Evolutionary Psychology is a Bunch of Hooey

[Revenant_Threshold]

@ITR champion

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.)

I would say that that’s kinda the idea of predispositions. It means that it is one factor among many. In many cases studies have found that the similarities attributed to genetic similarities account for only a reasonably small variance. On top of that, you’re assuming that that’s “need to spread offspring” is the only factor in play, when it pretty much isn’t. Just as you might assume there are behavioural or societal reasons for this (and i’d probably agree, evolutionary psychology being about predispositions), it’s fair to say that there could well be factors that hinge on other genetic predispositions besides that one.

You seem to be assuming that because such predispositions may not come to fruition, that genetic factors are insignificant (I assume you’re still holding to your hooey idea?). A change of 40-50% still leaves a significant percentage.

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.

It’s pretty hard to do such tests, as not every psychologist has access to or the funds for a genetic test of the type you’re talking about. But similar tests can be and are done with those naturally provided genetic testers - twins. Twin studies are a pretty big linchpin in evolutionary psychology (among other things), and significant results are got when looking at certain traits by comparing fraternal and identical twins. The problem, as has been pointed out, is that often we can’t then look through and pick out the exact genes, or combination of them. But we can know they’re in there somewhere.

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.

Certainly it would be back to the drawing board if the solution was found lacking; but as of yet, it really hasn’t been. There’s good evidence for genetic predispositions towards certain behavioural traits.

Taking into account that it was your apparent understanding of evolutionary psychology that psychologists are claiming that genes will with 100% certainty determine our behaviour, I would suggest to you that such a misunderstanding of the basic theories tends to suggest you yourself should learn the lesson and go back to reexamine the evidence. Seriously, pick up a good book on twin studies.

[Mr.Excellent]

@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. [ . . .]

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.

Actually, it would be hard to argue that women who’d already been pregnant would be particularly desirable because of guaranteed fertility. Remember, the resource expenditure for dudes in mating is really quite small. We don’t need to make sure we only, or even primarily, mate with women who’re actually fertile, because it’s a trivial investment in resources for us to have sex with lots and lots of women. In order for us to produce children, we don’t need to be picky - we just have to play the odds.

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@Lemur866

So denying evolutionary psychology is to deny that human nature is a product of human evolution. In other words, creationism.

I disagree. Evolutionary psychology is based on the foundations of adaptationism - the belief that all traits are the result of adaptive evolution. I do not accept adaptationist claims; there are many instances of non-adaptive traits to be found in nature. Therefore, I do not accept that all behavior is therefore adaptive, as well, and reject evolutionary psychology on those grounds.

Which is not to say that no behaviors are adaptive; that would be equally false. The trick is in teasing out which behaviors are adaptive, which might be emergent properties, which might be the results of happenstance, etc. I feel there is more at work to produce human behaviors than what is happening in the genome.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

I haven’t read the thread to carefully, so I’ll be honest, but I don’t think anyone has brought up this point:

Evolutionary psychology is one of TWO THINGS.

1. The belief that psychology is greatly influenced by instinct and, hence, evolution. This is almost self-evident. I think the discussion in this thread has been about whether this is true, and it obviously is.

2. The presumption that we know how evolution works: that it’s simply darwin’s survival of the fittest. This assumption has subtle effects which you won’t understand until you start examining evolutionary psychology in detail. The central problem is that Darwin’s theory has no clear mechanism for supporting the idea of “group selection,” since it’s the individual whose genes are passed. Many ev. psychs. simply reject group selection and come up with their individual-centric hypotheses. Yet explaining things not only like altruism, but our difficulty lying, our nervousness, the fucking hurdles and self-undermining behavior that people have in trying to reproduce (Darwin’s holy of holies)… is impossible with survival of the fittest. Group selection is undoubtedly real and most evolutionary psychologists, in the narrow sense, are full of shit. The only problem is we don’t have a theory of evolution, certainly not as magically clever as darwinism, that explains group selection.

[John_Mace]

@Darwin's Finch

I disagree. Evolutionary psychology is based on the foundations of adaptationism - the belief that all traits are the result of adaptive evolution.

Is it based on the idea that all behavioral traits are the result of adaptive evolution? The wikipedia article says:

Evolutionary psychologists see much of human behavior as having foundations in psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.

<snip>

Evolutionary psychologists see those behaviors or aspects of society that are nearly universal, such as parent-child conflicts, as more likely to reflect evolved adaptations.

Emphasis added. I think when **Lemur **used the term “human nature”, that’s what he meant. Human nature is not all human behavior, but that behavior which is [nearly] universal.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Ugh, I think I could have been clearer. In Darwin’s easy to understand theory, the only changes that get propagated are the ones that directly help the individual (or his immediate family) to reproduce. Meanwhile, group selection is the idea that evolution propagates changes that help the group survive by evolving instincts that are often at the expense of individual members. Group selection is clearly how things work, but the a-priori foolishness of people who think they ‘grok’ evolution has broken the entire field of evolutionary psychology. And, of course, prevented us from developing new theories of evolution.

[ultrafilter]

Coincidentally, I saw a link to this article suggesting that religious belief confers evolutionary advantages. There was a longer and probably better article in The Economist a few weeks back.

[LilShieste]

@Mr. Excellent

Actually, it would be hard to argue that women who’d already been pregnant would be particularly desirable because of guaranteed fertility. Remember, the resource expenditure for dudes in mating is really quite small. We don’t need to make sure we only, or even primarily, mate with women who’re actually fertile, because it’s a trivial investment in resources for us to have sex with lots and lots of women. In order for us to produce children, we don’t need to be picky - we just have to play the odds.

In the words of my Evolutionary Psych prof:

“Sperm are cheap; ovum ain’t.”

[John_Mace]

I should add that although I am a strong supporter of evolutionary psychology, there is a lot of really bad “science” out there that falls into that category. It’s a new field, and it’s very difficult to prove any given hypothesis, so it lends itself to some shoddy work. However, rejecting EP out of hand because of some bad examples would be like rejecting physics because of the guys who came up with cold fusion. Eventually the field will mature and the bad/pop science will get weeded out.

[Der_Trihs]

@Alex_Dubinsky

In Darwin’s easy to understand theory, the only changes that get propagated are the ones that directly help the individual (or his immediate family) to reproduce. Meanwhile, group selection is the idea that evolution propagates changes that help the group survive by evolving instincts that are often at the expense of individual members. Group selection is clearly how things work, but the a-priori foolishness of people who think they ‘grok’ evolution has broken the entire field of evolutionary psychology. And, of course, prevented us from developing new theories of evolution.

Group selection isn’t “clearly how things work”; it’s generally been regarded as incorrect by most modern evolutionary theorists. Not just people in evolutionary psychology.

[Lemur866]

@Alex_Dubinsky

Group selection is clearly how things work…

No it isn’t. Maybe group selection is a lot more important than most people think, but there’s no “clearly” involved.

And of course, I agree with Darwin’s Finch that not all human behavior is adaptive. It seems to me that our brains didn’t evolve to enable us to do things like, say, mathematics. Our brains evolved to allow general abstract reasoning, especially on a social level, and that general purpose reasoning can be turned to unnatural perversions like mathematics.

And we’ve all met people whose brains are screwed up in various ways. I don’t think you can argue that schizophrenia is adaptive, the most you could say is that the sorts of traits that sometimes lead to schizophrenia can be adaptive. We’ve got these gigantic swollen brains, it’s no suprise that they sometimes just break down in various disturbing ways. Or it might be a case of “a little is good, more is better, but too much is bad”.

And you can’t ignore simple deleterious genes. Sometimes people are born with genetic errors that cause immense suffering and early death. There are people born with brain defects that are pretty much unambigous genetic or developmental errors.

And we can also look at behaviors that might have been adaptive back on the african savanna, but are deleterious today. A person who stuffs themselves full of fat and sugar whenever they get the chance wouldn’t suffer any ill effects as a hunter-gatherer, because there are no 7-11 convenience stores filled with soda and potato chips on the Serengeti.

And lastly, we can distinguish between several behavior levels. Part of what I so blithely called “human nature” is simply our nature as primates, our nature as mammals, our nature as tetrapods, our nature as vertebrates, our nature as animals. We aren’t as different from a monkey, or a mouse, or a lizard, or a worm as we might think. While we have to guard against cheap anthropomorphism, it’s clear that many of the things that human beings do are the same as those monkeys and mice and fish.

Much of what makes us feel “human” is really our animal nature, which is why we can look at a dog and recognize a fellow creature there. Remove from a person the things that separate us from a dog, and you still have a person, as anyone who has worked with developmentally disabled people knows. Despite their lack of our solely human characteristics, these people aren’t inhuman. But a person who somehow retains those solely human characteristics but lacks those characteristics we share with dogs and monkeys, and we have an inhuman monster. The essence of our humanity ironically isn’t our human nature, it is our animal nature.

[John_Mace]

Good post, Lemur, but I’ll quibble with your example about math. I think very simple math is part of our evolutionary heritage, although calculus clearly isn’t. A better example would be writing vs language. We clearly evolved to have language, but we didn’t evolve to have writing-- that was a bonus for having all that gray matter. Although we do seem to have evolved to utilize symbols other than words to evoke thoughts-- ie, personal adornment and art. Writing probably came from that adaptive behavior.

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@John Mace

Is it based on the idea that all behavioral traits are the result of adaptive evolution? The wikipedia article says:

That would depend on which evolutionary psychologist you ask, I suspect. Nevertheless, many (probably most) claims made in the name of the field (see, for example, the earlier-mentioned supposed adaptive significance of religion) stem from the assumption that those behaviors are necessarily adaptive, and thus are born “just so” stories which attempt to explain how they are adapative. I reject the supposition that such behaviors are necessarily adaptive (in the biological, as opposed to cultural, sense), and thus reject the conclusions reached by such applications of the field.

Emphasis added. I think when **Lemur **used the term “human nature”, that’s what he meant. Human nature is not all human behavior, but that behavior which is [nearly] universal.

Belief systems such as religions are “nearly universal”, but can be explained using non-evolutionary means. That doesn’t mean one must accept creationism if one rejects evolutionary psychology. Instinctual behaviors are certainly adaptive, but not all “universal” behaviors are necessarily instinctual. The problem, of course, is in determining what is instinctual and what isn’t. Until you have established that, it’s a mistake to automatically look for the adaptive explanation, in my opinion.

[John_Mace]

@Darwin's Finch

That would depend on which evolutionary psychologist you ask, I suspect. Nevertheless, many (probably most) claims made in the name of the field (see, for example, the earlier-mentioned supposed adaptive significance of religion) stem from the assumption that those behaviors are necessarily adaptive, and thus are born “just so” stories which attempt to explain how they are adapative. I reject the supposition that such behaviors are necessarily adaptive (in the biological, as opposed to cultural, sense), and thus reject the conclusions reached by such applications of the field.

Yes, as I noted above, there seems to be a lot of bad science out there in the name of EP.

Belief systems such as religions are “nearly universal”, but can be explained using non-evolutionary means. That doesn’t mean one must accept creationism if one rejects evolutionary psychology. Instinctual behaviors are certainly adaptive, but not all “universal” behaviors are necessarily instinctual. The problem, of course, is in determining what is instinctual and what isn’t. Until you have established that, it’s a mistake to automatically look for the adaptive explanation, in my opinion.

Emphasis added. But it does in the sense that the OP has. He rejects “all” of EP. If none of our behavior can be attributed to the evolutionary process, then what else is there?

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@John Mace

Emphasis added. But it does in the sense that the OP has. He rejects “all” of EP. If none of our behavior can be attributed to the evolutionary process, then what else is there?

Perhaps so, but I’m not the OP. I was giving my take on the subject, using Lemur’s post (or, more specifically, that particular phrase) as a jumping-in point. I reject much of what I’ve seen coming out of EP, largely because I don’t agree with the premises and the inherent adaptationist philosophy. I also think it has too much of a pseudo-sciencey feel to it, very much like astrology, using genes instead of stars as “mystical” objects which govern our behaviors and decisions. If EP can shed itself of all that crap, it might be a worthwhile discipline. I was merely commenting that one can reject EP while still accepting that our brains, and therefore certain aspects of our behavior, are products of evolution.

[sqweels]

I think young children are more attuned to instincts than grownups. One example is the tendency of children to fear monsters under the bed or other shadowy places. Long ago there really were creatures lurking in the shadows and devouring our ancestors.

Anyway, for a highly crackpotty rumination on the subject, here’s Squeaky Wheels on Instinct

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Understanding human instinct without believing in group selection is like trying to understand flight without believing in air.

The majority of our behavior simply cannot be explained in terms of self-interest. The vast majority of our social instincts center on us acting in a way that is not ideal. The man who can lie, who can act, who can wear any face he wants, have an irrepressable confidence, a calm demeanor, and trustworthy eyes is unhindered in anything he wishes to achieve.

Someone just now likened humans to wolves/dogs, that we have so many similar emotions and instincts, including all the ones that go against self-interest. Wolves have a special mechanism for enforcing group selection. This mechanism is that only the leaders reproduce. Yet how did this mechanism arise? Humans, meanwhile, have all the same instincts but not the obvious mechanism. How do our instincts continue?

Evolutionary scientists cling to denial not because of observation but because of a-priori theory. It’s true, the idea of Mendelian evolution is exquisitely elegant… composed of almost pure logic. Yet anyone who thinks it must be all there is, is blind. Blinded by elegance, unable to see the fucking obvious. And what’s sad, is that whatever mechanisms are in our introns, our junk dna, our instincts, that somehow make group selection function: those will be the real theories of awe-inspiring beauty.

[Der_Trihs]

@Alex_Dubinsky

The majority of our behavior simply cannot be explained in terms of self-interest.

Evolution doesn’t center on human self interest, but the gene. You are expendable to it. Self sacrifice isn’t a problem for standard evolutionary theory to explain.

@Alex_Dubinsky

The vast majority of our social instincts center on us acting in a way that is not ideal. The man who can lie, who can act, who can wear any face he wants, have an irrepressable confidence, a calm demeanor, and trustworthy eyes is unhindered in anything he wishes to achieve.

Don’t be unrealistic. There are plenty of clever liars in prison, or dead. It’s not nearly the irresitable advantage you claim. No matter how convincing you are, you tend to get caught sooner or later.

@Alex_Dubinsky

Someone just now likened humans to wolves/dogs, that we have so many similar emotions and instincts, including all the ones that go against self-interest. Wolves have a special mechanism for enforcing group selection. This mechanism is that only the leaders reproduce.

That’s not group selection. That’s the selfish genes of the top male, and the selfish genes of the females.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Der Trihs

That’s not group selection. That’s the selfish genes of the top male, and the selfish genes of the females.

How do you explain the unselfish genes of the gamma male, then? Wouldn’t those genes have a better chance of reproducing by going against the pack leader’s wishes and mating (forcibly or otherwise) with one of the femalesl than by not mating at all?

Daniel

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

How do you explain the unselfish genes of the gamma male, then? Wouldn’t those genes have a better chance of reproducing by going against the pack leader’s wishes and mating (forcibly or otherwise) with one of the femalesl than by not mating at all?

I tend to disagree with the other things Der Trihs is saying, but this is plausible in cases where a “pack” is related. I don’t know enough about wolf packs to know whether they are, but certainly i’ve read theories on family altruism in this way. It may not be totally your genes passing on, but one couple having all the kids means you’ve got a pack full of babysitters waiting on call. Improves the quality and chance that kids’ll grow up. And those kids will have some of your genes in there.