Evolutionary psychology: British physicist targets theory-of-the-month on "how religion got started"

British physicist David Tyler, in his mild-mannered but incisive way, comments on Fincher and Thornhill's theory-of-the-month that religion got started because it reduced the spread of epidemics and thus was "naturally selected." The basic idea is that religions form closed little groups that do not admit outsiders. He writes,

The first concern is about causation. What is the cause and what is the effect? How do we know? The authors do not appear to discuss these questions. The areas of high religious diversity are in the tropics, where diseases tend to be more virulent and more numerous. Life in the tropics introduces many challenges that are not faced by those of us living in temperate zones of the Earth. Some analysis of lifestyles in the tropics would appear to be warranted, but this is not supplied by the authors.

Citing other problems, Tyler concludes,

There is a strong presupposition in the minds of many scholars that religion must be an evolved behaviour and that it must be possible to identify the drivers for the rise of religion as a phenomenon. What few will even consider in their research is whether man is a spiritual, as well as a material, being and that the drivers for religious diversity come from mankind's spiritual nature. This position is, historically, part of the Christian worldview and, at very least, it deserves to be tested and scrutinised fairly by academics.

Of course, the position that Mario and I take in The Spiritual Brain is that the driver of religion is humankind's spiritual nature. How it came about is currently unknown, but there is some reason to believe, based on prehistoric cave paintings and other art works, that it happened rather suddenly.

On that view, diversity is the outcome of different personality types, mind sets, moral development, and such. Pioneer psychologist William James recognized this long ago, when he pointed out that cheerful people tend to adopt different spiritualities than depressive ones.

The silliness of the current theory-of-the-month lies principally in the fact a stroll down any street in downtown Toronto, where I live, will show that most major religions thrive on evangelization, - the very opposite of avoiding disease by forming a closed little group. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, evangelical Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hare Krishna, secular humanists - whoever they are, they want you to come in, germs and all, attend their services, read their literature, go through their initiation - and then go out and bring in more people.

Was religion ever any different? Ancestor worship and shamanism are different, because, by their very nature, they do not encourage evangelism. But, as we pointed out in The Spiritual Brain, religions of that type are bound up with magic - best understood as a primitive attempt at technology, an attempt to control the world without really understanding it. So we will not understand much about the evolution of religion if we focus on that kind of thing.

Religion, separated from magic (which is often forbidden in major religions), tends to be evangelistic by nature. People who have apprehended what they believe to be a spiritual truth usually want to communicate it, to help others. Religion has probably spread as many epidemics than it has stopped, for that very reason - not that anyone could do anything about that until the existence and role of viruses and bacteria were understood.)

One thing I find intriguing about materialist theories-of-the-month about religion or spirituality is the way they typically begin by ignoring the most obvious facts about the subject. Thus, the best theory of religion becomes a fact-free theory.

See also: Religion: It got started to avoid the spread of disease?

David Berlinski on why we should not pay any attention to "evolutionary psychology"

I've been rereading agnostic mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (for a review I am writing), and it was fun to read his sendup of Harvard materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker (who thinks that the brain is like a machine):

A successful evolutionary theory of the human mind would, after all, annihilate any claim we might make on behalf of human freedom. The psychical sciences do not trifle with determinism: It is the heart and soul of their method. Were boron salts at liberty to discard their identity, the claims of inorganic chemistry would seem considerably less pertinent than they do.

When Steven Pinker writes that "nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives," he is expressing a belief - one obviously true - entirely at odds with his professional commitments.

If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes "to go jump in the lake," why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?

Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.

If the theory is wrong, which theory is right?

If no theory is right, how can "the idea that human minds are the product of evolution" be "unassailable fact"?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside "the idea that man was created in the image of God"?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.

We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent.

The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race. (pp. 178-179)

That's why you should never let a mathematician have a go at a materialist theory! Or if you do, don't expect to come back and find any of the structure standing.

Mario and I had a bit of fun with Pinker in The Spiritual Brain too, and he is easy to have fun with.

Here's the review:

Introduction:Berlinski, the devil, and the long spoon
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

Evolutionary psychology: Women prefer men with stubble? Oh, no wait - beards - but we can explain that too ...

At Pajamas Media, which is engaged in the entirely agreeable project of sending the MSM [legacy mainstream media] down the river, Roger Kimball pauses a moment to send up more Darwin nonsense:

“Women,” says a story in the London Telegraph , “prefer men with stubble for love, sex and marriage.”

Except, of course, for those who don’t.

But those women who don't prefer men with stubble are merely standing in the way of "science", right?

How dare such women interfere with "evolution" by preferring that the guy either grow a proper beard (and keep it trimmed) or shave - the usual choices for men for millennia? Well, as Kimball quotes for the authoritative "evolution" literature,

"The explanation for the preference is not clear, but experts in human evolution say that that facial hair may be a signal of aggression because it boosts the apparent size of the lower jaw, emphasising the teeth as weapons. "

And he asks,

Have you ever heard anything as silly? Well, if you trundle through the literature penned by “experts in human evolution” you undoubtedly have.

The thing is, there is so much of this stuff. It is like cleaning out a neglected barn. I've been working on the project for years.

(Note: If regular readers wonder why I have not posted much in recent days, that is because I was away in Ottawa for Canada Day. Ottawa is our national capital. Canada Day is July 1, which commemorates the beginnings of our country, July 1, 1867. The fireworks were excellent.)

Hat tip: Free Mark Steyn

Evolutionary psychology: The "meme" generates a fruitful hoax, if nothing else

In some detail, Mario Beauregard and I discussed Richard Dawkins's 1976 notion of "memes" - hypothetical units of thought that replicate themselves by spreading from brain to brain, possibly governed by Darwinian natural selection. As Dawkins explains it,

Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation, though that would certainly help. All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit the capacity to the full. (P. 218, quoting Dawkins's the Selfish Gene, 1976 pp. 214-15)

Not surprisingly, given the materialist mindset that spawned the concept, it was soon pressed into service to "explain" religion. This from Susan Blackmore, Dawkins's standardbearer for the meme theory:

When we look at religions from a meme’s eye view we can understand why they have been so successful. These religious memes did not set out with an intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were copied from one person to another in the long history of human attempts to understand the world. They were successful because they happened to come together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly passed on to more. (P. 219, quoting Blackmore's The Meme Machine, 1999, p. 192)

As we noted, "Like almost everyone who shares her views, Blackmore exempts science from the roster of deceitful meme gangs. She is sure that what she does is science. And what she likes best about science is that it is testable. Religious theories, by contrast, can thrive “in spite of being untrue, ugly, or cruel.” Well, are memes or memeplexes testable? Could we know if they
were not a correct explanation?

Not likely. It's not even clear what the concept means. We know that genes exist and we have even mapped the genome, but the meme is too vague a concept to generate anything except speculation, good graphics, culture vignettes - and hoaxes.

One hoax was perpetrated by Oxford poli sci prof John Gray. As explained by Bryan Appleyard in "John Gray's apocalypse" (Sunday Times, June 24, 1994). The ergoneme was supposedly a discovery of "widely ignored Hungarian thinker named L Revai," who never existed, except in the imagination of Gray, who reviewed his mythical book "The Word as Deed: Studies in the Labour Theory of Meaning" in 1989 (paywall). Says Appleyard,

It is a sign of Gray’s remarkable prescience that one of Revai’s “discoveries” was the “ergoneme”, a primitive atom of meaning that exactly anticipates Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes. “I intended it as a joke, but, sadly, he doesn’t. I intended to create something as far away from genuine science as possible, something akin to creationism or alchemy.”

Only one reader was not taken in. The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin simply said: “Too perfect, my boy, some kind of spoof.”

Yet many people wrote to Gray, claiming to know Revai.

Neuroscientist's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" hoax

By the way, neuroscientist Vilanayur Ramachandran also perpetrated an evolutionary psychology hoax paper on the theme of "Why Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Many refused to believe it was a hoax, or defended the basic idea.

In summary, I suggest that gentlemen prefer blondes in order to enable them to detect the early signs of parasitic infestation and aging – both of which indirectly reduce fertility and offspring viability. Although originally intended as a satire on ad hoc sociobiological theories of human mate-selection, I soon came to realize that this idea is at least as viable as many other theories of mate choice that are currently in vogue. - Med Hypotheses. 1997 Jan;48(1):19-20

That's not surprising. It sounds exactly like many other evolutionary psychology papers, and some rresearchers continue to defend the ongoing nonsense.

As Ben Goldacre says in a fun but thoughtful post in Bad Science (which features many other examples of total balderdash),

Fine. Neat. Perfect. Everything fits when you find your hypothesis in your results.

As I have said elsewhere, not all evolutionary psychology is nonsense. But 95% of it is. And generally, the more trendy it is, the more likely it is to be nonsense.

The image above is from Memes Org - through a memetic lens who offer this definition of a meme:

A meme is any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea,
that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to
another.

A meme is defined within memetic theory as a unit of cultural information, cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

Actually, there is nothing wrong with this sort of fun as popular culture. Trying to shoehorn it into serious science is where the nonsense begins.

Evolutionary psychology: Speculation rather than sound science, says new MIT Press book

Robert C. Richardson, a philosophy prof at the University of Cincinnati, has written a long-overdue critique of evolutionary psychology.

Regular readers of this space will know that I do not doubt evolution, still less that some factors in human psychology are best understood in the light of our evolution. But - like a growing number of people - I have limited patience with the nonsense fronted under the label of "evolutionary psychology" - much of which would be better presented (and perhaps more profitable for its authors) as "Clan of the Cave Bear" fiction.

In Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, Richardson's thesis is,

The claims of evolutionary psychology may pass muster as psychology; but what are their evolutionary credentials? Richardson considers three ways adaptive hypotheses can be evaluated, using examples from the biological literature to illustrate what sorts of evidence and methodology would be necessary to establish specific evolutionary and adaptive explanations of human psychological traits. He shows that existing explanations within evolutionary psychology fall woefully short of accepted biological standards. The theories offered by evolutionary psychologists may identify traits that are, or were, beneficial to humans. But gauged by biological standards, there is inadequate evidence: evolutionary psychologists are largely silent on the evolutionary evidence relevant to assessing their claims, including such matters as variation in ancestral populations, heritability, and the advantage offered to our ancestors. As evolutionary claims they are unsubstantiated. Evolutionary psychology, Richardson concludes, may offer a program of research, but it lacks the kind of evidence that is generally expected within evolutionary biology. It is speculation rather than sound science--and we should treat its claims with skepticism.

Johan J. Bolhuis, reviewing the book in Science ("Piling On the Selection Pressure" Science 320, 6 June 2008: 1293 [PAYWALL]), says,

The study of evolution is concerned with a historical reconstruction of traits. It does not, and cannot, address the mechanisms that are involved in the human brain. Those fall within the domains of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. In that sense, evolutionary psychology will never succeed, because it attempts to explain mechanisms by appealing to the history of these mechanisms. To use the author's words, "We might as well explain the structure of orchids in terms of their beauty." In this excellent book, Richardson shows very clearly that attempts at reconstruction of our cognitive history amount to little more than "speculation disguised as results." The book's title implies that the field is itself subject to selection pressure. Richardson is certainly piling it on.

Piling it on? Actually, I think Richardson better hire a dump truck. A wheelbarrow would be way too slow.

Evolutionary psychology: Would YOU shove a fat man off a trestle to save five people?

In this 2006 New York Times article, Nicholas Wade profiles this "evolutionary theory of right and wrong":

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.

Here is a dilemma that is claimed to illustrate the "hardwiring" of morality:

Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?

Most people say it is.

Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?

Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem.

Dr. Hauser hypothesizes that some hardwired evolutionary mechanism explains why we find a foreseen harm (first situation) more acceptable than an intended harm (second situation) "despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case."

Like all evolutionary psychologists, he starts with the assumption that no one uses their minds today in real time to think out ethical problems. Rather, the mind is an illusion generated by the hardwiring of neurons by genes. (Otherwise, evolutionary psychology, as practiced today, would be a pointless exercise.)

Now, if we set that basic assumption aside, what do we see? Obviously, most human beings will perceive a very great difference between throwing to his death someone who was not even at risk but for one's own sudden decision to put him there, versus choosing that one person should die rather than five, when all are actually on the tracks.

Obvious point: If someone other than the people on the track was going to die, why not me instead of the fat man? If I am going to play God, I better start with myself, right?

The fact that almost all moral traditions would underline such a distinction and make such a point does not require genes, hardwiring, or evolution to explain. Normal human experience in real time suffices. (But in saying so, I assume that the mind really exists and is really thinking.)

Two exceptions might be if the person standing beside the switch operator was (1) considered to be of low social status or (2) was a willing volunteer. Again, I would not advise looking for a gene that explains how these social calculations are made. The role of the gene is to help create the brain that is capable of calculation, for good or ill, not to program it to arrive at one calculation rather than another.

Overall, what makes me uncomfortable about evolutionary psychology is its practioners' constant need to come up with odd situations that unidentified hardwiring and genes are supposed to "explain". That suggests that it is not really a discipline. As I have noted earlier, there certainly are features of general human psychology and behaviour that can be attributed to evolution:

For example, the disproportionate tendency of humans to be right-handed rather than left-handed probably explains why so many languages associate the right side with things that are right or dexterous and the left side with things that are sinister or gauche or - if you like - left behind.

But the problem for the evolutionary psychologist is that these features are not particularly cool or transgressive, nor do they confer any special importance on the evolutionary psychologist and his discipline - they are just the outcomes of having evolved in a certain way, having noticed that fact, and acting on it.

Who doubts that if most humans were left-handed, "sinister" and "gauche" (= left-handed) would be terms of praise rather than blame, and social rules about the right hand and the left hand would all be reversed?

Note: Blogging may be spotty for a few days because I will be teaching at Write! Canada and I have just been apprised that I have 19 students, as of last count, in Freelance Survival 101, or whatever we are calling it this year. So I must prepare, prepare, prepare. I will likely blog, but probably only one entry at a time rather than five at once. Meanwhile, slainte and l'chaim and salaam and all that to all readers!

Evolutionary psychology: Computer modeller dismisses latest "computer model" of religion

Britain's New Scientist magazine, one of my richest sources of nonsense about religion and spirituality, reports that religion is a product of evolution, according to software designed by evolutionary anthropologist James Dow of Rochester University.

Evolutionary pyschologists, almost all of whom are materialists, fall into two camps: Religion is untrue and useless or religion is untrue but helped our ancestors survive.

Dow is in the second camp, arguing that

Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

The problem with any computer model of religion, of course, is that the topic is so vast and varied that any given model is wildly unrelated to real life. One wonders, for example, what to make of a model of religion that assumes that when unbelievers are attracted to believers the results will necessarily be good for the latter. I am reminded of Hebrews 36-38, NIV, on the fate of the heroes of faith:

36 Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37 They were stoned[a]; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. 39 These were all commended for their faith yet none of them received what was promised.

A friend, Gil Dodgen, who does computer models for a living, wrote to say,

This is utter silliness, and it stuns me that anyone would take this seriously, much less publish it as a "scientific" study. I design real-world computer simulations in my work with a finite-element analysis (FEA) program called LS-DYNA, which is the world's most powerful and thoroughly used and tested program of its kind. It originated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and has been designed and refined over decades by some of the greatest minds in the field.

LSD (as I affectionately call it) models the laws of physics and Newtonian mechanics with utter fidelity, and material properties are well understood, tested and documented, and are modeled accurately as well. LSD is capable of analyzing and simulating extremely complex systems involving all kinds of non-linear interacting dynamics. This program is so powerful that it is used heavily in the automotive industry to simulate car impacts, airbag deployments, occupant injuries, etc.

Yet, even with all this, and a programmer who is experienced and knows what he's doing, the simulations must always be tested against reality to finally validate them. (This way you only have to crash one or two real cars instead of 50 or 60 to get things right.)

So, when I hear about a computer simulation that demonstrates how religion evolved (or how any living system evolved, for that matter), all I can do is roll my eyes in wonderment and disbelief that anyone takes this stuff seriously.

As a final note, I can make an LS-DYNA simulation do just about anything I want, by arbitrarily tweaking parameters and material properties. I have done this on occasion just for the entertainment value. Those who attempt to model biological evolution, religion, or climate change can do the same.

Just for fun, check out this LS-DYNA simulation of a car airbag deploying (a 2 MB AVI file). It's pretty amazing:

Gil has also blogged on this here, saying much the same thing.

The only thing we really know about our ancestors' beliefs about life after death (the afterlife, as New Scientist terms it) is that burials that imply such a belief are quite ancient and widespread. One possible source is, of course, near-death experiences, as Mario and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain.

Evolutionary psychology: A "motley navy" of speculations, soon to be stranded?

Philosopher Jerry Fodor shares my skepticism of "evolutionary psychology", and explains why in "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings":

The years after Darwin witnessed a remarkable proliferation of other theories, each seeking to co-opt natural selection for purposes of its own. Evolutionary psychology is currently the salient instance, but examples have been legion. They’re to be found in more or less all of the behavioural sciences, to say nothing of epistemology, semantics, theology, the philosophy of history, ethics, sociology, political theory, eugenics and even aesthetics. What they have in common is that they attempt to explain why we are so-and-so by reference to what being so-and-so buys for us, or what it would have bought for our ancestors. ‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.’ ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’ ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ‘We like to gossip because knowing who has been up to what is important when fitness depends on co-operation in small communities.’ ‘We don’t all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer communities).’ ‘We don’t copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal, heterogeneity is good for the gene pool).’ I’m not making this up, by the way. Versions of each of these theories can actually be found in the adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has to stop somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some that we have simply because that’s the sort of creature we are. And perhaps it’s unnecessary to remark that such explanations are inherently post hoc (Gould called them ‘just so stories’); or that, except for the prestige they borrow from the theory of natural selection, there isn’t much reason to believe that any of them is true.

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, ‘hedge your bets’ is generally good advice.

I have no problem (and am sure Fodor does not) with assuming that many features of our psychology are a result of our evolution. For example, the disproportionate tendency of humans to be right-handed rather than left-handed probably explains why so many languages associate the right side with things that are right or dexterous and the left side with things that are sinister or gauche or - if you like - left behind.

The problem with the "just-so" stories of evolutionary psychology is that - as Fodor implies in his entertaining passage - the evolutionary psychologist seizes on a given trait noticed in contemporary society and makes up a story about how that trait may have been useful in the Stone Age. That's "adaptationism." But the reality is that, in most cases, we have no idea whether the trait even prevailed in the Stone Age, let alone whether conditions then actually favoured it. There is nothing unusual about people preferring to do things that do not particularly benefit them or their children, for a variety of reasons.

The underlying assumption of evolutionary psychology is that people do not simply make decisions about what feels right, but are programmed to behave in certain ways by their genes. Believe that at your peril.

Apparently, there will be a big meeting at Altenberg, Austria, this July, to discuss what is wrong with adaptationism in general. Maybe we will be seeing fewer stories about, for example, the Big Bazooms theory of evolution, but don't count on it.

Oh, and why pigs don't have wings? Because, you see, winged she-pigs outran the he-pigs that were pursuing them, so the he-pigs only caught up with the ones that didn't have wings, so the "wingless" trait was passed on to all the little piglets. And our Stone Age ancestors witnessed the last of the transition, when there were still a few flying pigs around but not many, hence the expressing "when pigs fly." And if you think that's ridiculous, see the Big Bazooms theory, and don't miss Fred Reed's hilarious take on it ("Darwin and Banana Boobs").

The selfish gene visits the four-year-old who saved her sister

Here’s a recent story about a four-year-old girl who saved her infant sister’s life:

The next morning, park groundskeepers saw Lindsay stumbling out of the woods holding the baby. She collapsed. The children were bitten so badly by insects that sheriff's deputies thought they had been burned. In the hospital that night, a sheriff's spokeswoman told me, Lindsay refused to sleep until nurses brought her baby sister to cradle in her arms.

[ ... ]

The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that Lindsay came to the funeral with a white scarf hiding her neck wound. Erin Manning, a Fort Worth writer, observed on my blog that the scarf conceals a profound mystery: "We can't bear to look at the sacrificial cost of love — a wound so bravely borne because at some level, this child's love for her tiny sister outweighed her terror and her pain."
- Rod Dreher, "From horror, a child's loving gift", May 11, 2008

A key recent project of materialist psychology, usually under the banner of evolutionary psychology, is to demonstrate that the cause of the girl's behaviour is her selfish genes. Because her genes are related to the infant's genes, there is said to be a sort of genetic program that causes the girl to act to save her sister.

Sometimes other theories, taken from animal studies, are called upon. A friend sent me this Roundup news note he came across in Science:

The Evolution of Cooperation

The question of how natural selection can lead to cooperative behavior has intrigued biologists for decades. On one hand, evolution is based on fierce competition and should therefore reward only selfish behavior. Yet cooperation is common throughout the biological world, whether between genes or cells or within animal and human societies. In a Review article in the 8 Dec 2006 Science, M. A. Nowak discussed five possible mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. And in a related Report, S. Bowles developed a model -- using genetic, climactic, archeological, ethnographic and experimental data -- to help explain the prevalence of altruistic behavior in human societies. According to his analysis, the ecological challenges facing humans during the late Pleistocene resulted in intense competition for resources, frequent group extinctions, and intergroup violence. Members of a group bearing genes for altruistic behavior paid a tax by limiting their reproductive opportunities in order to benefit from sharing food and information, thereby increasing the average fitness of the group, as well as their interrelatedness. Bands of altruistic humans would then act in concert to gain resources from other groups at a time when humans faced daily challenges to survival. An accompanying Perspective by R. Boyd considered how these views fit with other hypotheses about the evolutionary processes that spawned our uniquely cooperative societies.

My friend commented, "I never cease to be amazed by the rampant speculation that is so accepted in the soft sciences."

But the rampant speculation is easier to understand if you consider what underlies it. Recently, another friend asked me for essay help on evolutionary psychology, and I replied,

A driving force behind evolutionary psychology is an account of human behaviour that does not depend on the existence of the mind.

Evolutionary psychology tries to show that major human drives do NOT result from thoughts or judgements or preferences but are governed by the desire of selfish genes to spread themselves. So the mind does not cause thoughts, values, or judgements. A genetic or neural mechanism, triggered by accidental environment conditions causes the behaviour.

The curious thing about evolutionary psychology is that - despite the fact that the human genome has now been mapped - those who hold it do not usually identify actual genes. Instead, they attempt to show - as in the discussion of co-operation - how a given form of behaviour might have helped early human ancestors survive. We are expected to conclude that therefore the behaviour somehow originated and is passed on in their genes or brain structure. Otherwise, how can it be said to have evolved?

The problem is, of course, that a variety of opposing behaviours might help early human ancestors survive, just as a variety of opposing behaviours help people survive today. Many influences encourage us - and encouraged them - to choose one behaviour rather than another. The idea that behaviour is passed on in genes is speculation, especially when specific genes are not identified.

The following item, which I wrote for Salvo Winter 2008, expands on that point. I should really have called it "Evolutionary psychology and the reality of the mind" but I had to follow a pattern for that issue.

Intelligent design and the reality of the mind

(I published this article on evolutionary psychology in Salvo 4, which mainlly addressed the intelligent design controversy, and I think it's been three months so I am free to republish it here now.)

In 1995, midway through the Decade of the Brain, journalist Michael Lemonick observed in Time Magazine, "Utterly contrary to common sense . . . and to the evidence gathered from our own introspection, consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes.”

May be. The working assumption of materialism is that the human mind is an illusion generated by the frantic neurons of the brain. That assumption plays some interesting tricks with the explanations of human behavior that are accepted as reasonable. Consider, for example, evolutionary psychology - the effort to derive laws of human psychology from the behavior that helped our Pleistocene ancestors survive, and is transmitted willy-nilly in our genes. It regularly offers complex, exotic explanations for common human behavior. A recent article in Psychology Today (July/August 2007) avers that men prefer women with big breasts because the man can see whether the woman’s breasts sag, which indicates reduced fertility.

Really? Isn't the general human preference for the anticipated pleasure of abundance over scarcity a better explanation - and a wee bit simpler too? But to think that way is to be out of step with the whole point of evolutionary psychology, which derives from a materialist view of human nature. To say that men prefer abundance to scarcity is to say that they have minds and that - to their minds - abundance seems better than scarcity.

But to an evolutionary psychologist, framing the preference that way is simply not acceptable. Evolutionary psychology looks for a program in the genes that governs what men like. Its practitioners are entirely convinced that such a program exists. The program must exist because the mind does not cause anything to happen. Men do not know what they like until their selfish genes act on their neurons, creating the appropriate buzz. The man himself has no preferences, but his genes do.

The same approach may be observed in much materialist-driven research into religion, reported breathlessly in popular science media over the years. Researchers, we are told, have discovered a God spot, circuit, gene, or module in the brain. They have also discovered that, by putting on a special helmet, you can have mystical visions, and that Darwinian evolution selected cavemen who believed in religion. That is why humans can't help but believe (though the theorist can help it quite easily).

As with evolutionary psychology, the bizarre nature of these explanations for religion through the ages is not intentionally perverse. Not at all. It is rather the outcome of a duty to prefer a materialist explanation, however ill-suited to the case, to a non-materialist explanation, however well-suited. The materialist would use better materialist explanations, if he had them, but he often doesn’t.

How does this relate to the intelligent design controversy? Well, if the universe is intelligently designed, at least one Mind is real. We can then accept the available evidence from cognitive psychology for the reality of our own, lesser minds.

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne 2007)

Evolutionary psychology: So you don't stick to your goals? Blame your kludgebrain ... or maybe not

I see where Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind encourages us to blame "the sloppy engineering of evolution" for the fact that we often do not stick to our goals.

But why evolution? What happened to our stars, our parents, our societies, our religion, and our genes as the explanations for why we do not meet our goals? Oh, come to think of it, evolution is in the news right now, what with Darwin's anniversary celebrations and the Expelled film.

Marcus's basic thesis is this:

Our attempts to pursue our goals are often thwarted by the fact that evolution has built our most sophisticated technologies on top of older technologies -- without working out how to integrate the two. We can plan in advance, using our modern deliberative reasoning systems, but our ancestral reflexive mechanisms, which evolved first, still basically control the steering wheel. When the chips are down, it's those mechanisms that our brains turn to, and that means that our brains frequently wind up relying on machinery that is all about acting first and asking questions later, squandering some of the efforts of our deliberative system.

No sensible engineer would have designed things this way. Why design fancy machinery for making long-term goals if you're not going to use it? Yet the brain is structured such that the more tired, stressed or distracted we are, the less likely we are to use our forebrains and the more likely to lean back on the time-tested but shortsighted machinery we've inherited from our ancestors.

Which is nonsense. The examples he gives are failure to lose weight and failure to meet deadlines. But it takes no very great insight to see that goals like these are too socially and personally complex to be often met.

Take losing weight, for example: Most people don't lose weight because - overall - thinness doesn't matter as much to them as living comfortably. It doesn't matter as much in their forebrains or anywhere else. That has nothing to do with evolution.

As I have written elsewhere - there is very little evidence that overweight, all by itself, is an important health hazard. Lack of physical activity is a much more serious health problem.

Now that probably has a lot to do with evolution!

Obviously, the human body evolved or was designed to support specific activities, not to support a lack of activity. But it's hard to imagine the body either evolving or being designed in such a way that a bit of extra weight would be a serious health hazard. After all, food shortages and wasting illnesses have been endemic through human history, so a bit of padding is a good insurance policy.

At any rate, people who are trying to achieve an arbitrarily set weight dictated by health professionals or fashion gurus - when they are in no physical discomfort with the weight they now carry - are likely to experience internal conflict over their goals. But don't blame evolution or poor engineering. Blame the adoption of goals that conflict with reality.

Now, what about deadlines? In my line of work (writing), there is an expression "phantom deadline." That means a deadline with a weak relationship to reality. Young freelancers often half kill themselves to finish a project for a Friday deadline only to discover that the boss left at noon - so the job will just sit on her desk all weekend!

Actually, most people learn to fudge deadlines for their own well-being. Again, if this is evolution, it is the evolution of survival skills in relation to one's environment, and not a symptom of poor engineering. Sometimes, lateness is also a social message.

Some people even use lateness as a form of manipulation. And then we must ask, does it work? Often, it does - but only for accomplished practitioners. (If you have never in your life tried to control others by being chronically late, trust me, it would be a mistake to start now. You just haven't evolved in that direction.)

In short, I don't think that "blame it on kludgy brain evolution" will fare any better than the 1950s' "blame it on cruel potty training" as a reason why we behave as we do.

See also: Evolutionary Psychology: Eliot Spitzer is a kludgebrain! psychologist opines (but so are we all)

Evolutionary psychology: Eliot Spitzer is a kludgebrain!, psychologist opines (but so are we all)

Some idea of what awaits if we read psychologist Gary Marcus's Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin) can be divined from his comments at the Huffington Post on the recent resignation of New York governor Eliot Spitzer, caught in a prostitution scandal:

This is not just a case of a man being led about his hormones, to the exclusion of the rest of his brain, but something more complicated: a case in which an extraordinarily intelligent man used all of his rational capacities to form a track-covering plan -- yet seemingly focused none of his cognitive wherewithal on evaluating whether that plan was worth pursuing in the first place.

[ ... ]

Why does this happen so often? The answer, in a nutshell, is this; evolution blew it. When our fancy new deliberative reasoning systems evolved, evolution, which lacks foresight, took what amounts to the lazy way out, crudely grafting the new capabilities onto the older ancestral systems, with nary a thought as to how the two would work together. The ancestral mate seeking systems that led Client 9 [Spitzer] by the nose thus still receive extremely high priority, whether or not their actions are in the interests of our minds as a whole.

I've heard many unconvincing explanations of the age-old conflict between what we want to do and what we ought to do, but this is so far the least convincing.

Any convincing explanation must take into account Spitzer's reputation as a ruthless foe of corruption. A reputation often becomes a sort of shell - lots of hollow space inside. Evolution didn't fail Spitzer; he just found his shell too heavy after a while. It's better to walk humbly ... away from trouble (but Spitzer doesn't need anyone to tell him that now).

Gary Marcus also asks in "Total Recall" in the New York Times Magazine (April 13, 2008) how much we would pay to have a memory chip implanted in our brains to double our short term memory. But, in his view,

... techniques like that can only take us so far. They can make memories more accessible but not necessarily more reliable, and the improvements are most likely to be only incremental. Making our memories both more accessible and more reliable would require something else, perhaps a system modeled on Google, which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers.

However difficult the practicalities, there's no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn't pick up where nature left off, incorporating Google-like master maps into neural implants. This in turn would allow us to search our own memories - not just those on the Web - with something like the efficiency and reliability of a computer search engine.

The Next Big Thing will probably be a project for erasing the memories of things we would rather forget, so we no longer recognize our connection to our real past.

Psychology: Hurting oneself to hurt others not a useful social strategy ... duh!

Anna Dreber, David G Rand, Drew Fudenberg, and Martin A Nowak of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, have published a study in Nature that shows that "Winners don't punish." They studied "costly punishment" - hurting oneself to also hurt someone else. (For example, suppose you and I are friends, reader, and we get a twofer bargain on theatre tickets. I'm mad at you, so I decide to fix you by losing the tickets, with the result that neither of us can see the play.)

The researchers found that while costly punishment increased cooperation in a group, the total payoff for the group was less. (In my example, you will pay attention thereafter when I imply that I am mad about something. But we will both lead a duller, more resentful life.)

They conclude, "This suggests that costly punishment behaviour is maladaptive in cooperation games and might have evolved for other reasons."

But how do we know that costly punishment "evolved" at all? The key weakness of evolutionary models of human behaviour is that they assume that no human being actually thinks independently in the present day. That is, the evolutionist is looking for genes or brain circuits that compel people to behave in certain ways, inherited from Pleistocene ancestors. Presumably, none of us forms judgements - wisely or unwisely - from observing our own situation.

The next step for the evolutionary psychologist is typically an unfalsifiable just-so story about how costly punishment helped our cave-dwelling ancestors - even though it has been, from time immemorial, a reliable way of losing friends and alienating people. (If I pulled the stunt described above, I bet you wouldn't agree to share the cost of theatre tickets with me again, whether or not it was a bargain.)

Anyway, here's the abstract and citation: Nature. 2008 Mar 20;452 (7185):348-51 18354481

A key aspect of human behaviour is cooperation. We tend to help others even if costs are involved. We are more likely to help when the costs are small and the benefits for the other person significant. Cooperation leads to a tension between what is best for the individual and what is best for the group. A group does better if everyone cooperates, but each individual is tempted to defect. Recently there has been much interest in exploring the effect of costly punishment on human cooperation. Costly punishment means paying a cost for another individual to incur a cost. It has been suggested that costly punishment promotes cooperation even in non-repeated games and without any possibility of reputation effects. But most of our interactions are repeated and reputation is always at stake. Thus, if costly punishment is important in promoting cooperation, it must do so in a repeated setting. We have performed experiments in which, in each round of a repeated game, people choose between cooperation, defection and costly punishment. In control experiments, people could only cooperate or defect. Here we show that the option of costly punishment increases the amount of cooperation but not the average payoff of the group. Furthermore, there is a strong negative correlation between total payoff and use of costly punishment. Those people who gain the highest total payoff tend not to use costly punishment: winners don't punish. This suggests that costly punishment behaviour is maladaptive in cooperation games and might have evolved for other reasons.

So THAT'S why we don't eat Grandma? ... oh, come on!

Rutgers philosopher Jerry Fodor, who has little use for evolutionary psychology (he calls it "Darwinism"*), holds forth again, this time in the London Review of Books, targeting silliness like why we don't eat our forebears (if we don't):

The years after Darwin witnessed a remarkable proliferation of other theories, each seeking to co-opt natural selection for purposes of its own. Evolutionary psychology is currently the salient instance, but examples have been legion. They’re to be found in more or less all of the behavioural sciences, to say nothing of epistemology, semantics, theology, the philosophy of history, ethics, sociology, political theory, eugenics and even aesthetics. What they have in common is that they attempt to explain why we are so-and-so by reference to what being so-and-so buys for us, or what it would have bought for our ancestors. ‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.’ ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’ ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ‘We like to gossip because knowing who has been up to what is important when fitness depends on co-operation in small communities.’ ‘We don’t all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer communities).’ ‘We don’t copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal, heterogeneity is good for the gene pool).’ I’m not making this up, by the way. Versions of each of these theories can actually be found in the adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has to stop somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some that we have simply because that’s the sort of creature we are. And perhaps it’s unnecessary to remark that such explanations are inherently post hoc (Gould called them ‘just so stories’); or that, except for the prestige they borrow from the theory of natural selection, there isn’t much reason to believe that any of them is true.

Fodor goes on to explain why he thinks that the theory of natural selection (survival of the fittest) might be in danger.

The theory of natural selection may well be in danger. I can think of a number of reasons for doubting that natural selection/survival of the fittest explains the progress from mud to mind of the last five billion years. But, quite honestly, I hardly think we need go to that kind of trouble to explain what is wrong with the sort of evolutionary psychology Fodor is dissing here. The main problem is that there is no way whatever to know if it is wrong.

You want to eat Grandma? That's survival of the fittest. You don't, because she might make a babysitter if you ever have kids? Well, that's survival of the fittest too. You don't want to eat Grandma because the thought makes you sick, and you don't care if you NEVER have kids? Well, in that case, your selfish genes have declared that you will help your siblings raise kids instead, and spread your shared genes that way. See what I mean? It's like Dr. Freud pretending to read your unconscious mind.

If there is no way for something to be false, there is also no way for it to be true.

Go here for another entertaining and enlightening Jerry Fodor article, "Headaches don't have themselves," that bears directly on some of our Spiritual Brain topics.

*Note: Strictly speaking, even if Darwinism is wrong, it is a legitimate theory in science about how species form (natural selection acting on random mutations). Serious Darwinists are not to blame for the silliness dreamed up by evolutionary psychologists - unless they are actualy encouraging them. I suspect, however, that sometimes they ARE ... in which case ...

Do selfish genes explain why you want to hear about your great grandfolks?

An anthropologist offers a critical look at the claims of evolutionary psychology that your selfish genes cause you to care more about your relatives than about other people (because your kin have more of the same genes). Evaluating Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker’s attempt in "Strangled by Roots" to account for the current American craze for genealogy by evolution, poster Rex notes that human groups do not even have fixed ideas of who their kin are:

The overall plot of "Strangled By Roots" will be familiar to any one familiar with evolutionary psychology: a New Field Of Research has been opened up that sheds Scientific Light on a previously untheorized and salaciously quirky bit of human life. The Social Scientists, of course, with their Social Science Models, have got it wrong, but luckily New Experiments have revealed the hidden evolutionary basis of said quirky behavior.

Unfortunately—alas!—however adaptive this behavior once was, it no longer suits the rigors of modern life and is currently the source of many social woes.

This time around its kinship. In the article Pinker claims that "for all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences." While "many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no relation to biology" others disagree. "Genetics and evolutionary theory," Pinker says, "predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways"—for instance, that we like to share resources with them (this helps perpetuate their genes, including the genes we share with them).

[ ... ]

Pinker’s argument sounds plausible at first—especially if you don't know anything about the centuries-old literature on kinship or lack in-depth knowledge of the cultural complexity of ours species. In Pinker's case the problem is mostly naivete. ... Pinker's failure to review the literature on the topic can be blamed on many things, but our failure to write it is not one of them.

[ ... ]

But let me get to the main point: there are two main problems with Pinker's argument. First, there is that we have no evidence of what social organization was like deep in our evolutionary past. Of course we can imagine what they might have been like, but speculation is not science—especially for someone sufficiently serious about intellectual rigor that they feel the need to conduct experiments to prove the obvious fact that people who are raised together feel related. So his claim that feelings of kinship were once nontrivially adaptive in the evolutionary past but no longer are is in fact based on speculation. There is nothing wrong with speculation—indeed, it is all we have to go on with in some cases—but this point needs to be flagged.

The second problem is with Pinker's claim that kinship is currently no longer adaptive. The problem here is that Pinker, as philosophers say, 'proves too much'. For, as he himself shows and anthropology has already demonstrated, folk theories of relatedness and accurate biogenetic reckoning are so loosely coupled as to be only tenuously connected. In fact they are so tenuously connected that one wonder why he thinks they are or should be connected at all, except for his assumption (based on speculation) that they must have been in the past. Let's take a closer look.

Well, I won’t spoil any more of it for you; it's a great and instructive read, showing that different groups of people have very different ideas about how you should know who your kin are. And the fact that so many of these ideas are not based on degree of biological relatedness at all should be enough to sink the selfish gene theory.

Incidentally, the current North American craze for genealogy most likely relates not to remote human evolution but to (1) the fact that much more information is available, plus (2) the fact that the population is aging. Older people tend to be more interested in that kind of thing, and (3) After four or five generations, non-aboriginal North Americans are becoming more comfortable with the past their ancestors escaped. They can afford psychologically to find out more about it. They may even feel flattered or morally justified to learn of circumstances that were once a source of shame. Such is the veil that time draws over suffering ....

Now let me make two things clear here: I am not claiming that our evolutionary heritage has nothing to do with the way we view things. Indeed, it is quite easy to show the opposite. Humans, (unlike chimpanzees), are predominately right-handed. The fact that so many languages use "right" to mean good or clever (righteous, dexterous) and "left" to mean bad or awkward (gauche, sinister) is surely related. Similarly, "up" is generally a fortunate direction and "down" an unfortunate one - surely that relates to the fact that an upright stance is normal for humans.

So far, so obvious. But what happens when we seek to go beyond that? The key problems I see with evolutionary psychology, as generally practiced by - for example - Steve Pinker, are,

1. Speculation. As Rex notes, evo psycho explanations for human behaviour are usually speculation based on what we suppose life was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the practices for which we DO have documentation vary so widely that it is hard to place much confidence in the speculation.

2. Cherrypicking. Can anyone explain to me why, if selfish genes govern our behavior, so many men have had children with slave women and then treated those children with indifference, while doting on their legitimate offspring - irrespective of fitness? Oh yes, I am sure one speculation or other can be pulled out of a hat to rescue the selfish gene. But it would be more economical to assume that fatherhood is, in large part, a social idea and is not necessarily driven by a genetic imperative governed by natural selection.

3. Suspicious last-minute rescues. One theory has it that men play the field because their selfish genes want them to have as many children as possible in order to get themselves spread around. When I point out the obvious - that men who play the field usually do NOT want a whole pack of kids following them around - the reply is, "Well, that's modern. We’re in charge of evolution now. But back in the old days, ... " In other words, the times for which we do have information don't count, only the times for which we don't.

Of course, I am out of sympathy with the whole evolutionary psychology project because the underlying message is that people are not motivated by their culture but by their genes. I am on the side of the anthropologists (culture) on that one because I think the latter have more and better evidence. In other words, being human does not give us a specific culture (selected by our genes in order to spread themselves, in the evolutionary psychologist's view). It gives us the capacity to form a culture. Cultures may or may not contribute to survival or spreading genes. If they don't, they won't be around long, but we need not suppose that therefore the successful cultures were selected by anyone or anything for that express purpose. That's an attribution error.

In a longish section of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I look at these questions in relation to religion, and argue that the same thing applies there.

Thinkquote of the day: Evolution of the mind

Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.

- Michael Polanyi

On my other blog, the Post-Darwinist, I survey the dizzying scene of the growing intelligent design controversy. Polanyi was an enormous influence on some of the ID guys, and I think his approach is worth commending.

Evolutionary psychology: Why Clan of the Cave Bear makes more sense as a novel than as a science

Regular readers of this space will know that I consider evolutionary psychology (the attempt to derive human psychology from the qualities that may or may not have been adaptive, passed on in our genes) as something of a joke. Speculations on the dishonesty module or the infidelity gene are fun for the pop science media, of course, and no harm is done if they are left there.

Recently, I wrote about the quite serious proposal by an evolutionary psychologist to bid the uncomprehending and unsympathetic Western world goodbye and try exporting evolutionary psychology to the purportedly more welcoming world of Asia. Several commenters have noted at Uncommon Descent that when the evolutionary psychology missionaries arrive among their heathen, they will find monotheism (especially Christianity) - to which they were very anxious to bid farewell - pretty firmly established in many places that were not formerly Christian. So they should not assume that Islam is their only competition.

In a comment at Uncommon Descent, I also noted,

One of the difficulties with evolutionary psychology is that the traits identified need NOT have survival value, but only be associated with traits that do.
That's part of the general incoherence. To see what this means, consider the following:

If producing fertile offspring confers survival value (a logical idea), then homosexuality should be counterproductive. However, in the era of gay rights, the evolutionary psychologist cannot quite make that argument, so he pulls the ever-obliging rabbit out of the hat: The homosexual confers survival value by helping siblings raise children. So, it turns out that both having children and not having them confer survival value.

Notice that we have gone from something obvious (if you are not a successful parent, your line will come to an end) to something speculative (how homosexuals - assumed for the purposes of our discussion to be non-parents* - might help parents).

The only thing we can really be sure of is that we have a current population of over six billion humans who come from a very small number of common ancestors.

Were those common ancestors doing something unusually correct? Given the small numbers, it is hard to know what, in particular, without specific historical information.**

That's why I think Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, admittedly fiction, makes way more sense than evolutionary psychology, which is actually fiction but not admittedly so.

*The whole evo psycho enterprise is riddled with mere "assumptions du jour". In traditional cultures, people attracted to persons of their own sex married and had children simply because the culture required them to. Whatever else they did was a different matter, judged according to the culture. Thus people who were homosexually inclined did pass on their genes in large numbers - and probably needed about the same amount of help from their sibs as they gave, overall.

**If there were a large number of ancestors, you might be able to make some reasonable guesses as to the relationship between behavior choices and survival of offspring. But not necessarily so for a small number of ancestors.

For example, if you knew that 400 men out of 500 had survived a battle, you might assume that their group contained a larger number of capable warriors than the fallen, treated as a group. But if only one single man survived the engagement, that may be because he is a great hero, or because he hid or ran away, made a deal with the enemy, was left for dead but somehow survived, or was too drunk to get up on the morning of the battle, or was in the stockade for stealing from his fellows. In other words, even assuming that his behaviour is passed on in his genes, what behavior is passed on? And what inferences can we make about its relation to his survival generally?

Here is an interesting resource on the problem with evolutionary psychology, from a "common sense" philosopher, and here's another one.

Jerry "Headaches don't have themselves" Fodor on evolutionary psychology

Jerry Fodor, who points out that headaches do not have themselves, also weighs in on the trouble with "psychological Darwinism" (evolutionary psychology), here and why he, as a "new rationalist," does not accept it, in a review of materialist cognitive science books, such as Pinker's and Plotkin's, in the London Review of Books:

Plotkin says 'neo-Darwinian theory [is] the central theorem of all biology, including behavioural biology'; 'if behaviour is adaptive, then it must be the product of evolution.' Likewise Pinker: 'Natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve . . . [so] natural selection is indispensable to understanding the human mind.' One reply to this argument is to say that there is, after all, an alternative to natural selection as the source of adaptive complexity; you could get some by a miracle. But I'm not a Creationist, nor are any of my New Rationalist friends, as far as I know. Nor do we have to be, since there's another way out of the complexity argument. This is a long story, but here's the gist: it's common ground that the evolution of our behaviour was mediated by the evolution of our brains. So, what matters with regard to the question whether the mind is an adaptation is not how complex our behaviour is, but how much change you would have to make in an ape's brain to produce the cognitive structure of a human mind. And about this, exactly nothing is known. That' because nothing is known about how the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our brains. Nobody even knows which brain structures it is that our cognitive capacities depend on. Unlike our minds, our brains are, by any gross measure, very like those of apes. So it looks as though relatively small alterations of brain structure must have produced very large behavioural discontinuities in the transition from the ancestral apes to us. If that's right, then you don't have to assume that cognitive complexity is shaped by the gradual action of Darwinian selection on prehuman behavioural phenotypes.

A friend says, of Fodor, that he is a common-sense doubter of Darwinian materialism, like David Stove. For one thing, he makes quite clear, as Stove did, why one doesn't need to be a creationist of any type in order to dismiss the evo psycho nonsense to its most suitable venue - fluffy magazine articles on why you can't help cheating on your sweetie 'cause it's in your genes.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).