Evolutionary psychology

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==Problems with popular evolutionary psychology==
 
==Problems with popular evolutionary psychology==
In general, the idea of applying natural selection to behaviour is controversial. In some cases it works, in others it doesn't and it is important to keep this in mind. This is not to say that behaviours ''can't'' confer an advantage in the natural selection process, it's just that the law of "I'm sorry, it's a little more complicated than that" applies very well to evolutionary psychology.
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In general, the idea of applying natural selection to behaviour is controversial. In some cases it works, in others it doesn't and it is important to keep this in mind. This is not to say that behaviours ''can't'' confer an advantage in the natural selection process, it's just that the law of "I'm sorry, it's a little more complicated than that" applies very well to evolutionary psychology. Most importantly, the evolution of (for example) aggression, would select for all genes correlated with aggression - including those that have far reaching effects on the other traits - but not for aggression itself.
  
 
===Evolutionary straw men and flame wars===
 
===Evolutionary straw men and flame wars===

Revision as of 10:46, 26 March 2012

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Evolutionary psychology is the science of attempting to explain complex human behaviour in terms of the evolution of the human brain and its manifest psychological mechanisms. This includes fitness advantages that such behavior gives, i.e., by natural selection. In the broadest sense, behaviors or social constructs are seen as adaptations in the same way as physical adaptations. However, evolutionary psychology also investigates behaviors as a by-product of natural selection (or "spandrels," to use Stephen Jay Gould's term) or simple evolutionary noise. The long term evolutionary effects of such behaviors go a long way to explaining why some behaviours are universally seen among all humans or some groups of animals.

Contents

Use of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology has been quite successful at explaining previously unexplained things to some degree such as altruism, partially replacing ideas such as group selection. Areas in which an evolutionary approach to psychology are often applied include:

Problems with popular evolutionary psychology

In general, the idea of applying natural selection to behaviour is controversial. In some cases it works, in others it doesn't and it is important to keep this in mind. This is not to say that behaviours can't confer an advantage in the natural selection process, it's just that the law of "I'm sorry, it's a little more complicated than that" applies very well to evolutionary psychology. Most importantly, the evolution of (for example) aggression, would select for all genes correlated with aggression - including those that have far reaching effects on the other traits - but not for aggression itself.

Evolutionary straw men and flame wars

Proponents and critics alike are prone to making straw man arguments in both popular literature and sometimes scholarly literature. Common straw man arguments against evolutionary psychology (hereafter abbreviated "EP") include:

  1. EP is genetic determinism. In reality, EP attempts to describe the interaction between genes and environment.
  2. EP relies on guesswork about the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness" (EEA) because little is known about the environment of the late Pleistocene. The latter part is true, though the EEA does not refer generally to one single evolutionary environment, but specifically the environment in which a specific adaptation developed.[1]
  3. EP is panadaptationist. False. While some EP crosses into "hyper-adaptationist" territory and Panglossian thinking, much research in EP explains certain psychological phenomena as by-products (or "spandrels")[2]
  4. EP ignores proximate explanations of psychological phenomena. EP attempts to explain proximate explanations provided by cognitive, social, etc. psychology with an ultimate evolutionary explanation. These explanations are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.[3]

However, EP can and does sometimes cross into the territory of hyper-adaptationist, speculative, unfalsifiable "just-so stories."[4][5] In other words, the above straw men are actually true in some cases. (Mis-)Application of pop EP ideas to other fields has snarkily been referred to as "Flintstones thinking."[6]

More self-righteous promoters of EP and especially its pop incarnations will also straw man critics as denying biology, "social constructionists," or "politically correct." However, even prominent EP critic David J. Buller does not deny that evolution shaped the brain. He divides EP into what he sees as "Evolutionary Psychology" (i.e., EP of the Flintstones variety) and "evolutionary psychology" based on sound research.[7][8]

Mainstream media discovers evo psych

The mainstream media and pop science love evolutionary psychology. In the specific cases or studies brought to the public's attention in newspaper articles, situations are often over-simplified to the point of being plain silly. Even qualified scientists who should know better can sometimes not risk the temptation to attribute every behavior that is (stereotypically) associated with a particular gender in contemporary society is actually the result of something our remote ancestors did to survive on the savannah. In fact evolutionary psychology, at least in its "popular" incarnation, can be an example of using "science" to imbue just-so stories with an air of credibility that justifies sexism and discriminatory behavior.[9]

An example is a supposed "study" which explains why boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink. In the view of pop-evolutionary psychology, this is because women being gatherers and men being hunters, liking pink was most likely to allow you to find berries so women grew to be attracted to pink. So far, so common sense, however, the idea completely ignores many established facts (and blueberries). Such that colour preferences change from place to place, and even that in the western world (where the concept of gender specific colours is strongest) 100 years ago it was reversed; i.e., the soft colour of blue was associated with the Virgin Mary, and was thus feminine, while men preferred associations with strong, passionate colours such as red and pink.[10] Another colour that's now seen as feminine, purple, was once associated with the Roman Empire, and with it, was seen as masculine back in the day.

The curious case of Kevin MacDonald

Another example of how evolutionary psychology can go in a wrong direction is the work of Kevin B. MacDonald, who uses evolutionary psychology to explain stereotypical Jewish characteristics as being part of a group evolutionary strategy. His trilogy of books on the subject, especially The Culture of Critique (1998), has been called anti-Semitic for its assertion that Jews gravitate toward politics to promote policies in opposition to the dominant culture. In 1995 he was elected to a six year term on the executive council of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. But by 2007 he had increasingly associated on a working level with anti-Semitic and white nationalist groups, causing the California State University at Long Beach, where he is a professor, to publicly distance itself from his views. In 2010 he became the director of the newly-founded American Third Position political party. His "theory" essentially asserts Jewish biological superiority, but turns this around and uses it to argue that anti-Semitism is justified as "self-defense."[11]

Other evolutionary approaches

Despite the fact that the field explicitly calling itself evolutionary psychology is relatively new, the idea goes back to Charles Darwin. Darwin's works The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals included applications of evolutionary thought to psychology. Other evolutionary approaches to human psychology and behavior have variously gone under the names of "sociobiology," "human behavioral ecology," "gene-culture co-evolution," and "human behavior and evolution."[12] Some critics contend that evolutionary psychology is a politically motivated rebranding of sociobiology.[13] While a number of former sociobiologists have moved into the field of evolutionary psychology, the focus on psychological mechanisms is what distinguishes the two approaches. As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write: "...in the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual 'wrong turn', leaving a gap in the evolutionary approach that has limited its effectiveness. This wrong turn has consisted of attempting to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms."[14]

See also

External links

References

Footnotes

  1. This is explained in further detail in: Liddle and Shackleford. Why Evolutionary Psychology is "True". Evolutionary Psychology - 2009. 7(2): 288-294
  2. This is rather ironic as Stephen Jay Gould penned a scathing attack entitled Darwinian Fundamentalism, yet he believed religion to be an evolutionary spandrel, which has become a dominant view in EP in agreement with Gould as set forth in works like Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust and Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained.
  3. For further detail and more common straw man arguments, see Robert Kurzban. Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology: Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned. The Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 99-109 (14 March)
  4. Jaak Panksepp and Jules Panksepp. The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology. Evolution and Cognition. 2000, Vol. 6, No. 2.
  5. Robert Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt. Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology. Psychology Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 6, 819 – 835
  6. Graham Sewell. Yabba-Dabba-Doo! Evolutionary Psychology and the Rise of Flintstone Psychological Thinking in Organization and Management Studies. Human Relations, August 2004, vol. 57 no. 8 923-955
  7. Psyching Out Evolutionary Psychology: Interview with David J. Buller, Scientific American
  8. Sex, Jealousy, and Violence, Skeptic magazine
  9. Science reveals evolutionary origins of gender stereotypes (parody, but everything except the last two paragraphs is from real news stories)
  10. Bad Science - Pink, pink, pink, pink. Pink moan.
  11. Kevin MacDonald profile, Southern Poverty Law Center
  12. See Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown's Sense and Nonsense for a detailed overview.
  13. Val Dusek. Sociobiology Sanitized: The Evolutionary Psychology and Genic Selectionism Debates. Science as Culture, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1999
  14. Cosmides and Tooby. (1987) From Evolution to Behavior: Evolutionary Psychology as the Missing Link. In The Latest on the Best Essays In Evolution and Optimality, ed. John Dupre
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