And that context simply is that for several decades an absolutist nurturist philosophy held sway in psychology and related social sciences, and political philosophy and other humanities disciplines like critical theory. That bias, similarly, had arisen to primacy against the earlier absolutist naturist philosophy. In other words, this is part of the long nature/nurture war as it exists within the interplay of science of political ideology.

But at the height of this nurturist ascendency in the late 80s, or so, there began a golden era of new biological science about human cognition and behavior, which collectively began to erode the nurturist position.

Which, given what you’ve written, I think you’ll agree that this erosion of an absolutist nurturist position is a good thing, inherently in accordance with all the rest of biology.

However, the problem is that, to repeat, this is also deeply a contest of political ideologies. A great many folk who have an underlying political philosophy which finds a strong naturist position with regard to human cognition and behavior felicitous (generally cultural conservatives who like to argue that existing sociopolitical structures are inevitable consequences of inherent group differences — that is, the racists and the sexists and the like) have eagerly embraced EP and related as providing intellectual credibility. This is partly the case with some researchers, but it’s especially the case with science reporting and how this research is presented in the wider culture.

In response, then, those who oppose the political reactionaries, particularly the anti-sexists and anti-racists, are put into a defensive position where they naturally oppose naturist work like EP and, over time, in the context of activist affiliations and such, EP and all similar research is dismissed out-of-hand and inherently reactionary and, interestingly, where maybe fifteen years ago there was dissent about a strong nurturist position (and, indeed, in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a stream of academic feminism which was very strongly naturist), today there’s a retrenchment into a very strong nurturist position, something close to an absolutism.

It’s important to understand that very little of this highly-charged debate occurs within the context of much understanding or knowledge of any of the science involved. This is a proxy war about politics. Arguing that it’s absurd that it could be otherwise that human cognition and behavior is some complex combination of nature and nurture, and that it’s absurd to argue that simple causal explanations for cultural structures and such based upon biology are facile and suspect, or the opposite, are all unwelcome to most of the partisans in this argument. Admission of complexity and ambiguity about these issues is, to the partisans, a concession, an admission of weakness which the opposition will exploit (and they’re right, it will).

Finally, the other, related context very specific to the development of EP is its criticism of the paradigm of human cognition as some sort of general purpose computer. This is related to both the blank slate nurturist philosophy and to the rise of computing theory and AI in the middle of the twentieth century.

To my mind, this argument is very comparable to the arguments about “relativism” in the 90s. If you actually looked at what the academics who were writing about cultural and philosophical relativism through that period, it was nuanced and interesting. But in the popular imagination, “relativism” was a caricature of itself — it supposedly was the claim that there was no truth in any sense whatsoever, no right or wrong in any sense whatsoever. This wasn’t the case, but people believed it then and they believe this now. Because the popular arguments about relativism (moral or philosophical or cultural) are really arguments of political ideology given a facade of credibility of an authoritative scholarship. Just so with popular arguments about EP.

I’m curious because I am in the process of using historical role-models to adapt myself to a better niche, given my psychology which has been shaped by evolution. A functional use of evolutionary psychology as it were.

I attended a lecture at Berkeley in the early 90’s by Francis Crick and a question he posed to the audience was “What is a gene?” I think the intervening 20 years have only made the answer more difficult.

I think that Greg’s essay about evo-psych above is reasonable. Much more reasonable than the hatchet job in Pharyngula. It would appear that Myers has a rather imperfect grasp on variation and natural selection, though probably he just rushed his blog entry more than he would have a serious paper. Much better to read the Stanford Ency, of Phil. entry on the subject:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/

All scientific disciplines suffer from bad papers. If we were to judge Physics by the worst papers on cosmology or by papers on “Heat” before Maxwell, it would look like a rather sorry enterprise. Someone (I.I. Rabi?) proposed that mediocre scientists be paid *not* to publish.

–bks

More generally, there are myriad examples of behavioral variation across species of known phylgenetic relationship, and in some cases across populations within a species, showing behavioral variation that can be mapped onto measurable contextual variables. For instance among the mammals the social systems of deer, antelopes, cattle, various groups of primates, and carnivores are observed to vary across ecological setting in coordination with body size and other factors in ways that are pretty well understood. The day to day behavioral repertoires of all these mammals, including the more social and brainy ones (may primates) conforms with expectations, hypotheses have been tested, the literature is rich.

When we get to humans we could invoke human exceptionalism and just say, as per the old Frank Zappa song, “It can’t happen here.” But we don’t.

Having said all that, I’m not making any arguments here related to the question of telling whether a particular feature of human behavior is adaptive, and/or arose as an adaptation via natural selection. Like you say, it makes sense that such things are true and there are examples of likely adaptations. I’m just not talking about them here.

Here is an important piece of context: This blog post was written to correct misconceptions (arising from people getting things wrong) that my prior criticisms of classic Evolutionary Psychology are made from the perspective that I don’t think evolution applies to humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So, here in this humble blog post I’m simply stating that we’re going with the evolution assumption, not making an argument to convince anyone of that.

Good question, though.

I’m pretty sure that PZ and I do not have the same exact approach to the question of adaptation. This is probably because he studies fish and I study humans and primates. Having said that, one does have to make an argument for something being adaptive to suggest that it is adaptive, and then, something being adaptive does not necessarily mean that it arose as it is (from something entirely different or even ‘de novo’ somehow) as the adaptation you see for the adaptive (selective, fitness related) reasons one might assume.

This is definitely the subject of future writing by me. For now, I’ll just throw these two items into the mix:

Evolutionary psychologists some years back proposed that there are certain clues one can use to suggest that something is an adaptation, and one of those was “complexity.” If a thing is complex, it must have arisen through selection because randomness does not lead to complexity. However, what we see as complexity might not really be adaptive complexity, but rather, the simple fact that living stuff is complex, so even a simple (hypothetical) adaptation is going to be embedded in complexity somehow. Also, it may be the case that some Evolutionary Psychologist have skipped a step: If complexity leads one to consider something adaptive, as a clue to suggest that one develop a hypothesis about it, fine. But to lead to concluding that it is adaptive is wrong.

Second: Primates are generally pretty social and their social behavior clearly relates to individual fitness. But, sociality (and what one might call “culture” in some cases) emerges from a combination of factors inherent to the sociology and biology of the organisms and in some cases information passed on over time. This produces a very different milieu for potential adaptations to emerge. Using gene-behavior theory or even methods and applying that without modification to social and potentially cultural (where stuff is passed on behaviorally) organisms is not going to get you very far.

In my view, understanding adaptive evolution of behavior of highly social and cultural beings is in its infancy right now. This is analogous to doing astronomy with nothing other than a set of binoculars. You can do it, but you can’t get very far, and you are not even seeing much of what is out there.

So, research that attempts to answer the question: “is this behavior characteristic innate or learned” totally make sense to me (although it strikes me that it would be pretty important to have a research sample that crosses social groups and cultures).

What DOESN’T make sense to me is the assumption that evolutionary psychology seems to make, “our research shows this characteristic is innate (let’s call it mental module X), THEREFORE it must have been selected for by evolution”. (And then they go on to discuss/speculate about the evolutionary pressures that must therefore have influenced the development of that mental module.)

I think this is the essence of PZ’s objection in his latest ?EP article (btw, you’ve linked the same article twice).
If I’m understanding his article correctly, there are a variety of valid evolutionary explanations for why mental module X might exist:

1. Mental module X held a selective advantage that was strong enough to be acted upon by natural selection.

2. Mental module X was propagated through the population through genetic drift, since the evolutionary advantage wasn’t significant enough for natural selection to act upon.

3. Mental module X was a side-effect of a different change in the brain (Mental module Y) that was strong enough to be selected for. (PZ didn’t mention this one, but it occurred to me, and I don’t see any easy way to rule it out.)

PZ talked about why explanation 2 is more likely than explanation 1. I tossed in 3 just because that’s an option that occurred to me, and I don’t see any reason to rule that out as a valid hypothesis.

Any thoughts? Does evolutionary psychology take (1) as a premise, or are there ways they can support this view against the alternatives?