Category Archives: Social evolution

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.

7 Comments

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

by John S. Wilkins | December 9, 2012

Evopsychopathy 3: The explanatory target

In the Bad Old Days, biologists, including Darwin, used to speak of “instinct” as an inherited trait of organisms. Darwin has a comment in his Notebooks

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. — We consider those, when the intellectual faculties [/] cerebral structure most developed, as highest. — A bee doubtless would when the instincts were —

and he spent some time trying to work out how bees had an instinct for the formation of hexagonal honey combs. Instinct was a kind of Platonic remembrance, something that evolved before you were born but which you “knew” at birth. This is the hoary old chestnut* of nature-nurture. And it was employed at length by the nascent science of ethology that was spawned by Darwin, especially in the theories of Konrad Lorenz, who argued that the synthetic a prioria of Kant (things known to be true a priori that are not true by necessity) are the evolutionary a posterioria (1996). We are born with instincts.

Psychologist Danny Lehrman took Lorenz’s idea to task in the 1950s with a direct critique (1953) followed by a series of articles that extended the research.

To Lorenz, the instinctive act is a rigidly stereotyped innate movement or movement pattern, based on the activity of a specific coordinating centre in the central nervous system. [338]

He notes

Lorenz and Tinbergen consistently speak of behavior as “innate” or “inherited” as though these words surely referred to a definable, definite, and delimited category of behavior. [341]

He then considers cases, and ends up

It is obvious that by the criteria used by Lorenz and other instinct theorists, [these cases] are not “learned” behavior. They fulfil all the criteria of “innateness”, i.e., of behavior which develops without opportunity for practice or imitation. Yet, in each case, analysis of the developmental process involved shows that the behavior patterns concerned are not unitary, autonomously developing things, but rather that they emerge ontogenetically in complex ways from previously developed organization of the organism in a given setting. [343]

In other words, “instincts” must develop in the right environment. Change the environment during crucial developmental phases, and you do not get the “inherited” behaviour.

It must be realized that an animal raised in isolation from fellow-members of his species is not necessarily isolated from the effect of processes and events which contribute to the development of any particular behavior.

There is “learned information”, or better “acquired information” from the developmental environment. What is inherited is not the behaviour, but a disposition to develop it in the right circumstances (see Griffiths 2002 and Maclaurin 2002 for a discussion of this).

Much of the trouble with SB and EP is that this fine distinction is overlooked, or if it is acknowledged, people tend to fall back into modes of expression or thought that the distinction erases. For this reason I think it is best to realise that always what we are discussing is not instinct, nor even the behaviours themselves, but a disposition, under the right circumstances, to develop typical behaviours. Let us call these dispositional behaviours. Henceforth, when I speak of d-behaviours, I mean dispositions to develop the behaviours.

So, we cannot speak of foraging behaviours, but we might be able to speak of a foraging d-behaviour, which is, a disposition to acquire the skills to find food. It would be odd if we did not have that. And there may be (although I rather doubt that there is) a difference in genders in the strength of that d-behaviour. Note, I did not say that women forage and men hunt. It would instead be only that women tend to acquire foraging behaviours more easily than men do, not that men could not, nor that women could not hunt. Given everything we know about variability of genders and dispositions, it could hardly be otherwise. Many men will learn to forage, nearly as many as women, even if there is a variation in d-behaviours.

So marked differences in such behaviours will be the result of cultural overrides. Genes do not have culture on a leash, they merely bias the ways in which culture is acquired. This is not really genetic determinism, so much as genes as one factor among many (and not even the most significant) for behavioural development. And moreover, once you have identified that target of explanation correctly, you cannot justify some behaviour as “natural” therefore “justified”, since the multiplicity of causes for the shared behaviour will include culture, social organisation, availability of food during childhood, the local climate and very possibly epigenetic effects of the developmental influences acting on your grandparents, none of which are heritable biologically speaking [pedants will say epigenetic effects are inherited, but I think they are simple developmental processes that cause F2 generational effects. In effect, the grandchild is, with respect to that epigenetic outcome, an extended phenotype of the grandparent].

So knowing what explanatory target is available to SB4.0 is crucial. We can explain, where and if we can explain, biological influences upon behaviour only by explaining these dispositions. Nobody is born knowing these behaviours or skills. Instead they are born able to acquire them when the conditions are right. There is no Platonic remembrance going on.

Now a second issue about targets of explanation in SB4.0 is whether or not these are homologies. Under the phylogenetic bracket approach, you can only identify a trait as a shared trait of the group (in this case of Hominoidea) if the trait is actually something that is homologous in that group. As I have said, behaviour is not always considered a homology, but given that d-behaviours are species typical and heritable, they are. In fact d-behaviours are simply another developmental disposition, like growing a spinal column (but not in folate poor environments) and so on. So it seems that it is the dispositions to develop a behaviour that is the target of explanation in SB4.0, not the behaviours themselves. Lehrman’s point is correct.

* Is “hoary old chestnut” a hoary old chestnut?

This series:

References

Griffiths, Paul E. 2002. What is innateness? The Monist 85 (1):70-85.

Lehrman, Daniel S. 1953. A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior. The Quarterly Review of Biology 28 (4):337-363.

Lorenz, Konrad. 1996. The natural science of the human species : an introduction to comparative behavioral research: the “Russian Manuscript” (1944-1948). Translated by A. v. Cranach. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press.

Maclaurin, James. 2002. The Resurrection of Innateness. The Monist 85 (1):105-130.

14 Comments

Filed under Biology, Epistemology, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, Social evolution

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.

83 Comments

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

by John S. Wilkins | 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.

56 Comments

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 John S. Wilkins | August 26, 2012

Phylogeny and the history of language and culture

Increasingly, work is being done using the methods of phylogenetic systematics to uncover cultural and linguistic evolution. A leading lab on this work is Russell Gray’s lab at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and his collaborators have looked at the evolution of language, particularly Pacific languages, and other cultural trends (like canoe decoration) in evolutionary terms.

Now they have published a paper in Science (Bouckaert et al. 2012), “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family”. The media of course published this under headlines like “English language originated in Turkey”, thereby demonstrating that journalists understand no evolutionary thinking as well as they understand no economics. Basically by using word forms of many extant and extinct Indoeuropean (IE) languages, and a Bayesian analysis, they established that IE originated in Anatolia, or the central regions of modern Turkey.

This is not unlikely, for certain values of “began”. They locate the origination event around 9500 years ago, which is not long after agriculture began more or less in the same region. Previous hypotheses were that IE began around 5000 years ago in the central Asian steppes, along with the domestication of horses and the invention of the stirrup.

However, how good is this thesis? The BBC article with the silly headline is actually pretty well sourced and written. They quote Prof. Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki as saying that “Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.” He remains skeptical.

This is a matter of methodology and epistemology, and it goes to the very foundation of phylogenetic method itself. At best a sample of an organism or artefact from within C14 radioisotopic dating ranges only shows that an instance of that type was around at that time and place. It does not show whether it was the earliest or latest; it merely sets up a single anchor point that all hypotheses must account for.

Likewise, a document or monument with written language shows only that a language type was there at a time. And since writing per se did not arise until around 3500 years ago, even that cannot help. All we know are where recorded languages are or were found. They are anchor points, but not fixed ones. These anchors can and do move.

And Kallio is right: there are no fixed decay rates, or molecular clocks. In fact there aren’t such things in biology either. Molecular rates of change are not universal or constant, and inferences based upon them are at best hypotheses based hypotheses. Phylogeny is a tool, but what does it show?

In my last post I noted that phylogenetic reconstructions show only relatedness. What they do not show, without some extensive ancillary assumptions, is how that relatedness arose. The increasing awareness of lateral transfer and hybridisation between taxonomic lineages indicates that there can be some complex histories even if the taxonomic relationships are treelike. NB: to head off the most common error about this, lateral transfer does not undercut the treelike structure either of evolution or phylogenetic diagrams. It makes them harder to detect, but a certain admixture can be accommodated in a standard tree classification. Of course, if the rate of lateral transfer approaches equality, then you no longer have separate taxa, and so that would count as a single lineage that temporarily separated like populations either side of a geographic barrier that are brought back into contact.

In the case of sociocultural evolution, such lateral transfer is often assumed to be rife. This is thought by some to undercut the importance of phylogenetic method in cultural contexts. I want to argue that it doesn’t, but that the inferences from phylogeny are not so obviously historical as some seem to think.

First of all if some lateral transfer is possible in biological contexts between “good species” (the term used by biologists when they know it’s a species but it doesn’t follow some set of strictures they think species must), then some must be permissible in sociocultural contexts to. A loan word in French from English doesn’t make English and French the same language, no matter what the Academie Française might think. In biology it is the entire shared developmental system, including the genome, that makes a species a species. In culture a tradition has more than just a few elemental objects; it has a functional structure, and in language a grammar.

So phylogenetics can apply nicely in contexts where traditions (or species) are well behaved. If they are relatively stable (i.e., not so transitory that they cannot be tracked), and distinct (i.e., the rate of lateral transfer is not so high they aren’t recognisable traditions any more), then you can do a phylogenetic analysis of them. It’s not so surprising really. Willi Hennig, whose Phylogenetic Systematics (1966) set up modern phylogenetics, took some of his ideas out of the discipline of stemmatics, or tracking manuscripts by differences in transcription (Platnick and Cameron 1977, Atkinson and Gray 2005)

However, there are limitations when using this to reconstruct history. For a start, suppose you have two manuscripts that differ. You cannot reconstruct the last version they share historically. Suppose you have three, and two agree mostly. Can you reconstruct the last version from that? Well the two copies that agree might be from a large copy centre, but the one that disagrees might be from a minor monastery that actually had better copying procedures and a more original version, and so on. These issues are well known to historians and biblical scholars, for example.

Now consider the argument put forward by Bouckaert et al. They look at the frequencies of cognate words and conclude from their analysis that IE began in a particular location at a particular time. Such reconstructions rely on assumptions, like a relatively constant rate of diffusion in all directions. What if the language was blocked by a cohesive language and culture in one direction? What if one population into which it diffused was more conservatively structured? What if a small military power managed to spread through large territories? Each of those shifts the “weight” of the diffusion pattern and means we might think something other than the conclusion that Anatolia was the centre of origin. There are many contingencies and possibilities allowed just by a phylogeny, in culture and language as in biology.

I am not denying the conclusions reached here. I think it likely (the use of Bayesian analysis here is significant) that Anatolia was indeed a centre of many cultural novelties. We certainly think that agriculture arose near or around there. But it doesn’t follow that because Anatolia is novel in one respect (farming) it is novel in another (language). We should avoid confirmation bias in science.

In more general terms, what counts as evidence in any historical and evolutionary process? Can we say that passerine birds first evolved in Austronesia? Can we say that writing began once and was diffused or whether there were many independent inventions? Where did the Etruscans come from? Can we make any origin claims at all? We certainly would like to. The trouble is that information gets lost over time, and the best we can do is anchor events based on actual data. All process hypotheses based on these anchoring events are at best consistent with the data, not proven or even necessarily made more likely by them (to avoid confirmation bias and affirming the consequent style inferences when unwarranted).

It may sound like I am being contrarian here. I am not. This is the standard view in palaeontology (see for example Smith 1994), for example. History is hard to find, and we never have much confidence in our extensions beyond the data. It might be that we can reasonably think IE arose in Anatolia; knowing that is a lot harder.

References

Atkinson, Quentin D., and Russell D. Gray. 2005. Curious Parallels and Curious Connections—Phylogenetic Thinking in Biology and Historical Linguistics. Systematic Biology 54 (4):513-526.

Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, and Quentin D. Atkinson. 2012. Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family. Science 337 (6097):957-960.

Hennig, Willi. 1966. Phylogenetic systematics. Translated by D. D. Davis and R. Zangerl. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Platnick, Norman I., and H. Don Cameron. 1977. Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis. Systematic Biology 26 (4):380-385.

Smith, Andrew B. 1994. Systematics and the fossil record: documenting evolutionary patterns. Oxford, OX; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell Science.

5 Comments

Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, History, Natural Classification, Social evolution, Species and systematics, Systematics

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.