In another thread, you linked to some book, I forgot the name, there was critique from another prominent guy saying it’s not how mind works. Clearly there is critique.
Do you have an explanation why do you expect considerably more complex changes to wiring in the brain, than to gross morphology, i.e. shape of organism? I honestly just don’t see why it would be more common for evolution to hardwire a reflex than to make a new organ. edit: Okay, for the organs there is the argument that the existing organs are pretty damn good. Still, there’s plenty of opportunity for improving e.g. human locomotion, and pressure, too, and one can clearly see how slow did the bones change shapes.
edit: ahh, now i have a great question: Why would it be so much more common to evolve some complex but hard to separate from culture psychology, than it was to evolve verifiable, simple, straightforward hardwired reflexes? There’s not a single well defined, agreed upon reflex i can think of that humans have, which chimps lack. There’s a lot of evo-psych stuff that is allegedly unique to us humans, evolved during our hunter gatherer times.
I think this really should nail it down WRT plausibility of evo-psych. It propositions big number of very complex psychological adaptations, over the time when no straightforward, agreed upon hard wired reflexes evolved. Not just gross morphology. Anything well identifiable at which we can look and say—okay, chimps don’t have this innate reflex—and agree.
First, I don’t think the really interesting evo psych is about the difference between humans and chimps. The most interesting evo psych is about ideas like coalition politics, mating behavior, and emotions which we share with chimps and with many other primates as well.
(this also brings up the related points about the major “psychological” differences between different primates, or between chimps and bonobos; these seem to clearly exist, but are hard to attribute to culture; if chimp/bonobo differences can be attributed to evo psych, why not chimp/human differences?)
The more fundamental problem I have with your response is that it seems to be placing the burden of proof on Orthonormal by asking “Given such minor anatomical differences between chimps and humans, why are you expecting huge brain differences equivalent to completely new organs?” But who’s positing huge brain differences equivalent to completely new organs? Given that there are hundreds of small anatomical differences between chimps and humans, I would almost want to throw the burden of proof back at you and ask “Given all the anatomical differences between chimps and humans, why are you expecting there to be zero mental differences at all except those related to scale?”
It may be that we are thinking of different things when we say “evolutionary psychology”. I agree that there’s no specific novel human brain module responsible for (let’s say) religion: that would be equivalent to evolving a new organ. But could the brain modules handling sex, which certainly exist in other animals and chimps, have a slight difference in humans which explains why we’re more naturally monogamous or polygamous or whatever the theory is nowadays? Sure. And that’s what I think evo psych is about, more than it’s about saying “We must have evolved a specific religion module in the last million years!”
I’ve nothing against what you think evo psych is about. Clearly, the sensitivity of receptors at synaptic junctions can be altered in global manner, and clearly, the intensity of any existing process can also be adjusted—similar to how shape of human body differs from that of a chimp, so can the ‘shape’ of human psyche.
The argument with orthonormal is on an orthogonal subject, ha ha: the evo psych as proposed by Cosmides, Tooby, Pinker, and Symons, whom exactly propose the cognitive modules as complex as organs, in the past 1.8 millions years, and whom even draw organ analogies themselves. I’m aint making up any strawmen here.
edit: Actually i didn’t even want to bring up this whole debate, that’s why i didn’t directly refer to any of that in my original post. I just want to make a sensible argument, people can apply it, and discard the nonsensical variations of evo psych, especially when the evo psychologists themselves make organ analogies. I’d rather attack the fallacious lines of reasoning, than specific arguments.
Are you sure they believe what you think they believe? I mean, obviously all animals have sexual behaviors, many of them very complicated and different from one another, so it would be pretty nonsensical to say humans were the first animal with a “sex behavior module” in their brains. I can’t imagine someone like Cosmides & Tooby would make that mistake
Language seems like an easier mistake to make, but I agree with you that it’s a modification and upscaling of existing organs rather than anything new; primates seem to have Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in about the same place we do doing about the same sort of thing.
I’m not clear on what timeframe do they think the ‘modules’ have evolved in, but they argue for a bunch of high level ones related to cognition, as described here:
The argument presented here in course notes is that we have some sort of social contracts module, circa—not quite sure but rather recent—that helps us solve Wason Selection Task better—when we read off paper, mind you, in english language, better when it mentions social contracts than when its letters and numbers. Apparently we have some domain limited intelligence that does Wason Selection Task correctly using logic when it is presented as social contracts—in 75% of people, but sleeps in 75% of people when it is presented as letters and numbers. This is pretty ridiculous. The Wason selection task is a pretty regular language processing bug—you misinterpret it off carelessly as instructions to execute—flip cards with numbers, see if the even have red on the back—rather than as propositions to be tested. When you word it as something concrete, be it social contract, or testing of the medications, then people actually think beyond careless misunderstanding. In natural language, if A then B is very often misused when one wants to say iff A then B.
edit: that is to say, the field is badly suffering from lack of ‘probability of evolving’ prior, akin to the occam″s razor used elsewhere. The difference is more than adequately explained by a zillion causes having nothing to do with evolution and everything to do with education and culture. It’s a huge give-away that you can train people to be a lot better on this and similar tasks; the ‘evolved module’ explanation is redundant, and on top of this is highly implausible unless one’s treating evolution as magic.
The critique of testability is not the critique you’re making. Can you find any prominent evolutionary biologist who makes the criticism that there wasn’t enough time for language-specific structure to evolve?
The ‘prominent’ ones, like Dawkins, are being prominent for spending too much of their effort arguing against intelligent design.
Here, a well made summary:
The basic tenet of Evolutionary Psychology is that, just as evolution by natural selection has created morphological adaptations that are universal among humans, so it has created universal psychological adaptations. (An adaptation is a trait that has been fashioned by selection for its functional role in an organism). As Tooby and Cosmides say, “the fact that any given page out of Gray’s Anatomy describes in precise anatomical detail individual humans from around the world demonstrates the pronounced monomorphism present in complex human physiological adaptations. Although we cannot directly ‘see’ psychological adaptations (except as described neuroanatomically), no less could be true of them” (1992, p. 38). The goal of Evolutionary Psychology, then, is to discover and describe the functioning of our psychological adaptations, which are the “proximate mechanisms” that cause our behavior (Cosmides & Tooby 1987).
So far so good, they seem to refer to morphological adaptations (as similar to psychological) when it suits them. There’s where it gets really crazy though:
Since the construction of complex adaptations is a very slow process of cumulative selection, typically requiring hundreds of thousands of years, Evolutionary Psychologists argue that our psychological adaptations cannot possibly be designed for modern life. Instead, they must be designed to solve the adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene, the epoch spanning 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago (Tooby & Cosmides 1990b, 1992). In other words, “the evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way of life of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers” (Cosmides et al. 1992, p. 5). As a result, contemporary humans frequently behave non-adaptively (that is, in ways that don’t promote their reproductive success), since our Pleistocene minds are not designed to respond adaptively to agricultural, industrial, or urban lifestyles (Symons 1989, 1990, 1992).
The adaptive problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors ranged from acquiring mates and forming social alliances to avoiding predators and inedible plant matter (Buss 1995; Tooby & Cosmides 1992). Given the diverse natures of these many problems, Evolutionary Psychologists argue, a successful solution in one problem domain cannot transfer to another domain; so each adaptive problem would have selected for the evolution of its own dedicated problem-solving mechanism (Buss 1995; Cosmides & Tooby 1987, 1994; Symons 1987, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides 1992, 1995). As Symons says, “it is no more probable that some sort of general-purpose brain/mind mechanism could solve all the behavioral problems an organism faces (find food, choose a mate, select a habitat, etc.) than it is that some sort of general-purpose organ could perform all physiological functions (pump blood, digest food, nourish an embryo, etc.)” (1992, p. 142). Thus, Evolutionary Psychologists conclude, the human mind must be “organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history” (Pinker 1997a, p. 21).
Right. Did we see any 2 lineages evolving multiple different organs after being separated for ~180k generations? Hell frigging no, ain’t no examples here, because it’s off by a factor of 100 or so. We don’t have yesterday’s mind, we don’t have roman empire’s mind, we don’t have caveman’s mind. We have up-scaled rodent’s mind. edit: or actually, we have 21th century human minds, which arises on up-scaled and tweaked rodent’s brain.
edit: added link.
Anyhow, i give up. You can go on with a belief in belief however much you want. It’s worse than talking with mormon preachers. They don’t reference prominent theologists a whole lot. They come up with some arguments why god exist, flawed ones, but there’s some effort.
The argument that cognitive structure is as difficult to evolve as a new bodily organ is your personal assertion- it’s not found in the sources you cite. I understand it makes intuitive sense to you, but that doesn’t count for very strong evidence unless you’re better versed in evolutionary biology than all of the evolutionary psychologists.
I hate to repeat myself, but until I see some evidence besides your armchair biologizing, I’m going to consider it more likely that you’re making an error of reasoning than that every evolutionary psychologist is making a catastrophic error and that no evolutionary biologist has caught it. All the more so since you haven’t read any of the evidence in favor of in-born structure (beyond cortical columns) for the human brain, and especially for human language.
Can you be a little bit less meta and provide any reason what so ever why cognitive structures can be a lot (1..2 orders of magnitude) frequent to evolve than organs? No? The meta-beliefs like yours are called a belief in belief.
Also, read the link I gave, in full. It outlines the objections that significantly align with mine:
Can you be a little bit less meta and provide any reason what so ever why cognitive structures can be a lot (1..2 orders of magnitude) frequent to evolve than organs?
My priors start out pretty ignorant on just how complicated, in terms of genes, a re-wiring of the brain would be. Brains have had 500 million years to evolve, which is enough time to evolve plenty of genes that govern brain development at many levels (object and meta). If it was advantageous to be able to create new brain structures in a fairly short evolutionary time, it’s possible for the genome to be structured to enable that. (And in fact, this would account for why the genome doesn’t have to scale with brain size- which is the only claim I found on that website which pertains to your assertion.) Anyway, like I said, I have a fairly ignorant prior there.
But then, when I find evidence for deep structure to the brain, I can update on that evidence rather than be forced to defy the data.
I’m tapping out again, this time because the conversation is really starting to degenerate. I’ll just note that if you think someone believes a claim without reason, it helps to ask them for their reasons before asserting they have none. Less Wrong isn’t about who’s the first to accuse whom of a bias.
Well, you were first to accuse me of ignorance, but whatever.
But it does stand that you haven’t ever linked any data or made a single non-meta argument in our whole discourse up to this post, linking at most the books that are not available online. You just referred to yourself finding evidence for deep structure in the brain, without being in the slightest bit specific as to the argument at hand, which is ideally not which one of us is most biased, but whenever such data does exist.
There is one thing for you to update on: the neocortex is almost everywhere 6 layers thick. There are different regions of brain with different thickness, suited to different functions. That is, naturally, cognitive modules, performing different tasks—there is no dispute over that! (Removal of any such module is not recovered from). There is neocortex that is pretty damn uniform as far as we can see, and to top that off, compensates very well for any early (pre-pruning) injuries, and even post-pruning injuries. edit: And, now what your Occam Razor favoured hypothesis ought to be?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology#Testability
In another thread, you linked to some book, I forgot the name, there was critique from another prominent guy saying it’s not how mind works. Clearly there is critique.
Do you have an explanation why do you expect considerably more complex changes to wiring in the brain, than to gross morphology, i.e. shape of organism? I honestly just don’t see why it would be more common for evolution to hardwire a reflex than to make a new organ. edit: Okay, for the organs there is the argument that the existing organs are pretty damn good. Still, there’s plenty of opportunity for improving e.g. human locomotion, and pressure, too, and one can clearly see how slow did the bones change shapes.
edit: ahh, now i have a great question: Why would it be so much more common to evolve some complex but hard to separate from culture psychology, than it was to evolve verifiable, simple, straightforward hardwired reflexes? There’s not a single well defined, agreed upon reflex i can think of that humans have, which chimps lack. There’s a lot of evo-psych stuff that is allegedly unique to us humans, evolved during our hunter gatherer times.
I think this really should nail it down WRT plausibility of evo-psych. It propositions big number of very complex psychological adaptations, over the time when no straightforward, agreed upon hard wired reflexes evolved. Not just gross morphology. Anything well identifiable at which we can look and say—okay, chimps don’t have this innate reflex—and agree.
So I have two problems with your response here.
First, I don’t think the really interesting evo psych is about the difference between humans and chimps. The most interesting evo psych is about ideas like coalition politics, mating behavior, and emotions which we share with chimps and with many other primates as well.
(this also brings up the related points about the major “psychological” differences between different primates, or between chimps and bonobos; these seem to clearly exist, but are hard to attribute to culture; if chimp/bonobo differences can be attributed to evo psych, why not chimp/human differences?)
The more fundamental problem I have with your response is that it seems to be placing the burden of proof on Orthonormal by asking “Given such minor anatomical differences between chimps and humans, why are you expecting huge brain differences equivalent to completely new organs?” But who’s positing huge brain differences equivalent to completely new organs? Given that there are hundreds of small anatomical differences between chimps and humans, I would almost want to throw the burden of proof back at you and ask “Given all the anatomical differences between chimps and humans, why are you expecting there to be zero mental differences at all except those related to scale?”
It may be that we are thinking of different things when we say “evolutionary psychology”. I agree that there’s no specific novel human brain module responsible for (let’s say) religion: that would be equivalent to evolving a new organ. But could the brain modules handling sex, which certainly exist in other animals and chimps, have a slight difference in humans which explains why we’re more naturally monogamous or polygamous or whatever the theory is nowadays? Sure. And that’s what I think evo psych is about, more than it’s about saying “We must have evolved a specific religion module in the last million years!”
I’ve nothing against what you think evo psych is about. Clearly, the sensitivity of receptors at synaptic junctions can be altered in global manner, and clearly, the intensity of any existing process can also be adjusted—similar to how shape of human body differs from that of a chimp, so can the ‘shape’ of human psyche.
The argument with orthonormal is on an orthogonal subject, ha ha: the evo psych as proposed by Cosmides, Tooby, Pinker, and Symons, whom exactly propose the cognitive modules as complex as organs, in the past 1.8 millions years, and whom even draw organ analogies themselves. I’m aint making up any strawmen here.
edit: Actually i didn’t even want to bring up this whole debate, that’s why i didn’t directly refer to any of that in my original post. I just want to make a sensible argument, people can apply it, and discard the nonsensical variations of evo psych, especially when the evo psychologists themselves make organ analogies. I’d rather attack the fallacious lines of reasoning, than specific arguments.
Oh, okay.
Are you sure they believe what you think they believe? I mean, obviously all animals have sexual behaviors, many of them very complicated and different from one another, so it would be pretty nonsensical to say humans were the first animal with a “sex behavior module” in their brains. I can’t imagine someone like Cosmides & Tooby would make that mistake
Language seems like an easier mistake to make, but I agree with you that it’s a modification and upscaling of existing organs rather than anything new; primates seem to have Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in about the same place we do doing about the same sort of thing.
I’m not clear on what timeframe do they think the ‘modules’ have evolved in, but they argue for a bunch of high level ones related to cognition, as described here:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/evolutionary_psychology.html′
The argument presented here in course notes is that we have some sort of social contracts module, circa—not quite sure but rather recent—that helps us solve Wason Selection Task better—when we read off paper, mind you, in english language, better when it mentions social contracts than when its letters and numbers. Apparently we have some domain limited intelligence that does Wason Selection Task correctly using logic when it is presented as social contracts—in 75% of people, but sleeps in 75% of people when it is presented as letters and numbers. This is pretty ridiculous. The Wason selection task is a pretty regular language processing bug—you misinterpret it off carelessly as instructions to execute—flip cards with numbers, see if the even have red on the back—rather than as propositions to be tested. When you word it as something concrete, be it social contract, or testing of the medications, then people actually think beyond careless misunderstanding. In natural language, if A then B is very often misused when one wants to say iff A then B.
edit: that is to say, the field is badly suffering from lack of ‘probability of evolving’ prior, akin to the occam″s razor used elsewhere. The difference is more than adequately explained by a zillion causes having nothing to do with evolution and everything to do with education and culture. It’s a huge give-away that you can train people to be a lot better on this and similar tasks; the ‘evolved module’ explanation is redundant, and on top of this is highly implausible unless one’s treating evolution as magic.
The critique of testability is not the critique you’re making. Can you find any prominent evolutionary biologist who makes the criticism that there wasn’t enough time for language-specific structure to evolve?
The ‘prominent’ ones, like Dawkins, are being prominent for spending too much of their effort arguing against intelligent design.
Here, a well made summary:
So far so good, they seem to refer to morphological adaptations (as similar to psychological) when it suits them. There’s where it gets really crazy though:
http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm
Right. Did we see any 2 lineages evolving multiple different organs after being separated for ~180k generations? Hell frigging no, ain’t no examples here, because it’s off by a factor of 100 or so. We don’t have yesterday’s mind, we don’t have roman empire’s mind, we don’t have caveman’s mind. We have up-scaled rodent’s mind. edit: or actually, we have 21th century human minds, which arises on up-scaled and tweaked rodent’s brain.
edit: added link.
Anyhow, i give up. You can go on with a belief in belief however much you want. It’s worse than talking with mormon preachers. They don’t reference prominent theologists a whole lot. They come up with some arguments why god exist, flawed ones, but there’s some effort.
The argument that cognitive structure is as difficult to evolve as a new bodily organ is your personal assertion- it’s not found in the sources you cite. I understand it makes intuitive sense to you, but that doesn’t count for very strong evidence unless you’re better versed in evolutionary biology than all of the evolutionary psychologists.
I hate to repeat myself, but until I see some evidence besides your armchair biologizing, I’m going to consider it more likely that you’re making an error of reasoning than that every evolutionary psychologist is making a catastrophic error and that no evolutionary biologist has caught it. All the more so since you haven’t read any of the evidence in favor of in-born structure (beyond cortical columns) for the human brain, and especially for human language.
Can you be a little bit less meta and provide any reason what so ever why cognitive structures can be a lot (1..2 orders of magnitude) frequent to evolve than organs? No? The meta-beliefs like yours are called a belief in belief.
Also, read the link I gave, in full. It outlines the objections that significantly align with mine:
http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm
My priors start out pretty ignorant on just how complicated, in terms of genes, a re-wiring of the brain would be. Brains have had 500 million years to evolve, which is enough time to evolve plenty of genes that govern brain development at many levels (object and meta). If it was advantageous to be able to create new brain structures in a fairly short evolutionary time, it’s possible for the genome to be structured to enable that. (And in fact, this would account for why the genome doesn’t have to scale with brain size- which is the only claim I found on that website which pertains to your assertion.) Anyway, like I said, I have a fairly ignorant prior there.
But then, when I find evidence for deep structure to the brain, I can update on that evidence rather than be forced to defy the data.
I’m tapping out again, this time because the conversation is really starting to degenerate. I’ll just note that if you think someone believes a claim without reason, it helps to ask them for their reasons before asserting they have none. Less Wrong isn’t about who’s the first to accuse whom of a bias.
Well, you were first to accuse me of ignorance, but whatever.
But it does stand that you haven’t ever linked any data or made a single non-meta argument in our whole discourse up to this post, linking at most the books that are not available online. You just referred to yourself finding evidence for deep structure in the brain, without being in the slightest bit specific as to the argument at hand, which is ideally not which one of us is most biased, but whenever such data does exist.
There is one thing for you to update on: the neocortex is almost everywhere 6 layers thick. There are different regions of brain with different thickness, suited to different functions. That is, naturally, cognitive modules, performing different tasks—there is no dispute over that! (Removal of any such module is not recovered from). There is neocortex that is pretty damn uniform as far as we can see, and to top that off, compensates very well for any early (pre-pruning) injuries, and even post-pruning injuries. edit: And, now what your Occam Razor favoured hypothesis ought to be?