Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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Uncommonly Denyse shows more sparkling scholarship as she remarks upon another review of yet another book she hasn't read:
| Quote | Evolutionary psychology: So they really DON’T believe all that rot?
O'Leary
I’ve been trying for years, to get hold of some evidence that anyone at all who thinks Darwinian evolution plausible actually stops short of the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution - something so completely ridiculous that no one who takes it seriously can be considered a contributor to rational thought.
Apparently, some do stop short. And nice to know, for sanity’s sake.
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) |
Begley has commented upon the book What Have You Changed Your Mind About, which is described on Amazon thusly: "In this wide-ranging assortment of 150 brief essays, well-known figures from every conceivable field demonstrate why it's a prerogative of all thoughtful people to change their mind once in a while." Denyse is excited and quotes Begley extensively:
| Quote | | 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. |
Always interesting to peel one of Denyse's stinking onions.
First, it is worth noting that the book of which Begley is co-author is fully entitled, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. Her co-co-author is Jeffrey M. Schwartz. If you've read The Spatula Brain, you'll recognize Schwartz as the psychiatrist who specializes in the application of neuroplasticity to the treatment of OCD. His schtick is utterly unapologetic dualism: the mind is not the brain; the mind can reprogram the brain. He is also a supporter of IDC, and is honored with extensive appearances in the movie Expelled! No Intelligence Displayed. Begley herself is not a neuroscientist. She is a journalist. She has authored or co-authored a number of books that pedal a similar schtick, with titles such as,
Inside The Mind Of God: Images And Words Of Inner Space (with Michael Reagan)
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
So Begley has a stake, and probably a steak, in a bad outcome for evolutionary psychology, which understands that the mind is in fact instantiated in the brain and is, along with human culture, a highly derived component of the natural world. Which raises the question, could Begley possibly have quotemined Hauser and Pinker, above?
As it happens, the essays presented in What Have You Changed Your Mind About are also available online at www.edge.org. Including Pinker's and Hauser's. Best to restore Begley's nuggets of quote-ore to their contexts.
Begley quotes Hauser:
| Quote | | 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. |
Hauser himself:
| Quote | Although it is certainly reasonable to say that language, morality and music have design features that are adaptive, that would enhance reproduction and survival, evidence for such claims is sorely missing. Further, for those who wish to argue that the evidence comes from the complexity of the behavior itself, and the absurdly low odds of constructing such complexity by chance, these arguments just don’t cut it with respect to explaining or predicting the intricacies of language, morality, music or many other domains of knowledge.
In fact, I would say that although Darwin’s theory has been around, and readily available for the taking for 150 years, it has not advanced the fields of linguistics, ethics, or mathematics. This is not to say that it can’t advance these fields. But unlike the areas of economic decision making, mate choice, and social relationships, where the adaptive program has fundamentally transformed our understanding, the same can not be said for linguistics, ethics, and mathematics. What has transformed these disciplines is our growing understanding of mechanism, that is, how the mind represents the world, how physiological processes generate these representations, and how the child grows these systems of knowledge. |
So Hauser observes that an evolutionary perspective has fundamentally transformed our understanding of economic decision making, mate choice, and social relationships. And where evolutionary psychology has failed, progress is being made through increasing understanding of the physiological and developmental processes that underlie mental representation. These subtleties don't seem to come across in Begley's article, or Denyse's twice removed ruminations.
Begley's Pinker:
| Quote | | 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. |
And Pinker in context:
| Quote | If these results hold up, and apply to psychologically relevant brain function (as opposed to disease resistance, skin color, and digestion, which we already know have evolved in recent millennia), then the field of evolutionary psychology might have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over and done with 10-000 — 50,000 years ago.
And if so, the result could be evolutionary psychology on steroids. Humans might have evolutionary adaptations not just to the conditions that prevailed for hundreds of thousands of years, but also to some of the conditions that have prevailed only for millennia or even centuries. Currently, evolutionary psychology assumes that any adaptation to post-agricultural ways of life are 100% cultural.
Though I suspect some revisions will be called for, I doubt they will be radical, for two reasons. One is that many aspects of the human (and ape) environments have been constant for a much longer time than the period in which selection has recently been claimed to operate. Examples include dangerous animals and insects, toxins and pathogens in spoiled food and other animal products, dependent children, sexual dimorphism, risks of cuckoldry and desertion, parent-offspring conflict, risk of cheaters in cooperation, fitness variation among potential mates, causal laws governing solid bodies, presence of conspecifics with minds, and many others. Recent adaptations would have to be an icing on this cake -- quantitative variations within complex emotional and cognitive systems.
The other is the empirical fact that human races and ethnic groups are psychologically highly similar, if not identical. People everywhere use language, get jealous, are selective in choosing mates, find their children cute, are afraid of heights and the dark, experience anger and disgust, learn names for local species, and so on. If you adopt children from a technologically undeveloped part of the world, they will fit in to modern society just fine. To the extent that this is true, there can't have been a whole lot of uneven psychological evolution postdating the split among the races 50-100,000 years ago (though there could have been parallel evolution in all the branches). |
I came away from Begley/Denyse briefly wondering if Pinker had abandoned the perspective of evolutionary psychology. A closer squint finds that he is now entertaining the notion of "evolutionary psychology on steroids."
Begley caps her comments with a quote from Roger Bingham:
| Quote | | 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. |
A summary of Bingham's preferred model is in order:
| Quote | Although this is not the place to detail the arguments, we suggested that the selective pressures of navigating ancestral environments — particularly the social world — would have required an adaptively flexible, on-line information-processing system and would have driven the evolution of the neocortex. We claimed that the ultimate function of the mind is to devise behavior that wards off the depredations of entropy and keeps our energy bank balance in the black. So our universal evolutionary heritage is not a bundle of instincts, but a self-adapting system that is responsive to environmental stimuli, constantly analyzing bioenergetic costs and benefits, creating a customized database of experiences and outcomes, and generating minds that are unique by design.
We also explained the construction of selves, how our systems adapt to different 'marketplaces', and the importance of reputation effects — a richly nuanced story, which explains why the phrase "I changed my mind" is, with all due respect, the kind of rather simplistic folk psychological language that I hope we will eventually clean up. I think it was Mallarmé who said it was the duty of the poet to purify the language of the tribe. That task now falls also to the scientist.
This model of the mind that I have now subscribed to for about a decade is the bible at the Church of Theoretical Evolutionary Neuroscience (of which I am a co-founder). It was created in alignment with both the adaptationist principles of evolutionary biologists and psychologists (who, at the time, tended to pay little attention to the actual workings of the brain at the implementation level of neurons) and the constructivist principles of neuroscientists (who tended to pay little attention to adaptationism). It would be unrealistic, however, to claim that the two perspectives have yet been satisfactorily reconciled. |
Surprise! Bingham's view of human cognition and human neuroscience is thoroughly evolutionary and thoroughly adaptionist. It differs from the Barkow/Cosmides/Tooby brand of evolutionary psychology in that it eschews the radical cognitive modularity those authors espouse. And, pace Beauregard, Schwartz, O'Leary and Begley, Bingham explicitly rejects folk notions such as "I changed my mind."
Denyse gets it wrong. Dog bites man.
[edits of this and that]
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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