Evolutionary Psychology is a Bunch of Hooey

[ITR_champion]

By “evolutionary psychology” I mean the branch of psychology that seeks to explain current human behavior as the result of adaptations dating back to prehistoric times. My view is given in the title of this thread, namely that I don’t believe any of it. I’ll state my reasons in just a minute. First let me list three types of argument that I don’t accept.

1. Assuming the conclusion.

As in a thread last year started by scjas. When I challenged him to defend the possibility of beliefs resulting in this way, he said it had to be true because “any common characteristic must confer a surivival advantage and therefore have a genetic basis”. That, of course, is just a statement and does not include any proof of the truth of the idea.

2. Argument from academic snobbery.

As in a thread this year started by Sentient Meat. In a similar situation, he asked me “Would you say you understand evolutionary psychology well enough to summarily dismiss the career’s work of tens of thousands of scientists at the most august academic institutions in the world?” Yet there have been numerous instances where a mob of academics firmly believed something that turned out to be false. Hence it’s possible that evolutionary psychology is false even if there are tens of thousands of academic careers devoted to it. (And I’m not convinced that there are.)

3. Behavior exists, therefore it’s genetic.

As in a thread this year started by Gozu where somebody (not Gozu) linked to an article which says “Numerous studies of symmetry in humans have shown that men especially are more attracted to women with symmetrical features. (One hypothesis suggests that women are not as concerned with symmetry because instead of breeding, they look for a mate that can provide food and protection for their offspring, i.e., money and power for humans.) In one recent study conducted by Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, college males found symmetrical female faces more attractive than asymmetrical faces.” This is supposed to be proof of the genetic basis of sexual attraction, but it doesn’t mention anything about genes. Showing that some people behave in a certain way does not prove that they have a gene which makes them behave that way. If you’re trying to prove that “A causes B”, it not sufficient to prove “B”.

Now here are my reasons for not believing in evolutionary psychology.

First, the idea that our behavior was determined long before our birth doesn’t mesh with what we see. Anyone can tell the difference between our inborn traits such as eye color and height and our decisions, such as what we eat and how we judge other people. The former we can’t decide, the later we can. If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing. Hence it cannot have been genetically determined by our parents, much less our caveman ancestors.

Second, no one can find the genes. The media serves up stories about the “gay gene”, the “religion gene”, the “overeating gene”, the “polygamy gene”, and so on and so forth. They rarely bother to mention that none of these genes have ever been found. If there actually is a gene that causes a behavior, finding it shouldn’t be difficult. You just take 500 people who exhibit the behavior and 500 who don’t and find the gene that exists in all members of the first group and no members of the second group. If we can’t find any of the genes that supposedly control our behavior, it raises obvious questions.

Third, no one can explain how it works. Much of the discourse on the topic is written as if genes were magic, capable of automatically accomplishing anything. In reality genes hold the instructions for building proteins. If they lead to behaviors, we should be able to find the proteins and structures built from those proteins that produce the behaviors. In short, if humans are “hard wired” to act in certain ways, it’s reasonable to ask where the hard wires are.

Fourth, the evolutionary psychologists can’t agree on what genes we have and what our caveman ancestors did to produce those genes. Michael Shermer saysthat we evolved to be monogamous, while Alan miller is equally sure that we’re evolved to be polygamous. Likewise I’ve found articles saying that men are evolved to be polygamous while women are evolved to be monogamous, and other articles that say the exact opposite, and soon no doubt we’ll find that we’re evolved to be monogamous on Mondays, Wendesdays, and Fridays and polygamous on Tuesday and Thursdays. In short the evolutionary psychologists can’t agree on even their most basic conclusion, which is what you’d expect if they were making it all up from scratch.

[chacoguy]

Forgive me as I am not as well educated as yourself; have you never found yourself fixatedly staring at a really nice set of tits that were inappropriate for you to stare at? Your buddies girlfriends’ for instance? Why would you do such an illogical thing?

[ITR_champion]

No, I have never done so.

(And I am a heterosexual man.)

[chacoguy]

Kudos to you sir, for I am weak.

[Der_Trihs]

First, there are reasons to consider it true. The existence of common tendencies in all human cultures. The facts that ALL animals have instinct driven behaviors; the idea that humans don’t is a purely ideological/religious claim; whereas evolutionary psychology is essentially treating us like every other animal ( the Copernican Principle applied to biology ). The fact that it’s a principle of evolution that if every member of a species needs to learn a principle, that behavior will tend to become instinctive. The fact that statistically behaviors appear to be connected to genetics. The fact that people do things that make no sense, except when you assume a built in component.

@ITR champion

If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing. Hence it cannot have been genetically determined by our parents, much less our caveman ancestors.

You are confusing instinctive with compulsive. I have the instinctive urge to assault those I dislike; I don’t do so because of the way I was raised. That doesn’t mean the urge doesn’t exist, or that it wasn’t hardwired into me by evolution.

And most human behaviors, like language appear to have a strong genetic component, but are still largely determined by culture in the details. Language is instinctive; Russian or English is not.

@ITR champion

Second, no one can find the genes. The media serves up stories about the “gay gene”, the “religion gene”, the “overeating gene”, the “polygamy gene”, and so on and so forth. They rarely bother to mention that none of these genes have ever been found. If there actually is a gene that causes a behavior, finding it shouldn’t be difficult. You just take 500 people who exhibit the behavior and 500 who don’t and find the gene that exists in all members of the first group and no members of the second group. If we can’t find any of the genes that supposedly control our behavior, it raises obvious questions.

No, that just shows that the media gets things wrong. Complex human behaviors are almost certainly controlled by many genes, not just one. And the fact that we are dealing with humans and not lab animals makes research into these matters far harder. AND, in the case of many behaviors, the genetically determined behavior is going to be present in all healthy people, so when you find a gene that supposedly codes for that behavior, what you are really doing is finding only one of the many genes involved, that happens to be broken or unusual ( which is why that person stands out ).

@ITR champion

Third, no one can explain how it works. Much of the discourse on the topic is written as if genes were magic, capable of automatically accomplishing anything. In reality genes hold the instructions for building proteins. If they lead to behaviors, we should be able to find the proteins and structures built from those proteins that produce the behaviors. In short, if humans are “hard wired” to act in certain ways, it’s reasonable to ask where the hard wires are.

There’s been quite a few results on determining how this chemical or that brain structure leads to a particular behavior or attitude. Yes, our knowledge is limited, but it’s not nonexistent like you are claiming.

[Shagnasty]

Your idea is basically crap. We exhibit human behaviors rather than that of hyenas because we were born as humans rather than hyenas. Nobody taught you everything that is extremely basic about that including suckling behavior to your mother’s breast. It doesn’t matter if people understand everything about it works. People didn’t understand DNA at all decades ago and that doesn’t change the truth. We still don’t understand lots of things.

I will say it until I am blue in the face. My graduate studies were in behavioral neuroscience. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with DNA. The sex hormones control that and there are many ways those can become atypical in development and it is very easy to show in animal models. The fact that you appear to be male of female physically is not directly controlled by DNA. That is far downstream and the process is easily disrupted and is in the real world far more often in the real world than you probably know.

Your OP is so broad it is useless. Infinite numbers of counterexamples can destroy the whole thing and few of us have time to take on a viewpoint that challenges countless areas of science and many thousands of scientists themselves.

The basic idea should be obvious. I don’t track scents like a dog because I don’t have a nose like a dog. I don’t perform water stunts like a porpoise because I am not a dolphin. Unless you hold humans to be Divine mammals, all of this should be self-evident.

It is a nature versus nurture argument but one so extreme that it is ridiculous. Science has been trending towards the nature side in research years but there is still room for a nurture debate. Unfortunately, your is so broad as to be nonsensical.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@ITR champion

As in a thread this year started by Sentient Meat. In a similar situation, he asked me “Would you say you understand evolutionary psychology well enough to summarily dismiss the career’s work of tens of thousands of scientists at the most august academic institutions in the world?” Yet there have been numerous instances where a mob of academics firmly believed something that turned out to be false. Hence it’s possible that evolutionary psychology is false even if there are tens of thousands of academic careers devoted to it. (And I’m not convinced that there are.)

Actually if I recall correctly it wasn’t you saying that they all could be wrong, it was you saying they all were wrong. There are many valid reasons why you could say that they are. But if, as your post now seems to say, your reason for saying that they were in fact all wrong was that it was possible they were wrong, I would say that’s not really much of an argument.

First, the idea that our behavior was determined long before our birth doesn’t mesh with what we see. Anyone can tell the difference between our inborn traits such as eye color and height and our decisions, such as what we eat and how we judge other people. The former we can’t decide, the later we can. If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing. Hence it cannot have been genetically determined by our parents, much less our caveman ancestors.

Sure it can.

We’re talking predispositions, not certainties. Saying “Ah, because of our genetic history, we will all always be angry” then certainly someone not being angry would be a pretty big problem. But “Ah, because of our genetic history, we have a predisposition to be angry” then that’s not a problem if it changes; it accepts that there are other factors. The result being that over a wide population of people, some may be angry, and others might not. Likewise, over a wide population some may have blue eyes, and others brown.

Second, no one can find the genes. The media serves up stories about the “gay gene”, the “religion gene”, the “overeating gene”, the “polygamy gene”, and so on and so forth. They rarely bother to mention that none of these genes have ever been found. If there actually is a gene that causes a behavior, finding it shouldn’t be difficult. You just take 500 people who exhibit the behavior and 500 who don’t and find the gene that exists in all members of the first group and no members of the second group. If we can’t find any of the genes that supposedly control our behavior, it raises obvious questions.

Again, you’ve taken the idea of predispositions and turned it into certainties. Evolutionary scientists aren’t saying, “Hey, you have this gene? Right, you’re going to be fat”. It’s a matter of higher and lower probabilities. Just like you, they don’t believe that genes are the be-all and end-all. If they did, i’d be right there with you - if someone said there was a certainty and didnt’ do those kind of tests (assuming its possible), i’d be right there with you claiming hooey! But they don’t. Predispositions.

Third, no one can explain how it works. Much of the discourse on the topic is written as if genes were magic, capable of automatically accomplishing anything. In reality genes hold the instructions for building proteins. If they lead to behaviors, we should be able to find the proteins and structures built from those proteins that produce the behaviors. In short, if humans are “hard wired” to act in certain ways, it’s reasonable to ask where the hard wires are.

But we do. People who’re depressed may often show low serotonin levels. The structure of people’s brains does differ in some predictable cases based on their personality or behaviour. And vice-versa, people with brain damage in particular areas may show predictable personality/mind changes.

Fourth, the evolutionary psychologists can’t agree on what genes we have and what our caveman ancestors did to produce those genes. Michael Shermer saysthat we evolved to be monogamous, while Alan miller is equally sure that we’re evolved to be polygamous. Likewise I’ve found articles saying that men are evolved to be polygamous while women are evolved to be monogamous, and other articles that say the exact opposite, and soon no doubt we’ll find that we’re evolved to be monogamous on Mondays, Wendesdays, and Fridays and polygamous on Tuesday and Thursdays. In short the evolutionary psychologists can’t agree on even their most basic conclusion, which is what you’d expect if they were making it all up from scratch.

I’m glad that Christians are entirely in lockstep on their most basic of tenets, otherwise the same “making it all up from scratch” idea might apply to them. Indeed, if we take an analogy from “people who use science as a tool” to “people who use spirituality as a tool”, we’d have to include all people with a concept of the spiritual in our analysis on whether they’re bullshitting. As an atheist I don’t agree with the Buddhist ones, so of course we’re both just lying for screentime.

Anyway, sarcasm aside, two problems; first, it could just mean that it’s a difficult area to understand. And second, lost of people disagreeing doesn’t mean they’re all wrong, just that logically some must be.

So in conclusion; Predispositions!

[outlierrn]

one of the confounding factors is that one of humanities best tricks is flexibility. Any psychological adaptation that confers an advantage, will confer greater advantage if it’s flexible. That muddies the waters considerably if you limit yourself to the ethics of human testing.

[even_sven]

I have a pretty big beef against evolutionary psychology. While it may explain some very very fundamental things, on the whole I think it is a crock.

Why? First off, it always begs the question. In science you formulate a theory, test it, and see if it works out. But in E.P., you already know the results and you are just making up a theory that would explain it. As it turns out, you can often come up with a decent explanation of the exact opposite of whatever an E.P. theory is trying to explain.

For example, E.P.s say that men like young inexperienced women because the paternity of any child would not be in question. But you could just as easily say that men should like older experienced women who’s fertility is not in doubt. An EPer might say that humans are xenophobic because that ensures the continuation of the tribe, but you could just as easily posit that humans prefer reproducing with people from different areas because that increases genetic diversity.

If things were different, EPers would come up with a different but seemingly logical explaination.

My second beef is that it ignores the huge impact of culture. Humans vary superficially, but we all have two arms and two legs. We all pretty much resemble each other physically. But human cultures are so varied that some cultures are impossible for someone from another to really make any sense of.

And we suppress our natural urges all the time. Dieters regularly suppress the basic human drive for food. Married people suppress the desire to sleep with other people. Society is a far bigger shaper of our lives than ingrained traits from cave-man times.

[matt]

@even sven

I have a pretty big beef against evolutionary psychology. While it may explain some very very fundamental things, on the whole I think it is a crock.

I think that’s kind of harsh, although the field is tainted with a tendency to create “just so” stories. It does annoy me when people trot out the story about guys being better at throwing than girls, because men used to go out and hunt while the women stayed behind picking berries…

One of the biggest problems is, different species exhibit different levels of flexibility in their behaviours. Insects and other arthropods are famously inflexible, as anyone who has ever tried to steer a fly out of an open window will have noticed. You can feed a crocodile all its life, and it still won’t occur to it not to bite your hand off when it gets the chance. Buffalo protect themselves from lions by outrunning other buffalo, and it never occurs to them that in the long run they might do better by working together and kicking the crap out of the lions.

Other species are considerably more flexible in their behaviours though. Hunting predators, rats, dolphins, tool-using apes, all show an ability to adapt their behaviours to their situations. And we’re possibly the most flexible of them all! The high variation in human behaviour and strategies tends to mask our evolved behaviours, which mostly take the form of simple drives in any case.

[Der_Trihs]

@even sven

Why? First off, it always begs the question. In science you formulate a theory, test it, and see if it works out. But in E.P., you already know the results and you are just making up a theory that would explain it.

You are wrong. The theory was tested, if inadvertently, by the Soviet Union. They were ideological hostile to Darwinism, including as applied to humans, and intended to rework human nature via modifying culture, to create "homo sovieticus’. They failed because evolutionary psychology is true; we do have a built in human nature, and no amount of propaganda, education or anything short of genetic engineering can change it.

@even sven

My second beef is that it ignores the huge impact of culture.

No, it doesn’t. It’s the nature-over-nurture people who claim that the other side has no influence at all, that we are all blank slates. No one that I’ve heard of claims that culture has no effect.

@even sven

But human cultures are so varied that some cultures are impossible for someone from another to really make any sense of.

In some ways. In other ways, all are the same. Humans, wherever you go, are humans, with a universal human nature.

@even sven

And we suppress our natural urges all the time. Dieters regularly suppress the basic human drive for food. Married people suppress the desire to sleep with other people. Society is a far bigger shaper of our lives than ingrained traits from cave-man times.

If that was true we wouldn’t act like humans at all. We’d be like something out of an old dystopia novel, the mindless slaves of the first society to come up with the idea of forcing an ideology on people from childhood.

If evolutionary psychology isn’t true, why do people ever rebel against parents or authorities or tradition ? Why do they ever do things society disapproves of ? Why do they care about children ? Or other relatives ? Why does someone raised from birth as a slave want freedom, if it’s not in his genes ?

[brazil84]

@even sven

Dieters regularly suppress the basic human drive for food. Married people suppress the desire to sleep with other people.

Except that more often than not, dieters fail, even though they really really want to be thinner. And some huge percentage of married people cheat on their spouses (or leave their spouse for someone else).

It seems to me that both of these examples show that inborn urges can and do have a huge impact on peoples’ actions.

First, the idea that our behavior was determined long before our birth doesn’t mesh with what we see. Anyone can tell the difference between our inborn traits such as eye color and height and our decisions, such as what we eat and how we judge other people. The former we can’t decide, the later we can. If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing.

A lot of these behaviors are really really hard to change. As I mentioned above, it is very common for a dieter to ‘slip’ and eat some unhealthy food even though he or she knows it’s a bad idea.

It seems to me that the obvious explanation is that inborn genetic urges AND learned behaviors can both have substantial influence over human thoughts and actions.

Second, no one can find the genes. The media serves up stories about the “gay gene”, the “religion gene”, the “overeating gene”, the “polygamy gene”, and so on and so forth. They rarely bother to mention that none of these genes have ever been found. If there actually is a gene that causes a behavior, finding it shouldn’t be difficult. You just take 500 people who exhibit the behavior and 500 who don’t and find the gene that exists in all members of the first group and no members of the second group. If we can’t find any of the genes that supposedly control our behavior, it raises obvious questions.

I agree that this is a problem, but it doesn’t kill the theory. People knew there was a “height gene” (or genes) before those genes were found. Quite possibly, we still haven’t found the genes that control height.

Heck, people knew there was a gene for wrinkled seeds long before the discovery of DNA. Darwin came up with his theory of natural selection before the discovery of DNA.

By the same token, it’s possible to be reasonably confident that there is a genetic influence on some behaviors, even without knowing the precise genes or mechanisms involved.

Third, no one can explain how it works. Much of the discourse on the topic is written as if genes were magic, capable of automatically accomplishing anything. In reality genes hold the instructions for building proteins. If they lead to behaviors, we should be able to find the proteins and structures built from those proteins that produce the behaviors. In short, if humans are “hard wired” to act in certain ways, it’s reasonable to ask where the hard wires are.

That’s very similar to your second objection. I agree it’s a problem, but look at it this way: Do you dispute that the behavior of non-human animals is often influenced heavily by their genes? If not, can you tell me what the “hardwires” are for, say, baboons?

[John_Mace]

It’s the best theory we have, at present. If you’ve got a better hypothesis for the cause of behaviors, then let’s see it.

Also, if it’s not genetically based (ie, subject to evolutionary pressure), then why don’t chimps behave exactly like humans? Or, why do chimps behave more like humans than birds do? Could it be that we’re genetically closer to chimps than we are to birds? Nah, it must be something else… right?

[ultrafilter]

@even sven

Society is a far bigger shaper of our lives than ingrained traits from cave-man times.

Our society and our culture both have a huge impact on us, but they were invented by humans and reflect our biological nature.

[tomndebb]

The excluded middle in the OP makes the Grand Canyon look like the swale on a golf course. (There are people who believe in that excluded middle, as Der Trihs has demonstrated, but the argument of the OP is still more than a bit odd.)

As Revenant Threshold has already pointed out, the vast majority of researchers in the field in question do not follow a rigidly determinist view. They propose that certain genetic traits set up conditions in which various human activities would be more likely to occur, but that the genetic predisposition is still guided by environment.

Looking for a “gay gene” or an “anger gene” is probably a waste of time although I am sure that you can find some extreme researchers who believe that we will find those (combinations of) genes some day and that they will turn out to be very deterministic.

I do not really know very many Evolutionary Psychology researchers who hold that extreme a view.

However, pure environment does not explain those cases of twins separated at birth who grew up to like the same foods and colors and marry spouses who resembled each other and went into identical or related careers. It does not explain how a child whose parent dies shortly after birth (or whose father dies or leaves before the child is born) grows up to display many of the same likes and dislikes and even gestures and tics of the absent parent.
The apparent claim of the OP that there is no genetic component seems to be an extreme position that flies in the face of evidence and has nothing in the way of evidence to support it.

@Der Trihs

You are wrong. The theory was tested, if inadvertently, by the Soviet Union. They were ideological hostile to Darwinism, including as applied to humans, and intended to rework human nature via modifying culture, to create "homo sovieticus’. They failed because evolutionary psychology is true; we do have a built in human nature, and no amount of propaganda, education or anything short of genetic engineering can change it.

This is as silly as the OP. Even if the Soviets had really tried anything similar, they had neither sufficient control over child rearing nor limited control for a sufficient length of time to test any such theory.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@ultrafilter

Our society and our culture both have a huge impact on us, but they were invented by humans and reflect our biological nature.

This is it, I think. Human society is a construct of human beings; human beings are a construct of human cells; human cells are a construct of human DNA. We’re not hardwired to have a particular culture, but we’re hardwired to include certain things in our culture: an appreciation for linguistic wit, a love of music, a mechanism for revenge, games taught by children to other children, division of labor by gender, etc. (There’s a wonderful list of these universal cultural traits somewhere, but I can’t find it online right now; my google-fu is weak).

Again, these appear in different forms in different cultures, but they appear in all cultures. What is the explanation for their universal appearance?

There’s something of a “god of the gaps” appearance to the objections to evolutionary psychology. True, we don’t know where those genes are yet; to argue that they therefore don’t exist is fallacious. It may well be that they don’t exist, but there must be some explanation for these common traits among all humans, especially given the radical diversity of cultures out there. Genetic commonalities is an excellent explanation for such traits, one worthy of pursuit. That’s what’s currently happening: a plausible explanation is being actively pursued. That the science is in its infancy is not a mark against it. If you believe the basic hypothesis (that human culture is strongly influenced by genetics) is false, that’s fine: find a particular claim and falsify it. If you believe it’s unproven as yet in a particular area, you’re probably right. That doesn’t mean it’s not the best currently-available explanation; it means that scientists are looking for a way to falsify it.

THere are, to be fair, folks that claim evolutionary psychology is a field of pure speculation. Folks who do that are not acting within the scientific model.

Daniel

[MrDibble]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

(There’s a wonderful list of these universal cultural traits somewhere, but I can’t find it online right now; my google-fu is weak).

Was it perhaps this one? I found it linked off this Wikipedia article.

[ZenBeam]

First, the idea that our behavior was determined long before our birth doesn’t mesh with what we see. Anyone can tell the difference between our inborn traits such as eye color and height and our decisions, such as what we eat and how we judge other people. The former we can’t decide, the later we can. If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing. Hence it cannot have been genetically determined by our parents, much less our caveman ancestors.

Caterpillars change into butterflies midway through life. It’s certainly plausible that underlying forces influencing our behavior change for genetic reasons as we age.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@MrDibble

Was it perhaps this one? I found it linked off this Wikipedia article.

That’s exactly the one; thank you! How is it that googling “Universal cultural traits” doesn’t come up with this list!

If there’s no such thing as genetic causes for human behavior, this list becomes pretty difficult to explain, I think.

Daniel

Edit: note that I nor anyone else believes ALL human behavior can be explained through the genome; pointing out that there are differences between culture that cannot be explained genetically will be something I (and everyone I’ve ever heard of) would agree with absolutely.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@ITR champion

First, the idea that our behavior was determined long before our birth doesn’t mesh with what we see. Anyone can tell the difference between our inborn traits such as eye color and height and our decisions, such as what we eat and how we judge other people. The former we can’t decide, the later we can. If some people change some aspect of their behavior midway through life then evidently it’s possible to change that thing. Hence it cannot have been genetically determined by our parents, much less our caveman ancestors.

To add to Zenbeam’s observation:

Our genes may predispose us to value certain motives/actions above others. Someone with one set of genes may value revenge as a strong motive, whereas someone with a different set of genes may value social approval as a strong motive. Both people might encounter a situation in which (for example) they see their unpopular friend on the playground being teased by a more popular student. The first person might respond by punching the popular kid in the nose, where the second person might respond by joining in the teasing.

But then other factors come in.

The teacher sends the first kid to detention or other punishment. The teacher sits down with the second kid and discusses friendship, loyalty, and kindness. The first kid gets in tons of trouble with mom and dad for the punch. The second kid, normally a teacher’s pet, experiences the humiliation of having the teacher’s social approval withheld. If that sit-down was in the presence of other kids, the second kid may experience broader social ostracism for the disloyal behavior.

Both kids have genetic predilections toward certain behaviors, but those are not absolute imperatives: they’ve got, as we all have, myriad conflicting motives. The teacher’s influence (and the parents’, and the classmates’) may serve to strengthen other motives.

The first person will still feel more inclined toward vengeance than the second person; the second person will still feel more inclined toward obtaining social approval than the first person. But those aren’t the only influences on their behavior. They may change their behavior without changing their genes, because they now understand better how their behavior influences the world around them, and how behaviors they thought would satisfy their motives does not do so.

Daniel