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?
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?