explanations, are perfectly plausible if you don't look at them too closely. However, evolution ends up being a more and more rigorously quantitative explanation as natural selection gives way to intelligent selection.

It is the visions of intelligence which cause definite and measurable evolutionary paths to be heavily selected, whilein nature even mildly positive mutations are not likely to spread unless population bottlenecks unconnected to natural selection give them the chance.

The fault, dear friends, is not in evolutionary theory itself, but the faith in which it is held and worshiped. This prevents us not only from seeing what it can't do but what it can.

But much stronger - nearly perfect, in fact - was the correlation between the grief curves of these modern Canadians and the reproductive-potential curve of a hunter-gatherer people,

Erik, I work with statistics and mortality data all the time, and I strongly doubt the article's implied premise that reproductive potential peaks at just before puberty. I have not done the math, but my intuition in working with demographic numbers is that the potential peaks exactly AT puberty or a little later. A "nearly perfect" fit then is doubtful.

More problematic, it is well-established that the age of puberty varies in different populations. There is no such thing as THE single reproductive-potential curve that applies to all populations of humans, it varies with different groups. You would have to test the grief levels of a pre-agriculture population themselves versus their own age of puberty and their own reproductive potential cycle to have any numbers that mean anything. And it is not clear that a single population would remain static with the same underlying age of puberty or the same underlying reproductive cycle for a long enough time for evolution to produce the grief response in direct relation to it: if the age of puberty can change within a few short generations due to high success in pulling in meat over a period (or other factors, we don't really know entirely), and then drift back the other way with another change in the environment, then it is really difficult to see how any numbers you correlate can produce any more than a vague conclusion.

Lydia,

Two questions (from a WWwtW lurker):

1. Do you think a science of evolutionary psychology is *impossible* or just that so far it has been unimpressive? (I take Steve Burton as making an argument for the possibility of ev-pscyh like arguments.)

2. What we mean by an 'evolutionary explanation of the existence of trait X' is vexed. But I think we can, in many cases, generate testable hypotheses of the form "trait X was selected for by circumstances Y" when trait X is a physical trait. Do you agree with that?

Thanks,

Ben A

Genes that have psychological and/or behavioral effects which promote the survival and reproduction of oneself and one's kin in a particular environment will...

By the way, Steve, your 4th "premise" isn't a premise, it is an argument with a set of missed middle terms.

Earlier you talked about genes that influence actions or behaviors. You also said that behaviors can influence survival. Those premises do not allow you to say (with logical necessity) that genes promote survival. 2 logical problems: (1) "influence" may not end up having anything to do with the actual actions seen. In conscious humans with free will, "influence" toward violence can also be found in a person who is tempted, but rejects the temptation and does the moral thing by turning away from the temptation. The influence was there, but the behavior was not.

(2) Genes which have an influence toward actions, or even behaviors, can be affecting behaviors that don't really influence survival at all, and therefore may not "promote" it. We see this kind of situation all the time in other contexts: Birds seeking mates sometimes look for the "prettiest", most colorful, i.e. sexiest mate around. But it is strongly doubted that the specific criteria of "sexiest" always has something to do with higher survival rates in themselves, and therefore the trait is likely to produce more offspring solely because it attracts a mate, not because it "attracts a mate because it is a survival trait". This isn't to say that there cannot be genes that influence behavior that promotes survival, only that the mere fact that SOME genes influence behavior, and SOME behaviors influence survival, does not mean that the genes that can be shown to influence behavior are affecting THOSE behaviors that influence survival.

Now, if you had genes which you _knew_ were influencing behavior that is, specifically, related to survival or producing more offspring, that would be interesting. But frankly, I don't think the science is there yet. We surmise that higher intelligence is a survival trait, but darned if we can prove it in the concrete. And intelligence isn't even a behavior, it merely allows the possibility of some behavior. And I really doubt that the important behaviors we see, like "agriculture" are reducible to a set of basic traits whose genes can be singled out - agriculture involves so many behaviors, which use so many more basic skills and actions shared in common with non-agriculture behaviors, that you cannot single out traits that are agriculture-traits as such.

Yet more reason why sociology is still one of the soft "sciences". It has not yet found its foundations on which to build solid work.

Ben,

Do you think a science of evolutionary psychology is *impossible* or just that so far it has been unimpressive? (I take Steve Burton as making an argument for the possibility of ev-pscyh like arguments.)

I don't think it's within the realm of practical possibility. Logically, I suppose anything is possible, but that's a trivial point. It's a little bit like asking whether a science (on Earth) of Alpha Centaurian society is possible.

One thing that I think should be stunning to someone contemplating the whole sociobiological field is the realization that we're talking, just among many other aspects of this "science," about doing sociology not only on groups of people who aren't around anymore but on strictly prehistoric people. (No using the Bible, even, to tell us about Tubalcain or anything like that!) That's huge. The degree of conjecture required as a result of that fact alone means, I strongly suspect, that hypotheses in this "field" will always be at most suggestive. Think of the trouble we have doing sociology with any rigor even working with present populations!

What we mean by an 'evolutionary explanation of the existence of trait X' is vexed. But I think we can, in many cases, generate testable hypotheses of the form "trait X was selected for by circumstances Y" when trait X is a physical trait. Do you agree with that?

There have been cases of microevolution along these lines, observed cases (finch beaks and so forth) that are well-established. (But not the peppered moths. That selection conclusion appears to have been wrong, even though the population shift occurred within living memory.) Doing it for unobserved "selection" in the prehistoric past is, again, I think going to be heavily conjectural and very difficult to establish with any high degree of confidence.

Ben, addendum:

I have evidence that strongly supports the conclusions that God made man in his own image by *at least* some very significant interventions into nature and that man shortly thereafter fell and acquired a sin nature. Obviously, these propositions mean that most of the most interesting human psychology was loaded in at the beginning or (in the case of the Fall) very early on. Since I think, for evidential reasons, that this is the _true_ explanation of human traits like love, religious belief, creativity, language, intelligence, and so forth, even the human desire to do evil (!), I think that a great many of the suppositions on which evolutionary psychology is based are false. They're looking for a fox that isn't there. So talking about a "science" along those lines is, from my perspective, rather like future people's talking about a "science" of how computer software developed spontaneously from toasters. What would it even mean to have a good, rational, rigorous science under those circumstances?

"But I think we can, in many cases, generate testable hypotheses of the form "trait X was selected for by circumstances Y" when trait X is a physical trait."

The problem with this is the "was selected for". The only thing you can test for is to see whether under conditions Y, trait X increases or decreases in frequency over some number of generations. Any application of this to historical circumstances is guesswork and we-haven't-got-any-better-explanations handwaving.

Evolutionary theory, as incomplete as it may be, is infinitely better than ID, which boils down to boiler-plate skepticism combined with religious mysticism. Last time I checked, mysticism isn't falsifiable. It's unfortunate that some fundamentalist Christians have taken the anti-science line, as well as it's unfortunate that people like Dawkins have taken such a shrill anti-religion line. In reality, Darwinism and Christianity are not at odds. Heck, the Genesis creation story isn't even mentioned in the NT, which shows how unessential it is for Christian belief. By setting up Christianity against science, Christianity will only lose, or be relegated to the fever swamps of the low IQ and Third World. Is this what you want?

Lydia,

Thank you for the responses.

I think if one grants the plausibility of microevolution of physical traits, one might grant the plausibility of microevolution of certain psychological traits. If we limit the discussion to animals, this seems like a reasonable inference. I wouldn't claim to know what consciousness a dog has. Nor, even if we grant that dogs are conscious, does it seem possible that they possess a consciousness comparable in kind to that of man. But I do think that dogs have 'temperament': there are shy dogs and bold dogs, mean dogs and nice dogs. I can imagine having genetic information which would inform about the predisposition for certain dog temperaments (even though these temperaments as observed are not genetically *determined*). Similarly, I can imagine an evolutionary psychology of dog temperaments. Maybe as a matter of empirical verification, this would need to be entirely forward looking. We could observe that when dogs are exposed to environments X or Y, different temperaments are selected for. This would then count as evidence for 'evolutionary psychology' of dogs. As you mention, there are any number of reasons to not want to extend a evolutionary psychology of dogs (or a any kind of psychology of dogs!) to men and woman.

Would you agree on "dog evolutionary psychology"?

Evolutionary theory, as incomplete as it may be,

MAR, Steve wasn't talking about evolution in general here, but socio-evolution and evolutionary psychology. it is one thing for a science to have parts unexplained on one end or the other - above, or below, the level the science is directly targetted, especially. Chemistry can talk about why atoms bond into molecules, but chemistry cannot go "all the way down" in that explanation because then you get into subatomic physics, quarks, and so on that is beyond what chemistry is about.

It is another thing entirely when you have 3 puzzle pieces that fit together at the early end, and 3 pieces that fit together at the far end, and an unknown (but a guesstimate of many) pieces in the middle that you cannot account for. It's like the comic strip scientist at the blackboard with huge amounts of formula on the left side, lots more on the right side, and a simple "and then a miracle happens" in the middle. The elder scientist's comment "I think this step needs more work" is of course funny because it is such an understatement. It isn't really science until that "more work" is in hand.

Your comparative analysis of ID versus socio-evolution is pretty funny, since the socio-ev that we have rests on the "and then a miracle happens" middle step in the comic strip.

Darwinism and Christianity are not at odds. Heck, the Genesis creation story isn't even mentioned in the NT, which shows how unessential it is for Christian belief.

MAR, even though I happen to agree that there are some versions of evolutionary theory that are not in contradiction with Christianity, please do yourself a favor (and us at the same time), don't try to explain Christianity to us. Your ignorance of it doesn't lend itself to worthwhile accounts. That something isn't "mentioned in the NT" doesn't make it not an essential part of Christianity. Certainly, "through one man, sin entered the world" is in the NT, anyway.

If the Genesis story of creation is so essential to Christianity don't you think it would be at least somewhere mentioned in the NT?

BTW, I think it's had to accept the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis without accepting some form of evo-psychology (which tries to explain why the tools are in the box, not just what they do). As evo-psych progresses, perhaps it will acquire a new name as it's much bigger than what we think of as psychology, but encompasses philosophy, anthropology, biology, genetics, history, linguistics, etc. The problem with the earlier form of evo-psych was that it was too universalist (it treated all groups of humans, who have evolved along very different evolutionary paths, as identical), but this is quickly being rectified; hence, "human natures," not "human nature"

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/08/can-evolutionary-psychology-evolve.html

What do you mean by "the Genesis story"? Adam is mentioned nine times in the New Testament, in five books. Eve is mentioned twice:

2 Cor 11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. 1 Tim 2:13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

JC -- this isn't really my point but the point made by many Christian Darwinists. The quotes you list above mention Adam and Eve but don't articulate a creation story. Saying that "Adam was first formed" doesn't spell out a creation story. If the creation story were so essential, wouldn't it have been clearly spelled out in the NT? And doesn't the NT trump the OT? As these same Christian Darwinists have noted, if God set the laws of physics into motion, he certainly could have set the laws of Darwinism into motion. Nonetheless, couldn't the Genesis creation story, like the story of Jonah and the whale, be but a parable? This all seems plausible to me.

Nonetheless, I don't want to turn Steve's thread into one about theology, so I'll just drop it.

Why would the NT, which is nothing but a continuation of sacred Scripture, re-state the entire creation narrative? It was well-known to the Jews in any case. The NT writers clearly assumed the truth and authority of the OT. So no, the NT doesn't "trump" the OT. That sounds like the the heresy of Marcion: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09645c.htm

MAR, thank you for dropping it. It wasn't going to get anywhere.

As evo-psych progresses, perhaps it will acquire a new name as it's much bigger than what we think of as psychology, but encompasses philosophy, anthropology, biology, genetics, history, linguistics, etc.

Yes, I am glad that maybe it's name will change, because any such discipline that tries to involve philosophy, history and linguistics in with biology and genetics is going to have to be one hell of a discipline. It will also have to stop thinking of its job as telling just-so stories and instead get cracking on actual science. The fact that

However, many evolutionarily minded psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of science disagree with the theoretical proposals put forward by the Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologists, and the discipline has been the subject of intense debates

leads me to be willing to wait quite a while so that they can get the major kinks out of the system first. You know, a close friend involved in running a college says that one of the things that makes the education system in this country a mess is the incredible number of people who think "education is what goes on in schools". It appears that when some of us find a likable hypothesis, put forward by people who are paid to do science, then they are willing to call the new hypothesis "science" because "science is what is being done by scientists". Whereas, my impression is that when a scientist puts forward a hypothesis, he is doing something that any damn fool can do; science is the hard work of proving or disproving it. The hard work spent attempting to prove it using what turns out to be dead end methods (does not establish anything fruitful about it being true or not true) may be hard work but is not necessarily science.

Evolutionary theory, as incomplete as it may be, is infinitely better than ID, which boils down to boiler-plate skepticism combined with religious mysticism.

"Boiler-plate skepticism combined with religious mysticism" is EXACTLY what the common assumption of today's Darwinians rests on:

"I have seen what evolution explains, therefore I have faith that it will explain everything biology has to show us unless I see the Designer for myself. I will call all aspects of life 'adaptations' regardless of how well I can describe the process that led to their being adapted, where they started from, or what particular lineage I see them in. All strange recurrences of structures in seperate lineages will be declared 'convergence,' all difficulties of natural adaptation will be declared 'neutral', and all other objections will be left to mysterious chance, as we can never be sure if that was the cause in the first place."

It's not so much unfalsifiable as it moves the goalposts according to an entirely materialist historical philosophy. And it drastically reduces the amount of useful metaphors science can give to the laymen (or for that matter, scientists not in the field of biology.)

That study on grief was interesting, to say the least. However, I take issue with a particular passage:

This may sound suspiciously high - could evolution really do such exact fine-tuning? - until you realize that this selection pressure was not only great enough to fine-tune parental grief, but, in fact, carve it out of existence from scratch in the first place.

What was proved was that intelligent, grown up Canadian humans have already formed a conception of the world that analyzes it effectively based on long-term knowledge of what those losses mean in the future. What is now required is the same study done with both lower and higher-IQ individuals of different races, or with teenagers. We've proven that white childless Canadians can analyze effectively in accordance with observed reality, not that actual grief among actual people follows that reality.

Selection pressure carved out parental grief from scratch in the first place????

I mean, seriously, folks.

By the way, it seems some of us around here aren't the only people who think that ev-psych is just supposed to be a seamless continuation of evolutionary theory generally, which is *supposed to explain the mind*. That's stated clearly in the post (presumably, by a picayune blogger) about the study on grief.

I know: Maybe more sophisticated evolutionary theorists like Richard Dawkins think God created the human mind, and the idea that non-personal forces are supposed to explain the origin of consciousness on evolutionary theory is just an urban legend invented by creationists.

Oh. Guess not.

MAR

Evolutionary theory, as incomplete as it may be, is infinitely better than ID, which boils down to boiler-plate skepticism combined with religious mysticism.
As simply everyone knows, credulity is much the better intellectual stance than skepticism!

@Tony, 1:00 P.M: Oh, dear me. Dear, dear me.

Ben A., just now getting back to your question: What would I think of "dog ev-psych"? Dogs aren't a good case for your purpose, because dogs are domestic animals and bred deliberately by humans. This affects both what dogs are today and what they are going to be tomorrow. Perhaps one could try to do some sort of "forward-looking" sociology of wolves! I'm sure there are naturalists who try. If one observed some sort of temperament drift in the wolves one might conjecture that it was related to, say, a change in environment. That would be mildly interesting though still fairly conjectural. There's a tradeoff here: When we don't control environment, we can't vary it deliberately so as to see what happens in terms of gradual changes in the animal. But by the same token, our observing animals in the wild also means that they are really breeding without our interference so that any "selection" that is taking place is not plain old human breeding selection.

Again, consider the difficulties in human sociology. Wolf "sociology" is going to be a lot more difficult and hence worthy of having its conclusions held more tentatively. Which leads me to indulge an impulse I've been restraining thus far: Tom Lehrer, "Sociology."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI

Steve,

I think you're being rather deliberately obtuse in this entry. The fact is, evolutionary psychology as actually practiced has very little to do with supposing that group differences may be related to different environmental histories, and quite a lot to do with giving incoherent reductive explanations for consciousness, the mind-body problem, morality, etc. The most recent example is the "study" that "found" that reason "evolved for" winning arguments instead of ascertaining truth. If the radical post-modernist implications of that incoherent argument gained mass appeal (which a casual perusal of the Internet reveals it has been doing) it would do far more harm to the public than accepting the truth of group differences would do good, seeing as how it undermines the whole idea of truth in the first place. I'm pretty certain that evo-psych books like Stephen Pinker's "How The Mind Works", with their blather about memes, are intended to give a reductive explanations of how the mind works, and that Dennett's attempts to explain intentionality are meant to explain intentionality, and so forth.

Additionally, it's hopelessly naive to expect that evo psych will get liberals to accept the reality of group differences. As I said previously, before you can even attempt to give an explanation sufficient to some phenomenon, you have to properly identify it. Since liberals don't accept the existence of group differences in the first place, of course they're not going to accept attempts to explain their origin. If they don't accept what they see in front of their faces with their own eyes, they're certainly not going to accept it because of some hypothesis about how it got there.

What they'll accept is what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is (incoherent) materialist "explanations" for the mind, morality, reason, truth, etc that tell them that they have no free will and so aren't responsible for their actions, that morality and truth are relative and can be redefined as they see fit, and that God is a figment of their imaginations who will never judge them. It's not surprising that it's these evo psych "findings", and not the more "conservative" ones, that make the news time and again.

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