Latest attempt to explain away religion: Religion gene leads to babies, not thoughts

Robert Rowthorn advises, in “Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model” (Proc. R. Soc. B published online 12 January 2011),

Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain 'religiosity' gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of 'cultural hitch-hiking', whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.

“The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations”? They’d need to be because the rest is bunk.

Just three comments:
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Meaning of art and music not found in genes, says philosopher

Writer and philosopher Roger Scruton hasn’t much use for the lit crit fad known as “literary Darwinism”, popularized by the Denis Dutton. At Big Questions Online, he asks, “Only Adapt: Can science explain art, music and literature?” (December 9, 2010).

My sense is that a respectable science would not try, and the evolutionary psychology he quite properly deflates is not a science anyway, it is an artifact of a materialist culture and fully understandable as such. Scruton notes,

Over the last two decades, however, Darwinism has invaded the field of the humanities, in a way that Darwin himself would scarcely have predicted. Doubt and hesitation have given way to certainty, interpretation has been subsumed into explanation, and the whole realm of aesthetic experience and literary judgement has been brought to heel as an “adaptation,” a part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on our genes. No need now to puzzle over the meaning of music or the nature of beauty in art. The meaning of art and music reside in what they do for our genes. Once we see that these features of the human condition are “adaptations,” acquired perhaps many thousands of years ago, during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we will be able to explain them. We will know what art and music essentially are by discovering what they do.


[ ... ]


... the whole “adaptation” approach to human phenomena is topsy-turvy. It involves a mechanical application, case by case, of the theory of natural selection, as supplemented by modern genetics. It tells us that, if a trait is widespread across our species, then it has been “selected for.” But this means only that the trait is not maladaptive, that it is not something that would disappear under evolutionary pressure. And that is a trivial observation. Everything that exists could be said to be not dysfunctional. That tells us nothing about how the thing in question came to exist.

The expression “selected for” is thus emptied of meaning. Natural selection can usefully explain animal survival where the link between the adaptation and the survival are obvious.. It’s not at all obvious that art and music aid survival; that is not what they are for.

Evolutionary psychology: Wisdom swings from the trees, it turns out

My Salvo 15 Deprogram column:

LUCY SPEAKS
Evolutionary Psychology Is Now Taking Your Questions

When Britain's Guardian newspaper first introduced its "evolutionary" agony aunt (advice columnist in America) in 2009—to honor 150 years of the culture birthed with Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species—I thought, "Aha! a send-up, to be sure." I was wrong, but in fairness, when the evolutionary psychologist speaks, even an expert can't always tell.

No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly about Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and winner of the Wellcome Trust Award for Communication of Science to the Public. For the 2009 Darwin bicentennial celebrations, Jahme, who holds an M.A. in evolutionary psychology, put together a comedy show titled Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, which was described as a combination of Charles Darwin and Charlie Chaplin.

The Guardian touts her column as "shin[ing] the cold light of evolutionary psychology" on readers' problems, thus apparently offering welcome relief from the "Aw, just dump the dweeb!" froth churned out by glossier rags and mags.

For more, go here.

And treat yourself or a friend to a year-long Salvo of light-hearted fun at the expense of publicly venerated nonsense.

Evolutionary psychology: Pink for a girl, blue for a ... girl?

Philosopher Cordelia Fine, who wrote a book on the neuroscience and other studies of the differences between men's and women's brains - and found most of them flawed - pauses to target a classic in evolutionary psychology: Why girls prefer pink.

... psychologists and journalists now speculate on the genetic and evolutionary origins of gendered color preferences that are little more than fifty years old.

Little more than how many years old? Read on:

For example, a few years ago an article in an Australian newspaper discussed the origins of the pink princess phenomenon. After trotting out the ubiquitous anecdote about the mother who tried and failed to steer her young daughter away from the pink universe, the journalist writes that the mother's failure "suggests her daughter was perhaps genetically wired that way" and asks, "is there a pink princess gene that suddenly blossoms when little girls turn two?"

Just in case we mistake for a joke the idea that evolution might have weeded out toddlers uninterested in tiaras and pink tulle , te journalist then turns to prominent child psychologist Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg for further insight into the biological basis of princess mania: "The reason why girls like pink is that their brains are structured completely differently to boys," he sagely informs us. "Part of the brain that processes emotion and part of the brain that processes language is one and the same in girls but is completely different in boys ... "

- Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, p. 208.

Okay, but Dr. Carr-Gregg and other authorities are correct, the pace of evolution has been nothing short of catastrophic in recent decades. Formerly, blue was the colour for girls - and for boys?:

The preferred color to dress young boys in was pink! Blue was reserved for girls as it was considered the paler, more dainty of the two colors, and pink was thought to be the stronger (akin to red). It was not until WWII that the colors were reversed and pink was used for girls and blue for boys... -Dress Maker Magazine

Certainly, in Kate Greenaway's late 19th century illustrations, fashionable girls strut in blue.

Fine also informs us that the early 20th century saw a concerted move to use infant and toddler clothes to reinforce gender differences. But that requires consumer choice. Most children's clothing of long ago was pretty functional - swaddling clothes, smocks, et cetera, and cut down adult clothes. Few people could afford dyes of their choice.

So yes, it's evolution - a very recent evolution of ideas about gender, which might depart with no offspring.

See also: Neuroscience: Philosopher rips "drivel" - pop science media 's bread and butter

More fun from voodoo neuroscience:

Neuroscience and popular culture: Who do voodoo? They do! Social neuroscientists, that is:

Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys ... come to think of it, why does social neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock?

Is this really science? Probably not, say a team of statisticians, who took a look at some of these studies. Basically, many of the claimed correlations were simply too high to be possible. That was because the "social neuroscience" people were cherry picking the data."

Gender Genie: Fritz your wits about which sex you belong to?

Using an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, you can find out whether the genie thinks you are a man or a woman by submitting a sample of your writing.

Given that the genie works best on texts of more than 500 words, I have decided to submit my five most recent columns for ChristianWeek.

Neuroscience: Vive la difference between boys and girls?

What I find really interesting is the way people are always looking for confirmation of weird theories from neuroscience, but they won't accept actual evidence that disconfirms a weird theory. For exmaple, there is way more evidence that boys and girls are different than that weird materialist theories of religion are true.

Incidentally, none of these findings shows that girls can't excel in math and science. They help us understand why many girls do not TRY to excel in math and science. That's useful information, however we choose to use it.

Wishing can make it so ... or maybe not, if this is about monkeys

In, "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard (Chronicle Review , August 19, 2010)," Tom Bartlett reports that Harvard has told evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser to explain issues around a few of his journal articles:

The experiment tested the ability of rhesus monkeys to recognize sound patterns. Researchers played a series of three tones (in a pattern like A-B-A) over a sound system. After establishing the pattern, they would vary it (for instance, A-B-B) and see whether the monkeys were aware of the change. If a monkey looked at the speaker, this was taken as an indication that a difference was noticed.

The method has been used in experiments on primates and human infants. Mr. Hauser has long worked on studies that seemed to show that primates, like rhesus monkeys or cotton-top tamarins, can recognize patterns as well as human infants do. Such pattern recognition is thought to be a component of language acquisition.

Researchers watched videotapes of the experiments and "coded" the results, meaning that they wrote down how the monkeys reacted. As was common practice, two researchers independently coded the results so that their findings could later be compared to eliminate errors or bias.

According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant's codes, he found that the monkeys didn't seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. Hauser's coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

Well, the long and short of it is that no one in Hauser's own lab could replicate his results.

The research that was the catalyst for the inquiry ended up being tabled, but only after additional problems were found with the data. In a statement to Harvard officials in 2007, the research assistant who instigated what became a revolt among junior members of the lab, outlined his larger concerns: "The most disconcerting part of the whole experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science."

Hauser was found to be solely responsible for the discrepancies, and as of the date of the Chronicle Review article, was on leave.

The whole story is testimony to the sheer need some have to prove that apes and monkeys are just fuzzy people or we are just naked apes. Life, whatever it is, is not that simple.

According to Hauser’s Edge bio,

MARC D. HAUSER, an evolutionary psychologist and biologist, is Harvard College Professor, Professor of Psychology and Program in Neurosciences, and Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, Wild Minds: What Animals Think, and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

[ ... ]

Along with Irv Devore, he teaches the Evolution of Human Behavior class, a Core Course at Harvard with 500 undergraduate students. The interdisciplinary course, "Science B29" (nickname: "The Sex Course"), has been running for 30 years, was started by Devore and Robert Trivers, and is the second most popular course on campus, behind "Econ 10". Section teachers over the years comprise a who's who of leading thinkers and include people such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and Sarah B. Hrdy. In 1997-98, he sponsored a trial run of "Edge University" in which the students in Science B29 received Edge mailing as part of required reading in the course.

Re his book, Wild Minds: What Animals Think, it was what humans think that proved his undoing.

See also:

Wisdom from your local zoo

Evolutionary psychology: All wrong all the time

Humans are unique - get used to it, or get therapy. Do NOT get a chimpanzee

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are?

"Loving" chimpanzee eats its victims alive, new research shows

New assessment of ape language skills is dramatically scaled back

A defense of Apes r us - and insider look at the pygmy chimpanzee enthusiasts

Apes R Not Us, and we have to get used to it

Darwinian “triggers to persuasion and captivation” read more like the seven deadly sins.

From my recent MercatorNet column:

The Darwinian world of brand marketing

We all know what evolutionary psychology (EP) has meant for sociology, psychology, and religious anthropology: a serious effort to explain human behaviour in terms of ape behaviour or “hardwired” Stone Age genes. For example, you get your selfish genes from your mother, so it’s her fault if you don’t visit her...

The EP academics, however pernicious their ideas, are doubtless just trying to understand. But what happens when their theories hit the business world? Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation by Sally Hogshead (Harper Business, 2010) gives us a glimpse of the Darwinian universe, as opposed to the Judeo-Christian one.

Hogshead is a brand marketing specialist. She helps executives persuade us to pay more for a brand than for a reliable service. Her special theory, gathered from research studies of apes and brain scans, is that the best strategy is “fascinating” people, and she has identified seven triggers for the spells a perceptive marketer can cast on them: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust.

This list vaguely echoes the seven deadly sins, except for the last. But caution! Here, trust is not an intuition about how the universe really works; it is manipulative. We are told, “trust doesn’t demand a moral absolute—only absolute consistency.” (p 175)

Hogshead begins by disposing of free will. (MercatorNet, 30 September 2010)

And she’ll end by disposing of your bank account if you don’t look sharp.

For example,

*Still more news from the world of privilege: “Not so long ago, the height of epicurean indulgence was a gold box filled with Godiva chocolates … Then, in an effort to expand, in 1999 Godiva made a fateful decision to distribute in mass retailers such as Barnes & Noble. The chocolates, which for the first time now included preservatives, were no longer a treat to be craved and desired. Now you could buy the gold box in strip malls. (Strip malls!)” (79)

Huh? Does this writer really not know that millions of her fellow Americans crave the goods of strip malls in vain?

Read more here.

So tell me again, Uncle Doddy: Given the stats, how does sin promote survival - for anyone but the rackets downtown?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

The New Atheists are God's Prophets?

It is Sunday, so I allow myself one religious story.

One is informed by the Reverend Michael Dowd, and evangelist for Darwinism, that the "new atheists" are God's prophets:

According to Dowd, God is speaking pointedly to Christians today through some very unlikely messengers outside the church—namely New Atheists, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. These bestselling authors mock the biblical view of a God who, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s definition of terrorism, is a cosmic terrorist.

“The God that Richard Dawkins says is a delusion is a delusion!” asserts Dowd. “That way of thinking about God reflects an outdated, Bronze Age worldview that we have blindly believed for generations simply because someone said so and because our traditions taught us to. Biblical literalists are driving thinking Christians out of the church.”

Dowd claims that the central religious issue of our time is where people go for guidance and inspiration to deal with “this-world issues,” such as addictions and collapsing economies, not what might happen in “an imaginary, unnatural afterlife.”

No wonder liberal denominations are declining so fast. I can hear about how Darwinian evolution explains everything via the "evolutionary agony aunt" who shows how my complex series/matrix of problems can be understood by comparing my life with that of a chimpanzee somewhere.

I can't think of anything I needed more.

Wisdom from your local zoo: Introducing the “Evolutionary Agony Aunt”

When Britain’s Guardian newspaper first introduced its “evolutionary agony aunt”, this writer thought - a spoof for sure. But where evolutionary psychology is concerned, it can be genuinely hard to tell.

No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly, “A mere 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we are proud to introduce our very own Evolutionary Agony Aunt” in the person of Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and star of comedy Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, described as a combination of Charles Darwin and Charlie Chaplin. We were told that her column will shine the “cold light” of evolutionary psychology on readers’ problems, in sharp contrast to the glossy magazines.

Carole counsels her troubled readers by citing the behaviour of chimpanzees, other apes, and monkeys. And with what result?

Go here for the rest.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Evolutionary psychology: Getting it all wrong all the time

A friend wrote to ask me about "evolutionary" psychology claims that humans are promiscuous because of our evolutionary history with chimps and bonobos.

I replied:

Those people stoop to just about anything, don’t they?

As per your summary, “Evolutionary biologists consider that bonobos and chimps are the most closest species according to our evolutionary tree or bush, and since both species are very promiscuous, they infer that this behaviour was present in our common ancestor with them, and that promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history. ”

Let’s picture ourselves in the Toronto Zoo’s primate sanctuary. It comes out that one enterprising bonobo male has impregnated all the females, willing or no. So? It’s inconvenient, because the zookeepers will need to find new homes for most of the expected offspring. If they think it’s a big enough problem, they can always put the females on the Pill hereafter, right? Or put him in a separate enclosure. Otherwise, as we say here, that’s just life wandering its way through time.

Okay, now let’s picture ourselves in a courtroom at the Old City Hall Courthouse. The judge is hearing oral arguments from the defense lawyer for a serial rapist. The defendant's lawyer says that due to the behaviour of chimpanzees and bonobos, “promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history,” so we should go easy on his client.

I think the judge and the prosecution would be competing to interrupt at that point, and most local jurors and onlookers would be aghast.

What’s missing from the analysis is that lots of characteristics may be part of our evolutionary history, but humans uniquely possess the ability to select among characteristics which ones we think we should encourage.

A guy could be a serial rapist - or he could take a folk dancing class and meet a nice girl. The former choice will likely get him a set of leg irons at the Courthouse and the latter a rental tux and free carnation at the City Hall wedding chamber.

It is not an argument for any form of human behaviour whatever that it may have been in our evolutionary history, because all sorts of behaviour has been in our evolutionary history, including a great many behaviours never practiced by chimps or bonobos.

Evolutionary psychology: Tracing the road to extinction

Here is my latest MercatorNet article, dissecting the caveman theory of psychology, explaining why evolutionary psychology is so rapidly losing credibility:

“Is human behaviour really based on the survival strategies of our Pleistocene ancestors?”

Well, the stone hatchet is certainly poised over our iconic cavemen. A recent Scientific American podcast admits as much, and without the narrator throwing a panic attack either.

Why this? Why now? And why such equinamity?

Secular materialist thinkers have as deep a desire as anyone to understand the wellsprings of human nature. But they are much more restricted in where they can look. From the very beginning of the organized "human evolution" movement, starting with Darwin's publication of The Descent of Man, they have mined random findings from evolution for deep truths about human nature.

So what went so wrong, so badly, and so soon?

Go here for more and for the links, and great Flintstones graphics.

Evolutionary psychology: Forget that. If you want to be attractive, be NICE!

After reading this typical ooga! ooga! evolutionary psychology story about credit cards, I was hardly surprised to "learn" that

What men want is controlled by "evolution" and is thin women:

Despite another recent study that found modern men are more interested in intelligent, educated women than in decades past, in the new study men tended to base their attractiveness ratings on women's physical features, giving stellar marks to those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.

The big problem with modern education is that we must spend so much time learning what ain't so that we hardly get any time to learn what might be so.

A psychologist friend offered some suggestions about studies of this type:

This is the modus operandi of academic psychologists with an evolutionary bent in writing up their research.

1). Tell a story about evolutionary history

2). Report the data from an empirical study of behavior (obviously conducted in the present time)

3). Tell another story about evolutionary history

4). Conclude that the behavior observed ... indicates something hardwired, applies to everyone, and has relevance to real-world situations

And so what is the truth?

1. A study was conducted. [Frm Denyse: Hmmm.}

2. Pictures were used, not people. [From Denyse: Many men have decided not to marry a woman after listening to her seriously for two minutes. And vice versa, believe me.]

3. The data are necessarily limited to what people find physically attractive [From Denyse: Yes, attractive in a given environment today. Thinness, lauded by study participants, is a valued quality ONLY in societies where people get lots to eat whenever they wish, so they can merely choose not to eat. In less wealthy societies, thinness signals impending disaster. In many societies today, people still prefer to be fat, hence the current public health uproar about the worldwide epidemic of obesity.]

4. The subjects knew they were taking part in an experiment. [From Denyse: Which means that they were factoring in what elite opinion expects. That's really important. How many guys claim to prefer a thin girlfriend to a plump one - unless they know they are being monitored, and anyway no actual girlfriend is in sight?]

My friend writes, "Of course this study necessarily ignores the fact that ideas about attractiveness have changed enormously throughout history, but that's okay, we'll call it hardwired anyway. In other words, they ignore known history in favor of fairytales about eons ago."

Yes indeed. Body piercings have become a rage in Toronto.

In my view, the key to being attractive is, be nice. Niceness is underrated. Yes, it is bland, but it works, if all you want is a seat in the dress circle or some face time with an important official. Cinderella and Snow White weren't wrong about everything.

Evolutionary psychology: Good news, at last, for credit card companies!

"After eons of evolution, men are hardwired to overspend and max out credit cards to attract mates, a study last year concluded."

Of course it did.

You can be sure that the study would not have concluded that the countless generations of men who drove hard bargains out of necessity - for whom it was a matter of honour as well as necessity to do so - were our far more representative ancestors.

Ooga ooga.

Evolutionary psychology: David Brooks on the growing pushback

Everybody seems to be taking a whack at evolutionary psychology these days, and David Brooks gets in his shot in "Human Nature Today" (New York Times, June 26, 2009).

Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.

Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.

Sharon Begley's account, in my view, was not overdrawn, it was overdue. Re "Spent" - this sounds-like forgettable book takes evolutionary psychology to the shopping mall to show what we are genetically "hardwired" to buy and why, according to six (count 'em) big traits.

The book might have made a bigger splash before the recession hit. To listen to local retailers wail, many people just now have hardwired their wallets to their pockets. But surely Pleistocene cave men did the same thing, so there must be a module for that too somewhere in there ...

Essentially, two things killed evolutionary psychology: Neuroplasticity, as Brooks notes, and Occam's Razor. It's never been clear that EPs' selfish genes and brain modules ever existed, or ever needed to. Evolutionary psychologists keep looking for things that their current interpretation of human evolution can explain - which is to say, anything and everything, provided speculation is freely allowed.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Evolutionary psychology: Why it is on the way out, with last year's magazines

Sharon Begley's critical look at evolutionary psychology in a recent edition of Newsweek is a must-read for anyone interested in the field. She is hardly the first, but the first to have so wide a non-professional audience for a rational, science-based evaluation of the topic. Many of us have regaled ourselves over the years with the distinct pop-culture sound - more lark than lab, more salon than science.

We have learned so much from evolutionary psychology:

- Rape today can be explained because rape was once adaptive and rapists had more kids, so we carry rape genes. (The guys who didn't rape just didn't leave enough kids.) Then some ignorant scientist decided to pull in data from his many years' observation of one of the few remaining groups of people who live much as all humans lived 100 000 years ago. He did not observe rapes, but ran some numbers on the probabilities, based on the lifestyle, and discovered that rape was quite unlikely to be adaptive. Unless a fine collection of spears in one's back is adaptive ...

Begley observes that one hindrance to a scientific assessment of evolutionary psychology has been the moral outrage it provoked. Moral outrage enables the purveyor of silly or pernicious ideas to don the mantle of science, invoke Galileo, and delay the day of reckoning.

But it seems to have stretched as far as it can go because, behind all the posturing, some were counting.

For example (these from Begley's article, and don't let my summary stop you from reading it):

- Is it true that men are genetically adapted to prefer women with a waist to hip ratio of 0.7? That depends on what other qualities are important. Could Barbie work 10 hours a day under a hot sun?

- Are men programmed to neglect or kill their stepchildren? Many such claims relied on social work data gathered for other purposes, and often poorly or prejudicially gathered. Also, and this is a point Mario Beauregard and I made in The Spiritual Brain, the term "stepfather" can sometimes be used very loosely, and one need not assume that the man even intends to stay long.

- The brave warrior gets the girls? Not necessarily. An analysis of the family histories of 95 Amazon warriors showed that women avoid the "badass" guy, who is typically a disaster as a husband, and may trigger a counterraid that gets his family killed.

Begley notes that a growing new approach, behavioral ecology, makes much more sense than evolutionary psychology (BE). BE posits that evolution created the core of human nature as variability and flexibility - the ability to adapt behavior to the environment quickly - and that there is no universal human nature.

I have qualms with this approach, because I think that some features of human nature are universal, other things being equal. The desire for approval comes readily to mind. What there isn't are modules in the brain, created by selfish genes, that can be accounted for by the ways in which the behaviour was adaptive in the Pleistocene era..

But qualms aside, it is nice to see the subject finally leave the salon and get back to the lab.

You are your genes? Oh, maybe not

I happened to be rereading Jonathan Wells's The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, and thought I'd share this summary re genetics and behaviour:

Except for some rare pathological conditions, it has been impossible to tie human behavior to specific genes. (The “gay gene” that was much hyped a few years ago turned out to be a mirage.) If human behavior cannot be reduced to genetics, then according to neo-Darwinism it cannot be biologically inherited; if it cannot be biologically inherited, then it cannot evolve in a Darwinian sense. Still another problem with sociobiology is that it has been invoked to explain just about every human behavior from selfishness to self-sacrifice, from promiscuity to celibacy.

A theory that explains something and its opposite equally well explains nothing. It’s no wonder that sociobiology and its latest manifestation, “evolutionary psychology” (called “evo-psycho” by some wags), are held in low regard even by some evolutionary biologists.

Stephen Jay Gould once called sociobiology a collection of “just-so stories” in which “virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.” And in 2000 evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne compared it to discredited Freudian psychology: “By judicious manipulation, every possible observation of human behavior could be (and was) fitted into the Freudian framework.*

Truth squad notes: I am one of the wags who calls it "evo psycho."

Evo psycho first attracted my attention when I noticed that it always offered explanations in terms of current popular culture, which is entirely contrary to the way real science works.

When, a couple of weeks ago, I asked the scientists at the Solar Neutrino Observatory in Sudbury, Canada, how they did their work and what they discovered from it, popular culture played no role in the discussion. But if I asked an evolutionary psychologist about marriage in prehistoric times, he would tell me some popular culture lore dressed up in "let's play cave people" animal skins.

Whereas the SNO scientists actually know something about solar neutrinos, the evolutionary psychologist really knows nothing whatever about how prehistoric humans managed their domestic relationships.

Yes, we know a bit about marriage in the ancient world because of recovered marriage contracts, et cetera, and we also know a bit about marriage among modern humans who use only ancient technologies because anthropologists have observed them. But the rest is pure speculation.

So what do we know? Our genes play a role in our lives, and so do our experiences and our culture.

What we can really know abut ancient relatinships?: While we are here anyway: If you happen to recall the story in the Book of Genesis in the Bible about how Sarah got her husband Abraham to have a son with the servant girl Hagar, you will be interested to know that Abraham and Sarah had grown up in the Babylonian culture - and that culture specifically allowed an infertile wife this option. Memory of the custom was preserved in that story through many later centuries when it apparently was not an option any longer. So sometimes we do know, more or less what happened.

But just as dressing in animal skins would not make us Cro-Magnons, telling stories based on "evolutionary psychology" does not give us any special insights.

More evo psycho stories:

Evolutionary psychology: Moral judgement based on "rather primitive emotion"

Evolutionary psychology: Why do evolutionary psychologists exist?

Evolutionary psychology: So they really DON'T believe all that rot?

Evolutionary psychology: Gossip can be good for you

A Google Alert for evolutionary psychology pretty much tells you what you need to know about it

Evolutionary psychology: The scam getting nailed at last?

Lessons from the heroes of Mumbai

Evolutionary psychology: Police just as good as church in promoting socially helpful behavior -researchers

Evolutionary psychology: Do people see faces in cars?

Evolutionary psychology: Misunderstanding superstition

Evolutionary psychology: Why evolutionary explanations of religion don't work

Mind: Current science less and less precise as it approaches the mind?\

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

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

Evolutionary psychology: The selfish gene in the art world

Evolutionary psychology: Key concept of "memes" trashed as "one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades"

*Reffs? You want reffs? Okay ... :

10. Stephen Jay Gould, “Sociobiology: the Art of Storytelling,” New Scientist, November 16, 1978, 530–33. [Not, apparently, on line, but a bunch of fussy criticisms are.] Jerry A. Coyne, “Of Vice and Men: The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology,” a review of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape, in New Republic, April 3, 2000. [Also not on line, but note this is.] There is also Tom Bethell, “Against Sociobiology,” First Things 109, January 2001: 18–24. That is on line, but, fair warning, like me, he isn't fronting the nonsense.

Evolutionary psychology: Moral judgement based on "rather primitive emotion"

In "Psychologists Shed Light On Origins Of Morality" (ScienceDaily Mar. 2, 2009), we read,

In everyday language, people sometimes say that immoral behaviours “leave a bad taste in your mouth”. But this may be more than a metaphor according to new scientific evidence from the University of Toronto that shows a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to poison and disease.

“Morality is often pointed to as the pinnacle of human evolution and development,” says lead author Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology. "However, disgust is an ancient and rather primitive emotion which played a key evolutionary role in survival. Our research shows the involvement of disgust in morality, suggesting that moral judgment may depend as much on simple emotional processes as on complex thought."

See also: Neuroscience: Mirror neurons - cracks appearing?


[ ... ]

The U of T team found that people make similar facial movements in response to both primitive forms of disgust and moral disgust.

Ah, so that proves it then!

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not just its untethered speculation but its reflexive tendency to define explicitly human activities via non-human, subhuman, or prehuman models.

Moral disgust is an explicitly intellectual activity. Consider the following situations:

- a nursing home attendant flushes an old lady's dinner down the toilet so she doesn't have to help feed her, and steals from her purse when she is asleep. The old lady is too frightened to say anything.

- a social worker pressures clients to sleep with him, in which case he will put through the paperwork for benefits (to which they are legally entitled).

What provokes disgust is the difference between the way things are and the way they ought to be

So the question is, how do we know what ought to be?

Evolutionary psychology: Why do evolutionary psychologists exist?

A reader wrote to me to say,

I greatly enjoy your writing and I would like to ask your opinion about something I really find puzzling.

Well, once someone has decided to praise my writing, how can I resist responding? Anyway, this person goes on to say,

My question concerns the so-called "agent detection device" and the affirmation that it disproves God’s existence beyond any reasonable doubt.

Sounds like a scam to me, but then I have shut the door on the feet of so many people selling winter home heating plans that I may have an innate door-shutting mechanism that "evolutionary psychology" can explain ... (Like, it would never have anything at all to do with suspicion that the new plan would end up sticking me with more expenses than the present one - or anything else that suggests that the human mind is real, right?)

According to many experimental studies, human beings seem to have an innate mechanism enabling them to identify the presence of an agent under some circumstances. ( if one is in a deep wood, the shuffling of trees and bushes and a sudden silence would lead one to believe some creature is present).

Well, all I can say is, when that happens to me in the deep woods, I institute my wilderness survival plan immediately.

Admittedly, the last time that happened to me, wandering down a trail in Muskoka, the creature I nearly collided with was a fox that had apparently missed his rabbit. So the fox ran off. But what if it had been a bear who had missed his deer? ...

Anyway, my correspondent went on to explain,

However, this mechanism can easily fool us. What if we are, for instance, alone in an old house and hear some noise. We may be inclined to assume, too easily, that someone or something must be there, even if other explanations (like wind) would be much more likely.

Okay, not me. I've never had any trouble detecting the difference between, say, a fox and a ghost.

Not that I believe in ghosts. I figure, either a spirit is a holy soul or it is not. If it is a holy soul, I need not worry. And if it is not a holy soul, it would never approach a baptized and confirmed Christian like me.

True, during high summer, the floorboards of old houses can start to creak. It can sound like someone is walking there, due to the wood's adjustment to the temperature difference between day and night. I learned that as a small child.

(This was especially useful information for us girls because we were often yakking far into the night when we should have been asleep. ... So it was important for us to know whether an adult was sneaking in to check on us, as opposed to natural night noise that we could ignore.)

My correspondent advises me that evolutionary psychologists think that this "agent detection" mechanism is hyperactive and therefore completely unreliable.

That doesn't sound right to me. (Admittedly, not much about "evolutionary psychology" - a discipline without a subject - sounds right to me. But this "agent detection" stuff sounds especially unright.)

I wrote back and said, essentially,

I am nearly 60 years old, and have often faced real danger - and have never found the mechanism unreliable at all.

In every situation in which I suspected real danger, I was right to be concerned.

Yes, false alarms are common, but people learn to ignore them after a while.

If the mechanism is so unreliable, why am I still here? Why are you? Why is anyone?

Re God: I never thought God existed on those terms! I assumed it was because of the majesty and fine tuning of the universe and the moral law, and reason and revelation.

However, I have never uncovered a really good reason for why evolutionary psychologists exist, apart from taxpayer-funded universities. But if someone comes up with one, please let me know.

Evolutionary psychology: So they really DON'T believe all that rot?

In "On Second Thought ... Scientists are supposed to change their minds when evidence undercuts their views. Dream on" (January 3, 2009), Newsweek's Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, spills the beans (as if we hadn't seen them spilled all over the floor a long time ago - but never mind):

The most fascinating backpedaling is by scientists who have long pushed
evolutionary psychology. This field holds that we all carry genes that led to reproductive success in the Stone Age, and that as a result men are genetically driven to be promiscuous and women to be coy, that men have a biological disposition to rape and to kill mates who cheat on them, and that every human behavior is "adaptive"—that is, helpful to reproduction. But as Harvard biologist Marc Hauser now concedes, evidence is "sorely missing" that language, morals and many other human behaviors exist because they help us mate and reproduce. And Steven
Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field "may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over" 50,000 years ago, Pinker says. How has the view that reproduction is all, and that humans are just cavemen with better haircuts, hung on so long? "Even in science," says neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, "a seductive story will sometimes … outpace the data." And withstand it, too.

Well, it's reassuring that some people are beginning to rethink this idiocy. As I have often pointed out, it's all part of what we know that ain't so. To the extent that anyone takes it seriously, it can do serious harm.

Look, let me be clear about this: There is stuff in brain science that really is so.

A blood clot could indeed kill or paralyse you. You could develop a tumour that is difficult to excise. Alzheimer is a late life illness you can fight off only by the most stringent measures, and even then you may lose the battle. But that is what's true, and no one can deny it.

The evolutionary pyschologists's "cave men with better haircuts" is just a time-waster in a world where serious neuroscience issues must be addressed.

Hat tip: Brains on Purpose.

I love it. Gossip can be good for you ...

A friend on his lunch break sends me this - the latest nonsense from "evolutionary psychology":

Google News Alert

Bruce Schneier: More on the Broad View of Security CSO - Framingham,MA,USAFor example, a lot of the seemingly irrational security trade-offs that the behavioral economists have documented can be explained by the evolutionary ...See all stories on this topic

Have you heard? Gossip can be good for you Chicago Tribune - United StatesGossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn't ...See all stories on this topic

Does religion provide an evolutionary advantage? Science a Gogo - USA He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains - including neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology - that religious beliefs and religious ...See all stories on this topic

Look at that middle story: I wonder whether a study detailing how gossip isn't good for you – relative to minding your own business and getting on with the job at hand - would see the light of day ... ?

One thing to note about EP is its utter predictability. It always seems to be about whatever foolishness is noised about in pop culture. If the talk show circuit likes it, it is definitely science. And who could possibly argue with that?

It certainly never seems to be about anything that provides real insight into human nature. But then it couldn't be, could it?

See also: Recently, a friend sent me this Google alert for "evolutionary psychology" (Similar nutty stories)

Go here for other stories on evolutionary psychology (scroll down to second and following).

Recently, a friend sent me this Google alert for "evolutionary psychology"

As follows:

Ooga Ooga! Men Overspend to Attract MatesLiveScience.com - New York,NY,USAThe finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology, did not hold with women. Vying for women is simply what men do and have ...See all stories on this topic

Study: Men's overspending hard-wired from caveman daysCreditCards.com - Austin,TX,USA... "Male Financial Consumption is Associated with Higher Mating Intentions and Mating Success," printed in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. ...See all stories on this topic

A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of DecentralizationThe Oil Drum - USABoth evolutionary psychology and modern commerce suggest that cities may actually be counter-productive in these functions. Dunbar's number, for example, ...See all stories on this topic

Status, sex prime for aggressionMinnesota Daily - Minneapolis,MN,USA... deny the senselessness of such violence, but recent University of Minnesota research indicates that such behavior could indeed make evolutionary sense. ...See all stories on this topic

Feeling lonely? Genes might be at fault CNN - USA... University who runs the psychology department's Self, Emotion and Behavior Lab. Part of the explanation for loneliness is evolutionary, experts say. ...See all stories on this topic

Gifts often wrapped in self-interest Canada.com - Don Mills,Ontario,CanadaHarvard psychology professor Ellen J. Langer reports that giving gifts "typically makes us feel competent, empowered and engaged," allowing us to feel like ...See all stories on this topic

Daily Digest: Legal doping; aggresive behavior and status Minnesota Daily - Minneapolis,MN,USA... and Social Psychology. It says that fighting for status is similar to fighting ofr survival of their genes and not doing so can be evolutionary suicide. ...See all stories on this topic

Nietzsche and MoralityPhilosophy Now (subscription) - London,UKNietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals is an exercise in 'animal psychology', studying (in Nietzsche's own words) "the physiology and evolutionary history of ...See all stories on this topic

Ooga ooga ...

I keep having to remind myself that some people think this is science.

I remember science in Grades Eleven and Twelve. It was about measuring things accurately, estimating according to fixed rules, and - above all - understanding how the laws of physics and the periodic table worked. If I were a Darwinist trying to make some order in my life and career, I would begin by banishing "evolutionary psychology" from any pretense whatever to be a science. I do not know what they can lose, but I can sure see what they would gain.

Hmmmm. Maybe it's just as well for me that they will never actually do it!