Evolutionary Psychology is a Bunch of Hooey

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=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?

Daniel
[/QUOTE]
What makes you think they don’t, or at least try ? Where you find males with harems, you find other males trying to mate with his females when he’s not looking.

And to a large degree this looks like an example of the high risk/high reward strategy common to males and their genes; the genes take the gamble that they’ll end up in a gamma, for the chance to be in the alpha.

And as Revenant Threshold says, since they tend to be related the risk isn’t that huge, since the odds are good the alpha has many of the same genes.

62

[QUOTE=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.
[/QUOTE]

Ev Psychs are so sceptical of group selection precisely because to laymen entering the field, group selection looks so stunningly obvious and yet can be trivially explained by individual selection and are actually difficult to explain by group selection.

However, group selection is getting hot again in recent years, but not for the reasons you think it is.

What seems to have been neglected in this thread is that evolutionary psychology doesn’t just consist of trying to explain behaviours through stories, there’s also an equally large portion devoted to a theoretical and mathematical approach. Rather than testing big messy things like humans, they work with computer models and very simple organisms to try and reverse engineer basic principles of evolutionary selection. This stuff is typically much more rigorous and empirical but far more boring than the ev psych that gets into the NYT. But people who are critical of ev psych need also to address the claims made by this side of things because much of ev psych reasoning is based on these theoretical models.

63

[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
What seems to have been neglected in this thread is that evolutionary psychology doesn’t just consist of trying to explain behaviours through stories, there’s also an equally large portion devoted to a theoretical and mathematical approach. Rather than testing big messy things like humans, they work with computer models and very simple organisms to try and reverse engineer basic principles of evolutionary selection. This stuff is typically much more rigorous and empirical but far more boring than the ev psych that gets into the NYT. But people who are critical of ev psych need also to address the claims made by this side of things because much of ev psych reasoning is based on these theoretical models.
[/QUOTE]

While that may be true, and it’s all well and good, such exercises are hardly exclusive to EP. Indeed, the whole of evolutionary biology is involved with untangling such principles.

My problems with EP are in the underlying assumptions; I am neither a gene-centrist nor a strict adaptationist, thus do not agree with many of the conclusions which arise out of those two philosophies.

64

[QUOTE=John Mace]
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?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t see how we can assert that “chimps behave more like humans than birds do”. Would we compare human literature to chimp literature and bird literature? Neither chimps nor birds produce any literature. Do we compare human laws to chimp laws and bird laws? Again, neither chimps nor birds have laws. Do we compare human education to chimp education and bird education? Neither chimps nor birds have a system of education.

65

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
I don’t see how we can assert that “chimps behave more like humans than birds do”. Would we compare human literature to chimp literature and bird literature? Neither chimps nor birds produce any literature. Do we compare human laws to chimp laws and bird laws? Again, neither chimps nor birds have laws. Do we compare human education to chimp education and bird education? Neither chimps nor birds have a system of education.
[/QUOTE]

How about mating, dietary and social behaviors?

66

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
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.
[/quote]
Yeah, some forms of sacrafice… like dying to save your kids or perhaps other family members. But what about the sacrafices we make each day for total strangers? Or to society as a whole?

Actually, fuck it. I should not mention wolves or generalizations about the human condition.

Here, fools, explain this: Why does the vast majority of us possess the instinct designed to specifically hinder our chances at reproduction? Why is it that the more attractive or desirable the member of the opposite sex, the more incapable we are of going up to talk to them, much less be our usual charming selves? Nervousness undercuts us, makes us unsociable, unwitty, unpleasant to be around.

Clearly, group selection has deemed it most efficient if not only do the supermodels not want to talk to us, but if we make ourselves hideous if they ever do.

Also, this isn’t a lone example regarding sex. The exact same thing happens if we try to associate with emminent people. Ie, you weren’t popular in high school not just because those kids didn’t like the way you looked. More specifically, we can talk about the instinct of nervousness that underlies the previous situations. Nervousness is one of the fundamental emotions that were created for our self-sacrafice. For example, say you’re playing one-on-one basketball with the quarterback of the football team. Your nervousness makes you miss shots and not play well, while his relaxed demeanor lets him observe all of your moves and dribble with a light hand. You may be quite good against your dad or friends, but in this match you lose, the girls swoon around him, and the status quo is reaffirmed due just as much to your own instincts as to his or the spectators’.

Or maybe you keep your calm, win the game, and then make some jokes about his mom. Not being nervous, your manner is sociable and amicable. He laughs. A few hours later, you’re with him and the cheerleaders getting drunk. By not being nervous, you proved to them you’re a leader too.

[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
Ev Psychs are so sceptical of group selection precisely because to laymen entering the field, group selection looks so stunningly obvious and yet can be trivially explained by individual selection and are actually difficult to explain by group selection.
[/QUOTE]
Trivially explained, huh? Ev Psychs’ explanations are trivial, yet that doesn’t mean the questions they try to answer can be trivially explained.

67

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]

[QUOTE=Aleksandr 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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I wasn’t talking about how great a criminal you could be.

68

[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
However, group selection is getting hot again in recent years, but not for the reasons you think it is.
…
Rather than testing big messy things like humans, they work with computer models and very simple organisms to try and reverse engineer basic principles of evolutionary selection.
[/QUOTE]
Would you elaborate? Some computer models (caughtoyscaugh) lend support to group selection?

69

[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
How about mating, dietary and social behaviors?
[/QUOTE]

I thin the same basic argument holds. With regards to how we mate, humans have a ton of behaviors ranging from writing love poetry to exchanging locks of hair to honeymoons in Las Vegas to divorce court to foot fetish websites to couples counseling to a thousand other things. Neither chimps nor birds do any of those things. When they mate, they just do it.

As far as eating, humans eat or refrain from eating for any number of reasons: religious, ethical, long-term health, social. Chimps and birds eat whenever they are hungry and food is available.

Social behavior is obviously a huge category but I don’t see similarities there either. The most common human social behavior is talk, which chimps and birds can’t do.

70

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
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?
[/QUOTE]

I would offer logic and common sense. Taking the list of human universals, many of them just can’t be avoided. The number two, for instance, is the quantity you get when you start with one thing and add another. In other cases there’s a logical reason behind the trait. For instance if males are more likely to be violent and do physical labor, that’s probably because males are stronger on average. If women are more likely to take care of children, it may be because women give birth to children and can give breast milk. Any tribe that decided to have men do the breast-feeding would suffer certain setbacks.

71

[QUOTE=Alex_Dubinsky]

Trivially explained, huh? Ev Psychs’ explanations are trivial, yet that doesn’t mean the questions they try to answer can be trivially explained.
[/QUOTE]

The examples you’ve given are exactly what I’m talking about. Lets take the whole nervousness thing for example. You’ve proposed that non-nervous people have better success at mating and, thus, that nervousness is still around is proof that it’s selected for on a group level. The only problem with that is that a necessary condition of group selection is that those who possess the advantageous gene must be systematically punished in some way for the greater benefit of the group. Otherwise, the non-nervous people are just going to get all the chicks and pass on a generation of non-nervous offspring which dominate over time.

That nervousness exists must necessarily come from something other than group selection. I can think up a bunch of just-so stories off the top of my head: Evolution favored timidity over rashness in hunters, the risk of rejection in small tribes was far larger, social cues are all mixed up nowadays etc. Regardless of what the actual explanation is, there are several plausible ones involving individual selection and none involving group selection.

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection looks to be a promising start. This is just one at random of the many papers within the literature of group selection.

72

[QUOTE=Alex_Dubinsky]
Here, fools, explain this
[/quote]

Moderator’s Warning: This is a violation of the rules of this forum. You’ve been warned for insults a couple of times in the last few months; you need to rein in your temper.

73

[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
The examples you’ve given are exactly what I’m talking about. Lets take the whole nervousness thing for example. You’ve proposed that non-nervous people have better success at mating and, thus, that nervousness is still around is proof that it’s selected for on a group level. The only problem with that is that a necessary condition of group selection is that those who possess the advantageous gene must be systematically punished in some way for the greater benefit of the group. Otherwise, the non-nervous people are just going to get all the chicks and pass on a generation of non-nervous offspring which dominate over time.

That nervousness exists must necessarily come from something other than group selection. I can think up a bunch of just-so stories off the top of my head: Evolution favored timidity over rashness in hunters, the risk of rejection in small tribes was far larger, social cues are all mixed up nowadays etc. Regardless of what the actual explanation is, there are several plausible ones involving individual selection and none involving group selection.
[/QUOTE]
Let me paraphrase the beginning of your post: Group selection must, as its guiding principle, punish individuals who have the undesired advantage or they’ll overrun the planet. Yet society doesn’t punish non-nervous people.

But don’t you see, you’re trying to argue group selection is wrong simply by assuming simple darwinian selection is all there is. That’s circular. Group selection says (or should say… can’t speak for all its proponents) that there is some other mechanism going on. Something far more subtle than “handicapping the advantaged,” so that non-nervous people can have huge advantages and not outbreed everyone else.

That is the essence of the idea.

Your individual selection-based explanations don’t make any sense. I can’t get laid or look the President in the eye because of patience when hunting? because in a small tribe i’d be looked down on? mixed up social queues? The reason for the nervous/non-nervous divide is simple. Society needs leaders and it needs followers. After billions of years, our genes have found a way to create both kinds of people in the right proportions while keeping the obvious consequence, that the leaders outbreed the followers, at bay! Screw the “language gene,” this is what propelled human evolution.

Like I said, you reject the conclusion because you don’t understand the mechanism. That’s, in some ways, backward thinking. Don’t be too enamored with the elegance of the current theory to ignore observation. Really, that’s the way science works. We realize something’s true, then we hunt down why. It very rarely works the other way. Anti-group selectionists want to first understand why before they’ll accept it as true. That’s backwards.

74

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
I thin the same basic argument holds. With regards to how we mate, humans have a ton of behaviors ranging from writing love poetry to exchanging locks of hair to honeymoons in Las Vegas to divorce court to foot fetish websites to couples counseling to a thousand other things. Neither chimps nor birds do any of those things. When they mate, they just do it.
[/quote]
Looked at a peacock lately? Animals have a huge array of behaviours designed to ensnare a mate, whether that be a display of some kind or simply fighting off other potential mates. To say animals “just do it” is a pretty gross simplification.

Actually, some animals do display some long-term planning as far as food goes. Animal species that live in groups have pecking orders that allow alpha members or pairs or kids first go. Seems like a social reason to me. As for those other things; sure. But then they’re dumber than us.

They can certainly communicate.

Why is being stronger a logical explanation for being more violent?

75

[QUOTE=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.)
[/QUOTE]

Sorry to resurrect a zombie thread here, but I saw this misconception (no pun intended) pop up more than once in this thread without being corrected. It’s long been known that the expression of genetic effects can be amplified or suppressed by the environment. Take for example the height of corn, which is known to be genetically influenced. A short-bred corn plant can grow taller than a tall-bred one if the short one is planted in fertile soil in a sunny spot. Evolutionary psychology does not in any way discount the effect of environment on genetic expression, and well-known proponents of EP (such as Pinker) take into account both the physical and cultural environment.

As you can guess I do believe there is definitely something to EP, although I agree it seems to attract bad scientific thought that reflects the wishful thoughts of its practitioners. Thanks to the culture wars, the current media climate is fertile ground for the sensational speculation it tends to generate. In this regard, though, it is not much different from many other disciplines examining human behavior and culture in the infancy of their fields. With more time, the details will likely solidify.

76

[QUOTE=chacoguy420]
Kudos to you sir, for I am weak.
[/QUOTE]

Go sit in the corner, and don’t come back out unless you’re deeply sorry! :slight_smile:

I’ll be in the other corner.

77

[QUOTE=Cosmic Relief]
Sorry to resurrect a zombie thread here, but I saw this misconception (no pun intended) pop up more than once in this thread without being corrected. It’s long been known that the expression of genetic effects can be amplified or suppressed by the environment. Take for example the height of corn, which is known to be genetically influenced. A short-bred corn plant can grow taller than a tall-bred one if the short one is planted in fertile soil in a sunny spot. Evolutionary psychology does not in any way discount the effect of environment on genetic expression, and well-known proponents of EP (such as Pinker) take into account both the physical and cultural environment.
[/QUOTE]

Two things:

First, what proof is offered for the theory that genes drive our behavior but that environment also plays a role? Where’s the physical evidence that supports that conclusion?

Two main lines of evidence were offered in this thread. The first is that evolutionary psychology is “the best theory we have”. But how can it be the best theory we have if we can’t physically find the genes that are the basis of the entire theory? The second line of evidence is that human universals exist. But as there are alternative explanations for that, we’re still looking for some proof.

Second, what would it even mean in the context of human psychology to say that there’s a genetic effect and also an environmental effect? When a human being make a decision, there are two or more choices and he or she picks one of them. A person must pick either chastity, monogamy, or polygamy, for instance. Nobody can pick sixty percent of one and forty percent of another. So if there was genetic determination in one direction and environmental pressure in another, there would be no way to split the difference.

78

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Looked at a peacock lately? Animals have a huge array of behaviours designed to ensnare a mate, whether that be a display of some kind or simply fighting off other potential mates. To say animals “just do it” is a pretty gross simplification.
[/QUOTE]

Let me try to make my point in more detail. Animal mating is determined entirely by instinct. Take a male and female peacock or any other animal and put them together under the right circumstances (i.e. they’re both healthy and sexually active, it’s mating season, and so forth). Mating will occur. If it does not, there must be some aspect of the situation which lead to the mating instinct not activating.

Human beings, however, always have a choice. There’s no environment where you could put a couple together and be guaranteed that they’d have sex. A man may have inate attraction towards women with a certain looks, but he chooses whether to follow that attraction. People may have social prejudices against fornication, but they choose whether to follow those prejudices. There is no circumstance where the choice vanishes. Even if they decide to abandon all morals and do it like they do on the Discovery Channel, they still made a decision. (And how do they do it on the Discovery Channel? I’ve never been sure.)

Now I’m open to the possibility that some of those inate attractions are determined by an evolutionary process, though of course I’d like to see some proof before I believe that. However, the choices that get made cannot be driven by evolution because there’s no way to pass them on. A horny bastard may have plenty of offspring, but his sperm cannot influence the decisions those offspring will make. Hence there’s no way that polygamy could get handed down in evolutionary fashion.

79

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Let me try to make my point in more detail. Animal mating is determined entirely by instinct. Take a male and female peacock or any other animal and put them together under the right circumstances (i.e. they’re both healthy and sexually active, it’s mating season, and so forth). Mating will occur. If it does not, there must be some aspect of the situation which lead to the mating instinct not activating.
[/quote]
That seems somewhat oddly put. “Animals will always mate when put together, except of course when they don’t, which is of course down to unknown environmental factors, because animals will always mate when put together”. Why must there be some aspect of the situation that leads to the instinct not acting? What evidence do you have that in no cases animals act mating-wise on anything other than pure instinct?

I agree. But you haven’t provided me with any evidence that there are zero animals besides humans that have any kind of mental input in the situation.

Again, it is not the general theory of evolutionary psychology that things are determined by evolutionary processes, only that *predispositions * may be created by those processes.

Choices may certainly be passed on, because that are determined in part by our biology. A horny bastard may be that way because his body produces a higher than normal level of testosterone (pulling that out of my ass, I don’t know if that would have that effect). A particularly chaste person may have a biologically lower sex drive than on average. These are certainly things that may be passed on, and they are certainly things which could cause the same predispositions which parents had. Choices are not biology-dependent, and if you disagree i’d ask you to think back to your teenagerhood.

80

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
First, what proof is offered for the theory that genes drive our behavior but that environment also plays a role? Where’s the physical evidence that supports that conclusion?
[/quote]

Twin studies are taken to be strong evidence of behavioral heritability. Identical twins separated at birth and put in highly divergent environments often are shown to have behavioral similarities that are staggeringly improbable unless they are heritable. But their behavior isn’t identical, suggesting there’s also an environmental effect.

We may not know the exact genes that drive some of these behaviors, but we know that genes govern what is heritable. I agree that actually finding the genes would be a good standard of proof, but there are a number of human attributes we know to be heritable though we haven’t yet isolated the genes.

Under the EP explanation, the genes you get are deterministic, but how they end up manifesting is probabilistic as a function of the environment. We may all have genes that cause our behavior to be polygamous when resources are plentiful, and monogamous when the environment is more harsh. Depending on your exact genetic makeup you may have a stronger or weaker tendency to go one way or the other. But it’s not as if there’s a simple gene that turns it on and off like a light bulb.