Yeah, because there’s just no way it might have something to do with the fact that women’s elbows are angled more than men’s elbows are so that we can swing our arms normally while walking and not bash into our hips. Women get whanged with bowstrings more often when learning archery, too, and have to learn how to straighten the elbow to avoid the string. :smack:
I went to the first hit for searching on that term (with quotes), which has a shortened list under the heading “cultural universals”, so I thought that might be the specific term of art, so I used it, to find the Wiki link.
Although it is abundantly clear that evolution is the driving force behind the development of most every aspect of human identity, including our behavior, I do have agree that evolutionary psychology is not a current field of rigidly scientific exploration and in so many words, a lot of it is bullshit.
I think a large part of them stems from faith in the existence of a good teleological explanation for all human behavior, and at some point, that just no longer becomes the case. Evolutionary psychology means having to put up with the bloviating from the New York Times editorial staff on why modern humans get depressed because, “it’s good from time to time for us to seriously consider the path of our life and reevaluate what we’re doing with it.” Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but as a field of study evolutionary psychology will no more be able to definitely settle this issue that English literature Ph.D.’s will be able to definitively settle the role of natural and vegetabilic imagery in gender relations in 17th century British literature.
As humans, we are not perfectly adapted for any given environment, and that’s likely especially untrue for our modern world. Why would a fifth of us develop type II diabetes from too many sodas and Chips-A-hoy’s if it were true that we could look to evolutionary pressure to explain every aspect of human functioning in our modern society?
So it goes with evolutionary psychology. It has its place and it is interesting, but people take it too far.
This is a misunderstanding of what the evolutionary psychologists are saying. No one can reasonably claim that we’ve evolved to function in modern society, and I doubt that many evolutionary psychologists are.
With regards to your specific example, the best available explanation is that we’re hardwired to prefer the tastes of sugar and fat because those are readily available energy sources, which are good to have when food is scarce. Before the invention of refined flour, there weren’t too many problems with that, but as soon as it was invented (circa 1700) diabetes became a much more common disease. This, I think, is a good example of evolution preparing us poorly for our modern world (assuming that the explanation I gave is correct).
Anger in fact makes a good example of how we can clearly see that it’s society that shapes things. Right now American society is very much on an anger binge. You can see the effects by watching Bill O’Reilly or listening to eminem or simply reading many of the threads on this message board. It seems that at the very least a large majority of Americans currently view anger as a good thing and think it somehow proves authenticity and strength. (An interesting book on the topic was just published last year:
Bee in the Mouth, by Peter Wood.)
However this was not always the case. Back in the Victorian era you were definitely not supposed to show anger. It was thought of the exact opposite way that we think of it, as a sign of weakness, dishonesty, and immaturity. To be a proper gentleman or lady you were supposed to remain calm and collected at all times, “the strong, silent type” in other words. And this basic thinking held sway up to the first part of the 20th century.
So in short the two societies were at opposite ends of the scale with regards to anger. (Though obviously there were a few individuals in both cases who bucked the trend.) But we have the same genes as the Victorians did. Hence it’s possible for a wide population with the same genes to change its mind about a trait like that. What, then, would it even mean to say that there’s a genetic disposition for or against anger if a society is apparently able to turn that genetic disposition on or off?
People have all kinds of crazy ideas about how society “should” be, but that doesn’t mean society is that way. You anecdotal evidence about O’Reilly is laughable, considering you’re trying to critique a school of science. Is it your contention that human behavior is infinitely malleable?
Currently, no one can explain or predict in a perfectly mechanistic way exactly why giving estrogen suppliments to one woman will cause her to develop breast cancer, and giving them to another woman will actually prevent her from developing breast cancer. If we can’t do that, how are we supposed to explain something as complex and non-linear as human behavior, by either genetics or psychology?
Science tends to have fads, just like every other human endeavor. The current focus on evolutionary psychology is in part a reaction against the former fad of denying that there was any genetic component of human behavior. At it’s most extreme, it was claimed that all normal human brains were general-purpose personality generating machines, and that with the (unknowable) exact right input from birth, anyone could grow up to have any personality whatsoever.
Finally, almost certainly the reason why human behavior is so muddled is that our ancestors have gone through radically different circumstances over the past million years or so, and what constituted successful survival behavior changed a lot over different times and places. As matt and threemae noted, we seem to be either poorly adapted for any one set of circumstances, or well adapted for flexibility, depending on how you look at it.
This is one (of many) of your problems. They weren’t “at the opposite ends of the scale”. You have to get much more radical than that to define opposites. One end would be that people would show aggressive by trying to kill anyone that disturbed them, worked to kill their entire family including the children, and kidnapped the women and raped them repeatedly until the original aggressors were killed and eaten by another group.
The opposite end of the scale would be complete pacifism and actually turning to help anyone that tried to destroy themselves or their family up to and including death of all.
The differences that you give as examples are simply tiny deviations when compared to the different types of living organisms. Make a chart about the common behaviors people engage in, the range of behaviors we exhibit, and then individual differences in those behaviors. Now compare those behaviors to the possible ranges based on an inter-species level. This last sentence is where you break down over and over.
As mentioned up above, you are advocating a blank slate theory that was popular in the 1960’s and has been broken down over and over and and over since then. Nature overtook nurture a long time ago although no one completely rejects the nurture part. You are trying to overtake the nature part once again despite decades of research and the work of tens of thousands of people and that is sheer lunacy. Give it up because it isn’t logical, learned, or rational in the least.
Some aspects of human behavior are pretty simple and straightforward. For example, most adults want to get laid. Or a more specific example:
All things being equal, most guys find a 25 year old woman much more sexually attractive than a 65 year old woman.
For me, the sociobiological explanation for this phenomenon is pretty convincing.
Okay, I agree that the existence of disagreement alone would not probe that they’re both wrong. What I see developing in the field, though, is a free-for-all of making things up to suit the current needs. Shermer in that column had a certain political statement that he wanted to make and … surprise! Evolutionary psychology happens to support that statement. Miller and Kanazawa want to grab attention and be “politcally incorrect” and … surprise! Evolutionary psychology gives them reasons to do exactly that. I have to be suspicious that each is cherry-picking the availalbe studies to get the results that they want. If they (or someone else) actually laid aside all previous prejudices and desires and made an earnest attempt to form a conclusion based on the data alone, I’d be interested in seeing the result. But, needless to say, it’s difficult to do that.
They had plenty of control, which they actively tried to use to reshape society and human nature. As for time, if the blank slate theory was true, one generation would be enough.
As pointed out, they did no such thing. Besides what others have said, you haven’t shown that the people of that time didn’t have anger, just that they didn’t get showy about it. There’s no such thing as a culture without anger, because anger is part of our inherited human nature. You can change how it’s expressed, you can channel it, encourage or discourage it; you can’t just get rid of it.
I think that the anger example again shows that genes AND other stuff (culture, upbringing, etc.) can have a big impact on human behavior.
During the Victorian era, supposed you walked up and down the street in London proclaiming that the Queen is a worthless whore; that English people are a bunch of losers; etc. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t provoke an angry response.
Really? I don’t believe i’d characterise Victorian society that way. Granted i’m not exactly a historian, and if you have a lot of knowledge of the area i’ll happily bow to your greater experience, but I believe anger had its place there as it does now. And I wonder if by society you mean Society.
As has already been pointed out, that’s not opposite. Opposite would be widespread condemnation on one hand and widespread exhaltation on the other. But I believe you may have unwittingly shifted what’s being talked about here.
It’s been your suggestion that evolutionary psychology rings false when applied to behaviour. But what you’re talking about here is views on that behaviour. You’re saying that Victorians thought of anger one way, and people today think of it as another; but what is their actual behaviour? How many people actually showed anger? You seem to be saying that because Victorian society deemed anger bad, they could all magically shut if off at will, when all it means is that they deemed it bad. But the views on something and the existence of something are two very different things. After all - if they could and did shut off their anger, why would they have societal mores against it? I would say the existence of the concept that *anger is bad * pretty much implies that anger exists, and furthermore that it requires some kind of punishment through societal disapproval in order to try and curtail.
Put simply, you’re arguing about what people think about behaviour, not the behaviour itself, which is ostensibly the focus of your debate.
But how do you know that they are?
We can’t just assume that because a scientists’ view is supported by the data they present that they’re therefore making it up, or cherrypicking. For one thing, it could be that their views are the result of the data, rather than the other way around. I would point out that your own needs as a philosopher are best met by the complete failure of evolutionary psychology - and, lo and behold, you feel that that failure exists. Should I thus be suspicious of your claims? Potentially. But I can’t know for certain whether or not your views are a result of your data or your data is the result of your views without genuinely evaluating it. Suspicion doesn’t mean rejection; it means careful analysis.
I’d also be interested to know whether you’re able to point out potential areas of bias for all evolutionary psychologists - you’ve mentioned three. Are they the total of your experience of the field? When you say you see it developing, could you point out to me some examples of work or researchers of the past you feel were not motivated by such biases?
It would be hard to prove a point statistically about overall anger in ye olden days since there weren’t many statisticians studying the issue back then, but the same point could be made on any number of issues. Take the marital fidelity vs. polygamy question, there’s obviously been huge changes in both attitudes and behavior on that one. For instance, in the African American community as recently as the 1940’s out-of-wedlock births were beneath 10% of the total. Since that time they’ve skyrocketed upwards and is now well over 50%. So if these men have a genetic inclination to travel far and spread their seed widely, apparently almost all of them were suppressing it until recently. On the other hand, if these men have a genetic inclination towards monogamy then the majority are somehow managing to ignore it now. Certainly the genes haven’t changed in such a short time. (Not that I’m picking on African American men. A similar trend hit every group in America and most other western countries at the same time.)
Obviously there are a lot of possible explanations for the failure to find the actual genes in evolutionary psychology. Maybe each trait is caused by multiple genes, maybe the adaptations are flexible, maybe the genes are playing hide-and-seek. Yet in every case it would still be possible to run genetic tests and get significant results. For instance if trait A is caused by two genes, there would still be a strong correlaiton between the presence of each gene and the manifestation of trait A. If we did a study with a large enough sample size we should still be able to find it.
We can learn a lesson from the case of luminiferous ether, which 19th century physicists supposed to be medium for light waves. After the Michelson-Morley experiment to find the speed of the ether contradicted earlier results, physicists knew they had a problem. There were some solutions proposed to explain the experimental results, yet the eventual solution was one of elegant simplicity: the ether didn’t exist. I believe that as the actual genetic evidence continues to not pile up, we’ll eventually need to go back and question the premise in the same way.
This is a fine example to use. If I remember my science history correctly, during the nineteenth century, it was good science to believe in luminiferous ether, because there was no better alternate explanation along. Someone who denied liminiferous ether in the nineteenth century without having a better explanation would be practicing bad science: skepticism for the sake of skepticism ain’t good science.
So. How do you explain the huge number of traits universal to all human cultures? Is it coincidence? Are we descended from an ur-culture? Is there some sort of cultural natural selection going on independent of genetics? What alternate explanation do you offer for (for example) the ubiquity of people dancing to music?
Daniel
Assuming that’s true, it sounds more like a matter of more testing being done and the results publicized than anything. Back when the military started experimenting with blood tests, as I recall they decided to cover up the fact that so many of the people they tested were shown to be ‘illegitimate’ by the tests. I think you are grossly overestimating how loyal people have ever been to monogamy.
And, at any rate as circumstances change, you can expect different urges to take prominence. AND, as many people have pointed out, no one is saying that culture doesn’t matter. This idea that it’s EITHER culture OR genes is exclusively a fetish of the ‘culture’ side.
Look, we know for a fact that certain human behaviors are inborn. Why do people like sweet tastes? Why do they like sex? Why do they care for their children? Why do they have language? Why do they dislike pain?
Nobody had to teach you as a baby to like sweets. Nobody had to teach you to talk, you learned to talk by observing older people and copying them. Nobody had to teach you that pain is bad, you just knew. Nobody had to teach you to want sex, when you went through puberty you just wanted it.
Human nature is not infinitely malleable. Or to put it another way, there exists such a thing as human nature. Humans are humans, and while human beings show a bewildering variety of social behaviors, that array is not infinite.
So, where does human nature come from? One answer is that it comes from God, that when God created humans on the 6th day he decided what human nature would be. I suppose if you deny that humans evolved from non-human ancestors you might hold to this.
Except, if we accept that humans are the product of evolution, then it is clear that human nature was created by evolution as well. We are as we are because of our evolutionary history. Now, it is clear that simply because human beings have a particular human nature, it doesn’t follow that we human beings completely understand ourselves. We clearly DON’T understand ourselves fully. And simply recognizing that human nature is a product of evolution doesn’t mean that we understand our evolutionary history, or why human beings act as they do. And neither does it deny that plenty of human behaviors are influenced by culture.
Evolutionary psychology isn’t a master key to understand human behavior, rather it is a fruitful way of looking at human behavior. Biologically we’re pretty much identical to people 40,000 years ago back in the Paleolithic era, and any differences we have with those people are purely cultural. We might look at how differently we live compared to a hunter-gatherer back in the ice age, and conclude that culture is everything. But the more we look at ourselves and at that hunter-gatherer, the more we find that we’re not so different after all.
So denying evolutionary psychology is to deny that human nature is a product of human evolution. In other words, creationism.
Lemur, I’m so glad you wrote that. This was exactly what I was thinking, but couldn’t figure out how to phrase it. Essentially, if you believe in evolution, and that we evolved, you have to accept that we are as evolution created us, at least to some degree. The thing that differentiates us from other animals is that we can attempt to understand our own animalistic urges, assign moral value to them, and exert a certain amount of control over the behaviors that result. But the urges are animalistic, and they are the result of evolutionary pressure, there is no question about that. And if some of our behavior is due to those urges, well, then that gives evolutionary psychology some creedence right there.
I think that this is clearly a science that helps explain things at a macro/societal/cultural level, but is very hard to apply to any particular individual.
So in your opinion, why does sex and violence continue to sell so well in popular culture?