Category Archives: Logic and philosophy

by | 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 | December 7, 2012

Evopsychopathy 2: The phylogenetic bracket

As noted, SB and EP have a very unfortunate tendency to reflect the status quo in their results and research questions. This is not unique to them. History, sociology, other fields of psychology (psychotherapy for gods’ sake!), and in my own profession, ethics, all have this “Pull of Privilege”. Somehow the results of this research generally seem to show how natural and right things are. I am always amazed that no matter how radical the ethical foundations in philosophy, ethics always seems to end up supporting the bourgeois status quo (Peter Singer, whose approach I disagree with, is an honourable exception – he’s not afraid to follow his ethical foundations wherever they lead).

This Pull is very hard to shake off. Historians of science (and more recently historians in general) have a term for it: The Whig Interpretation of History, AKA whiggism (also triumphalism, or presentism, ). It is widely, and rightly, seen as a sin of interpretation. Why? It is because if you wish to understand the subject under investigation, rather than tell a story that makes you feel warm and comfortable about you and yours, you must to the best degree possible rid yourself of your relative attachments. You can’t see animist religions in terms of Christianity, alchemical practitioners in terms of modern chemistry, or sexuality in the Azande, say, in terms of Middle American marriage practices and categories (or worse, of penguins in terms of those practices).

So defeating the Pull of Privilege is a serious concern in any discipline that studies human behaviours. How can we do it in SB4.0? As it happens, I have Thoughts.

Behavior is quite labile, evolutionarily, and so there has been debate over whether it can be treated as a homology (Brigandt and Griffiths 2007; Hall 2012; Love 2007). However, classes of behaviors can easily been seen to be homologous. For example, most passerine birds have courtship displays which, while individually unique, fall into a shared class of behaviors, and moreover, these dances are very similar within groups such as riflebirds or lyrebirds (Andrew 1961). It is hard to reject the idea that these are homologies, with species-relative instantiations. The entire field of ethology is founded upon investigating both the commonalities and unique differences of behaviors in many groups of organisms.

There is, in palaeontology, a technique known as phylogenetic bracketing (Witmer 1995). If you need to reconstruct something that doesn’t fossilise in a fossil taxon (say, T. rex), you can place it in a phylogenetic tree and see what its surrounding surviving relatives have in the tissues and structures that don’t fossilise. By projection you can presume this is true of the extinct organism. Likewise, if you find a behaviour in known taxa, you can inductively project (Goodman 1954) from the known to the unknown if they are within the same clade. Of course, this only works if the clade happens to be relatively unspecialised, and the greater the evolutionary distance, the less specific you can get (remember: specific and all other words based on the Latin spec- root, are modifications of species). So you may know that all falconiformes have a recurved claw, but you may not be able to confidently predict whether an unobserved species of falconiforme is a hunter or scavenger. You’ll know, though, that it eats meat.

The application of phylogenetic bracketing here should be relatively obvious. If we wish to reduce the Pull, we need to set an objective behavioural baseline for all humans and not just the WEIRDos. We cannot do this from within the milieu of a culture by an act of will or imagination. But we can bracket humans among the Hominoidea, the African Great Ape clade.

For instance, suppose that one knew nothing else about the human species than that it was squarely nested within the Hominoidea . What would we know about that species? The inferential return on that phylogenetic investment is extensive and indefinite. We would know the species had a particular skeletal structure, with, among other things, four limbs ending in five-digit manus, or hands, and that it had a certain visual system, aural system, and so forth, and interacted with the world at a certain macroscale, in what von Uexküll called its Umwelt (1957), or sensed environment. It would have the primate Umwelt, and so interact with commonsense objects (Griffiths and Wilkins 2012). For our purposes here, however, what we would mostly know is that it was a social species with social dominance hierarchies.

Now it is very hard to find animal species that are not in some sense social. At the least they must interact during mating. But sociality comes in degrees ranging from a brief or even displaced social interaction at mating through to care of neonates and, as in chimp, gorilla, and even orang social behaviors, lifelong interaction with conspecifics of all ages. The one thing that marks all primate species, and thus all hominoids, is that they form dominance hierarchies based upon pairwise interactions, with sanctions of both a positive (reward collaborators) and negative (punish defectors) nature. As has been observed in many primate species (chimps, bonobos, various baboons and monkey species), alliances are formed and social deviants are punished (Cronin and Field 2007; de Waal 1982, 1989). We are socially normative apes. Moral strictures and social conformity is what apes do. Achieving high social dominance results in improved health and better mating opportunities (Burnham 2007; Creel 2001). Hence, such behaviors must be expected to play a crucial role in any social institution that may evolve generally in human, which is to say, one particular ape species’, social structures.

But it will not do to take what is observed among bonobos or gorillas and simply apply them directly to our human species. We know that the human species must typically have some social dominance behaviours or dispositions (why I keep referring to dispositions will become clear in a later post on selectionist explanations); we know roughly how they will be formed (through pairwise dominance displays and competitions, mate choice, etc.) and we have some reason to think they will be primarily male biased as all but bonobo dominance hierarchies are (but note: one species defeated the generalisation based on phylogenetic bracketing. This is not an infallible inference methodology, it is, as we philosophers say, defeasible).

Of course, there are differences between hominoid apes and humans in social dominance behavior, as there are between the non-human apes species. Common chimps tend to have a single alpha male, and the hierarchy is always determined by male status and females derive their status from their mates. Status is determined by aggressive competition and mating occurs in proportion to achieved male status. Bonobos, on the other hand have a hierarchy driven by female choice. This reflects their degree of sexual dimorphism: chimp males are on average around 125% the weight of females, while bonobo males are only slightly larger if at all than the females. Gorilla males are up to three times the weight of the females. As a result a single alpha male guards a harem of females against “bachelor” males. The hierarchy is both within the family, and between males in a territory. Humans, like bonobos, have very slight dimorphism: males weigh around 108% of female weight on average. The degree of polygyny (number of female mates per successfully mating male) roughly correlates with size dimorphism. Social hierarchies vary according to species-typical mating strategy.

Which comes first, the strategy or the dimorphism? That is in many ways a silly question; strategies are constantly evolving, largely, I think, in response to ecological conditions, but also there is a large degree of contingency here – what one species might develop will depend on accidental factors that are largely unpredictable relative to another. Dimorphism is both a result of the evolution of mating strategies, and also a cause of it. These things evolve together. Nevertheless, when you find a fossil ape that has massive dimorphism like the gorilla, you can bet it was a harem-style (almost herd-style) social animal.

So what would we predict about humans, if we had just arrived from Mars and been given only a copy of Walker’s Primates of the World without the section on humans? We would first of all predict that they would form dominance hierarchies, and that high status individuals would reward those that conformed to the group norms so formed, and punish those who defected from them. We would predict a slight male dominance over females. We would expect that the progeny of high status individuals will preferentially rise to higher status than those born of low status parents (primate societies are not meritocracies, Silk 2009). We would expect that male dominance relies upon height and musculature – the bigger males tend to gain higher status even if there is no violence in the dominance behaviours of the species. There are more things we might say, but you see how this applies.

But what would we not be able to predict? Well we would not be able to predict when cultural influences modulate, moderate or even override these social dominance dispositions. We could not have predicted Elizabeth I or Benazir Bhutto (or maybe we could – both were acting as if they were sons of powerful males). We could not predict the rise of liberal democratic ideals, although once it is in play we might predict its eventual corruption and decline as plutocracy and nepotism reasserts itself. We could not predict American supermarkets, although once they are observed we can see some of the foraging dispositions (of males and females) of our predecessors being exploited.

All this does is set up the baseline of expectations. It is not, I think, even remotely possible to give a complete account of societal structures in terms of our shared ape heritage, although that heritage can be ignored at our peril.

I should note that the sort of explanations I am giving (sketching roughly) here are not the outcome of evolutionary psychology per se. Instead, it is the outcome of a number of disparate and only vaguely connected lines of research. Such research covers comparative cognitive psychology (e.g., Suddendorf 2008, a critique of Wynne and Bolhuis 2008), race psychology (Sidanius and Pratto 1999, Sidanius et al. 2000), the effect of status on primate testosterone levels (Anestis 2010, Eisenegger et al. 2011, Gray 2011), the neurology of social behaviour (Harmon-Jones and Winkielman 2007), and so on. Each of these either relies upon something like phylogenetic bracketing (as in comparative psychology) or is consonant with it (as in social dominance psychology).

There are limitations to this method. An inference to homologous traits or behaviours is going to work just to the extent that the species does not have what cladists call an autapomorphy for that trait, which is to say a trait that is unique or in a unique state for that species not shared with other species. For example, the speech centres of the human brain have homologs in other primates, but not as speech centres. Complex grammatical speech is our autapomorphy (and perhaps was also shared by extinct species like H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and H. erectus, but we are the sole possessors of it now). So we could not predict symbolic language from a knowledge of other primates.

But the real problem with sociobiological projections is what I call the problem of analogy. Previous SBers would look at eland stamping in a place to attract mates and infer that humans would have “stamping grounds”; that chickens maintained social dominance by the use of violent pecking, and assert that humans had “pecking orders”, and so on. Even ants and bees were used to generate analogies of this kind. But we aren’t ants, bees, elands or chickens.

To infer that we have trait X because all in our clade does is a licensable inference, but much of what we are looking at is not a homology at all (although every trait rests upon underlying homologous structures and systems). Instead they are themselves analogous traits (like shopping, or “rape”*) that may in fact have no homologous dispositions underlying them. Since we want to know what humans should have without ascertainment bias, we must treat these inferences as highly questionable. First you catch your homology. Some real science has to be done.

Moreover, any trait that has been the subject of a selective sweep is, by definition, no longer a homolog in terms of its function. So if something did occur in the X million years since we separated from taxon Y, it is not a homology with Y’s function, even if it is a structural or physiological homolog. So, for example, the role of testosterone among humans may not be (but it actually is according to the research) the same as the role it plays in other primates. You have to check.

So the target of explanation is crucial. I’ll return to this in the next post.

This series:

Cheesy footnote

* Rape is a social and legal term that is often illicitly projected, whiggishly, from humans to other animals like ducks and beetles. Similar objections should be used for terms like “homosexual”, “thief” and so on. Sometimes these terms are harmless, but very often they are not, and mislead us into anthropomorphisms. Caveat lector!

References

Anestis, Stephanie F. 2010. Hormones and social behavior in primates. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 19 (2):66-78.

Brigandt, Ingo, and Paul Griffiths. 2007. The importance of homology for biology and philosophy. Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):633-641.

Burnham, Terence C. 2007. High-testosterone men reject low ultimatum game offers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274 (1623):2327-2330.

Butterfield, Herbert. 1931. The Whig interpretation of history. London: G. Bell.

Creel, S. 2001. Social dominance and stress hormones. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (9):491-497.

Cronin, Adam L., and Jeremy Field. 2007. Social aggression in an age-dependent dominance hierarchy. Behaviour 144 (7):753-765.

de Waal, Frans. 1982. Chimpanzee politics: power and sex among apes. London: Cape.
———. 1989. Peacemaking among primates. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Eisenegger, Christoph, Johannes Haushofer, and Ernst Fehr. 2011. The role of testosterone in social interaction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (6):263-271.

Gray, Peter B. 2011. The descent of a man’s testosterone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (39):16141-16142.

Goodman, Nelson. 1954. Fact, fiction and forecast. London: University of London, The Athlone Press.

Hall, A. Rupert. 1983. On whiggism. History of science; an annual review of literature, research and teaching 21 (51):45-59.

Hall, Brian K. 2012. Homology, homoplasy, novelty, and behavior. Dev Psychobiol. Early online. DOI: 10.1002/dev.21039

Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Piotr Winkielman, eds. 2007. Social neuroscience: Integrating biological and psychological explanations of social behavior. New York: The Guilford Press.

Love, Alan. 2007. Functional homology and homology of function: biological concepts and philosophical consequences. Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):691-708.

Nowak, Ronald M. 1999. Walker’s primates of the world. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sidanius, Jim, and Felicia Pratto. 1999. Social dominance: an intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sidanius, James, S. Levin, J. Liu, and Felicia Pratto. 2000. Social dominance orientation, anti-egalitarianism and the political psychology of gender: an extension and cross-cultural replication. European Journal of Social Psychology 30 (1):41-67.

Silk, Joan B. 2009. Nepotistic cooperation in non-human primate groups. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 364:3243–3254.

Suddendorf, Thomas. 2008. Explaining human cognitive autapomorphies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (02):147-148.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 1957. A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. In Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, edited by C. H. Schiller. New York: International Universities Press:5-80.

Wilkins, John S., and Paul E. Griffiths. 2012. Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religion. In A New Science of Religion, edited by J. Maclaurin and G. Dawes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Witmer, Lawrence M. 1995. The extant phylogenetic bracket and the importance of reconstructing soft tissues in fossils. In Functional morphology in vertebrate paleontology, edited by J. Thomason. Cambridge UK; New York: University of Cambridge Press:19-33.

Wynne, Clive D. L., and Johan J. Bolhuis. 2008. Minding the gap: Why there is still no theory in comparative psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (02):152-153.

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, Logic and philosophy, Natural Classification, Social dominance, Species and systematics, Systematics

by | 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 | December 4, 2012

Eww, I stepped in some evolutionary psychology and other crap

*Sigh*

NewImage

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 @ @ @ not recommending the individual, but that one post.
@pzmyers

@ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ EP is not a priori false.
@pzmyers

EEA is shockingly bad. RT @ @ @ 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 | November 25, 2012

My latest paper – Carving Nature at its Joints, a review

You can find it online here. A very interesting but ultimately, to me, largely frustrating book (because it didn’t answer my questions, goddammit!).

NewImage

Review – Carving Nature at Its Joints
Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science
by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke and Matthew H. Slater (Editors)
MIT Press, 2012
Review by John S. Wilkins
Nov 20th 2012 (Volume 16, Issue 47)

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Filed under Academe, Book, Epistemology, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics

by | November 24, 2012

Why is Darwin’s theory so controversial?

So asks this essay and gets the whole thing wrong.

Darwin’s theories (plural) are not controversial because they imply that species are mutable. This was a widely held view by preachers, moralists, Aristotelians, naturalists, breeders, formalists, folk biology, and even biblical translators.

Darwin was not controversial because he implied racist ideas about humans. He never did and the racism that is sometimes associated with his ideas preceded him by centuries (and were good Christian virtues) and were mediated by those who disagreed with him.

Darwin was not controversial because he thought the age of the earth was large. This preceded him also, and was settled in the late eighteenth century, although the present value wasn’t finalised until the 1960s.

Darwin was not controversial because his account of humans being animals contradicted the Bible. Linnaeus knew humans were animals a century earlier, and indeed the only issue was whether humans were animals with souls (or if all animals had souls), which Darwin never implied anything to the contrary.

Moreover, it was Christians who rejected the literal interpretation of the Bible, long before Darwin (beginning with the Alexandrian school in the second century), and those who realised that the global Flood was a myth (or an allegory) were Christian geologists a half century at least in advance of Darwin.

No, the reason why Darwin was controversial is very, very simple. Darwin argued that complex designs could arise without a mind to guide it. In short, his controversial idea was natural selection (and sexual selection, but even that preceded Darwin). Almost from the day it was published, critics attacked the implication that the living world was not all that special, and that it lacked a Plan or Meaning. Theologians, moralists and even scientists objected to this, and while even most of the Catholic Church accepted common descent and modification of species, it was natural selection they hated.

All the supposed “controversies” of Darwinism (or that phantom, “neo-Darwinism”) are post hoc attacks based on the prior objection to the lack of a guiding hand in biology. Don’t like natural selection? Attack Darwin by calling him a racist or blaming him for the Holocaust. Say he is antiessentialist. Say he is anti-religion. No matter how much evidence one puts forward that these are deliberate lies manufactured by those who hate Darwin for natural selection, it won’t stop the prevarication industry.

Sensible philosophical critics of Darwin focus on selection for that reason. It undercuts our prior belief that We Are Special. Human mentation, cognition, language, morality, religion or economics is somehow privileged in the universe. Bullshit. We are an animal and we arose without the universe seeking us (although, as I have argued, a deity might choose this universe because we evolve in it). The human exceptionalism which critics like Fodor, Fuller, Plantinga and the rest presume but do not argue for unfairly places the onus on Darwinians. It is time to stop taking them seriously.

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Filed under Biology, Creationism and Intelligent Design, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, History, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Race and politics, Social evolution, Truisms

by | October 26, 2012

What is critical thinking

I’m typing away the pain tonight so I aim to be a bit crappy and annoyed.

I often read on various websites, blogs, mailing lists and other propaganda (yes, this blog is propaganda: look it up) that this or that person or organisation is devoted to “critical thinking” and “rational thinking”. Obviously these are noble goals and imply that their views are the result of critical thinking and rationality. It’s often a trick, though. What they seem to mean by that is that they have a set of views that are baptised as critical and rational. As Lincoln once said, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. Just naming a view critical and rational doesn’t make it one if it actually isn’t. That’s a fallacy.

What then is it to be critical and rational? We get all kinds of definitions in the literature and around the web. Here’s a couple, with key terms bolded:

From the Hong Kong Critical Thinking Web:

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following :

  • understand the logical connections between ideas
  • identify, construct and evaluate arguments
  • detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
  • solve problems systematically
  • identify the relevance and importance of ideas
  • reflect on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values
From The Critical Thinking Co.™:

Critical thinking is the identification and evaluation of evidence to guide decision making. A critical thinker uses broad in-depth analysis of evidence to make decisions and communicate his/her beliefs clearly and accurately.

From the fellow that started the current critical thinking trend in education (Robert H. Ennis, 1987.):

Reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.  In addition to 12 CT abilities, CT also includes 14 dispositions. Namely: to seek a clear statement of the thesis or question; to seek reasons; to try to be well informed; to use credible sources and mention them; to take into account the total situation; to try to remain relevant to the main point; to keep in mind the original or basic concern; to look for alternatives; to be open-minded; to take a position when the evidence and reasons are sufficient to do so; to seek as much precision as the subject permits; to deal in an orderly manner with the parts of a complex whole; to use one’s CT abilities; to be sensitive to feelings, level of knowledge, and degree of sophistication of others.

From the standard definition in education (Facione 1990):

 … purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which judgment is based.

Everything but the kitchen sink! I think these are either too vague, too heterogeneous, or simply false. I would rather say this:

Critical thinking is the application of careful analysis and rational reconstruction to arguments, so that the correctness of the reasoning and the truth of the premises can be evaluated and the support for the conclusion determined.

Rational thinking is the assent of the reasoner to any conclusion that is both correctly reasoned and founded on known to be [added: see comments] true, or likely to be true, premises.

In short, a critical and rational thinker is one who accepts the conclusions of good arguments.

If you are rational and presented with a good argument, no matter how objectionable, then you must accept the conclusion. Even if that means accepting that God exists (or not, depending on what you find objectionable), abortion is right (or wrong), or some political or scientific proposition is correct. If the premises are known to be [edit] true and the reasoning is strong and you don’t accept the conclusion, then you are, by definition, irrational, no matter how your favoured community or ideology views you and your beliefs. If you analyse an argument and find no errors or strong objections, but nevertheless fail to assent to the conclusion, then you are not a critical thinker.

At once, the notion of objections comes into the picture, and this shows us how the game plays out a bit. An objection is an argument for a conclusion that is contrary to or inconsistent with one of the premises or the conclusion of another argument. It is an argument in its own right. If you have an argument for the existence of God, and I have a stronger argument against it, I am not required to assent to the existence of God because I cannot fault the pro-argument. Now I weigh the rational likelihoods and accept (assent to) the stronger conclusion. That is also rational.

Okay, with that machinery and definitional apparatus in place, let’s contrast this with what is sometimes called sophistry, after the target of Plato’s and Aristotle’s attacks, the Sophists. Another term for this is rhetoric, although that isn’t necessarily bad on its own. Sophistry is the attempt to gain assent without good arguments, usually through emotional and linguistic tricks. We call these “fallacies”, but that’s just a fancy way to say “mistake of reasoning”, which is how these are often taught these days. I call it “marketing” or “public relations”, or better: “spin”.

These tricks aim to change attitudes by misleading or manipulating the audience. They make a presumption about those who hear them, that they are not adults, nor rational. Rhetoric is fundamentally an end run around the critical faculty. If it is linked to critical thinking, then rhetoric becomes a useful communication tool. When it is unlinked, and even antithetical to reasoning and critical thinking, then it becomes sophistry. Reasoned arguments treat the audience as responsible, thinking, adults. They are respectful, not patronising the way sophistry is.

So let us think somewhat about how some of the so-called skeptics behave. Most people – I would say everyone, including myself, just on first principles – have beliefs they hold dear and which they did not arrive at through rational or critical reflection. Sometimes these turn out to be reasoned ideas. But what is arrived at uncritically will be defended uncritically, and this is, on average, a recipe for irrational beliefs. Here’s one: nuclear power is always a bad thing. In fact bad engineering is a bad thing, and not balancing risks against benefits is a bad thing. Nuclear power is often a very good thing. I would personally like to see a lot more, even if there are risks, to counterbalanced the many actual deaths from coal generation and hydroelectric environmental damage, and so-called renewables won’t cut it. But you cannot argue that with many “skeptical thinkers”.

Here’s another: religion poisons everything. The evidence is against that, and it can only be supported by cherry picking the data like Bjorn Lomborg cherry picks ecological data. But to challenge it is to commit an act of ideological impurity, and the so-called skeptic often won’t even discuss it; just attack. I can multiply the examples without effort, although I won’t, because this is about reasoning, not these specific cases.

Of course those who these “skeptics” attack also commit many failures of reasoning. One well known fallacy is the false dichotomy; I am not suggesting that if one side makes mistakes the other side is correct. Everybody makes mistakes. And mistakes are relatively evenly distributed across all groups, so long as the groups aren’t gerrymandered.

Ennis, R.H. 1987. A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities. In Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice., edited by J. B. Baron and R. J. Sternberg. New York, NY: W H Freeman/Times Books/ Henry Holt & Co: 9-26.

Facione, Peter A. 1990. Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Research Findings and Recommendations (“The Delphi Report”). Millbrae, CA: American Philosophical Association.

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Filed under Logic and philosophy, Rant, Sermon