Which is why our zoos are overflowing with Giant Pandas…
Evolution can operate on information-transfer mechanisms other than genes though, can’t it? Whatever works well, and is heritable, will tend to happen more - whatever doesn’t work so well, or isn’t so heritable, will tend to drop out.
Genes are one way in which some kinds of information can be inherited, social structures and cultures are another, as are languages, mythologies, etc. The process of evolution can operate on all of these - but not in isolation on each category. Social adaptations might cause different selections in the gene pool, for example.
The whole thing is a network of interactions, upon which selection operates in many different ways.
I am not saying there is no human nature.
We like to screw. We don’t like to be hit. No doubt these are animal instincts and the affect our every day life.
This does not in any way explain why most people’s favorite color is blue.
There are two many steps between “caveman” and, lets say, “Middle school receptionist dreaming about buying a blue Prius”, and too many variations of human society for us to draw any straight lines between one and another.
Think of it like the butterfly effect- one butterfly’s wings in Tokyo may have started a hurricane in Florida. But even with the most advanced technology imaginable we can’t look at a hurricane in Florida and decide that it was caused by a Japanese moth. We especially aren’t going to trace those connections by sitting in our offices making shit up that sounds good.
My first thought on the topic was what I learned from a friend who worked as an assistant in a bio lab. In one experiment she put pairs of clown loaches into a tank 211 times and observed mating on all 211 occasions. Not a single clown loach had any scruples. There may be some animals for which you can’t get one hundred percent mating in a lab. Nonetheless if you set up identical environments and run experiments, you can predict how often you’ll get mating.
Not so with human beings. You cannot set up an experiment and know beforehand what mating behavior you’ll get from human subjects, while knowing nothing about the subjects except that they’re human.
Besides which, we observe animals and we know that they don’t have the mental capacities of a human being. No animal asks philosophical questions, debates using abstract ideas, upholds moral principles, or anything of that sort. We can watch animals communicating with each other and see that they don’t communicate those sorts of things. Hence we can reasonably conclude that philosophy, morals, and other abstractions play no role in their mating decisions. The only decision they can make is “do I, right here and right now, feel like doing it?”
No cite handy, but I heard dolphins are actually capable of dealing with abstract concepts when expressed to them via hand signals.
Then again dolphins are sex-crazed thrill killers (and rapists, actually), so it kind of evens out. (Then again they’re also shown to have sex for pleasure instead of procreation by that as well, so this gets a little confusing)
ETA: Found a cite, not sure on the credibility, but thought I’d post it before an edit timeout.
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2007/07/11/pink-dolphin-sheds-light-on-human-evolution/
All that tells you is that clown loaches will mate at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t tell you anything about what other animals, more complex than a fish, will do under similar circumstances. Nor does it address the fundamental logical flaw in your argument - you’re commiting a fallacy of special pleading when you discount all sorts of animal mate selection behaviour as instinctive but elevate human mate selection behaviour as somehow special, just because we (sometimes) use reasoning to do it. Reasoning’s an ability we evolved just as much as a peacock’s tail or a bowerbird’s collection of shiny objects (see, extended phenotype). There’s nothing exceptional about it.
Interestingly, Darwin conceived his Natural Selection Theory of Evolution and proceeded to propound that theory for the rest of his life without ever appearing to know that something later identified as a gene even existed and his theory appears to have survived quite well for the last 149 years. It also took roughly 65 years from the publication of The Origin of Species for subsequent scientists to make the direct connection between Natural Selection and genetics. Certainly, having the explicit genetic evidence for a phenomenon would tend to make a more solid case for a hypothesis, but your objection fails on the clearest corresponding event in the physical sciences.
As has been pointed out, we appear not to be overrun with panda. They, at least, seem complicated enough in thought or demanding enough in situation for us to have significant trouble getting them to mate. You can’t apply your information on fish to the whole of animalkind.
And this is true of animals other than us. I don’t deny that we’re pretty darn complex when it comes to our mating behaviours. But complex doesn’t mean nonexistant, and unpredictability doesn’t mean we can have a pretty good guess on behaviours in general.
Some of the apes that have been taught sign language seem capable of communicating abstract ideas, combining signs to create new words that demonstrate an understanding of the underlying definitions. I agree animals don’t have the mental capacity of humans, but in some cases you’re significantly underestimating them, I think. Besides, to indicate communication of ideas as the only proof of such ideas is a somewhat androcentric metric.
Misogynists give EP a bad reputation.
It’s actually false accusations of misogyny that give EP a bad reputation… not any actual misogynists. Unless of course you have some cites that you’d care to discuss…
Well, actually, that’s not the case. Though it’s true that primates don’t possess the higher reason that humans do, there are a number of factors that have influence over whether the animal “feels like doing it”. Female apes are known to trade sex for food and security. Males have to consider their place in the status hierarchy and assess the risk of possibly having to fight for a female. If fighting enters into the question, they perform displays of strength and dominance to possibly decide the matter without fighting (not out of nonviolence, mind you, merely to balance the cost of injury against the odds of successful mating). Animals benefit when they can read what is a bluff vs. what is really a desperate attempt for status. When they practice altruistic behaviors like grooming or group defense, they have to detect cheaters and remember to cut them off from reciprocation in the future.
You might say this is all just calculated practicality, but going back to your original comment, how calculated can apes actually be? They lack the cognition to calculate all these factors, thus it must be wired into other than cognitive faculties, such as the limbic system. Thus it isn’t a calculation, but a feeling, an urge, and emotion. EP argues that many of the same mechanisms are at work in humans… we feel angry when we have been cheated, we feel guilty when we have cheated and fear retribution, we have status hierarchies and feel more comfortable when we are the top of them. We may dress these things up in whatever high-minded vocabulary we please, but stripped of the emotional tint, it generally looks much like the concerns of apes.
I don’t do a really good job of summarizing it because it’s not my field, but if you’re sincerely interested in understanding the field, I’d recommend some books by Steven Pinker, specifically “How The Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate”. Once you’ve gained enough familiarity with the material to shoot down Pinker’s work, then come back and we can have a better discussion.
There is something exceptional about reason, namely that it can trump any other influence on our thinking and behavior. Even if it’s an ability we evolved, it’s in a class by itself.
The peacock doesn’t decide how, when, where, and to what extent to have colorful tail feathers. If he has the genes, then he has the tail feathers. By contrast, our ability to reason is entirely dependent on the choices we make. There are vast differences in how much thinking people do at different times and places, and also in what topics they focus their thinking on. Heck, why are we discussing this topic right now, while people in other places on Earth are not and people at previous times did not? Not because our ability to reason evolved differently from people at other times and places. (There hasn’t been enough time for that to happen.) Rather because the personal choices that we make for how to use our reason are different.
The point I’ve been trying to make is that humans (and only humans) are in charge of these mechanisms and are able to change them. It may be that early in our conscious lives we naturally feel angry when cheated. I don’t know how much of that originates inately and how much is taught to us. But what’s certain is that if a human decides that feeling angry is wrong, he or she can take steps, practice routines, and gain sufficient self-control such that the anger ceases. Hence a human can consciously control not just actions, but also the feelings at the root of all actions. Of course it’s true that not all people do so. Some choose not to exercise self-control and then their end behavior may be something close to animalistic, but they still made a choice.
I don’t think you can make a clear-cut distinction like that. Take fear, panic, for instance: I guarantee you that if put under enough emotional stress, no amount of reasoning will be able to compete with your basic survival instincts. There was a recent threat here about waterboarding, that showed this pretty clearly: despite not being in actual danger, and even in control of the situation, the poster (Scylla) was unable to overcome his reaction to the drowning sensation, and that’s how waterboarding works (and, essentially, the same reasoning works for other base instincts, though maybe less clearly so. There’s plenty of examples of people having woken up the next morning with a lot of regrets, which you wouldn’t have if your decisions of the night before had been entirely rational and not influenced by a hard-wired desire to mate).
I’d say that to deny an evolutionary influence on our decisions is to deny a biological component in them, since our biology is definitely a product of evolution, and there’s ample evidence that the current state of our biology, of our hormones, neurotransmitters and whatever else creeps through our cells does have an influence, that there is a chemical basis for at least some percentage of influence on how we react in a given situation. That might not determine us entirely, but noone’s talking about that – take your earlier example of making a decision between chastity, monogamy and polygamy: obviously, you can’t decide for 60 percent monogamy, 40 percent polygamy, but your genetic predispositions might give your decision for monogamy a 60 percent probability.
Still, though, I do think that EP is a bit too simplistic a picture; as Mangetout already pointed out, evolution (or rather, natural selection) isn’t confined to genes, particularly in the human case, because we have developed other methods to hand down information to our successors, like oral tradition, writing, and, in recent times, direct audiovisual recordings. Susan Blackmore claims that there are two separate (but interconnected) evolutionary mechanisms working in an intelligent, conscious species, a genetic and a memetic one, which she uses to explain our super-sized brains; I’m not sure if even that is the complete picture, but I do think it’s essentially the right starting point.
Thus, it’s not just the evolution of our genes that puts a predisposition on our decision-making process, but that of every bit of (imperfectly) hereditary information that accretes to form our culture, our society, and our mores.
Okay… stipulating that it’s true that humans have a greater capacity to manage emotinonal responses, and overlooking other errors in the above paragraph… what do you suppose this proves or disproves w/r/t EP? Simply because a trait is unique to a species does not mean that it couldn’t have evolved.
Also, apes also perform some amount of “anger management” to the extent that they are able to de-escalate violent confrontation by shows of status, shows of force, and cost-benefit analysis. Arguably, this is all humans are doing when they practice anger management… they’re simply practicing what is best for them when an authority has a monopoly of force. When this situation doesn’t exist, then they start acting like apes again (re: wild west and places that don’t have a state-granted monopoly of force).
EP does not rule out or the effects of culture or passing information from generation to generation. It just says that some behavior is innate, not 100% attributable to culture as some discplines suggest.
Trump some, sure, but not any. We can’t reason ourselves into doing anything, thank goodness; our "any other influence"s are pretty much necessary for human society as it is.
Is it your opinion, then, that a person may always choose otherwise? That there is no level of influence from anger, or any other emotion, or suchlike that would leave us incapable of choosing particular ways?
I would point out again that you have not shown that there are no animals but humans who do this. How is it that you know animals don’t do this? I’d certainly be with you on a lot of them, but i’m interested to know where such apparent strong certainty comes from.
I didn’t mean to imply that EP espouses an exclusively genetically determined model of behaviour; rather, I’d argue that the methods of applying adaptationist reasoning to behavioural traits ought to be extended beyond genetic inheritance, in order to adequately capture interactions between genetic and memetic selection (for instance, one could make an argument that the memetic capabilities of an individual influence its chances of reproduction, and thereby the proliferation of its genetic traits).
But I’m pretty well outta my depth here, and haven’t really kept up with the field, so maybe that’s already being done and I’m just not aware of it, or I’m just talking nonsense. 
So you admit it’s just special pleading, then.
Plus, as others have already pointed out, you are wrong. There’s a continuum of reason from the other animals to Homo sapiens. We may be the pinnacle of intelligence, but we are not exceptional about it.
Firstly, we don’t always act rationally, any of us. Secondly, what you said there amounts to “our ability to reason is dependent on our ability to reason”, which is a meaningless tautological observation.