"It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field."
May 13, 2020 11:07 AM Subscribe
"Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. 'Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?' describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem." [Gizmodo]
On the matching problem:
On the matching problem:
Evolutionary psychologists’ thought is that, for at least some of our behaviors, they believe that we have—dare I use this term—hard-wired cognitive structures that are operating in all of us contemporary human beings the same way they did for our ancestors on the savannas. The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring—the cognitive structure of the brain itself—is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn’t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance—that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors’ brains. The sameness in how our brains work is on account of genetic selection for particular modules that are still functional in our environment today. [Editor’s note: These “modules” refer to the idea that the brain can be divided up into discrete structures with specific functions.]PZ Myers's writeup on Pharyngula:
The matching problem is really the core issue that evolutionary psychologists have to show that they can meet: that there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors; that they’re working the same way then as now; and that these modules are working the same way because they are descended from the same functional lineage or causal lineage. But I don’t see any way that these charges can be answered.
I also appreciate this bit. One of the common insults that Evolutionary Psychologists deploy is that their critics believe that humans only evolved below the neck, which is nonsense. One can accept that the brain is an evolved organ without believing in the narrow, specific, and oddly improbable premises demanded by Evolutionary Psychologists.The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag:
[...]
Not that any of this will have any effect on EP at all — that’s a field that relies more on an emotional belief that they can study the past entirely by imposing their desired conclusions on weak data. Smith, on the other hand, has a strong understanding of logic and recognizes where these Evolutionary Psychologists have made a huge leap beyond what the data entails.
But the classic evopsych douchebag, like Miller, absolutely wants to believe that humans are still in thrall to the same psychological forces that shaped our behavior much earlier in Homo sapiens evolution. At the same time, he wants to allow for the idea that some people have obviously evolved to be smarter, like guys who donate DNA to eugenics projects.Men have always used 'Science' to explain why they're better than women:
Miller's work is a more erudite version of a lot of what you see in the pickup artist (PUA) and men's rights scenes. In both groups, the common sense belief is that sexuality is based on a very old game that isn't terribly different from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to an anthropologically inaccurate cave. Other kinds of human relationships aren't much better. I guess you could say that evopsych douchebags are the academic version of pickup artists. They throw you negs on Twitter, but only if you're a potential Ph.D. student.
Many ideas embraced by this ex-Google employee are based largely on the so-called conclusions of evolutionary psychology, a field premised on the idea that our psychological traits are the product of the same natural selection that shaped early human evolution. In practice, evolutionary psychology has been used to justify everything from rape to claims that certain groups of people are inherently more intelligent than others. It has also been criticized for shoddy methodology, ignoring cultural context, and “leaping to conclusions on inadequate evidence.” Evolutionary psychologists have tried to use their science to determine the best way to seduce women, which they think can be gamed out like Battleship.[Previously]
I think we have a special responsibility, when we say evolution made us that way, to recognize that people will read “innate” or “hardwired” as synonymous with evolution. We should be especially careful to not be making claims like these, which can have consequences.
Welp. I have a new academic crush on Dr. Smith now. The Gizmodo article notes that she's not on social media and that her husband is screening some of the comments since they're "not nice." And while I'm not surprised by the shitshow she probably unleashed, I really really really hope that her family is indeed as delightfully sensibly unbothered as the interview implies because that would be a wonderful way of owning the trolls.
Also, Damore just filed to have his lawsuit dismissed. While he probably got money out settling, it hopefully became clear he couldn't win a public spectacle trial, even with the backing of evo psych.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 11:31 AM on May 13, 2020 [15 favorites]
Welp. I have a new academic crush on Dr. Smith now. The Gizmodo article notes that she's not on social media and that her husband is screening some of the comments since they're "not nice." And while I'm not surprised by the shitshow she probably unleashed, I really really really hope that her family is indeed as delightfully sensibly unbothered as the interview implies because that would be a wonderful way of owning the trolls.
Also, Damore just filed to have his lawsuit dismissed. While he probably got money out settling, it hopefully became clear he couldn't win a public spectacle trial, even with the backing of evo psych.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 11:31 AM on May 13, 2020 [15 favorites]
The author had me at "In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound." Oh, glorious day.
To be fair, the problem with evolutionary psychology is perhaps not with the academics who attempt to use it to explain everything, but the marvelous appeal it seems to have to a certain kind of highly unevolved mind. :)
posted by Peach at 11:31 AM on May 13, 2020 [28 favorites]
To be fair, the problem with evolutionary psychology is perhaps not with the academics who attempt to use it to explain everything, but the marvelous appeal it seems to have to a certain kind of highly unevolved mind. :)
posted by Peach at 11:31 AM on May 13, 2020 [28 favorites]
Full text available from sci-hub here. You know, in case you don't have access to this journal.
posted by sciatrix at 11:34 AM on May 13, 2020 [29 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 11:34 AM on May 13, 2020 [29 favorites]
As an archaeologist, EvoPsych is one of my big peeves. It's a topic worth studying, but so, so much of it is circular, by being based in a very naive understanding of archaeological data. For example, the kinds of studies which suggest men are "better at spatial analysis" because they spent 100,000 years outdoors hunting distant, camouflaged three-dimensional prey while women tended the hearth (hence why women "gossip more on facebook"). Well, what evidence is there from archaeology that men hunted and women tended the hearth? Essentially, none: that's a comfortable "presentist" projection from a 1950s view of gender roles. So images like this one are taken as if they were photographs, and not projections, of gender roles for which there is little to no actual empirical evidence one way or the other.
EvoPsychologists seem peculiarly apt to slurp up archaeology in the least knowing way possible, presumably because they absolutely must have some sort of evidence for the long trajectory of human behaviour, or at least some sort of starting point for the evolutionary or selective forces they maintain have shaped out brains. When you unpack this evidence even minimally, much of their discipline is founded on gross misunderstanding and shallow interpretation of archaeological data. I'm sure they could do much better, but they would have to suck up a huge glass of humility and that doesn't seem to be how their brain modules are wired, lol.
posted by Rumple at 11:39 AM on May 13, 2020 [82 favorites]
EvoPsychologists seem peculiarly apt to slurp up archaeology in the least knowing way possible, presumably because they absolutely must have some sort of evidence for the long trajectory of human behaviour, or at least some sort of starting point for the evolutionary or selective forces they maintain have shaped out brains. When you unpack this evidence even minimally, much of their discipline is founded on gross misunderstanding and shallow interpretation of archaeological data. I'm sure they could do much better, but they would have to suck up a huge glass of humility and that doesn't seem to be how their brain modules are wired, lol.
posted by Rumple at 11:39 AM on May 13, 2020 [82 favorites]
Wonderful to hear that someone is criticizing this practice systemically. The few eco psych papers I reviewed during my biology grad school days did have incredible logic patterns--which made them attractive for an informal journal club! They would read like this:
"we surveyed 100 people for preferences, and then studiously ignored centuries of social science literature, including several major disciplines, basic public data like the national census, and personally avoided cocktail parties at several buildings on our own campus, to screen from our brains any theory about social or cultural impact that would give a more parsimonious answer. This was very difficult, because we continue to rely on certain aspects of anthropology and not others. Based on our preferences survey, [insert wacky conclusion]"
I think that Sociobiology, while more substantial, historically suffered greatly from the same disease, although not to the same degree. It is very hard to make anything but very basic conclusions, and it seemed then that you were really better off sticking to traditional animal behavior studies anyway. And then Joan Roughgarden, among many others, came along and radically expanded our thinking on those animal behavior studies with cultural theories!
The article mentions that Evo Psych spawned from Sociobiology, which makes sense. There was already some forced ignorance in that discipline. Evo Psych just seems to expand on the weaknesses of Sociobiology.
You don't have to burn books, if you can pretend they aren't there.
posted by eustatic at 12:02 PM on May 13, 2020 [22 favorites]
"we surveyed 100 people for preferences, and then studiously ignored centuries of social science literature, including several major disciplines, basic public data like the national census, and personally avoided cocktail parties at several buildings on our own campus, to screen from our brains any theory about social or cultural impact that would give a more parsimonious answer. This was very difficult, because we continue to rely on certain aspects of anthropology and not others. Based on our preferences survey, [insert wacky conclusion]"
I think that Sociobiology, while more substantial, historically suffered greatly from the same disease, although not to the same degree. It is very hard to make anything but very basic conclusions, and it seemed then that you were really better off sticking to traditional animal behavior studies anyway. And then Joan Roughgarden, among many others, came along and radically expanded our thinking on those animal behavior studies with cultural theories!
The article mentions that Evo Psych spawned from Sociobiology, which makes sense. There was already some forced ignorance in that discipline. Evo Psych just seems to expand on the weaknesses of Sociobiology.
You don't have to burn books, if you can pretend they aren't there.
posted by eustatic at 12:02 PM on May 13, 2020 [22 favorites]
Well, what evidence is there from archaeology that men hunted and women tended the hearth?
Also an archaeologist, and I've also always loved this assumption - because if women were the ones exclusively building kilns, refining ceramic recipes and figuring out the complexities and chemistry of cooking/baking/brewing in long, iterative processes, well, I guess they were the first scientists. But even suggesting that, typing that out, I can feel the armies of dudes suddenly going: "Wait, there's NO EVIDENCE that women did those things *exclusively*".
It's just so damn easy to use ancient humans as an excuse for anything. Once you notice how much people do it, it's kind of incredible. Mountains of random articles that claim "in caveman days, ancient man used to...". One of my favorites is some random venture capitalist, in reference to current trend of obsessively researching before buying something: "These feelings are biologically part of who we are. I call it the biology of wanting the best. Our ancestors a million years ago were programmed to wait for the best because it meant they were more likely to succeed."
posted by thebots at 12:29 PM on May 13, 2020 [39 favorites]
Also an archaeologist, and I've also always loved this assumption - because if women were the ones exclusively building kilns, refining ceramic recipes and figuring out the complexities and chemistry of cooking/baking/brewing in long, iterative processes, well, I guess they were the first scientists. But even suggesting that, typing that out, I can feel the armies of dudes suddenly going: "Wait, there's NO EVIDENCE that women did those things *exclusively*".
It's just so damn easy to use ancient humans as an excuse for anything. Once you notice how much people do it, it's kind of incredible. Mountains of random articles that claim "in caveman days, ancient man used to...". One of my favorites is some random venture capitalist, in reference to current trend of obsessively researching before buying something: "These feelings are biologically part of who we are. I call it the biology of wanting the best. Our ancestors a million years ago were programmed to wait for the best because it meant they were more likely to succeed."
posted by thebots at 12:29 PM on May 13, 2020 [39 favorites]
One response to the paper, from biological anthropologist Ed Hagen
https://grasshoppermouse.github.io/2020/01/21/is-evolutionary-psychology-impossible/
posted by Ayn Marx at 12:30 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
https://grasshoppermouse.github.io/2020/01/21/is-evolutionary-psychology-impossible/
posted by Ayn Marx at 12:30 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
A whole paper? Heidegger only needed a footnote to toss out physics.
posted by thelonius at 12:32 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 12:32 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
Wow, this is timely! I know her from years ago, and was just wondering the other day how she's been doing. Thank you for posting this!
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:36 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:36 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
It seems to me that this critique would also apply to other applications of evolutionary theory, and might be advanced by a creationist attacking evolutionary theory in general. If it were we would reject it. Instead, we (you) support this critique because it aligns with your political stance: evolutionary psychologists make regressive, right-wing arguments, and we (you) are generally progressive and left-wing. But it's still not a very good critique.
For example: evolutionary psychologists must show that "there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors". What does this mean? That evolutionary psychologists must be able to go back in time and bring us a caveman to test? Clearly not a standard we apply to other evolutionary theorists, who are (quite rightly) able to assume that the eye now is like the eye of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (say).
Though I might just be unable to parse the opaque academic language, and it is three decades since my undergraduate degree in Genetics! why yes, that is a minor claim to authority, smile.
posted by alasdair at 12:55 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
For example: evolutionary psychologists must show that "there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors". What does this mean? That evolutionary psychologists must be able to go back in time and bring us a caveman to test? Clearly not a standard we apply to other evolutionary theorists, who are (quite rightly) able to assume that the eye now is like the eye of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (say).
Though I might just be unable to parse the opaque academic language, and it is three decades since my undergraduate degree in Genetics! why yes, that is a minor claim to authority, smile.
posted by alasdair at 12:55 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
It seems to me that this critique would also apply to other applications of evolutionary theory, and might be advanced by a creationist attacking evolutionary theory in general. If it were we would reject it.
Correct on both counts.
Instead, we (you) support this critique because it aligns with your political stance: evolutionary psychologists make regressive, right-wing arguments, and we (you) are generally progressive and left-wing. But it's still not a very good critique.
Correct again. However, it is important to further assert that the theory of evolutionary in general is the birthplace of regressive, right-wing arguments:
posted by No Robots at 1:08 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
Correct on both counts.
Instead, we (you) support this critique because it aligns with your political stance: evolutionary psychologists make regressive, right-wing arguments, and we (you) are generally progressive and left-wing. But it's still not a very good critique.
Correct again. However, it is important to further assert that the theory of evolutionary in general is the birthplace of regressive, right-wing arguments:
‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start—‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.--Darwin / Adrian Desmond, James Moorep. xxiThe rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general. And where does that rejection leave us? In the hands of the creationists? Perhaps. Or perhaps it will force the development of a new approach to biology in which life is understood not as the interplay of random mutation, competition and speciation, but rather as an orderly and necessary system.
posted by No Robots at 1:08 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
What it is, is a polite way of saying "Before you claim that women like pink because it's the color of ripe berries, please check with a fashion historian who can tell you that until the 20th century, pink was the juvenile masculine color and blue was the juvenile feminine, on account pink was a young red (blood and vigor) and blue was serene and peaceful, the color of the Virgin Mary, and also check in with someone about how colors are gendered in non-Western cultures."
Evopsych starts from the assumption that our modern world reflects the prehistoric one, and works backwards from there, instead of starting with what we can reasonably know or state about early man (very little!) and trying to work forward to see what, if anything, carries through. She's not saying we need a real live cro magnon, but that someone ought to ask things like "is this behavior we're analyzing universal and consistent throughout history or is it located in a specific time and place?"
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 1:09 PM on May 13, 2020 [68 favorites]
Evopsych starts from the assumption that our modern world reflects the prehistoric one, and works backwards from there, instead of starting with what we can reasonably know or state about early man (very little!) and trying to work forward to see what, if anything, carries through. She's not saying we need a real live cro magnon, but that someone ought to ask things like "is this behavior we're analyzing universal and consistent throughout history or is it located in a specific time and place?"
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 1:09 PM on May 13, 2020 [68 favorites]
The author appears to address the difference in reasoning between evo psych and evo bio in a section near the end of the paper. I haven't finished reading it so I won't attempt to respond. I'd encourage others to read the paper before replying based only on the text in the OP. The full text is linked in this thread.
posted by muddgirl at 1:12 PM on May 13, 2020 [11 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 1:12 PM on May 13, 2020 [11 favorites]
Setting aside the troglodyte manifestations of this field, I'm genuinely curious to understand why methodologies usually applied in evolutionary biology don't play out the same way here. Can't we look at brain function in near cousins (chimps, etc), as well as more distant cousins, and draw some conclusions about our common ancestors? Is the issue that brain matter is soft tissue and so the fossil record is very scant at revealing evidence of ancestral behaviors? Does that matter if we just look across cousin-species?
posted by simra at 1:18 PM on May 13, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by simra at 1:18 PM on May 13, 2020 [2 favorites]
On the contrary, EP's appeal is enhanced by its right-wing flavors making it appealing to people who like that because it aligns with their political stance. What's not a good critique is telling people what they would believe in some alternate scenario. In fact that's highly insulting.
As I understand it, (and my own undergrad genetics class was some time ago also) the matching problem is potentially a problem with all evolutionary applications, but things like comparing humans and chimpanzees is a method for handling it -- common phenotypes associated with common genotypes among related populations is a sign their fitness landscape has been conserved! So EP don't need to find a caveman but they ought to find the psychological module equivalent of a chimpanzee eye, which I gather is way beyond current science's ability, hence the critique.
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general.
Again, this is a weird inverse of the actual situation: EP wants people to think this to try to boost their own cred. They're wrong.
posted by traveler_ at 1:23 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
As I understand it, (and my own undergrad genetics class was some time ago also) the matching problem is potentially a problem with all evolutionary applications, but things like comparing humans and chimpanzees is a method for handling it -- common phenotypes associated with common genotypes among related populations is a sign their fitness landscape has been conserved! So EP don't need to find a caveman but they ought to find the psychological module equivalent of a chimpanzee eye, which I gather is way beyond current science's ability, hence the critique.
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general.
Again, this is a weird inverse of the actual situation: EP wants people to think this to try to boost their own cred. They're wrong.
posted by traveler_ at 1:23 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
Evopsych starts from the assumption that our modern world reflects the prehistoric one, and works backwards from there
Exactly. A great deal of it seems like a just-so story to explain why a given status quo is not just awesome but inevitable.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:23 PM on May 13, 2020 [23 favorites]
Exactly. A great deal of it seems like a just-so story to explain why a given status quo is not just awesome but inevitable.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:23 PM on May 13, 2020 [23 favorites]
So to naively follow a bit of a chain of logic: evolution is accepted as a theory at almost the theory of gravity, it's the law. People are one result. Therefore if people have an attribute called psychology, it is in some way the result of evolution. So if Evolutionary Psychology is discredited, it's due to the fields approach to the science.
Or what rmd1023 posted rather less pretentiously.
(Now if each of us gave genetic samples, could our responses be correlated? :-)
posted by sammyo at 1:27 PM on May 13, 2020
Or what rmd1023 posted rather less pretentiously.
(Now if each of us gave genetic samples, could our responses be correlated? :-)
posted by sammyo at 1:27 PM on May 13, 2020
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general.
I...
I really don’t think this is true.
posted by nickmark at 1:28 PM on May 13, 2020 [43 favorites]
I...
I really don’t think this is true.
posted by nickmark at 1:28 PM on May 13, 2020 [43 favorites]
Though I might just be unable to parse the opaque academic language, and it is three decades since my undergraduate degree in Genetics! why yes, that is a minor claim to authority, smile.
I'm about four months from my PhD in Ecology, Evolution, and Animal Behaviour, so if we're waving ourdicks claims to authority around to measure, there's mine out there on the table for you.
I am extremely tired and crabby today, and looking at this paper is only making me more so: most of the critiques that this scholar is leveling are common critiques that come out of my field of evolutionary studies of animal behavior. We tend to produce a lot of evolutionary psychology criticisms. The arguments that Smith is making are painfully familiar; I have made them myself, and I have heard evolutionary biologists irritably making them for the decade I have been in this field. It does not matter. The conclusions are just too damn emotionally appealing for too many people, I guess.
I wish I could look at this new piece, which seems quite solid to me generally, and feel "Ah! A new argument! Surely that will shed light!" But no, my optimism is gone today, and it has left only exhaustion in its wake.
posted by sciatrix at 1:31 PM on May 13, 2020 [30 favorites]
I'm about four months from my PhD in Ecology, Evolution, and Animal Behaviour, so if we're waving our
I am extremely tired and crabby today, and looking at this paper is only making me more so: most of the critiques that this scholar is leveling are common critiques that come out of my field of evolutionary studies of animal behavior. We tend to produce a lot of evolutionary psychology criticisms. The arguments that Smith is making are painfully familiar; I have made them myself, and I have heard evolutionary biologists irritably making them for the decade I have been in this field. It does not matter. The conclusions are just too damn emotionally appealing for too many people, I guess.
I wish I could look at this new piece, which seems quite solid to me generally, and feel "Ah! A new argument! Surely that will shed light!" But no, my optimism is gone today, and it has left only exhaustion in its wake.
posted by sciatrix at 1:31 PM on May 13, 2020 [30 favorites]
I would have thought the article would be titled, "Why on earth are people still pretending evolutionary psychology is worthwhile?"
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:33 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:33 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
Can't we look at brain function in near cousins (chimps, etc), as well as more distant cousins, and draw some conclusions about our common ancestors?
Our ability to match brain functioning to recognizable psychological states is pretty much non-existent, as I understand it. Our understanding of the relationship between brain and mind is mostly guesswork.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:42 PM on May 13, 2020 [15 favorites]
Our ability to match brain functioning to recognizable psychological states is pretty much non-existent, as I understand it. Our understanding of the relationship between brain and mind is mostly guesswork.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:42 PM on May 13, 2020 [15 favorites]
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general.
I am not sure why this would make sense to anyone, but it does open up some interesting possibilities. Like, if the laws of thermodynamics were disproven in cartoon physics, would they be invalidated in regular physics? Does phrenology invalidate anatomy?
posted by snofoam at 1:53 PM on May 13, 2020 [23 favorites]
I am not sure why this would make sense to anyone, but it does open up some interesting possibilities. Like, if the laws of thermodynamics were disproven in cartoon physics, would they be invalidated in regular physics? Does phrenology invalidate anatomy?
posted by snofoam at 1:53 PM on May 13, 2020 [23 favorites]
evolution is accepted as a theory at almost the theory of gravity, it's the law.
The theory of gravity is not "law," it is a mathematical explanation of why gravity works the way it does, to the extent that we can measure and observe it. And while it is a very strong, well-supported theory, it is also not complete, in that there are phenomena which the current theory of gravity cannot explain, or which are explained by other theories in ways that seem to conflict with the theory of gravity. There is no progression in science from "theory" to "law," because scientific "laws" are not explanatory but descriptive. At some point, perhaps, new evidence, observations, and mathematics will be require a modification of the theory of gravity.
Similarly, the Darwinian theory of evolution is a way to explain the observable and observed fact that species change over time, the shared genetic heritage of most living things on earth, and the archaeological record.
if people have an attribute called psychology, it is in some way the result of evolution
Yes, in the sense that brain structures etc. are a result of biological evolutionary processes. Unless you want to assert that human psychology is strictly the result of biological development, with no influence from social structures, belief systems, etc., then maybe this argument would sort of work. But human psychology -- and human social structures, etc. -- and the transformations therein are not solely the result of physical processes.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:54 PM on May 13, 2020 [14 favorites]
The theory of gravity is not "law," it is a mathematical explanation of why gravity works the way it does, to the extent that we can measure and observe it. And while it is a very strong, well-supported theory, it is also not complete, in that there are phenomena which the current theory of gravity cannot explain, or which are explained by other theories in ways that seem to conflict with the theory of gravity. There is no progression in science from "theory" to "law," because scientific "laws" are not explanatory but descriptive. At some point, perhaps, new evidence, observations, and mathematics will be require a modification of the theory of gravity.
Similarly, the Darwinian theory of evolution is a way to explain the observable and observed fact that species change over time, the shared genetic heritage of most living things on earth, and the archaeological record.
if people have an attribute called psychology, it is in some way the result of evolution
Yes, in the sense that brain structures etc. are a result of biological evolutionary processes. Unless you want to assert that human psychology is strictly the result of biological development, with no influence from social structures, belief systems, etc., then maybe this argument would sort of work. But human psychology -- and human social structures, etc. -- and the transformations therein are not solely the result of physical processes.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:54 PM on May 13, 2020 [14 favorites]
They been pushing a lot of eugenics hidden as other stuff and the old fake racial supremacy shit onto the internets again recently. "prePrints" are flooding the world.
posted by Mrs Potato at 2:35 PM on May 13, 2020
posted by Mrs Potato at 2:35 PM on May 13, 2020
I'd encourage others to read the paper before replying based only on the text in the OP. The full text is linked in this thread.
Ancient experiences of leaping to kill prey during hunting have evolutionarily adapted men to comment without having RTFA; it’s encoded in the genes!
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:37 PM on May 13, 2020 [98 favorites]
Ancient experiences of leaping to kill prey during hunting have evolutionarily adapted men to comment without having RTFA; it’s encoded in the genes!
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:37 PM on May 13, 2020 [98 favorites]
I've read a lot of general biology and evolutionary biology over the past couple of decades, and I've finally come around to the idea that the general problem with most evolutionary psychology as it's done is that the question usually being asked is "which response is most human?"
I've come to think that this question is wrong-headed. It's like asking, "Which language is most human?"
We've obviously evolved to speak. We've obviously evolved to have complex impulses and behaviours. But did we evolve to speak a specific language? No, obviously not. So why do we think we evolved to carry out a specific set of impulses and behaviours?
Joseph Henrich and colleagues have done some work on the evolution of human behaviour from the perspective that the most interesting question isn't, "What's most human?", but, "What's the full range of human behaviour?" I suspect that's the direction which will be fruitful in the future. To take that approach, you have to be enough of an anthropologist to know where to look for interesting human behaviour.
Asking that question doesn't allow you to predict human behaviour, though, which I think is the pull of more traditional evolutionary psychology for both its practitioners and the PUA guys who latch on to it.
posted by clawsoon at 2:38 PM on May 13, 2020 [10 favorites]
I've come to think that this question is wrong-headed. It's like asking, "Which language is most human?"
We've obviously evolved to speak. We've obviously evolved to have complex impulses and behaviours. But did we evolve to speak a specific language? No, obviously not. So why do we think we evolved to carry out a specific set of impulses and behaviours?
Joseph Henrich and colleagues have done some work on the evolution of human behaviour from the perspective that the most interesting question isn't, "What's most human?", but, "What's the full range of human behaviour?" I suspect that's the direction which will be fruitful in the future. To take that approach, you have to be enough of an anthropologist to know where to look for interesting human behaviour.
Asking that question doesn't allow you to predict human behaviour, though, which I think is the pull of more traditional evolutionary psychology for both its practitioners and the PUA guys who latch on to it.
posted by clawsoon at 2:38 PM on May 13, 2020 [10 favorites]
dammit, this made me check up on everyone's least favourite ev psych blowhard. It was with some delight I realized I'd forgotten his name.
(he's still alive, btw, after the ill-advised Russian pseudo-medical trip.)
posted by scruss at 2:58 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
(he's still alive, btw, after the ill-advised Russian pseudo-medical trip.)
posted by scruss at 2:58 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
Ancient experiences of leaping to kill prey during hunting have evolutionarily adapted men to comment without having RTFA; it’s encoded in the genes!
Whereas women, who in traditional cultures usually butcher the prey, are particularly adept at dissecting arguments. Also, ancient bands of hunter-gatherers weren't operating in a homogeneous landscape. The negotiations over territory and hunting rights that hunting parties made when they encountered each other were encoded through ritual and tradition. And this is exactly what we see today with evo-psych figures relaying "just so" stories and making appeals to authority. This is the remarkable thing about evolutionary psychology: it works even when it's falsified.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:06 PM on May 13, 2020 [19 favorites]
Whereas women, who in traditional cultures usually butcher the prey, are particularly adept at dissecting arguments. Also, ancient bands of hunter-gatherers weren't operating in a homogeneous landscape. The negotiations over territory and hunting rights that hunting parties made when they encountered each other were encoded through ritual and tradition. And this is exactly what we see today with evo-psych figures relaying "just so" stories and making appeals to authority. This is the remarkable thing about evolutionary psychology: it works even when it's falsified.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:06 PM on May 13, 2020 [19 favorites]
I use the following story as an analogy for the limits of hindsight:
Imagine that you find yourself in the center of a thick jungle. You have a machete to clear a path, but you have no idea which way leads out, and which way leads to danger; you just know that you have to start moving.
You start cutting your way through. At any single moment, the direction you choose will be determined by any number of things: maybe one part looks a little thinner or thicker; maybe one direction has a slight downward slope; maybe you think you hear water, or someone's voice; maybe you think you hear a dangerous predator; etc. etc. ad infinitum.
Now let's say you've made your way out of the jungle, and you turn around and look at the path you cut. Even though there may be twists and turns, to anyone tracing your journey backwards, the path will seem far more directed, obvious, and necessary. Because the path already exists, it obscures many of the influences (and counter-influences) that preceded it, leaving evidence of only the more obvious, proximate causes, those visible in and immediately surrounding the now-existing path itself.
It also obscures any of the alternative choices at any single moment, because even the slightest alteration in direction could then change the next moment, and so on, creating both a path and an ending point potentially radically different from your position of observation.
This of course isn't a perfect analogy, as a more correct version would be that we have always been and always will be more-or-less lost in the jungle, so to quote Axl Rose, "BABY YOURE GONNA DIIIIIIIIE!"
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:07 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
Imagine that you find yourself in the center of a thick jungle. You have a machete to clear a path, but you have no idea which way leads out, and which way leads to danger; you just know that you have to start moving.
You start cutting your way through. At any single moment, the direction you choose will be determined by any number of things: maybe one part looks a little thinner or thicker; maybe one direction has a slight downward slope; maybe you think you hear water, or someone's voice; maybe you think you hear a dangerous predator; etc. etc. ad infinitum.
Now let's say you've made your way out of the jungle, and you turn around and look at the path you cut. Even though there may be twists and turns, to anyone tracing your journey backwards, the path will seem far more directed, obvious, and necessary. Because the path already exists, it obscures many of the influences (and counter-influences) that preceded it, leaving evidence of only the more obvious, proximate causes, those visible in and immediately surrounding the now-existing path itself.
It also obscures any of the alternative choices at any single moment, because even the slightest alteration in direction could then change the next moment, and so on, creating both a path and an ending point potentially radically different from your position of observation.
This of course isn't a perfect analogy, as a more correct version would be that we have always been and always will be more-or-less lost in the jungle, so to quote Axl Rose, "BABY YOURE GONNA DIIIIIIIIE!"
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:07 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general.
The question that the paper asks is whether selection pressures shaped our brains in specific ways or whether they shaped our brains to be a more general processing unit.
Both are possible. There are many examples of evolution creating super-specialized structures to optimize the exploitation of a highly specific situation. There are also many examples of evolution creating generalized structures which allow for the imperfect exploitation of many different situations.
Are our brains more like the tongue of an anteater or more like the hands of a raccoon?
What the paper proposes - a little provocatively, but usefully - is that evolutionary psychology as it's usually practised depends on the idea that the selection pressure shaped our brains in highly specific ways, that evolution was optimizing when it made us. If evolution was instead generalizing when it made us, many of the questions that evolutionary psychology tries to answer become unanswerable.
"What will this clock be doing one day after you turn it on?" is a lot easier to answer than, "What will this general purpose computer be doing one day after you turn it on?" The second question is provably impossible to answer. Are our brains more like a clock or more like a computer?
posted by clawsoon at 3:18 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
The question that the paper asks is whether selection pressures shaped our brains in specific ways or whether they shaped our brains to be a more general processing unit.
Both are possible. There are many examples of evolution creating super-specialized structures to optimize the exploitation of a highly specific situation. There are also many examples of evolution creating generalized structures which allow for the imperfect exploitation of many different situations.
Are our brains more like the tongue of an anteater or more like the hands of a raccoon?
What the paper proposes - a little provocatively, but usefully - is that evolutionary psychology as it's usually practised depends on the idea that the selection pressure shaped our brains in highly specific ways, that evolution was optimizing when it made us. If evolution was instead generalizing when it made us, many of the questions that evolutionary psychology tries to answer become unanswerable.
"What will this clock be doing one day after you turn it on?" is a lot easier to answer than, "What will this general purpose computer be doing one day after you turn it on?" The second question is provably impossible to answer. Are our brains more like a clock or more like a computer?
posted by clawsoon at 3:18 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
re: Hagen
A whole paper? Heidegger only needed a footnote to toss out physics.
posted by mikelieman at 3:45 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
A whole paper? Heidegger only needed a footnote to toss out physics.
This leaves the impression that because (in her view) EP hypotheses cannot be tested, they are therefore false, and that because (in her view), a domain-general learning system can be tested it is more likely to be true.If EP hypothesis cannot be tested, they are not even science, so true or false is only of passing interest.
posted by mikelieman at 3:45 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
I wonder if the authors of the study she used as a whipping post:
posted by clawsoon at 4:09 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
Due to the costs associated with being cuckolded, men’s infidelity detection system may have been designed to overestimate the likelihood of their partner’s future infidelity....ever heard of partible paternity. Was there a genetic defect in the "infidelity detection systems" of men in ~70% of pre-contact Amazonian cultures?
posted by clawsoon at 4:09 PM on May 13, 2020 [9 favorites]
I'd encourage others to read the paper before replying based only on the text in the OP. The full text is linked in this thread.
Where is it? I can only find the Abstract and the $39.95 link to the pdf. I would love to read it
posted by rtimmel at 4:17 PM on May 13, 2020
Where is it? I can only find the Abstract and the $39.95 link to the pdf. I would love to read it
posted by rtimmel at 4:17 PM on May 13, 2020
rtimmel, check out the link from sciatrix above.
Thanks!
posted by rtimmel at 4:20 PM on May 13, 2020
Thanks!
posted by rtimmel at 4:20 PM on May 13, 2020
The question that the paper asks is whether selection pressures shaped our brains in specific ways or whether they shaped our brains to be a more general processing unit.
I take that back. The paper is more about how and whether we could tell which one happened. That makes me a little less sympathetic to its argument. I don't think we have answered that question yet - and I agree with her that evolutionary psychologists are much too eager to assume that we have - but to say that it's impossible is a bold prediction.
Are there any examples in animals where we've been able to link an animal species' behaviour to its evolutionary history and to a specific brain module? What about an example where we've been able to show that an animal's behaviour is the result of generalized processing, and that general processing was a result of selection? What kind of experiments were needed in both cases?
The study of the behaviour of domesticated animals seems like it would shed the most interesting light on this part of her argument:
posted by clawsoon at 5:45 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
I take that back. The paper is more about how and whether we could tell which one happened. That makes me a little less sympathetic to its argument. I don't think we have answered that question yet - and I agree with her that evolutionary psychologists are much too eager to assume that we have - but to say that it's impossible is a bold prediction.
Are there any examples in animals where we've been able to link an animal species' behaviour to its evolutionary history and to a specific brain module? What about an example where we've been able to show that an animal's behaviour is the result of generalized processing, and that general processing was a result of selection? What kind of experiments were needed in both cases?
The study of the behaviour of domesticated animals seems like it would shed the most interesting light on this part of her argument:
When biologists give ultimate explanations of nonhuman animal behavior it is generally the case that those animals are still living in, or have been living in until very recently, an environment that is similar to the environment where the behavior evolved. In such cases, it is trivially true that the behavior under consideration as well as the proximate mechanisms underpinning that behavior are identical to a corresponding behavior and the mechanisms that underpinned it in the EEA. We can see this in the case of vervet monkeys. Whatever the nature of the selection process, it is reasonable to infer that because producing and consuming alarm calls enhances vervet fitness in the present by helping them to avoid predation, it was selected for this effect in the past. In contrast, applying this principle in the human case is problematic, because the circumstances of contemporary human life are, in many important respects, quite different from those in which our species evolved. This makes extrapolation from the present to the past particularly challenging. To succeed, ultimate explanations of human behavior must draw on some other method for establishing the existence of strong vertical homologies.An example I can think of off the top of my head is the foxes that were domesticated in the Soviet Union. As far as I know, the best explanation we've got so far for their much gentler and friendlier behaviour is neoteny. How would you even classify that in terms of this schema, though? Did they evolve a "friendliness module"? Or did they extend an already existing "friendliness module" from childhood into adulthood? Or did they extend a general more-positive-about-everything tendency from childhood into adulthood? Or...?
posted by clawsoon at 5:45 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
Is it wrong to say that we do not have any specific knowledge as to how the brain/mind actually works? How are my memories stored? How to do I access them? How do I know 2+2=4? Etc. I found it really interesting that both of the articles linked here use computers as a metaphor for the brain. Computation. Algorithm. Etc. I feel that in many ways our paucity of knowledge about the mind is being filled with our actual knowledge about how computers work. As if they are the same thing. Module? Could it be more obvious? It seems to me that these scientists are mistaking their models, analogies, metaphors, etc. for reality. A reality of which we see it’s actions but have no clue on how they actually occur.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:49 PM on May 13, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 5:49 PM on May 13, 2020 [7 favorites]
It’s like we’re in a cave, looking at shadows of objects on the wall, but the actual objects which are casting the shadows are blocked from our view.
posted by nickmark at 5:59 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
posted by nickmark at 5:59 PM on May 13, 2020 [13 favorites]
njohnson23: I feel that in many ways our paucity of knowledge about the mind is being filled with our actual knowledge about how computers work.
Someone once pointed out that we always explain the brain in terms of the most advanced technology of the time. When hydraulics were cutting edge, we talked about our brains as being like plumbing.
posted by clawsoon at 6:04 PM on May 13, 2020 [17 favorites]
Someone once pointed out that we always explain the brain in terms of the most advanced technology of the time. When hydraulics were cutting edge, we talked about our brains as being like plumbing.
posted by clawsoon at 6:04 PM on May 13, 2020 [17 favorites]
A modest proposal: We take a bunch of toddlers who've been raised just enough to know how to eat / drink, toss them on an island, leave them for a few decades and see what happens. All Lord of the Flies / The Blue Lagoon style but with much less pre-programmed cultural baggage. Then we might be able to tell whether the psychology is specific or general.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:27 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by zengargoyle at 7:27 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
Reading a couple of recent review papers, it seems we've been able to experimentally determine that various animal species use learning instead of innate programming to figure out the what, when, where, how, and who of mating. ("Why" doesn't seem to come up.) In some species the learning is biased (you have to at least look vaguely like a damselfly), while in others it appears to be completely untethered (like the birds which, when hand-raised, will grow up to fuck fingers).
Is there any ethical experiment which would allow us to determine where humans lie on the fixed-behaviour vs. looks-like-a-damselfly vs. finger-fucking spectrum?
posted by clawsoon at 8:16 PM on May 13, 2020
Is there any ethical experiment which would allow us to determine where humans lie on the fixed-behaviour vs. looks-like-a-damselfly vs. finger-fucking spectrum?
posted by clawsoon at 8:16 PM on May 13, 2020
I take that back. The paper is more about how and whether we could tell which one happened. That makes me a little less sympathetic to its argument. I don't think we have answered that question yet - and I agree with her that evolutionary psychologists are much too eager to assume that we have - but to say that it's impossible is a bold prediction.
I'm still digesting and need to reread a few times, but I think that what she is arguing is that, even if we concede that our psychological architecture is modularized, and even if we concede that these modules are inheritable, Evolutionary Psychology can't prove that the module which causes Behavior A in modern humans is the same module that caused Behavior A in ancient humans.
posted by muddgirl at 8:21 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
I'm still digesting and need to reread a few times, but I think that what she is arguing is that, even if we concede that our psychological architecture is modularized, and even if we concede that these modules are inheritable, Evolutionary Psychology can't prove that the module which causes Behavior A in modern humans is the same module that caused Behavior A in ancient humans.
posted by muddgirl at 8:21 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
Well, there's shoe fetishists. In evolutionary scales, we've been wearing shoes for a very short time, and fashion changes even faster, so I don't think that's genetically ingrained.
posted by RobotHero at 8:25 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by RobotHero at 8:25 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]
We take a bunch of toddlers who've been raised just enough to know how to eat / drink, toss them on an island, leave them for a few decades and see what happens. All Lord of the Flies / The Blue Lagoon style but with much less pre-programmed cultural baggage.
It wouldn't work at all, thankfully. The first few years of life are precisely when our brains are most shaped by the cultural baggage around us.
posted by howfar at 10:50 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
It wouldn't work at all, thankfully. The first few years of life are precisely when our brains are most shaped by the cultural baggage around us.
posted by howfar at 10:50 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
One response to the paper, from biological anthropologist Ed Hagen
I notice this response couldn't even get halfway through the first paragraph without a "well, actually".
posted by eviemath at 11:08 PM on May 13, 2020 [8 favorites]
I notice this response couldn't even get halfway through the first paragraph without a "well, actually".
posted by eviemath at 11:08 PM on May 13, 2020 [8 favorites]
This is the remarkable thing about evolutionary psychology: it works even when it's falsified.
I don't really know what counts as evo-psych these days. I think the general idea that brains work the way they do in part because of evolutionary pressures is plausible on the face of it. I also think it is fairly uncontroversial that physical manipulations of the brain can affect the mind. Putting this together, it seems reasonable to surmise that in so far as evolutionary pressures have shaped the physical brain, and in so far as the physical brain determines our mental makeup, then evolutionary pressures can have some impact on our mental makeup, and I think that idea can be helpful in gaining a better understanding of our unwarranted biases, prejudices, and tendencies to violence, with the aim of modulating them.
However the lingering impression I have from my admittedly limited exposure to evo-psych thinking is rather the opposite. Quite a few people seem committed to evo-psych not because it might help avoid the pitfalls of pride, hatred, anger, and fear, but because it provides a justification for cruelty, intolerance, and self-interest, embellished by the authority of Science. There can be a gleeful cynicism about the whole thing, almost a kind of exhilaration at having found an excuse to celebrate the worst in themselves and others. Which, fine, I mean, the realization that you can be a willfully, culpably shitty person, even to revel in that for a while, can be a step on the way towards becoming a better person.
Where it gets frankly unbearable, though, is when they maintain that's the only possible logical conclusion for clear-eyed, unflinching, rational minds such as theirs. Because if what they're saying has any force to it, that is, if survival on the savannah really has conditioned the human mind to the extent they say it does, then how on earth did they escape its influence to become such clear-eyed, unflinchingly rational thinkers? The savannah must have been positively teeming with evolutionary psychologists.
posted by dmh at 2:23 AM on May 14, 2020 [17 favorites]
I don't really know what counts as evo-psych these days. I think the general idea that brains work the way they do in part because of evolutionary pressures is plausible on the face of it. I also think it is fairly uncontroversial that physical manipulations of the brain can affect the mind. Putting this together, it seems reasonable to surmise that in so far as evolutionary pressures have shaped the physical brain, and in so far as the physical brain determines our mental makeup, then evolutionary pressures can have some impact on our mental makeup, and I think that idea can be helpful in gaining a better understanding of our unwarranted biases, prejudices, and tendencies to violence, with the aim of modulating them.
However the lingering impression I have from my admittedly limited exposure to evo-psych thinking is rather the opposite. Quite a few people seem committed to evo-psych not because it might help avoid the pitfalls of pride, hatred, anger, and fear, but because it provides a justification for cruelty, intolerance, and self-interest, embellished by the authority of Science. There can be a gleeful cynicism about the whole thing, almost a kind of exhilaration at having found an excuse to celebrate the worst in themselves and others. Which, fine, I mean, the realization that you can be a willfully, culpably shitty person, even to revel in that for a while, can be a step on the way towards becoming a better person.
Where it gets frankly unbearable, though, is when they maintain that's the only possible logical conclusion for clear-eyed, unflinching, rational minds such as theirs. Because if what they're saying has any force to it, that is, if survival on the savannah really has conditioned the human mind to the extent they say it does, then how on earth did they escape its influence to become such clear-eyed, unflinchingly rational thinkers? The savannah must have been positively teeming with evolutionary psychologists.
posted by dmh at 2:23 AM on May 14, 2020 [17 favorites]
dmh: Because if what they're saying has any force to it, that is, if survival on the savannah really has conditioned the human mind to the extent they say it does, then how on earth did they escape its influence to become such clear-eyed, unflinchingly rational thinkers? The savannah must have been positively teeming with evolutionary psychologists.
LOL, that's great! Reminds me of this quote from Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex:
LOL, that's great! Reminds me of this quote from Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex:
Consider, for example, how University of Glasgow psychologist Gijsbert Stoet explains the persistence of the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields:posted by clawsoon at 4:55 AM on May 14, 2020 [15 favorites]People are often guided by their unconscious desires. In the stone age, it was useful for men to be hunters and women to look after babies, and nature has helped by encoding some of these skills in the hardware of our brain. That still influences how we think today.I have to say that none of the many mathematicians and scientists I know do their research in a way that brings to mind a caveman chasing a bush pig with a spear, but of course things may be done differently in Glasgow.
If science was a (poorly paid, low-prestige) feminised profession like nursing or childcare, they'd justify it by saying that performing experiments is cognitively like picking berries or something.
posted by acb at 5:27 AM on May 14, 2020 [16 favorites]
posted by acb at 5:27 AM on May 14, 2020 [16 favorites]
If science was a (poorly paid, low-prestige) feminised profession like nursing or childcare, they'd justify it by saying that performing experiments is cognitively like picking berries or something.
Most of these guys are evo-psych 'theorists' with very little experimental credibility so they probably would make that claim.
posted by srboisvert at 9:28 AM on May 14, 2020
Most of these guys are evo-psych 'theorists' with very little experimental credibility so they probably would make that claim.
posted by srboisvert at 9:28 AM on May 14, 2020
I've been spending all day trying to come up with an evo-psych Just So Story to explain the origin of evolutionary psychologists. There's gotta be a great one out there.
posted by clawsoon at 9:38 AM on May 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 9:38 AM on May 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
The rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general. And where does that rejection leave us? In the hands of the creationists? Perhaps. Or perhaps it will force the development of a new approach to biology in which life is understood not as the interplay of random mutation, competition and speciation, but rather as an orderly and necessary system.
I think Darwin was not wrong about evolution, but his British class and education background meant he took his assumptions about society and overplayed them on top of his findings - and he saw competition as the driving force because that's how society was supposedly organized.
Piotr Kropotkin wrote a lot about evolution also and expanded the view of what drove behaviour in nature. Link.
I think Darwin was not wrong about evolution, but his British class and education background meant he took his assumptions about society and overplayed them on top of his findings - and he saw competition as the driving force because that's how society was supposedly organized.
Piotr Kropotkin wrote a lot about evolution also and expanded the view of what drove behaviour in nature. Link.
Peter's theory of mutual aid came to him in the most unlikely of places. To follow in the footsteps of his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, when he was twenty years old, Kropotkin began a series of expeditions in Siberia. At that point, he was already an avowed evolutionary biologist—one of the few in Russia—and a great admirer of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Fifty thousand miles later, and five years the wiser, Kropotkin left Siberia a Darwinian. But he was a very different kind of evolutionary biologist: a new species of sort. For in Siberia, Kropotkin had not found what he had expected to find. Though still in its early gestation period when Kropotkin began his journey through Siberia, evolutionary theory of the day advanced that the natural world was a brutal place: competition was the driving force. And so, in the icy wilderness, Peter expected to witness nature red in tooth and claw. He searched for it. He studied flocks of migrating birds and mammals, fish schools, and insect societiesposted by Space Coyote at 10:36 AM on May 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
Space Coyote: I think Darwin was not wrong about evolution, but his British class and education background meant he took his assumptions about society and overplayed them on top of his findings - and he saw competition as the driving force because that's how society was supposedly organized.
That makes me think of the Lord of the Flies story from the other day - how different the upper-class British version of the story was from the real-life Tongan event.
posted by clawsoon at 12:10 PM on May 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
That makes me think of the Lord of the Flies story from the other day - how different the upper-class British version of the story was from the real-life Tongan event.
posted by clawsoon at 12:10 PM on May 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
That makes me think of the Lord of the Flies story from the other day - how different the upper-class British version of the story was from the real-life Tongan event.
I feel a lot of things are explained by the idea that many famous thinkers have wrongly generalised from their experiences of British public schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the provincially-minded society it created.
posted by plonkee at 12:45 PM on May 14, 2020 [14 favorites]
I feel a lot of things are explained by the idea that many famous thinkers have wrongly generalised from their experiences of British public schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the provincially-minded society it created.
posted by plonkee at 12:45 PM on May 14, 2020 [14 favorites]
njohnson23: I feel that in many ways our paucity of knowledge about the mind is being filled with our actual knowledge about how computers work.
Someone once pointed out that we always explain the brain in terms of the most advanced technology of the time. When hydraulics were cutting edge, we talked about our brains as being like plumbing.
Except that with computers it's largely the other way around. We used brain functions as metaphors when naming various components and functions of computers. The word "memory" applied to computers is a metaphor based on whatever our brains are doing when we remember things. Even the word "computer" meant "a person that does math" before it meant "a machine that, in some analogous way to how a person does it, does math." Plumbing wasn't invented as an attempt to do what brains do.
posted by straight at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
Someone once pointed out that we always explain the brain in terms of the most advanced technology of the time. When hydraulics were cutting edge, we talked about our brains as being like plumbing.
Except that with computers it's largely the other way around. We used brain functions as metaphors when naming various components and functions of computers. The word "memory" applied to computers is a metaphor based on whatever our brains are doing when we remember things. Even the word "computer" meant "a person that does math" before it meant "a machine that, in some analogous way to how a person does it, does math." Plumbing wasn't invented as an attempt to do what brains do.
posted by straight at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
Evopsych can definitely explain the behavior of one species... the sealion.
posted by benzenedream at 1:52 PM on May 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 1:52 PM on May 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
For example: evolutionary psychologists must show that "there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors". What does this mean? That evolutionary psychologists must be able to go back in time and bring us a caveman to test? Clearly not a standard we apply to other evolutionary theorists, who are (quite rightly) able to assume that the eye now is like the eye of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (say).
But isn't the point that one assumption is much more well-founded than the other? There are good reasons to believe the eyeball function of our common ancestors was similar to ours, but much less good reason to believe the gendered behavior of our common ancestors was similar to the modern behaviors evolutionary psychologists are pointing at?
posted by straight at 1:57 PM on May 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
But isn't the point that one assumption is much more well-founded than the other? There are good reasons to believe the eyeball function of our common ancestors was similar to ours, but much less good reason to believe the gendered behavior of our common ancestors was similar to the modern behaviors evolutionary psychologists are pointing at?
posted by straight at 1:57 PM on May 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
Re: Darwin and competition: There's Darwin, there's the modern understanding of evolution in biology, and there's the popular misunderstanding of evolution, and they are kind of three different things.
In popular misunderstanding, evolution is directed, toward greater "fitness". In popular misunderstanding, all traits that a species exhibits must provide some specifically positive evolutionary adaptation. There's an understanding that what may work within one ecosystem could be harmful within another, so the popular misunderstanding does allow for the possibility that the "fitness" of traits is very context-dependent. But there's still the idea that evolutionary pressures end up shaping random mutation in specifically adaptive directions - the Invisible Hand of Darwin, as it were. I haven't read much actually published-in-scientific-journals evo psych, but the more hobbyist or pop sci versions I've run across have uniformly exhibited this misunderstanding of evolution.
In contrast, the modern understanding of evolution in biology is that species evolve only in the "direction" of not dying off. That can mean some truly adaptive traits evolve, but it can also mean that completely random but not specifically maladaptive traits also evolve. Manatees are a good example of the latter: they are not "fit" by basically any measures that anyone has come up with. But they also happen to have no natural predators (unless you count boat motors as a natural predator, I guess), so they haven't died off, so we have manatees. Outrageous mating plumage on birds would be another example - peacock feather certainly don't help them with any survival tasks, so there's no "fitness" reason why peahens should be attracted to more and more extravagant displays in peafowl mating. But they're not disadvantageous enough to have killed off the peacocks with more brilliant displays before their prime mating years. So we have birds with absurd and pointless plumage. Think, here, of Conway's Game of Life: in some cases, order arises as an emergent property; but in some cases it doesn't. Evolution allows both types of outcomes in this analogy, just not an outcome that would crash the computer running an instance of Conway's Game of Life. In other analogies: actual evolution is not a search algorithm that picks one (at least locally) optimal direction; it's not even a reality tv competition where someone (i.e. some trait from the initially random collection of possible traits) for sure gets eliminated each round. Everyone (trait) can stay on the show (in the gene pool for a species/population) from week to week, so long as they don't specifically screw up badly enough.
(* There are a couple details arising from the role of randomness in all of this that complicate the picture: traits can randomly fail to get a foothold within a population's gene pool, even if they aren't specifically harmful. And there can be thresholds, where if there are two different options for a trait that is neither particularly helpful nor particularly harmful, if prevalence of one version happens to randomly drop below the threshold, then just due to how probabilities work, that trait will almost certainly die out from the population. People tend to want to think of that threshold effect as the one version of a trait "outcompeting" the other version, but that would imply that there is something non-random about the outcome, which is not supported by the math or the biology in many cases.)
Darwin himself seems to have been somewhere in between the two. Certainly at the time mathematical probability theory was not sufficiently developed that he would have understood randomness, emergent properties, or threshold effects the way we do nowadays, and so would have more likely reached for other explanations to attempt to observe what he saw. But Darwin also seemed to have a bit better understanding of the non-directedness of evolutionary processes than the modern popular misunderstanding.
posted by eviemath at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2020 [25 favorites]
In popular misunderstanding, evolution is directed, toward greater "fitness". In popular misunderstanding, all traits that a species exhibits must provide some specifically positive evolutionary adaptation. There's an understanding that what may work within one ecosystem could be harmful within another, so the popular misunderstanding does allow for the possibility that the "fitness" of traits is very context-dependent. But there's still the idea that evolutionary pressures end up shaping random mutation in specifically adaptive directions - the Invisible Hand of Darwin, as it were. I haven't read much actually published-in-scientific-journals evo psych, but the more hobbyist or pop sci versions I've run across have uniformly exhibited this misunderstanding of evolution.
In contrast, the modern understanding of evolution in biology is that species evolve only in the "direction" of not dying off. That can mean some truly adaptive traits evolve, but it can also mean that completely random but not specifically maladaptive traits also evolve. Manatees are a good example of the latter: they are not "fit" by basically any measures that anyone has come up with. But they also happen to have no natural predators (unless you count boat motors as a natural predator, I guess), so they haven't died off, so we have manatees. Outrageous mating plumage on birds would be another example - peacock feather certainly don't help them with any survival tasks, so there's no "fitness" reason why peahens should be attracted to more and more extravagant displays in peafowl mating. But they're not disadvantageous enough to have killed off the peacocks with more brilliant displays before their prime mating years. So we have birds with absurd and pointless plumage. Think, here, of Conway's Game of Life: in some cases, order arises as an emergent property; but in some cases it doesn't. Evolution allows both types of outcomes in this analogy, just not an outcome that would crash the computer running an instance of Conway's Game of Life. In other analogies: actual evolution is not a search algorithm that picks one (at least locally) optimal direction; it's not even a reality tv competition where someone (i.e. some trait from the initially random collection of possible traits) for sure gets eliminated each round. Everyone (trait) can stay on the show (in the gene pool for a species/population) from week to week, so long as they don't specifically screw up badly enough.
(* There are a couple details arising from the role of randomness in all of this that complicate the picture: traits can randomly fail to get a foothold within a population's gene pool, even if they aren't specifically harmful. And there can be thresholds, where if there are two different options for a trait that is neither particularly helpful nor particularly harmful, if prevalence of one version happens to randomly drop below the threshold, then just due to how probabilities work, that trait will almost certainly die out from the population. People tend to want to think of that threshold effect as the one version of a trait "outcompeting" the other version, but that would imply that there is something non-random about the outcome, which is not supported by the math or the biology in many cases.)
Darwin himself seems to have been somewhere in between the two. Certainly at the time mathematical probability theory was not sufficiently developed that he would have understood randomness, emergent properties, or threshold effects the way we do nowadays, and so would have more likely reached for other explanations to attempt to observe what he saw. But Darwin also seemed to have a bit better understanding of the non-directedness of evolutionary processes than the modern popular misunderstanding.
posted by eviemath at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2020 [25 favorites]
To add to eviemath's great comments, not only can disadvantageous and/or "irrelevant" mutations occur at random in the course of a species' evolution, but extremely advantageous mutations can occur as the random consequence of an adaptation.
To put things just slightly differently, evo-psych seems to be underwritten by a fundamentally teleological understanding of evolution: that its purpose was to generate intelligent human life in its current form, rather than a truly random and infinitely complex process.
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:23 PM on May 14, 2020 [9 favorites]
To put things just slightly differently, evo-psych seems to be underwritten by a fundamentally teleological understanding of evolution: that its purpose was to generate intelligent human life in its current form, rather than a truly random and infinitely complex process.
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:23 PM on May 14, 2020 [9 favorites]
straight: There are good reasons to believe the eyeball function of our common ancestors was similar to ours, but much less good reason to believe the gendered behavior of our common ancestors was similar to the modern behaviors evolutionary psychologists are pointing at?
That's a fair point, and one of the things we're finding as more data on mating behaviour comes in from more species is that it's a lot more complicated in other animals, too, than it is in theory. You might not end up agreeing with Joan Roughgarden's conclusions, but the impressive array of sexual and gender behaviour data she has brought together should at least get you thinking interesting thoughts about evo-psych.
posted by clawsoon at 3:37 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
That's a fair point, and one of the things we're finding as more data on mating behaviour comes in from more species is that it's a lot more complicated in other animals, too, than it is in theory. You might not end up agreeing with Joan Roughgarden's conclusions, but the impressive array of sexual and gender behaviour data she has brought together should at least get you thinking interesting thoughts about evo-psych.
posted by clawsoon at 3:37 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
straight, here is a review paper I was reading the other day that doesn't make any comment on "evo-psych, good or bad?", but does have a bunch of fascinating examples in it that I think you might find interesting. Evo-psych theories tend to be so focused on "what's the optimal solution that evolution could've come up with" that I don't recall a single evolutionary psychologist predicting that we'd find an animal with the strategy of "mate with random animals until you figure out what works." The field tends to be so focused on optimality that it misses possibility. Evolution doesn't miss possibility, though, and that creates one of the disconnects between evolutionary psychology and actual evolution.
posted by clawsoon at 4:53 PM on May 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 4:53 PM on May 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
I feel like evopsych is most quickly and efficiently dismissed with one simple phrase:
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:20 AM on May 15, 2020 [4 favorites]
Not everything is selective!They will grind their axe against the stone of selective advantage until all that is left is a rusty nub, insisting Marx-like that history foretold! But no serious evolutionary biologist in the world believes that absolutely every trait is selected for, and evopsych refuses to accept that.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:20 AM on May 15, 2020 [4 favorites]
Maybe toddler was a bit too much. I'm not a parent and am not clued in on child development. From our living things cousins there's a range from laying eggs and walking away and letting the kids fend for themselves (spray and pray) up to us humans who take 18 years before we kick kids out of the house to fend for themselves. Just keep dialing that slider down until you get a viable sample where they all just don't die real quick. Do it all The Truman Show like, find a nice safe tropical island, recreate it in the lab, wean the kids and teach by showing just enough to eat bugs. Toss them on the island, if they all die, repeat the experiment and raise them a little bit longer. At some point you'll eventually reach The Lord of the Flies / The Blue Lagoon / raised by wolves stage where you have a bunch of kids and can sit back and watch what happens.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:53 PM on May 15, 2020
posted by zengargoyle at 10:53 PM on May 15, 2020
Just keep dialing that slider down until you get a viable sample where they all just don't die real quick.
Bluntly, this is impossible. If you don't touch infants and talk to them and provide contact, they straight up die; and by then you've already contaminated them with your cultural assumptions. Cultural gender rules start getting picked up by eighteen months. Even if you could successfully manage to rear human children to self sufficiency without interaction from adults, the sheer trauma and isolation creates its own problems with the developing brain. Consider for example case studies of feral children whose social models are nonhuman or stunted; such children usually have such massive linguistic and cognitive issues that they make awfully problematic "blank slates."
The essential problem is that nature and nurture are both required to produce a functioning human. Without nurture, you have a blastocyst or a vial of DNA, which clearly isn't very helpful when it comes to measuring a phenotype. Without nature of course you have an idea of a human created in theory. Disentangling the relative contributions of culture and genetics therefore is a complicated process, and you really have to understand how cultural and historical norms shape and develop the human mind before you can even try to begin. Which is notably absent from the theory or experimental design of most evolutionary psychology.
posted by sciatrix at 5:55 AM on May 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
Bluntly, this is impossible. If you don't touch infants and talk to them and provide contact, they straight up die; and by then you've already contaminated them with your cultural assumptions. Cultural gender rules start getting picked up by eighteen months. Even if you could successfully manage to rear human children to self sufficiency without interaction from adults, the sheer trauma and isolation creates its own problems with the developing brain. Consider for example case studies of feral children whose social models are nonhuman or stunted; such children usually have such massive linguistic and cognitive issues that they make awfully problematic "blank slates."
The essential problem is that nature and nurture are both required to produce a functioning human. Without nurture, you have a blastocyst or a vial of DNA, which clearly isn't very helpful when it comes to measuring a phenotype. Without nature of course you have an idea of a human created in theory. Disentangling the relative contributions of culture and genetics therefore is a complicated process, and you really have to understand how cultural and historical norms shape and develop the human mind before you can even try to begin. Which is notably absent from the theory or experimental design of most evolutionary psychology.
posted by sciatrix at 5:55 AM on May 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
sciatrix, it's a thought experiment. Imagine we're an advanced species sending a generational ship to a new colony and have created the same environment inside the automated ship. One day something happens and everybody over 12 months just dies, weird virus or something. The ship continues on providing the thousands of under 12 month olds. Do they survive? Hell, we can maybe figure out Chomky and whether language is wired in or not. We end up on the next ship hitting the planet that the kids were automagically beamed down to a couple centuries ago and find human DNA, but really, they're aliens.
Just like if it's 100 degrees on one coast and 20 degrees on the other coast, somewhere inbetween on any pathy you must cross every degree between 100 and 20 if you want to stick to the smooth continuity and not go into a bit of an instant quantum discontinuity... There must be a point where both parents can just fall over dead and not having done anything but provide basic eat/drink/sleep where the kids cross into survive or die. Whether they would be Human is the question that is being asked.
But seriously, this is just a la-la thought experiment of what would happen if all of the sudden everybody over X age just keeled over and died? Would the under X age survive and thrive or not. If we stick to the continuous there must be a minimum point where it is viable. We already know the maximum point, old people die all the time and the world moves on. The old times, like 30 or 40 was ancient and they died and the world moves on. Somewhere there must be a minimum age that the parent's die yet the kids live on.
The other hand leads to the conclusion that there's a minimum amount of time that a parent has to teach life and culture to a child and if that's not met they'll die or are not human. Which is true at least for the nursing / must eat but not poisonous things sort of thing. But the whole point of the thought experiment is to determing what is innate vs what is learned. The argument that you can is moot because you obviously can spend 18 years raising and setting them free to thrive down to (eww, nevermind) a newborn will die really soon. Answering the question about humanity is the purpose of the experiment.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:00 AM on May 16, 2020
Just like if it's 100 degrees on one coast and 20 degrees on the other coast, somewhere inbetween on any pathy you must cross every degree between 100 and 20 if you want to stick to the smooth continuity and not go into a bit of an instant quantum discontinuity... There must be a point where both parents can just fall over dead and not having done anything but provide basic eat/drink/sleep where the kids cross into survive or die. Whether they would be Human is the question that is being asked.
But seriously, this is just a la-la thought experiment of what would happen if all of the sudden everybody over X age just keeled over and died? Would the under X age survive and thrive or not. If we stick to the continuous there must be a minimum point where it is viable. We already know the maximum point, old people die all the time and the world moves on. The old times, like 30 or 40 was ancient and they died and the world moves on. Somewhere there must be a minimum age that the parent's die yet the kids live on.
The other hand leads to the conclusion that there's a minimum amount of time that a parent has to teach life and culture to a child and if that's not met they'll die or are not human. Which is true at least for the nursing / must eat but not poisonous things sort of thing. But the whole point of the thought experiment is to determing what is innate vs what is learned. The argument that you can is moot because you obviously can spend 18 years raising and setting them free to thrive down to (eww, nevermind) a newborn will die really soon. Answering the question about humanity is the purpose of the experiment.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:00 AM on May 16, 2020
There was that study of kittens raised in horizontally striped rooms that didn't develop their ability to see vertical stripes. Even something that seems as fundamental as vision develops as the result of experience.
Though the horizontally striped room is really artificial. The odds from an evolutionary viewpoint favour being raised in a very similar environment to the one they'll live in as an adult. So there would be no point to evolve hard-wired visual abilities that can be developed through training on their environment.
For something to evolve as hard wiring, it has to be common enough for a long enough time to be selected for, but also not something so omnipresent that it can be relied on as training data.
The availability of older humans whose behaviour children can emulate is omnipresent. That we have to twist into knots to think of a scenario where that wouldn't happen shows how that's a reliable constant in our evolutionary history. So a huge part of our intellectual development could rely on that, just like kitten's vision relies on there being a mixture of vertical and horizontal things.
posted by RobotHero at 9:04 AM on May 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Though the horizontally striped room is really artificial. The odds from an evolutionary viewpoint favour being raised in a very similar environment to the one they'll live in as an adult. So there would be no point to evolve hard-wired visual abilities that can be developed through training on their environment.
For something to evolve as hard wiring, it has to be common enough for a long enough time to be selected for, but also not something so omnipresent that it can be relied on as training data.
The availability of older humans whose behaviour children can emulate is omnipresent. That we have to twist into knots to think of a scenario where that wouldn't happen shows how that's a reliable constant in our evolutionary history. So a huge part of our intellectual development could rely on that, just like kitten's vision relies on there being a mixture of vertical and horizontal things.
posted by RobotHero at 9:04 AM on May 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
zengargoyle: The ship continues on providing the thousands of under 12 month olds.
And that's where the new example falls apart. :-) The ship would have to be programmed to take care of kids, and cultural knowledge would inevitably end up in that programming.
I think you need to send out a few million ships with randomized programming. (Especially if you want to answer, say, the Chomsky question.)
But the whole point of the thought experiment is to determing what is innate vs what is learned.
I've started to think of what's innate as being like a quantum wave before it collapses, and what's learned as being like a quantum particle after collapse. What's innate is the potential to create and participate in any one of thousands or billions of cultures and languages. Is that potential a combinatorial result of Chomskian switches, or is it a smoother spectrum? I don't know, but it would be interesting to find out, and maybe the million-ship version of your experiment would help.
posted by clawsoon at 1:30 PM on May 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
And that's where the new example falls apart. :-) The ship would have to be programmed to take care of kids, and cultural knowledge would inevitably end up in that programming.
I think you need to send out a few million ships with randomized programming. (Especially if you want to answer, say, the Chomsky question.)
But the whole point of the thought experiment is to determing what is innate vs what is learned.
I've started to think of what's innate as being like a quantum wave before it collapses, and what's learned as being like a quantum particle after collapse. What's innate is the potential to create and participate in any one of thousands or billions of cultures and languages. Is that potential a combinatorial result of Chomskian switches, or is it a smoother spectrum? I don't know, but it would be interesting to find out, and maybe the million-ship version of your experiment would help.
posted by clawsoon at 1:30 PM on May 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Imagine a spherical infant, yeah? I get that you're proposing a thought experiment in an attempt to better understand an empirical problem. I am telling you that this thought experiment will still bleed culture in, because it's impossible to produce a functioning human in isolation, and I am pointing out that we have extensive empirical evidence to demonstrate this. Models advance our understanding of the world only when they are not so abstracted that they fail to reflect reality; past that point, you're just writing science fiction every bit as fantastical as any High Fantasy epic.
posted by sciatrix at 1:38 PM on May 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 1:38 PM on May 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
It seems like when I read about an evo-psych theory being confirmed down to the mathematical details in some species, that species is almost always an ant species. In reality that's probably because altruism in ants has inspired scientists interested in behaviour to study ants more than any other species, but I'd like to offer an alternate half-baked hypothesis: Maybe matching the mathematical predictions - knowing to sacrifice yourself for two siblings or eight cousins, that sort of thing - is expensive.
Maybe it's expensive because it takes many generations to create the mutations required to achieve evo-psych perfection and many communities and subspecies to select for those mutations. Maybe it's expensive because it takes a lot of energy within an individual to maintain those mathematically perfect traits.
Maybe it has happened most often in ants because they've had 100,000,000 generations with 1,000,000,000,000,000 individuals in most of them, and because their success has meant that they're well-fed compared to many other animals. Maybe with 1000 times more generations and 100 million times as many individuals and communities as we've had through most of human evolution - and an earth big enough to hold all those people and allow them to become reproductively isolated - we'd end up with psychology better matching the theory.
Since we haven't had the numbers to reach evo-psych perfection, maybe a bunch of our psychology is more-or-less accidental, or a collection of imperfect heuristics (like the "mate randomly until you find what works for you" of some damselflies, which is a not-inaccurate summary of my own love life) that have worked well enough to keep us alive so far.
This hypothesis is probably wrong, and probably not even original, but it was fun to think about.
posted by clawsoon at 1:52 PM on May 16, 2020
Maybe it's expensive because it takes many generations to create the mutations required to achieve evo-psych perfection and many communities and subspecies to select for those mutations. Maybe it's expensive because it takes a lot of energy within an individual to maintain those mathematically perfect traits.
Maybe it has happened most often in ants because they've had 100,000,000 generations with 1,000,000,000,000,000 individuals in most of them, and because their success has meant that they're well-fed compared to many other animals. Maybe with 1000 times more generations and 100 million times as many individuals and communities as we've had through most of human evolution - and an earth big enough to hold all those people and allow them to become reproductively isolated - we'd end up with psychology better matching the theory.
Since we haven't had the numbers to reach evo-psych perfection, maybe a bunch of our psychology is more-or-less accidental, or a collection of imperfect heuristics (like the "mate randomly until you find what works for you" of some damselflies, which is a not-inaccurate summary of my own love life) that have worked well enough to keep us alive so far.
This hypothesis is probably wrong, and probably not even original, but it was fun to think about.
posted by clawsoon at 1:52 PM on May 16, 2020
That's not really how mathematical moding works, no.
posted by eviemath at 9:54 PM on May 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 9:54 PM on May 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
But the whole point of the thought experiment is to determing what is innate vs what is learned.
There is simply no such distinction or dichotomy. Genes, from the moment of conception, always exist and express in an environment. No phenotype, physical or mental, emerges in the isolation you seem to be imagining. It's not a weighing scale with "nature" on one side and "nurture" on the other; it's a system of interactions, in which no element has significance, impact or, when you get down to it, existence of any sort except by virtue of its relationship with everything else.
posted by howfar at 6:16 AM on May 18, 2020 [5 favorites]
There is simply no such distinction or dichotomy. Genes, from the moment of conception, always exist and express in an environment. No phenotype, physical or mental, emerges in the isolation you seem to be imagining. It's not a weighing scale with "nature" on one side and "nurture" on the other; it's a system of interactions, in which no element has significance, impact or, when you get down to it, existence of any sort except by virtue of its relationship with everything else.
posted by howfar at 6:16 AM on May 18, 2020 [5 favorites]
Maybe with 1000 times more generations and 100 million times as many individuals and communities as we've had through most of human evolution - and an earth big enough to hold all those people and allow them to become reproductively isolated - we'd end up with psychology better matching the theory.
The theory of evolution is preposterous from a mathematics perspective, heaping improbability upon improbability.
Biology needs a solid foundation in mathematics. The starting point cannot be randomly occurring error. Rather, it must be on the understanding of biologic processes as driven by the avoidance of error. This means approaching biology as systematic. Just as the embryo follows a necessary course of development, so does the whole of the biosphere. There is nothing magic in this, just the same kind of necessity that drives all other physical processes. This means that human psychology is also determined. This is the position of Spinoza, who developed psychology on the basis of the human mind as a “spiritual automaton,” responding in a determined way to stimuli. This outlook is repellent to many people, who want to see in nature a ground for freedom through theories like quantum physics and random mutation.
posted by No Robots at 10:53 AM on May 18, 2020
The theory of evolution is preposterous from a mathematics perspective, heaping improbability upon improbability.
If each of these is one in a million, then all these multiplied creates a statistical impossibility masquerading as the driving force behind biology. No appeal to “deep time” can salvage this. It makes a thousand monkeys on a thousand computers producing Shakespeare seem like a sure bet.
- Is there a mutation?
- Is it beneficial?
- Is it transmissible?
- Does it operate in concert with other mutations to create an expressed trait?
- Is it selected?
Biology needs a solid foundation in mathematics. The starting point cannot be randomly occurring error. Rather, it must be on the understanding of biologic processes as driven by the avoidance of error. This means approaching biology as systematic. Just as the embryo follows a necessary course of development, so does the whole of the biosphere. There is nothing magic in this, just the same kind of necessity that drives all other physical processes. This means that human psychology is also determined. This is the position of Spinoza, who developed psychology on the basis of the human mind as a “spiritual automaton,” responding in a determined way to stimuli. This outlook is repellent to many people, who want to see in nature a ground for freedom through theories like quantum physics and random mutation.
posted by No Robots at 10:53 AM on May 18, 2020
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'" - Douglas Adams
posted by howfar at 3:01 PM on May 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by howfar at 3:01 PM on May 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
Possibly relevant interview with Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. Transcript here.
posted by howfar at 3:29 PM on May 18, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by howfar at 3:29 PM on May 18, 2020 [1 favorite]
The theory of evolution is preposterous from a mathematics perspective, heaping improbability upon improbability.
...
The starting point cannot be randomly occurring error.
Not at all! In fact, probability theory (a large branch of mathematics) helps us to understand that very, very tiny probabilities add up to something significant when there are enough of them. And there are a *lot* of random mutations - mutations are occuring in your cells and my cells as we type or read this! Mostly they get corrected by other cellular machinery. But you get mutations passed on through sexual reproduction because male organisms produce a *lot* of sperm. Mostly they don't end up contributing to viable new organisms. You see more mutations in asexually reproducing organisms like bacteria because they have fewer error correction mechanisms, so those mutations stick around long enough for human scientists to observe them. There are a lot of error correction mechanisms in nature at all levels - cellular to ecosystem. Perhaps my previous comment misleadingly implied that a higher success/survival rate for random mutations. The point I was trying to make is that evolution occurs through culling harmful errors, not through promoting helpful errors, however. Maybe this is also what you mean by "driven by the avoidance of error", but it is relevant that the errors occur regardless, they just don't get a chance to propagate.
(* Due to different molecular structure of the different DNA/RNA bases, particularities of the three-base encoding (codon) system for translating DNA or RNA into proteins, and a whole bunch of other factors like these, mutations are not what is called "uniformly" random in the sense of having equal probability of mutation of any base at any location within a DNA or RNA strand. Instead there's a probability distribution that weights the frequency or likelihood of mutations of given bases at given locations. That still falls well within the purview of mathematical probability theory, however: it is still random in the sense of being not deterministic; though describing mutations as probabilistic rather than random would be a little more accurate.)
posted by eviemath at 6:23 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]
...
The starting point cannot be randomly occurring error.
Not at all! In fact, probability theory (a large branch of mathematics) helps us to understand that very, very tiny probabilities add up to something significant when there are enough of them. And there are a *lot* of random mutations - mutations are occuring in your cells and my cells as we type or read this! Mostly they get corrected by other cellular machinery. But you get mutations passed on through sexual reproduction because male organisms produce a *lot* of sperm. Mostly they don't end up contributing to viable new organisms. You see more mutations in asexually reproducing organisms like bacteria because they have fewer error correction mechanisms, so those mutations stick around long enough for human scientists to observe them. There are a lot of error correction mechanisms in nature at all levels - cellular to ecosystem. Perhaps my previous comment misleadingly implied that a higher success/survival rate for random mutations. The point I was trying to make is that evolution occurs through culling harmful errors, not through promoting helpful errors, however. Maybe this is also what you mean by "driven by the avoidance of error", but it is relevant that the errors occur regardless, they just don't get a chance to propagate.
(* Due to different molecular structure of the different DNA/RNA bases, particularities of the three-base encoding (codon) system for translating DNA or RNA into proteins, and a whole bunch of other factors like these, mutations are not what is called "uniformly" random in the sense of having equal probability of mutation of any base at any location within a DNA or RNA strand. Instead there's a probability distribution that weights the frequency or likelihood of mutations of given bases at given locations. That still falls well within the purview of mathematical probability theory, however: it is still random in the sense of being not deterministic; though describing mutations as probabilistic rather than random would be a little more accurate.)
posted by eviemath at 6:23 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]
Just as the embryo follows a necessary course of development, so does the whole of the biosphere. There is nothing magic in this, just the same kind of necessity that drives all other physical processes.
How do you imagine the universe came up with the embryo's "necessary course of development"?
posted by AceRock at 7:41 AM on May 20, 2020
How do you imagine the universe came up with the embryo's "necessary course of development"?
posted by AceRock at 7:41 AM on May 20, 2020
How do you imagine the universe came up with the embryo's "necessary course of development"?
The same way it came up with all processes: the eternal and necessary order of things.
posted by No Robots at 7:51 AM on May 20, 2020
The same way it came up with all processes: the eternal and necessary order of things.
posted by No Robots at 7:51 AM on May 20, 2020
Mod note: No Robots, you're getting into that place again of arguing from your idiosyncratic view of biology, evolution, etc and it ends up confusing people and derailing discussions, and I'm going to ask you to drop it, in this thread. If you or others want to discuss the details of your view that's ok but please find another venue, such as putting it up on your own blog.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:33 AM on May 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:33 AM on May 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
clawsoon: I've been spending all day trying to come up with an evo-psych Just So Story to explain the origin of evolutionary psychologists. There's gotta be a great one out there.
Well, actually, because human beings spent thousands of years without understanding logic or the scientific method, the rhetorical use of fallacious arguments and unfalsifiable claims is an adaptive strategy for pedantic nerds to gain social status, and therefore access to the mating pool.
well, that's the theory at least. however, there is little evidence that this strategy has ever been successful in all of human history.
posted by thedamnbees at 10:47 AM on May 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
Well, actually, because human beings spent thousands of years without understanding logic or the scientific method, the rhetorical use of fallacious arguments and unfalsifiable claims is an adaptive strategy for pedantic nerds to gain social status, and therefore access to the mating pool.
well, that's the theory at least. however, there is little evidence that this strategy has ever been successful in all of human history.
posted by thedamnbees at 10:47 AM on May 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
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