Category Archives: Cognition

by John S. Wilkins | January 20, 2013

Gilbert White on Instinct: stepping back from Nature

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In the course of helping teach a “History of Nature” course for Sara Maroske just lately, I re-encountered Gilbert White’s lovely Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne, a classic of literature and field biology. As a philosopher I hadn’t read him closely as there is little abstract argument in it, but this time, in a history course, I noted that he uses the term “instinct” in several ways. Here are some, all bolding mine:

Birds in general are wise in their choice of situation: but in this neighbourhood every summer is seen a strong proof to the contrary at an house without eaves in an exposed district, where some martins build year by year in the corners of the windows. But, as the corners of these windows (which face to the south-east and south-west) are too shallow, the nests are washed down every hard rain; and yet these birds drudge on to no purpose from summer to summer, without changing their aspect or house. It is a piteous sight to see them labouring when half their nest is washed away and bringing dirt …. ‘generis lapsi sarcire ruinas.’ Thus is instinct a most wonderful unequal faculty; in some instances so much above reason, in other respects so far below it! [Letter XVI, Nov. 20, 1773]

A certain swallow built for two years together on the handles of a pair of garden-shears, that were stuck up against the boards in an out-house, and therefore must have her nest spoiled whenever that implement was wanted: and, what is stranger still, another bird of the same species built its nest on the wings and body of an owl that happened by accident to hang dead and dry from the rafter of a barn. This owl, with the nest on its wings, and with eggs in the nest, was brought as a curiosity worthy the most elegant private museum in Great Britain. The owner, struck with the oddity of the sight, furnished the bringer with a large shell, or conch, desiring him to fix it just where the owl hung: the person did as he was ordered, and the following year a pair, probably the same pair, built their nest in the conch, and laid their eggs.

The owl and the conch make a strange grotesque appearance, and are not the least curious specimens in that wonderful collection of art and nature.

Thus is instinct in animals, taken the least out of its way, an undistinguishing, limited faculty; and blind to every circumstance that does not immediately respect self-preservation, or lead at once to the propagation or support of their species. [Letter LVII, Sept. 9 1767]

To a thinking mind nothing is more wonderful than that early instinct which impresses young animals with the notion of the situation of their natural weapons, and of using them properly in their own defence, even before those weapons subsist or are formed. [Letter XXXI, April 29, 1776]

They who write on natural history cannot too frequently advert to instinct, that wonderful limited faculty, which, in some instances, raises the brute creation as it were above reason, and in others leaves them so far below it. Philosophers have defined instinct to be that secret influence by which every species is impelled naturally to pursue, at all times, the same way or track, without any teaching or example; whereas reason, without instruction, would often vary and do that by many methods which instinct effects by one alone. Now this maxim must be taken in a qualified sense; for there are instances in which instinct does vary and conform to the circumstances of place and convenience. [Letter C, not dated]

What is most interesting is how White takes a more objective or distinct stance towards his subjects. He no longer ascribes their actions either to the guiding hand of God as most people would have at the time, nor to the intelligent actions of the animals (mostly, birds and dogs, two kinds of animals of interest to the hunting English) themselves. Instead, he assigns their behaviour to a nonmoral but useful trait in them. Instinct is an occult property, hidden from us, but recognisable in its influence.

It is so very like a “mental module” of evolutionary psychology that I shudder: it is simple in scope and action, does one thing well, it is internal and inborn. It is adaptive, to the survival of the organism and for the propagation of the species. All it needs is the adjective “Darwinian”, and yet it precedes the Origin as White presents it by nearly a century.

Darwin of course read White – probably as a young man. Every natural historical enthusiast would have done so in England at the time Darwin was becoming one. I wonder if what we are seeing now with modules is so entrenched in Anglophone society that we cannot frame this any other way. My suggestion of dispositional behaviours or d-behaviours was an attempt to get past this; it requires a three-part set of conditions: the genetic inheritance, the developmental conditions that make the behaviour developable, and the environmental triggers that start that development. And yet it is hard not to fall back to the idea that instinct is just the behaviour. It’s habit. Maybe it’s instinct…

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Filed under Biology, Cognition, Epistemology, Evolution, Philosophy

by John S. Wilkins | January 2, 2013

Evopsychopathy 5: Conclusion

The criticisms of evolutionary psychology and its predecessors sociobiologies 1 through 3 focus on three major points:

1. It is adaptively-biased;

2. It is gene-centric (or biological determinist, which amounts to the same thing);

3. It is culturally biased in favour of the privileged classes of the people making the claims.

I hope I have dealt with, or guarded against, each of these, but I would like to note something that any evolutionary thinking person must accept: our biological foundations for psychological and cognitive dispositions did evolve. Something like SB must be true. So what we must do is to limit the excesses (which exist in every kind of social and psychological science anyway, and must be limited in every approach), and seek to uncover what the bases of our minds are. This has to be acceptable to any naturalistic evolutionary theorist. If it is not, then one has to suspect that there is what Dennett once called “white picket fence” mentality in play: humans are more important, qualitatively different, or somehow dualistically distinct from all other living things. And to hold this view is to run contrary to all the available science. One might understand why Plantinga wants to defend this kind of qualitative dualism (for him, humans are different to all other living things; he is not a naturalist), but why Fodor? Why Gould? What is happening here?

This falls out of a larger project of what philosophers refer to as the naturalisation project. It is the view that everything can be given a natural account, at least if we were able to gather the right data and understand the natures involved. Most naturalists are physicalists, but naturalism is not necessarily about ontology; it is about explanations. So far as explanations rest on ontologies, naturalists are physicalists, but it doesn’t do to equate the two.

Those who, like Fodor, wish to privilege human (and possibly others species’) intellection and semantic reference as being irreducible to computation or to physical processes (usually relying upon a failure of denotation of terms, which is, in my view, a matter of confusing the signs for the signification par excellence; but leave that to one side for now), treat these mental events as non-physical (although they must of course exist on a physical substrate in most accounts). So EP and SB fail because they presume that the irreducibility is a failure of language not of principle, and that we are making some kind of mistake.

Others have consequentialist objections, like the apocryphal bishop’s wife who said that if evolution from monkeys is true, let us hope it does not become widely known. If we have our prized characteristics by evolution and selection, then we are lessened thereby. We might find out that we are inclined to racism, sexism, and oppression. If these things were true in virtue of an evolutionary account (rather than being what we all understand from experience anyway), perhaps we might justify them thereby. But we all know (at least if we have read our Moore) that the mere fact that something evolved doesn’t serve as justification any more than the success of the Romans (or the Americans) justified the Caesars’ (or the Kennedys’) pre-eminence.

If we did evolve with a predisposition towards rape (and I do not think this has even been shown to have a non-cultural component yet, so bear with me), surely to know this is not to justify it, but to forewarn and forearm? If males tend to rape, change the culture to guard against rape. If they do not, then you will find that there are other factors that explain, for example, the high rates of rape in India or other societies, and be able to look for these factors and modulate them. To know ourselves is a virtue not something to be feared.

As was once said by of all people a seventeenth century preacher, things are as they are, and their consequences will be what they will be. Why, then, should we seek to be deceived? Humans must be what they are via natural processes if you take the science seriously. Knowing what we are can only aid us in building a better society.

I have tried to suggest that adaptationism is not the evil demon it is sometimes painted to be, but this needs more qualification. Individual alleles or variant traits may indeed go to fixation in a population by random processes (although something like an SNP – single nucleotide polymorphism – is way below anything that would count as a psychological trait unless it happens to be akin to a single base pair defect in a psychological process~~, like Williams’ Syndrome~~†). However, I regard the overall absolute fitness of modern organisms to be very high indeed. In the light of the rigid stick and rubber band metaphor I used above, we might expect that multiple-gene traits will be maintained at a high fitness. So it resolves to a question of what the explananda are. In short, how do we atomise the biology here?

We do it the way we approach any problem domain that is not already clearly atomised. We observe, try different things out and when we find a promising and productive line of research, we follow it. When we have several such lines of research we run them in parallel and wait and see. Sociobiology is one (several, perhaps) of those lines of research, and it should be followed to the degree it is both promising and productive. And it seems to be productive, whatever the promise its proponents see in it. Massive modularity is a dead issue, in my view, but we still can identify, quite clearly, heritable traits, and seek to find out if they are heritable because they are adaptive or because they are side effects of something that is adaptive. Ruling the sociobiological approach out of hand tout court is simply dogmatism. It is the opposite of scientific reasoning.

So I have nailed my colours to the mast. I am a born again sociobiologist. I don’t like some of the tenets of other sociobiologists (such as massive modularity or group selectionism) but they aren’t definitive of the approach; merely the contingent hypotheses and methodologies of some sociobiologists. If this be heresy, then you mistakenly think science is a religion or ideology.

This series:

† Clem Stanyon, who worked on Williams Syndrome and is the source of all I know about it, corrects me here: Williams’ Syndrome consists of around 30 deletions. However, the point stands.

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Filed under Biology, Cognition, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Social evolution

by John S. Wilkins | December 6, 2012

Evopsychopathy 1. Conditions for sociobiology

Well I better put up or shut up, I guess. Here are my ruminations, excretions, and expressions regarding evolutionary psychology, or, as we might call it, evopsychopathy. I am, as I have said, a born again sociobiologist, so I guess that makes me an evopychopath.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first. Evopsych, or EP, is the third version of sociobiology (SB). It is Sociobiology 3.0. Sociobiology 1.0 was developed by Herbert Spencer among others. It was not the simple point that human beings are evolved animals and so also our psychology must be evolved, which is the common thread not only to EP and SB, but to all neurobiology, and a great deal of modern psychology. It was in Spencer’s and Darwin’s time also the claim that humans are sui generis in some fashion. We had animal dispositions, yes, but something, the famous sentence “Man is the only animal that…” [blushes, uses tools, talks in English, etc.], marks us out. Moreover, in SB1.0, there were more advanced humans and less advanced humans. Often, SB1.0 was used to justify the privilege of the race or class that the SBer was a member of or identified with. Sometimes it justified the status of a race or class the SBer aspired to (as in the case of Japanese modernisers). SB1.0 was immediately applied to larger classes of people than trait groups. The industrialists of Germany before and during the second world war applied it to their nation. The robber barons (or their pundits – it is unclear to what extent the barons themselves believed this) applied it to capitalist classes. And of course it rapidly got used to justify the elimination of disabled, lower class people, and ethnic groups that were unpopular. In the United States, Canada, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth apart from Britain itself. Germany was only catching up.

But to what extent was SB1.0 novel? Aristocrats had been talking about “good breeding” and “good blood” since the classical times, and it was the fashion during the later medieval period and the subsequent eras to maintain what were basically breeding charts of families the way one might do for horses (unsurprisingly most of these people were equestrians). Killing ethnic groups you didn’t like went back throughout history. All that was novel here was that evolutionary biology was employed to support prior views defending or attacking privilege. It would not be the last time.

SB2.0 was due to the development of genetics at the turn of the century. Although genetics took a while to get reconciled to evolutionary biology (not until 30 years passed was there a full treatment by Fisher), it immediately was adopted by eugenicists moving away from the statistical version of biological determinism that had been promoted by Galton and Perason before the turn of the century. Of course, SB1.0 remained around while SB 2.0 developed.

SB2.0 continued to develop until the 1980s. It often appealed to “genes for” this or that trait, behaviour, or more rarely disposition. No matter how often geneticists cavilled and railed against this usage, and no matter how often journalists were admonished not to use the terminology, still the popular mythos had it that there was a God Gene, a Language Gene, an Autism Gene right alongside a Cancer Gene and so on. And these genes were Selfish.

This is the backdrop to the famous glass of water in the face of Edward O. Wilson, whose book Sociobiology, the new synthesis set off a host of personal and political attacks. This was the 1970s (aptly and thoroughly described by Ullica Segestråle in Defenders of the Truth) and political outrage was the fashion. A movement known as Science for the People, including Lewontin and Gould, attacked all and every attempt to do SB as fascist and racist. Often enough for the theme to become entrenched, it was.

So a new form of SB – SB 3.0, or EP – was invented. Like the other SBs it was often employed in defence of this or that cultural or social privilege (indeed, like evolution itself). And early work was hamfisted in an egregious manner. It attracted the considerable rhetorical eloquence of Gould and others such as Steven Rose in attacks that are required reading. Like the rejection of the existence of human races by Dobzhansky and other evolutionary and anthropological researchers after the second world war, it became the consensus that we could not do this except on pain of vapidity and pure conjecture. Adaptationism was a Bad Thing, and led to Just-So Stories.

It didn’t help, as it hadn’t in the early period evolutionary biology itself, that popular science writers, political writers, and ersatz philosophers had taken on EP and the older SBs as the justification for their own agendas. Writers like Desmond Morris were taken as the best of science, when in fact nearly all of the explanations offered were unsupported post hoc explanations of observed behaviour – if, indeed, it was observed. Nothing is so easy to think you see as human social behaviours you already think exist.

When some researchers began to argue that rape or shopping were natural and evolved behaviours, this immediately set off alarm bells. Of course, some of these researchers indeed did justify the status quo as being “natural” but as any philosophy student knows, nature is not prescription, or as we like to put it, is does not imply ought. However, the reaction to the researchers’ claims was uniformly based on the notion that if rape is natural it is justified or inevitable, when in fact the researchers tried, sometimes at least, to point out that natural behaviours can be modulated by social pressures, and that being an evolved property is not itself a reason for thinking it is good. Even Darwin thought that the highly evolved behaviours of some wasps to lay eggs in living caterpillars was immoral, despite being adaptive. And Huxley had written an entire book decrying the idea that evolved = justified, back in the late 19th century.

In this series I do not propose to defend any actual work, or to do a historical review of personalities and political games. Segerstråle’s book gives a lot of this anyway. What I am going to do is strive to offer an SB4.0, evopsychopathy. The idea is this: we did evolve, and we do know that dispositions to behave are inherited, species typical and the result of selective pressures. So I aim to argue that we must

1. Constrain our hypotheses somehow. I will offer the phylogenetic bracket as such a constraint.

2. Specify the explanatory target. I will suggest that we can explain biological dispositions only. We cannot explain, using any form of SB, specific cultural practices, any more than a gene can explain how tall a human will grow without consideration of their upbringing, experience, parental resources and experiences, and so on.

3. Separate description from justification of behaviours.

4. Test adaptive scenarios. This means we have to think a bit about how how hypotheses are formulated and tested, whether there is a null hypothesis (there isn’t by the way), and what counts as explanation in sociobiological sciences.

This series may take me some time due to other calls on my time, but I will try to repurpose it in a grant application, so that’s all right.

This series:

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Filed under Biology, Cognition, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, Genetics, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Science, Social dominance

by John S. Wilkins | December 4, 2012

Eww, I stepped in some evolutionary psychology and other crap

*Sigh*

I try and try to stay out of the muck, but they keep pulling me back in! I saw what I thought was a careful and rather overly-documented critique by Edward Clint of a talk by Rebecca Watson against evolutionary psychology (EP). It was full of references and arguments, devoid of ad hominem, and well defended. So I linked to it on Twitter. I got these responses:

Very BAD post. Surprised you’d recommend it.RT @john_s_wilkins @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae not recommending the individual, but that one post.
@pzmyers

@pzmyers @john_s_wilkins @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae Looked decent to me PZ, at a glance – has anyone done a response/take-down then?
@mjrobbins

Nope. not well done most of the time & premises are false. RT @john_s_wilkins @pzmyers @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae EP is not a priori false.
@pzmyers

EEA is shockingly bad. RT @lippard @john_s_wilkins @DuaeQuartunciae massive modularity of mind? Environment of evolutionary adaptedness?
@pzmyers

And off it went. There were some response articles by Stephanie Zvan (which PZ called a GOOD response), James Croft (the most measured response so far) and Greg Laden, but the raw nerves were on fire. Clint was accused of being an “MRA” (men’s rights activist – a term of abuse apparently, and one I hadn’t come across) and having evil motives against Rebecca. Others said that because evolutionary psychology was bad science, a post defending it must be wrong (I suspect that might be PZ’s underlying enthymeme) no matter what the arguments made were.

I also discovered that while I had linked to one post, I disagreed with Clint on his treatment of agnosticism (1 and 2). I am not recommending him as an Authority, but then I don’t do that.

I am not shocked (any more) that this has descended into partisan personalities. I have come to expect this. But I am interested in the arguments made. Stephanie’s post is not bad, but in the end Croft effectively says “It’s okay to equivocate and cherry pick if it’s for popular purposes”, and that I do not agree with. If it’s bad science, and we can attack antivaccinationists, homeopaths and creationists for popular bad science, then the wheel turns against us skeptics too.

Clint’s defence of EP as potentially good science and not at all to be attacked because of the bad examples and bad reportage is solid, I think. The problem is that EP has its defenders who will ignore all counter evidence and counterarguments, while the opponents will ignore all evidence and arguments in its favour. I want to do something here, which I have previously alluded to: announce my being a born-again sociobiologist - EP is a form of sociobiology.

The criticism of sociobiology and EP is largely cultural. It tends to privilege the power structures of the people doing the research. Henrich’s, Heine’s and Norenzayan’s recent essay on psychology focusing on WEIRD students (western educated industrialised rich democratic, if memory serves) points out that all psychology and social science tends to do this, by default. But we should try to remove that bias as much as possible in all science, so it is fair criticism of EP also.

But what some people, including (I know from personal contact) PZ and Larry Moran, object to about EP is what Gould called “panadaptationism” and “Just-So” storification. Here is where there is interesting and philosophical issue, and so here is where I am most compelled to comment. Forgive me in advance.

First of all, there is the issue of when it is appropriate to use adaptationist explanations. Clint cites the leading philosopher on natural selection, Elliot Sober. Now I often disagree with Sober, especially in the assumption of optimisation studies (and of course classification), but Clint is right to cite Sober here:

Adaptationism is first and foremost a research program. Its core claims will receive support if specific adaptationist hypotheses turn out to be well confirmed. If such explanations fail time after time, eventually scientists will begin to suspect that its core assumptions are defective. Phrenology waxed and waned according to the same dynamic (Section 2.1). Only time and hard work will tell whether adaptationism deserves the same fate ( Mitchell and Valone 1990).

Opponents, largely following Gould and Lewontin’s 1979 attack, tend to assert (often without consideration of the particular attempts to give adaptive explanations) that any and all adaptive hypotheses are cheap and to be avoided. This has the effect of basically eliminating natural selective accounts of anything. But we know that selection is the only process that results in complexity over any time, and the fact there are complex traits among organisms leads to the inevitable conclusion that we should be able to give selective explanations from time to time. I have argued before that we should think of adaptation as a viable hypothesis at all times; but being viable doesn’t make it true. The problem is not that EP or sociobiology makes adaptive hypotheses. They should. It is that they often make them without testing them.

This is no longer the case, at least not universally. Desmond Morris is long gone from the forefront of panadaptationist thinking, and we can start to deal with the more serious claims and studies made. As Clint says

Although there are always going to be some flawed studies, researchers weeded out failed hypotheses and refined methodologies. The influence of evolutionary psychology has steadily grown. Evolutionary psychology theories once controversial are now accepted by mainstream psychology.

Mind, that isn’t a high bar to leap. A lot of psychology is still fairly simplistic (but not most, by any means). If there’s a field that is really well grounded in my subjective assessment, it is comparative psychology, which is cross-specific at comparing human cognitive development and our nearest relatives, the primates. And that gives us a constraint upon EP-style adaptationism. If it is shared across all primates, then it can’t be an adaptation to an ancestral environment not shared by all primates (not unless some massively unparsimonious evolution has occurred, in which case we can’t say squat about evolutionary history).

But something must have happened in our lineage to give us the traits we now have and it simply is not sufficient to say it could have been evolution by accident. Accident is an admission we cannot explain things. It is the background assumption of anything. And let us not forget that accident is the raw material of selection. Accident proposes, selection disposes. Accidental variation is the origin of things, not the reason why things are retained and built upon, at least, not always. If something can be acquired by accident, and spread through a population via drift, then it can be lost the same way. Nobody sensible would go so far as to say that there is no evolution by accident. But neither should anyone sensible suggest there is no evolution by selection either. The question, as the wit said to the society woman, is how much.

So sociobiology as a hypothesis is acceptable. It need not lead to Nazism, racism, sexism or US exceptionalism. So long as there is empirical data, testing the particular hypothesis at hand, it is and can be good science. It is not the final word. And as Twain said, I wouldn’t hang a dog on a newspaper report. EP like anything else can be misrepresented by various interests, just as evolution always has been.

This brings us to the formal and informal fallacies this whole subject seems to attract like things that are attracted to bad metaphors. If PZ is saying Clint’s post was bad because it asserts and defends something he knows without argument to be false, then that is question begging and displays massive confirmation bias. This is not a good trait in scientists. If, similarly, he approves of Zvan’s piece because it agrees with his belief that EP is false, then that too is confirmation bias. If he dismisses Clint’s defence because Clint is an MRA or has “issues with Rebecca”, that is obviously a fallacy of ad hominem, and a genetic fallacy to boot. His argument stands or falls on the merits of the case made (even if, and I can’t stress this highly enough, he is massively wrong about agnosticism!).

And no, ~~Stephanie~~ (see comments) James, it is not sufficient to accept a bit of exaggeration or cherry picking or equivocation when we do it because it’s entertaining or fun. It is false argument. If it’s wrong to do it when you are anti vaccination, then it’s wrong to do it when you are “skeptical”. This is called tu quoque in reasoning. Rebecca equivocates between a field and reportage or misuse of a field. She is clearly trying to poison the well. Similarly, Dawkins does the same thing with religion in The God Delusion. It’s simply dishonest argument, no matter how entertaining.

In the past I have been challenged by PZ and Larry Moran for saying “we are all subject to our own biases”. I know I am (and because they are mine I am not sure what they are, although in the case of chocolate I have suspicions), but Larry once said to me that I should show him his. Well he’s not engaged on this topic for now, but here is me showing some cognitive biases of some skeptics.

I initially thought Clint’s piece was overkill. Now I see that it will never be enough for some. No matter what his history or motives.

Late note: PZ has a post here and a promise of more to come.

Later note: The first of his ?EP series is here.

This series:

References

Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc R Soc Lond B 205:581–598.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):61-83.

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Filed under Cognition, Epistemology, Evolution, Journalism, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Social evolution, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | August 25, 2012

New publications

I have added some under-review drafts of my papers to the PhilPapers archive:

Essentialism in Biology. Essentialism in philosophy is the position that things, especially kinds of things, have essences, or sets of properties, that all members of the kind must have, and the combination of which only members of the kind do, in fact, have. It is usually thought to derive from classical Greek philosophy and in particular from Aristotle’s notion of “what it is to be” something. In biology, it has been claimed that pre-evolutionary views of living kinds, or as they are sometimes called, “natural kinds”, are essentialist. This static view of living things presumes that no transition is possible in time or form between kinds, and that variation is regarded as accidental or inessential noise rather than important information about taxa. In contrast it is held that Darwinian, and post-Darwinian, biology relies upon variation as important and inevitable properties of taxa, and that taxa are not, therefore, kinds but historical individuals. Recent attempts have been made to undercut this account, and to reinstitute essentialism in biological kind terms. Others argue that essentialism has not ever been a historical reality in biology and its predecessors. In this chapter, I shall outline the many meanings of the notion of essentialism in psychology and social science as well as science, and discuss pro- and anti-essentialist views, and some recent historical revisionism. It turns out that nobody was essentialist to speak of in the sense that is antievolutionary in biology, and that much confusion rests on treating the one word, “essence” as meaning a single notion when in fact there are many. I shall also discuss the philosophical implications of essentialism, and what that means one way or the other for evolutionary biology. Teaching about evolution relies upon narratives of change in the ways the living world is conceived by biologists. This is a core narrative issue.

Gods Above: Naturalizing Religion in Terms of Our Shared Ape Social Dominance Behavior. To naturalize religion we must identify what religion is, and what aspects of it we are trying to explain. In this paper religious social institutional behavior is the explanatory target, and an explanatory hypothesis based on shared primate social dominance psychology is given. The argument is that various religious features, including the high status afforded the religious, and the high status afforded to deities, is an expression of this social dominance psychology in a context for which it did not evolve: high density populations made possible by agriculture.

Naturally these are unreviewed, unedited and probably under-thought.