That sort of information [i.e. facts about “human nature”] can only be found by ordinary empirical research, and ordinary empirical research doesn’t need evolutionary psychology for anything else than suggesting interesting hypotheses.
Amen. Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists. It amazes me how readily laymen are fooled by this nonsense.
Of course we evolved, and of course our adaptations are a result of natural selection. But that doesn’t help us to know about ourselves unless we know in detail what the selective environment was, and what kinds of heritable variation was present in our gene pool. And we don’t know those things. So why are we so seduced by invented stories about these things?
I sometimes think that we are tempted to draw too much significance from the Darwinian account of our origins, because it replaced the Biblical account of our origin and that account, if it were true, would have all kinds of significance. Just as the natural sciences tend to suffer from “physics envy”, I suspect that the humanities all have a bad case of “Scripture envy”. We expect our origin stories to be significant, and we can not accept the significance of anything unless it comes attached to an origin story.
I disagree with this comment, but I think the score of −5 is far too harsh. That’s spam/nonsense/troll territory. While I would not put this above 0, on account of sentences like
It amazes me how readily laymen are fooled by this nonsense
nor would I put it below −2, since after all it also contains this:
Of course we evolved, and of course our adaptations are a result of natural selection. But that doesn’t help us to know about ourselves unless we know in detail what the selective environment was, and what kinds of heritable variation was present in our gene pool.
The opposition of Gould, Lewontin, and the Roses needs no citation—you can easily find it by Googling. Jerry Coyne is an outspoken critic - . Larry Moran even more so. This is a fairly gentle explanation of what is wrong with evolutionary psych from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology.
But even more telling was my total inability to Google up any citations at all in which more prominent evolutionary biologists (Dawkins, Doug Futuyma, the late John Maynard Smith, etc) say anything nice about evolutionary psychology. In case you didn’t notice, that is a counter-challenge. Please provide a citation showing that any eminent biologist considers evolutionary psychology to be good science.
The Blank Slate is … a stylish piece of work. I won’t say it is better than The Language Instinct or How the Mind Works, but it is as good—which is very high praise indeed. What a superb thinker and writer he is: what a role model to young scientists. And how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science, while remaining in person the best sort of liberal. Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him.
Yes, Dawkins doesn’t mention evolutionary psychology at all, but he praises three books by an author, only one of which is generally considered a work of evolutionary psychology. Of course H. Allen Orr’s review of The Blank Slate was quite critical, for all of the same reasons being discussed here. My challenge stands: cite a biologist praising (or even defending) evolutionary psychology as science.
Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist; it’s his métier. I don’t know on what grounds you say that “only one” of the three books mentioned is considered a work of evolutionary psychology (I don’t even know which one of the three you mean! -- I’m guessing How The Mind Works?); but in any case, given Pinker’s reputation for advocating evolutionary psychology, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Dawkins would have praised Pinker in those terms if he (Dawkins) shared your view that the subject is pseudoscience. The quote strongly implies that Dawkins holds a view of evolutionary psychology that is drastically different from yours, which I don’t think you anticipated. Update!
No, I meant Blank Slate as the one of three which is ev.psych. I haven’t read How the Mind Works but assumed from the title that it is into the mechanism of mind rather than its evolutionary origin. I read most of The Language Instinct and formed the impression that it too was mostly about mechanism rather than origins. But I will take your word for it (and Tim’s word) that I was wrong.
“In this extraordinary book, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit, clarity, and verve that earned The Language Instinct, worldwide critical acclaim and awards from major scientific societies.”
Similar blurb from “The Language Instinct”:
“With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
The theory not only challenges convention wisdom about language itself (especially from the self-appointed “experts” who claim to be safeguarding the language but who understand it less well than a typical teenager). It is part of a whole new vision of the human mind: not a general-purpose computer, but a collection of instincts adapted to solving evolutionarily significant problems—the mind as a Swiss Army knife.”
I agree that evolutionary psychology is not well-regarded by biologists in general, but Dawkins is an exception to this trend. He’s even praised one of the most obviously sloppy practitioners (Satoshi Kanazawa.) Dennet, as a fellow adaptationist (though no biologist per se), is in a similar camp.
I don’t have a copy to check, but from what I can remember Dawkins was careful to say that what he was doing is not real science but merely a counter to a hypothetical theist argument along the lines of “If God doesn’t exist, then where do our ideas of God and morality come from?” That is, his claims were no stronger than “It is plausible that it might have happened this way.”
In any case, I have admitted I was wrong about Dawkins. He now seems to me to be a moderate supporter of the ev.psych enterprise, rather than, as I had believed, someone who cringed but kept his mouth shut rather than alienate fellow “Darwinists”.
I was pretty amazed at how Dawkins pussy-footed around his opponents in “The God Delusion”. His claims seemed pretty mild—along the lines of “it is OK to be an atheist”.
He discusses “the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology” directly—on page 208:
“The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths’ celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility.”
Yes, but what does this have to do with evolutionary psychology? The wiki article on Wilson never mentions evolutionary psychology. When I Google for “Wilson evolutionary psychology”, I find this complaint that Wilson doesn’t like “evolutionary psychology” even though the author wants to claim Wilson as the founder of the discipline.
“Today, my only complaint is that Wilson has never really embraced the word usage of “evolutionary psychology” and prefers that we consider it nothing more than “human sociobiology”.”
Sociobiology came first—evolutionary psychology is a more modern offshoot that only deals with human universals and mostly ignores human culture.
I read this a while back but have been putting off writing about it while I thought about it (and until I reread at least parts of it). Some parts I think are mistaken and some need more work, but it is mostly an interesting critique of Evolutionary Psychology.
The hardest to follow, and where I think the most potential benefit lies, is in Chapter 4 on modularity of minds. One big problem for evolutionary psychology is its claim for “massive modularity” versus the well established plasticity of minds at the neural level, and that all memory and mental function relies completely on the neural plasticity.
I read that, and many other criticisms, before I bought the book. Some of the criticisms are accurate, others miss, and most there is no real way to decide rationally either way. As for most of the criticisms from the EvoPsych direction, they are of the 3 chapters on specific adaptation claims that I haven’t read, I am more interested in the basis, and especially as I pointed out above the conflict between evo-psyc and neural plasticity which I don’t think even this paper addresses adequately (and the others mostly or entirely ignore). I’m not going to respond any more right now, like I wrote above I need to think through it a bit more.
I haven’t read Adapting Minds, but I’ve seen responses to it by evolutionary psychologists. You can find a bunch of them on Cosmides’ and Tooby’s website
After what might seem like a reasonable review of the mate preferences literature, Buller concludes that evolutionary psychologists are mistaken in their claims of a universal male preference for relatively young women as mates and a universal female preference for high status men as mates. Male mating preferences, Buller argues, although sometimes containing a preference for young women, are far more complicated. We agree with this conclusion, but not because he demolishes the empirical evidence, or because his theoretical acumen is sharper than the many evolutionary psychologists who have written on this issue. Instead, we agree because the “alternative” he proposes is essentially the reigning consensus among evolutionary psychologists. He fails to understand that evolutionary psychologists also believe that people in different situations will behave differently. For instance, college aged fraternity boys and elderly widowers face different circumstances and are at different life-history stages; no one would expect them to have identical mates. Regarding the female preference for high status males, Buller goes even further, arguing that it is in fact non-existent—an artifact of skewed samples and mating preferences for similar others. In this conclusion, he is simply wrong, and we present evidence explaining why below. Indeed, much of the evidence we will cite is in papers he cites during his criticism, except that he repeatedly misconstrues the findings along the way.
...
Buller’s arguments to the contrary have been shown to be false, superfluous, or a slight variant on the consensus of evolutionary psychologists. Throughout this response we have relied mainly on data and theories that were published prior to Buller’s book. Most of this work was available in papers he himself cites or was published by researchers whose work he is criticizing. Theories of shifting strategies
have always been part of evolutionary psychologists’ theories. Buller has created a straw man: He implies that evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that each sex has a single-minded focus on only one characteristic of potential mates—youth or status—regardless of other factors. In reality, evolutionary psychologists have always included multiple preferences in their theories of mate choice (see Buss’ textbook, 2004). He suggests that homogamy is a potent force in mating and that it explains many empirical phenomena for both sexes. This isn’t new or an alternative: Over a decade ago, Kenrick and Keefe (1992) incorporated similarity preferences into their evolutionary model. Buller’s one original hypothesis, the age-adjusted homogamy hypothesis, fails to convincingly account for any previously unexplained data.
Another negative review from Machery and Barrett concluded:
Buller has failed to mount a successful challenge to evolutionary psychology. Most of his critiques of the theoretical commitments
of evolutionary psychology miss the mark. Some misrepresent the literature; others are fallacious, drawing untenable conclusions from admittedly uncontroversial premises. His attacks against the empirical findings
are similarly erroneous. Most important, if Buller were right, there would
remain little place for a science at the intersection of psychology and
evolutionary biology. If, as he claims, Buller actually endorses evolutionary
approaches to human behavior, but simply wants to raise the standards
of the field, his book, alas, fails to do so.
The arguments of Buller’s critics seem well-reasoned and well-cited, though someone who has read his book would have to confirm that they are fair to him.
Has anyone from evolutionary biology proper weighed in with a critique of Buller? Even Buller’s critics admit that the book was well received generally in the academic press.
Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
I personally have nothing against the term “Human Nature”. But I think it is easy to reconstruct Buller’s meaning here. Our “nature” has clearly evolved; evolution takes place (in part) as a result of variation in a population; evolution of our “nature” is still taking place; hence there is still variation in the “nature” of the human population; hence the whole concept that the species has an essential “Human Nature” is flawed. We are diverse.
I’m not sure I would want to call that kind of word chopping “clueless”. But I would point out that the diversity in human nature is the result of the last 150,000 years or so of our evolution, whereas our shared evolutionary history (creating an “essence” of human nature) spans a period roughly 40 times as long.
I’m guessing that most laypeople here identify Ev Psych with the sort of explanations offered in Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. Are those the kinds of explanations that you consider to be pseudoscience?
I haven’t read Blank Slate. What little I remember of the fraction I read of How the Mind Works made the case for a materialistic and reductionist account of the Mind, and pointed out that the Human Mind evolved by natural selection. I am in complete agreement on both points—those viewpoints did not originate with Evolutionary Psychology, and EP does not have the sole responsibility for defending them.
So, since I don’t know the explanations you are talking about, I can’t say for sure they are pseudo-science. But I do know of a demarcation criterion. Did Pinker suggest how his explanations could be tested by experiment? Did he report the results of experiments? If not, then he was either doing pseudo-science or philosophy. Sorry, I don’t have a demarcation criterion to distinguish those two. But, if someone says they are doing philosophy, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt.
But that doesn’t help us to know about ourselves unless we know in detail
what the selective environment was, and what kinds of heritable variation
was present in our gene pool. And we don’t know those things. So why
are we so seduced by invented stories about these things?”
Hang on: we can’t understand adaptations—unless there are fossils?!?
What about molecular residues? What about current utility? What about current variation? There is a considerable quantity of evidence relating to these issues lying around—even without fossils.
Re: “Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists.”
It’s a real science—just one where we would like more data—and most science is like that. Neanderthal resurrection should provide another data point someday.
It’s a real science—just one where we would like more data.
Ah, yes. And that is why, every summer, when teaching duties are completed, the practitioners of evolutionary psych and their graduate students head out into the field to collect more data!
And Neanderthal resurrection will tell us next to nothing, since we still will have no idea what selective pressures our ancestors faced or what pressures Neanderthal ancestors faced. To say nothing of the difficulty in assessing the differences between
Neanderthal psychology and H. sapiens psychology. And even if this weren’t a problem, we would still have only two data points to work with.
There’s chimps and bonobos—and other primates. That is quite a few “data points” - considering the mountain of information that can be obtained from each of them.
Amen. Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists. It amazes me how readily laymen are fooled by this nonsense. Of course we evolved, and of course our adaptations are a result of natural selection. But that doesn’t help us to know about ourselves unless we know in detail what the selective environment was, and what kinds of heritable variation was present in our gene pool. And we don’t know those things. So why are we so seduced by invented stories about these things?
I sometimes think that we are tempted to draw too much significance from the Darwinian account of our origins, because it replaced the Biblical account of our origin and that account, if it were true, would have all kinds of significance. Just as the natural sciences tend to suffer from “physics envy”, I suspect that the humanities all have a bad case of “Scripture envy”. We expect our origin stories to be significant, and we can not accept the significance of anything unless it comes attached to an origin story.
I disagree with this comment, but I think the score of −5 is far too harsh. That’s spam/nonsense/troll territory. While I would not put this above 0, on account of sentences like
nor would I put it below −2, since after all it also contains this:
Thx. I’m up to −4 now. :)
Yeah, I guess I deserve that.
Citation needed.
The opposition of Gould, Lewontin, and the Roses needs no citation—you can easily find it by Googling. Jerry Coyne is an outspoken critic - . Larry Moran even more so. This is a fairly gentle explanation of what is wrong with evolutionary psych from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology.
But even more telling was my total inability to Google up any citations at all in which more prominent evolutionary biologists (Dawkins, Doug Futuyma, the late John Maynard Smith, etc) say anything nice about evolutionary psychology. In case you didn’t notice, that is a counter-challenge. Please provide a citation showing that any eminent biologist considers evolutionary psychology to be good science.
Dawkins on Pinker:
Yes, Dawkins doesn’t mention evolutionary psychology at all, but he praises three books by an author, only one of which is generally considered a work of evolutionary psychology. Of course H. Allen Orr’s review of The Blank Slate was quite critical, for all of the same reasons being discussed here. My challenge stands: cite a biologist praising (or even defending) evolutionary psychology as science.
Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist; it’s his métier. I don’t know on what grounds you say that “only one” of the three books mentioned is considered a work of evolutionary psychology (I don’t even know which one of the three you mean! -- I’m guessing How The Mind Works?); but in any case, given Pinker’s reputation for advocating evolutionary psychology, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Dawkins would have praised Pinker in those terms if he (Dawkins) shared your view that the subject is pseudoscience. The quote strongly implies that Dawkins holds a view of evolutionary psychology that is drastically different from yours, which I don’t think you anticipated. Update!
No, I meant Blank Slate as the one of three which is ev.psych. I haven’t read How the Mind Works but assumed from the title that it is into the mechanism of mind rather than its evolutionary origin. I read most of The Language Instinct and formed the impression that it too was mostly about mechanism rather than origins. But I will take your word for it (and Tim’s word) that I was wrong.
Updated.
Back cover blurb from “How the Mind Works”:
“In this extraordinary book, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit, clarity, and verve that earned The Language Instinct, worldwide critical acclaim and awards from major scientific societies.”
Similar blurb from “The Language Instinct”:
“With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
The theory not only challenges convention wisdom about language itself (especially from the self-appointed “experts” who claim to be safeguarding the language but who understand it less well than a typical teenager). It is part of a whole new vision of the human mind: not a general-purpose computer, but a collection of instincts adapted to solving evolutionarily significant problems—the mind as a Swiss Army knife.”
I agree that evolutionary psychology is not well-regarded by biologists in general, but Dawkins is an exception to this trend. He’s even praised one of the most obviously sloppy practitioners (Satoshi Kanazawa.) Dennet, as a fellow adaptationist (though no biologist per se), is in a similar camp.
Chapter 5 (“The roots of religion”) of the God Delusion is largely a work of evolutionary psychology.
I don’t have a copy to check, but from what I can remember Dawkins was careful to say that what he was doing is not real science but merely a counter to a hypothetical theist argument along the lines of “If God doesn’t exist, then where do our ideas of God and morality come from?” That is, his claims were no stronger than “It is plausible that it might have happened this way.”
In any case, I have admitted I was wrong about Dawkins. He now seems to me to be a moderate supporter of the ev.psych enterprise, rather than, as I had believed, someone who cringed but kept his mouth shut rather than alienate fellow “Darwinists”.
I was pretty amazed at how Dawkins pussy-footed around his opponents in “The God Delusion”. His claims seemed pretty mild—along the lines of “it is OK to be an atheist”.
He discusses “the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology” directly—on page 208:
“The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths’ celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility.”
Surely all those works are heavily laced with evolutionary psychology.
Exhibit 1 is surely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson—father of sociobiology.
Yes, but what does this have to do with evolutionary psychology? The wiki article on Wilson never mentions evolutionary psychology. When I Google for “Wilson evolutionary psychology”, I find this complaint that Wilson doesn’t like “evolutionary psychology” even though the author wants to claim Wilson as the founder of the discipline.
So lets have Exhibit 2. [Edit: minor typo]
The quote seems to be:
“Today, my only complaint is that Wilson has never really embraced the word usage of “evolutionary psychology” and prefers that we consider it nothing more than “human sociobiology”.”
Sociobiology came first—evolutionary psychology is a more modern offshoot that only deals with human universals and mostly ignores human culture.
Buller’s Adapting Minds
I read this a while back but have been putting off writing about it while I thought about it (and until I reread at least parts of it). Some parts I think are mistaken and some need more work, but it is mostly an interesting critique of Evolutionary Psychology.
The hardest to follow, and where I think the most potential benefit lies, is in Chapter 4 on modularity of minds. One big problem for evolutionary psychology is its claim for “massive modularity” versus the well established plasticity of minds at the neural level, and that all memory and mental function relies completely on the neural plasticity.
It’s a good book, but see also Debunking Adapting Minds.
I read that, and many other criticisms, before I bought the book. Some of the criticisms are accurate, others miss, and most there is no real way to decide rationally either way. As for most of the criticisms from the EvoPsych direction, they are of the 3 chapters on specific adaptation claims that I haven’t read, I am more interested in the basis, and especially as I pointed out above the conflict between evo-psyc and neural plasticity which I don’t think even this paper addresses adequately (and the others mostly or entirely ignore). I’m not going to respond any more right now, like I wrote above I need to think through it a bit more.
I haven’t read Adapting Minds, but I’ve seen responses to it by evolutionary psychologists. You can find a bunch of them on Cosmides’ and Tooby’s website
See this one by Delton, Robertson, and Kenrick for instance:
...
Another negative review from Machery and Barrett concluded:
The arguments of Buller’s critics seem well-reasoned and well-cited, though someone who has read his book would have to confirm that they are fair to him.
Has anyone from evolutionary biology proper weighed in with a critique of Buller? Even Buller’s critics admit that the book was well received generally in the academic press.
Amazon’s summary has:
http://www.amazon.com/Adapting-Minds-Evolutionary-Psychology-Persistent/dp/0262524600/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281740042
IMO, that does an excellent job of making the author sound clueless.
I personally have nothing against the term “Human Nature”. But I think it is easy to reconstruct Buller’s meaning here. Our “nature” has clearly evolved; evolution takes place (in part) as a result of variation in a population; evolution of our “nature” is still taking place; hence there is still variation in the “nature” of the human population; hence the whole concept that the species has an essential “Human Nature” is flawed. We are diverse.
I’m not sure I would want to call that kind of word chopping “clueless”. But I would point out that the diversity in human nature is the result of the last 150,000 years or so of our evolution, whereas our shared evolutionary history (creating an “essence” of human nature) spans a period roughly 40 times as long.
It reminds me of those who argue against:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor
...on the grounds that intelligence is composed of many diverse abilities.
Someone making such a complaint about the term “Human Nature” simply hasn’t bothered to understand what the term is intended to refer to.
That is simply untrue. Ev. Biologists often make use of ev. psych reasoning. Dawkins does this all the time.
Could you give an example? Perhaps you and I understand different things by evolutionary psychology.
I’m guessing that most laypeople here identify Ev Psych with the sort of explanations offered in Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. Are those the kinds of explanations that you consider to be pseudoscience?
I haven’t read Blank Slate. What little I remember of the fraction I read of How the Mind Works made the case for a materialistic and reductionist account of the Mind, and pointed out that the Human Mind evolved by natural selection. I am in complete agreement on both points—those viewpoints did not originate with Evolutionary Psychology, and EP does not have the sole responsibility for defending them.
So, since I don’t know the explanations you are talking about, I can’t say for sure they are pseudo-science. But I do know of a demarcation criterion. Did Pinker suggest how his explanations could be tested by experiment? Did he report the results of experiments? If not, then he was either doing pseudo-science or philosophy. Sorry, I don’t have a demarcation criterion to distinguish those two. But, if someone says they are doing philosophy, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt.
Hang on: we can’t understand adaptations—unless there are fossils?!?
What about molecular residues? What about current utility? What about current variation? There is a considerable quantity of evidence relating to these issues lying around—even without fossils.
Re: “Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists.”
It’s a real science—just one where we would like more data—and most science is like that. Neanderthal resurrection should provide another data point someday.
And Neanderthal resurrection will tell us next to nothing, since we still will have no idea what selective pressures our ancestors faced or what pressures Neanderthal ancestors faced. To say nothing of the difficulty in assessing the differences between Neanderthal psychology and H. sapiens psychology. And even if this weren’t a problem, we would still have only two data points to work with.
There’s chimps and bonobos—and other primates. That is quite a few “data points” - considering the mountain of information that can be obtained from each of them.