The original plan was to get two people to debate the topic, but it was hard to find two people in town to do that. One idea was to get PZ Myers over here, and then he and I would debate the topic. Problem with that is that we probably agree a lot more than we disagree so that would be boring. Well, I’m sure we’d make it interesting but we’d have to switch topics.

So it ended up being me. There will be a debate. I’ll handle both sides. Seriously.

I’d love to give you a working link to meetup.com for this event, but meetup.com appears to be undergoing a massive, extended DDoS attack. From some very lonely person, I assume. Here’s the link in case it works.

Anyway, this talk is sponsored by the Critical Thinking Club of Saint Paul. Details:
Sunday, March 2, 2014
10:00 AM
Best Western Kelly Inn
161 Saint Anthony Ave
Saint Paul, MN 55103

Evolutionary Psychology is a late 20th century scientific discipline created for the explicit purpose of understanding how the brain works (mechanisms) and why the brain works that way (adaptations). It assumes the adaptations we observe in the brain are to the environment in which they arose. Unfortunately, this new discipline was created in human brains (as opposed to some other really smart species) and human brains did not evolve in an environment in which understanding the workings of brains was important. Rather, human brains evolved in an environment in which outsmarting other people may have been more important than getting things right. In this talk, we will see what is right, and perhaps not right, about evolutionary psychology.

Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist who has studied key transitions in human evolution, including the ape-human split and the rise of our genus, Homo. He was present at the birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in room 14A of the Peabody Museum, at Harvard, and has been observing the field ever since. Greg writes about evolution, climate change, and other issues on his blog at National Geographic Scienceblogs, often provides public talks or interviews on these topics.

Breakfast Buffet $12.00 Coffee only $3.00. We need to plan for the room setup and meal, so if you are going to attend, please RSVP by Friday, February 28.

If you want me to respond to any of your enraged rage regarding anything that was said, or for that matter, if you have anything at all … negative, positive, informative, whatever … to contribute to the conversation please put it in the comments below. Of late I’ve been engaged in a handful of projects that curtail my web surfing activities so if you put comments somewhere other than below this post I’m very unlikely to ever see them. This thread will not be moderated unless you post secret launch codes or whatever. (Comments are typically held in moderation until I release them unless you are a prior-trusted commenter, but I’ll put whatever you’ve got here that is not spam … or launch codes.)

Here’s the video:

The transcript is here.

Miller is an evolutionary psychologist with an interested in IQ, the usual sex related things Evolutionary Psychologists are interested in, etc. etc.

On June 2nd he wrote this tweet:

Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbsk, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth

The number of way in which this is wrong is myriad.

Anyway, he’s in a heap of trouble. Here is a video from his university, the University of New Mexico, showing his department chair trying to do some damage control.

Good luck with that.

I’m guessing this … that if you are fat you are not PhD material … is not really a scientific assertion on the part of Professor Miller. Rather, it looks more like a bone-headed remark he made because of something personal that happened to him. Professor Miller may have demonstrated something useful, though. If you are X stay away from Twitter because you are a jerk. I’m not sure what X is. Maybe it is just being a jerk. If you are a jerk stay away from Twitter because you are a jerk. Hard to say.

Anyway, Professor Geoffrey Miller is digging in and/or backpedaling. As you can see in the video, and indicated on this UNM web page, Miller now claims that he is carrying out a research project in which he produces inflammatory tweets.

Do you think he’s telling the truth? What would you do if you were his department chair?

Fixed up and reposted.

Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or sexuality in a human. You have probably heard of the finger-index (not the index-finger) … often called the 2D:4D ratio. The ratio of length of two of your fingers seems to be associated with certain trends; Men with a certain ratio tend to be more athletic and/or more gay, for instance. The mechanism for the finger ratio variation is probably a surge of steroid hormones that enhances growth rate of whatever bones are forming at that time (I simplify somewhat) and if such a surge occurs at a certain time, a slight shift in bone length ratio affecting fingers occurs and because of the timing, a slight change in something else also occurs, something having to do with what will eventually be adult behavior.¹

I am not arguing here for the strength of this association or its meaning, but available evidence shows that there is something going on. To the extent that this particular relationship is true, we see an adult outcome (related to gender, sexuality, or other behavior) being the result of something that is biological and prenatal, but not likely genetic. While the overall pattern of the hormonal environment of a fetus may be broadly determined by genes, variations in the details are just as likely determined by other things. In many contexts, one steroid hormone looks a lot like another, or can convert into another as they float around in the blood supply, so any large surge of steroids could act like sex hormones or growth hormones even if they are merely stress hormones, and there is an exchange of hormones between the mother’s blood supply and that of the fetus. Since the mother’s hormonal environment is heavily influenced by her environment (especially stress hormones), the ultimate cause of steroid hormone-mediated developmental variations in a human is very likely to be strongly environmental, if not entirely environmental, even though it all happens before birth.

Then there is the stuff that happens after birth. Back in the 1980s there was a great deal of attention to what causes gender differences, and several studies were carried out mainly in psychology. This was before the rise of Evolutionary Psychology, so the studies were not necessarily developed within an evolutionary paradigm (probably a negative). On the other hand, they weren’t carried out with the naive assumptions about our evolutionary past often held by Evolutionary Psychologists (probably a positive). Anyway, one study carried out in Australia seems to show that adults in a specific culture (Australian middle class) treated infants very differently depending on their knowledge of the infant’s sex.² For instance, a boy would be moved around more, tossed about a bit, handed boy-specific toys, and so on, while a girl would be held more calmly, not tossed about, hugged more, and handed girl-specific toys. In that study, the “sex” of the infant (boy vs. girl) was “known” to the adult on the basis of obvious clothing choices and pronoun use, and in fact, the infant was always a boy. After months of treatment as one sex or the other, depending on what that treatment consisted of, one could potentially get a gendered difference. Movement, touch, voice, etc. all form part of the environment in which the infant’s neural system, including the infant’s brain, develops. This would make a difference.

These studies should be taken as somewhat limited, as we can’t be sure how many similar studies with different results were completed but not published or discussed widely because the results did not make sense. But, it probably is true that the sociocultural environment readily takes over from the prenatal environment in the shaping of gender in growing individuals.

And so it goes throughout development; At numerous stages along the way, a human is affected by hormones, bathed in gendered behavior, and eventually, starts to observe her or his own environment and act accordingly. One of those studies seemed to show that at about Kindergarten age, boys were more conscious of how they would fit into a group than girls, paying special attention to what other boys were doing before making certain choices. If this was a general pattern in a particular group of people, one might see girls engage in a wider range of available stereotypes while boys restricted themselves to a narrower range. (Although not suggested by the study as far as I know, I can think of a nice post-hoc evolutionary explanation for that, given that humans are probably mostly femal exogenous!)

While it is possible that there is some hidden Jungian subconscious difference between nominal boys and girls resulting in different themes in their behavior (i.e., girls like circles and boys like lines or some such thing), the degree to which kids past a certain age … say six or so … gravitate towards gender specific toys or other objects, or engage in gender specific behaviors, is way too finely tuned to be the product of anything other than high cognitive function. While we know that across cultures, different colors are associated with different genders, within a culture most boys and girls know what the boy vs. girl colors are and to varying degrees express this knowledge as strong preferences, perhaps with boys expressing a narrower range of preferences than girls. Most likely, culturally specific gender preferences for things like toys and clothing are learned early, become deeply ingrained, are unlikely to be genetically determined at any level of detail (if at all) but may be attended to by boys more than girls (maybe that last difference is genetic-ish).

There are many factors that would determine a person’s gender over a lifetime. The above mentioned intra-uterine hormonal conditioning is probably fairly complex, with multiple moments in time when one or another thing might happen, and where one version of the developmental scenario would lead towards one gender orientation than another. After birth there would be more of the same but less hormonal and more cultural, and later on, with puberty, the hormones kick in again, but with a twist: Early conditioning may determine the nature of later hormonal activity by setting up differences in receptor sites or sensitivity, or other aspects of hormone feedback systems.

In speaking of humans it is easy to assume that other animals, who lack the complex and often costly (and therefore presumably ‘important’ in some way) trappings of prolonged development and culture have simpler systems for determining gender. For the most part, I would argue that rodents do in fact have simpler systems of gender than do humans, with the caveat that I’ve just compared an entire order of mammals (and a rather speciose and diverse one at that) with a single species in an entirely different order. But what would you make of a gender-shaping system in rodents that was actually very complex, in which ‘culture’ was the main determinant of, for instance, adult male-ness?

In rats, males get to be males in large part because they have testes that secrete testosterone, which in turn causes other changes. But according to at least one study, the degree to which testes will secrete testosterone is determined by anogentital licking behavior of the mother. This behavior is, in turn, brought on by some sort of cue produced by the newborn male. Without this licking, the testes do not produce much testosterone and andorgenization of the rat does not take place.³

OK, so I was exaggerating slightly when I said that rat “culture” determines adult gender, but prior to hearing this you probably assumed that there was a gene or set of genes that simply coded for which sex the rat would be when it grew up. And yes, you can get some interesting results when the mother rat is replaced with a lab tech and various different variations of the licking thing are tried out. (Using tiny wet paintbrushes.)

And I could go on. But I want to make two points about development and behavior, especially gender. One is that whatever genetic component is working, most aspects of adult behavior and orientation are shaped by non-genetic factors and those genetic factors that may exist come in the form of basic species-specific (but almost certainly gender-differentiated) “drives.” I’ve discussed the importance of drives here, and if you want to read a whole book about the link between drives and everything you do in your life check out Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts (See all Self-Help Books)

The second point is that as something complex (and both personal and social) as gender orientation emerges in a person it must be true that it comes to whatever point it comes to after a series of many turning points. If every single factor is thought of as a simple binary choice (and I use the word “choice” with no reference to human decision making) between two canalized options, then the number of possible outcomes could be thought of as 2ⁿ where ‘n’ is the number of times a binary choice is encountered. So, if there are, say, three hormonal moments in utero, and one more after birth (puberty) and, say, three life stages that have major influences on gender (and I oversimplify) then the number of possible routes a person may take from conception to adulthood would be 2⁷. That is 128. If these different paths lead to mostly different outcomes, wouldn’t there be over 100 “genders” among humans?

The interesting thing about this is that a cursory examination of potential human gender diversity from a purely biological point of view suggests that there are at least dozens of “genders” but the vast majority of cultures define (or even allow) only a few. Perhaps culture, in this case, is more restrictive than biology. Which, to a behavioral biologist, is not much of a shock, though it might be if considered from a broader social science perspective.

So, the next time you are in charge of making a form to collect personal information from people, when you are designing the “gender” question, you might consider something other than a couple of checkboxes. Perhaps a drop-down list. Or, best of all, just have people write a short essay. Make ’em think, that will.

¹Be careful with this idea: While I’m sure there are several aspects of 2D:4D research that are valid and interesting, it is often somewhat over-reported. Also, the numbers are tricky. The measurement is often done on fleshed and living fingers, but should really be done on the bones directly (using X-ray technology, not sacrificing the subject and defleshing them!). And the meaning of this trait is somewhat open to interpretation. I’d be comfortable sorting out males from females in a skeletal population with good preservation of hands but no pelvic remains, but more reluctant to use this for sorting out ethnic groups, gender orientations, or assertiveness levels. For a recent review see Bailey and Hurd, 2005. Finger length ratio (2D:4D) correlates with physical aggression in men but not in women. Biological Psychology. Volume 68, Issue 3, March 2005, Pages 215-222.)

²The specific research to which I refer was shown on a documentary about sex differences; For an exemplar published study on this work see Frisch 1977. Sex Stereotypes and Adult-Infant Play. Society for Research in Child Development. Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 1671-1675

³See this study and references therein: Moore and Morelli, 1979. Mother rats interact differently with male amd female offspring. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, Vol 93(4), Aug 1979, 677-684. doi: 10.1037/h0077599.

Moore, C., & Morelli, G. (1979). Mother rats interact differently with male amd female offspring. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 93 (4), 677-684 DOI: 10.1037/h0077599

A simplified model for the development of typical behavior in humans might include these elements:

1) Behavior that emerges no matter what because genes make that happen. If you want to go see some of that, sneak up behind a friend and poke them with a sharp object. They will let out a primal sound and jump. They didn’t need to learn that.

2) Behavior that would not be observed at all were it not for enculturation or learning in the individual. If you want to see some of that, check out the languages people speak. Regardless of how language itself emerges in individuals, one is not genetically programmed just to speak French. One learns one’s language, and the language one uses is a very important behavior.

3) Behavior that is only “normal” (normative in antro-speak) or “typical” when it develops as a combination of those two things (canalized learning). This is a bit harder to explore. Looking at language in a different way than above might be one. Another might be looking at individuals with an upbringing that deprived them of the usual cultural inputs, like some of the classic “wild child” examples.

(I’m avoiding defining what “behavior” is to allow this discussion to fit into one blog post!)

This is basic Evolutionary Biology. A lot of people think that what I just described is Evolutionary Psychology. If it is, then Evolutionary Psychology has broadened its mission considerably, which would be fine. But Evolutionary Psychology is more narrowly defined than this. Specifically, Evolutionary Psychology assumes the existence of “modules” in the brain, mainly in the cerebrum (but there is no reason for them to not involve other brain structures) that are distinct neural systems that allow individual humans to carry out specific behaviors. From Cosmides and Tooby’s Primer on Evolutionary Psychology:

We have all these specialized neural circuits because the same mechanism is rarely capable of solving different adaptive problems. For example, we all have neural circuitry designed to choose nutritious food on the basis of taste and smell – circuitry that governs our food choice. But imagine a woman who used this same neural circuitry to choose a mate. She would choose a strange mate indeed (perhaps a huge chocolate bar?). To solve the adaptive problem of finding the right mate, our choices must be guided by qualitatively different standards than when choosing the right food, or the right habitat. Consequently, the brain must be composed of a large collection of circuits, with different circuits specialized for solving different problems. You can think of each of these specialized circuits as a mini-computer that is dedicated to solving one problem. Such dedicated mini-computers are sometimes called modules. There is, then, a sense in which you can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers – a collection of modules. There must, of course, be circuits whose design is specialized for integrating the output of all these dedicated mini-computers to produce behavior. So, more precisely, one can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers whose operations are functionally integrated to produce behavior.

While some of these behaviors might be in some form general to mammals (or primates or vertebrates or some other taxonomic group) they only count as proper modules if they exist in humans as human-specific capacities that are adaptations each shaped by a particular “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness,” altered over time through natural selection, to function a certain way. To be very clear: The functioning of these modules is primarily determined by neural systems that are specified by genes that were, in turn, shaped by natural selection.

The gasp and jump behavior noted above would be a bad example of a “human behavior” for this sort of study because although there are certainly human aspects to it, it is mainly a more general behavior. Try it with your cat and see what happens. A great example from Evolutionary Psychology would be cheater detection. Even if the detection of “cheating” behavior might be found in non-human animals, humans seem to do this in unique human ways. One study that supports and exemplifies this (which I’m a bit familiar with because I helped with it) compared human ability to solve a basic logic problem under different conditions. Briefly, humans were given two different problems, both with the same underlying logic and with the same logically determined answer, but framed in very different contexts. In one setup, the humans were asked to solve the problem in the context of an esoteric filing problem that a file clerk might encounter. In the other context the humans were asked to evaluate the honesty of individuals trying to get a drink at a bar, from the point of view of the bartender. In both cases there would have been an exhaustive, multi-step solution (such as asking everybody for their ID no matter what, or looking in every single file folder to see if everything was filed correctly) but there was also a clear and unambiguous least-step most efficient solution (ask only certain people for their ID, or look in only certain file folders), and the test subjects were asked to provide that efficient solution. In the case of the filing problem, people were shown to be really bad at finding the solution. In the case of the more human problem, where subjects were being asked to asses the chance that people were lying, they did rather well. This suggests that humans have an ability, built into the brain, to handle lying and cheating by other humans. (Here is an example of a recent related study.)

Evolutionary Psychology says that humans evolved to do this during a period of “evolutionary adaptiveness,” living in social groups where detecting cheaters conferred a fitness advantage, or not doing so caused a fitness disadvantage. Moreover, this capacity exists as a brain “module” that develops in individuals by virtue of genetic programming, with the genes doing that developmental programming having been under selection during that period.

An alternative explanation … but still evolutionary and still scientific … might be that the ability to detect cheating emerged in individuals who, over their lifetime, experienced the need to do so and learned, and/or received from their culture through the processes of enculturation, the ability to do so. In this explanation there may well have been gene-level selection to facilitate some sort of data processing or reasoning, and perhaps most importantly, learning, without which individuals would not be very good at developing a cheating detection mechanism.

In both cases, one could say that there is a “mental module” … a neural structure in the brain that is good at doing some thing. In both cases one could say that the module emerged as part of the evolutionary process. Indeed, I regard the result of this and similar experience as very strong evidence that there are modules in human brains that are really good at doing certain things, and that are sufficiently specialized that they are also bad at doing similar but in some sense “unnatural” versions of the same thing. In an Evolutionary Psychology version, the module was mostly built neurologically because of genetically specified development. In a more general Darwinian Psychology, brains are selected (though evolutionary process) to be good at learning how to do this sort of thing.

One way to test this would be to raise a group of babies in a cultural environment in which it was not necessary to ever detect cheaters, but where day to day activities of import required being really good at file clerking. If Evolutionary Psychology is right and Darwinian Psychology is wrong, then the adults that emerge from that experience will test the same way on the previously described experiment (or maybe a little different, but the pattern would be the same). If Darwinian Psychology is right and Evolutionary Psychology is wrong, then when confronted with a test for cheater detection vs file clerking, the test subjects will excel at file clerking and be lousy cheater detectors.

It is possible, of course, that both things happen: there could be genetically determined human-unique modules AND a set of general learning capacities.

In fact, much of the better research in Evolutionary Psychology addresses the potential combination or overlap between these developmentally distinct explanations. A recent paper by Fessler et.al is a great example of this. The paper, “Weapons Make the Man (Larger): Formidability Is Represented as Size and Strength in Humans,” tests the idea that when assessing the degree to which one should regard a foe as formidable, humans narrow down their assessment into a generalized variable that is very likely to have emerged as a cognitive tool during our Old World Primate/Ape ancestry: Size. They conclude “… knowing that a man possesses a gun or a kitchen knife leads people to assess him as larger and more muscular. In conjunction with prior work, our studies thus provide strong preliminary evidence that the conceptual dimensions of size and strength are employed to represent relative formidability.” To me, that is an excellent example of a study of evolved human capacities, done by a team of researchers who call themselves “Evolutionary Psychologists,” which does not ignore, but rather incorporates, the most likely scenario for the evolution of the human mind; human brains are the product of millions of years of evolution and specific human capacities emerge as a conjuncture of innate abilities and drives (attention to “bigness”) and individual culturally mediated experiences (understanding of the artifacts of violence) combined and fine tuned by forces that are worthy of further exploration.

(I would note that the lead author on this study, Dan Fessler, would be one of the first authors I’d point someone to whom might be interested in reading some “good Evolutionary Psychology.”)

“Evolutionary Psychology” can be viewed as distinct form a more general “Darwinian Psychology” which simply says that the brain is shaped by evolutionary forces, or a “Behavioral Biology” that might derive from both human and non-human primate studies, which could assert that typical human behaviors are the result of an unspecified (but knowable) combination of evolved genetically determined capacities or drives, and learning. hese are very different ideas, but many people conflate or confuse them.

Brains evolved. Sometimes, when criticizing Evolutionary Psychology, as I’ve done now and then and as Rebecca Watson recently did, those who call themselves “Evolutionary Psychologist” react in an interesting way. They claim that the criticisms are unscientific. They may label the critics as “creationists” or “science denialists.” I some cases, a defender of the subfield may even resort to cherry picking among the perceived attacker’s prior writings to falsely show that they hold certain beliefs. This sort of reaction has been observed of others who undergo criticism by people who really do hold similar fundamental views, but who do not agree in total with a particular position. I wonder if this reaction is a human universal of some sort. Perhaps, even, a module. It would be interesting to see this developed as a research project.

Fessler, D., Holbrook, C., & Snyder, J. (2012). Weapons Make the Man (Larger): Formidability Is Represented as Size and Strength in Humans PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032751

See also:

?EP: The fundamental failure of the evolutionary psychology premise

?EP: The fundamental failure of the evolutionary psychology premise

Is evolutionary psychology worthless?

Reason.tv: Stone Age Minds – A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

A critique of a talk by Rebecca Watson is very likely heavily influenced by the critiquer’s membership in one group or another as defined by The Great Sorting. This not because Rebecca is a polarizing person. It is because she has been outspoken on issues that tend to polarize people, like feminism. This polarization is enhanced by the fact that a break-off group of skeptics have chosen to join the haters rather than the thinkers and doers. Also, she leads a group of women who have tried to open up the Skeptical Community to having more female participants and to more frequently address women’s issues, and this has led to significant push back. As you listen to Rebecca’s recent talk on Evolutionary Psychology or read critiques of it, especially those that specifically call her talk “science denialism” or “creationism” or some other absurd thing, keep that in mind.

(Because it isn’t science denialism.)

I’ve been asked by numerous people to read a blog post called Science denialism at a skeptic conference addressing Rebecca’s talk, written by some guy named “Clint,” but when I notice the blog network it is on, one created specifically to support the opposition to Atheism+, “Free Thought Bullies,” and Skepchicks, I find it hard to convince myself to spend the time on it. When I read the title of the post, which makes use of the inappropriate and absurd hyperbole just mentioned, I find it hard to convince myself to spend time on it. There may well be useful ideas in that post, perhaps it is even brilliant, and I’m not saying I’ll never read it. But I’m very busy and the chance of that post being informative or useful, and not overly annoying, is very slim. In other words, Clique Membership is more important, in many instances, than any honest attempt to engage in a conversation, for most of the people who respond publicly to anything Rebecca Watson says. For now I’m guessing that Clint is a Cliqueist.

This post-Great Sorting bias is evident in a recent comment by blog reader “bks” on my earlier post pointing to Rebecca’s talk. “bks” refers to Clint’s post and says “Now I’m really glad I didn’t waste 48 minutes..” Perhaps Clint was very convincing, but given the qualities I see in Rebecca’s talk, I don’t se how he could have been both convincing (of the talk not being worth listening to) and honest or thorough at the same time. Here are the facts surrounding the comment:

1) I am a behavioral biologist with expertise in the area of Rebecca’s talk, and I said I liked the talk although it had some flaws.

2) Clint is (probably) a politically motivated Rebecca Watson Hater, though he might also be a student of psychology or something, and he claims, apparently, that Rebecca’s talk is totally wrong (correct me if he’s saying her talk is good, but that is what I understand to be the case).

3) On the strength of those two assertions, “bks” decided to not bother listening to Rebecca’s talk because it must be bad, rather than judging it only after reading it.

That is a great example of the sorted sorting sordidly. “bks” could certainly have done what I’ve done … decided to not read it for some indirect heuristic reason. But that does not seem to be what he’s done. He seems to have judged it without seeing it.

Here’s what I like about Rebecca Watson’s talk

Much science is misrepresented or mistranslated as it reaches the public arena. For instance, say some cellular biologist unravels a small but important detail of the S Phase of cell division in eukaryotes. She writes a peer reviewed paper on it. During the process of developing the press report of that paper at her institution, some public relations expert pries the word “cancer” out of a lab assistant who is nineteenth author on the paper. Yes, yes, technically cell division is related to cancer, so the more we know about cell division the better, probably. So, now the press report says “New Finding at MRU may lead to cancer cure.” You know the drill.

Skeptics, including the special variety of Skeptic known as Skepchick, founded by Rebecca Watson, sometimes tackle this kind of misrepresentation or other misunderstandings of science. Many skeptics do not do so from the point of view of trained scientists. Even the trained scientists write about things that are not their own field of expertise. But skeptics, including Rebecca, generally have special insight (from skeptical philosophy and experience) which allows us to write useful essays, or give useful talks, that critique either woo and bullshit (homeopathy, Bigfoot, etc.) or the misrepresentation of science (Mono Lake aliens, some paper being misrepresented in the press as leading to a cure for cancer, etc.) There is a risk, though, of getting some if it wrong or contradicting oneself or making another error. For such a sin, we should not be carrying out summary executions. If we are sincere about our goals, we should be doing something different.

Evolutionary psychology is a bit different from other areas of science. In some ways, I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist, in that I am totally on board with the idea of identifying evolution based descriptions and explanations for features of human psychology. Some of my best friends are evolutionary psychologists. In fact, I’m pretty sure there is one using my bathroom right now, as I write this.

But there is a lot of what I consider inadequate science and bad reasoning being done within this field. There are two key features that I have critiqued: 1) The assumption, without evidence, that higher level psychological functioning in the cerebrum operates as behavior specific and distinct modules that are shaped by Natural Selection to do specific things … which develop to a significant level of specificity primarily by genetic programming; and 2) That the modern human is essentially a Ju/’hoansi person in a technologically and culturally different world, and that the Ju/’hoansi person represents a single physical and behavioral phenotype of human shaped by 2 million years of the same kind of selection operating on a single human ancestral population, and that this Pleistocene environment of evolutionary adaptiveness resembles the Serengeti.

So, when an evolutionary psychology paper gets out into the public arena, it may well be misrepresented by the media. If you work your way backwards from a misrepresented paper to the source in cell biology, physiology, endocrinology, and many other fields you’ll generally find good research when you get to the original published work, but, when you work your way backwards from the Major Media representation of evolutionary psychology, you often find that the paper itself is highly problematic. This is probably true for other areas of psychology as well (and sociology) for a variety of reasons.

Rebecca pointed this problem out in her talk and gave several examples, and, essentially, informed her audience that when they see certain things in the public press reports about human sexuality, sex differences, and related topics, the basic research in those areas may itself be highly suspect.

She is correct.

Here’s what I did not like about Rebecca Watson’s talk.

We know more about early hominid behavior than Rebecca indicated, but not at the scale needed for many of the assertions made in evolutionary psychology. So she’s right but I would say it differently. My critique is not that we don’t know about the Pleistocene, it is that there is a lot more to know than “it looks like the Serengeti” which would also imply that the amount of information we still seek much greater than often assumed by evolutionary psychology researchers.

Rebecca claimed that the idea that men hunt and women gather is highly questionable and cited a number of examples that contradict this. She’s got that mostly wrong; those examples don’t contradict the fact that the vast majority of mammal (and reptile) meat that ends up in forager meals is from male hunting. Having said that, “men hunt animals” and “women gather plants” is an oversimplification. In various societies men gather quite a bit, and often, much of the men’s diet is foraged plant food they eat while hunting. In some societies women do most of the fishing (but not in all cases). And, there are a few cases where women engage in mammal hunting, but that is rare and exceptional and the nature of that engagement often underscores rather than obviates the commonly asserted sex difference in foraging behavior, for reasons beyond what I can cover here.

Almost everything you ever hear about foragers, by the way, is an oversimplification, and I’m afraid that most people who talk about foragers, especially Evolutionary Psychologists, are happy to keep them simple despite the fact that they are not.

What next?

But otherwise Rebecca Watson’s talk was an informative and entertaining approach to bringing a valid critique of evolutionary psychology to a public audience, with humor and in fun and in all the other ways Rebecca is so good at. The Guild of Haters, however, care less about advancing skepticism than about plying their trade in snark and drek, so of course, they will not claim to see any of that. It would ruin their fun.

I would like to work with Rebecca on some of the details of this talk. It would not take much to fix up some errors that I see as important, but tangential to her main point. Maybe we’ll go up to the cabin next July and spend a couple of days on it. There may be hunting and gathering opportunities.

Update: Now I don’t have to read Clint because Mark did. Thanks Mark.

The original video is HERE. Please be so kind as to go and “like” it, as there will be many haters who will bother to go and “unlike” it because they are haters.

CLICK HERE for my followup post on this. And, HERE is another, related post.

I list this argument among the falsehoods that I write about, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)

Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.

But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….

[This is an updated repost of an item originally posted here where you will find many interesting comments.]

I want to first provide the argument from bottom up. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll outline why evolving during the Pleistocene made us what we are today, and what some evolved features of our species may be. Later, I’ll deconstruct the argument.

Organisms have genes that vary (the variants are called alleles). Sometimes a variant arises that, when interacting with the environment, confers a negative or positive effect. Those that confer a positive effect with respect to the process of passing on genes to future generations are over-represented (on average) in the next generation while those that confer a negative effect are under-represented. If the strength of this selection is sufficient and random effects do not overpower it, there may be a shift in allele frequencies over time.

That’s evolution.

Some behaviors vary because of underlying genes. The pattern of foraging by fruit fly larva, for example, varies in a way that has been mapped directly to specific base pair differences between alleles for a gene. There are a handful of other gene-behavior links (a handful relative to the total amount of behavior out there to study) but in most cases, the link between the underlying genetics and the resulting behavior is not directly documented, but assumed. This is reasonable. The link between phenotypic variation and the underlying genetic variation is almost always assumed and hardly ever documented directly.

Humans are mammals and thus have internal fertilization, internal gestation, and lactation. Each of these three important features of mammalian reproduction means a striking difference between males and females in the risks and benefits of behavioral practices, and in the very nature of reproductive strategies. Consider the very act of mating. A single copulation may have consequences that are extraordinarily different between a female and a male. A pregnancy followed by nursing and so on is a huge investment for a female, but virtually zero investment for a male. Copulating with the “wrong” mate (i.e., one that is somehow genetically not the best choice) has almost zero consequences for a male, who can simply copulate with some other female. A bad choice in mate for a female, however, may blow a huge percentage of her total reproductive career.

(Pause: In the above paragraph, I was writing about mammals. Voles, for instance. Or aardvarks. You may have been putting humans in there as your mammal of choice, but since the vast majority of mammals are rodents or bats, that may have been a bad idea. Please consider re-reading the paragraph and placing a wild, non-domestic ‘typical’ mammal in there as the fill-in organism, just in case your assumption that I was talking specifically about you was influencing your thinking on this.)

It is not at all unreasonable to expect that any mammal, including humans, would evolve such that there are male-female differences in things like risk-taking behavior, mate-preference, offspring-care proclivities, etc.

In particular, and this is very important, humans are the result of evolution over two million years or so of the Pleistocene, during which time our ancestors lived in a social setting that is represented today by the likes of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of southern Africa, who were intensively studied during the 1960s in part to learn about what the lifeways of our ancestors may have been like.

Furthermore, it has been proposed that the behavioral tendencies of humans are often fairly specifically hard wired protocols. We have the ability to do certain things because our brains are really a set of many different organs, including a set of cognitive structures called “modules” which were shaped by natural selection over these millions of Pleistocene years, a time that was pretty much similar from generation to generation, among people living in Ju/’hoansi Bushman like groups in the tropics and subtropics of Africa.

These modules provide the ability to be very good at certain things. When these modules are tested or challenged in modern-day humans living in the West, we see that we are still good at doing some of the things that we did back in the Pleistocene but no longer need to do today, and we often show poor performance when it comes to modern, western, industrialized, non hunter-gatherer or non-Pleistocene problems or contexts. Just as our hand eye coordination evolved to facilitate the use of tools, our brainy bits evolved to detect certain kinds of cheaters but not others, have a taste for important but rare nutrients, and so on. Most importantly relative to the current discussion, males have a module that facilitates promiscuous sexual behavior and females have a module (probably the female version of the same module, according to the theory) that makes them relatively prudish and careful about sexual relationships. Males have abilities to orient things in time and space in order to better shoot the antelope with the spear, while women have the ability to remember details of things in space in order to better find and select the proper plant foods. And so on. Thus, males show off, fight other males, and practice hunting by playing hockey, baseball, and football, or at least, watching the games and knowing every detail of the statistics, while females … shop and stuff.

It’s a nice theory and there have been a lot of studies supporting the basic idea as well as a number of specifics. However, there are some problems.

Let’s start with the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene is, among recent geological time periods, considered to be the most variable time period that the Earth has ever experienced since the origin of multicellular life in terms of climate change, and thus, overall ecology, habitat distributions, etc. There is no expectation that any given population making up part of a species like humans or their close relatives would have had any long term consistency in natural environment. Indeed, the post-Pleistocene life of the horticulturalist, buffering their food supply by growing crops, is probably more consistent over time than any period in the Pleistocene, with respect to basic ecology. Furthermore, when we look at foragers across Africa today, and at the archaeology which tells us something about their past, we see a huge amount of variation in habitats and adaptations to habitats. Humans have lived in very arid environments and very wet environments, coastal and inland, riverine and woodland, grassland and forest. Post-Pleistocene food producing human groups tended to avoid several of these habitats and have lived in a much narrower range of contexts.

One might argue (and this is the usual argument) that it is really the social setting in which humans lived, not the habitat, that was consistent over two million years, thus the Pleistocene as a variable time period argument goes out the window. But I should point something out about that counterargument: It wasn’t ever made until people like me (mainly me, in fact) started arguing, mainly at conferences, that the Pleistocene varied too much to be thought of as a stable habitat in which certain behaviors would evolve and get “stuck.” You see, part of the Pleistocene argument is that it was a long time compared to the subsequent Holocene (two million vs. 10,000 year) so we are essentially Pleistocene creatures. But when it was pointed out to evolutionary psychologists that the Pleistocene varied tremendously compared to the Holocene, the “oh, it’s the social argument” was raised to salvage the idea.

But that doesn’t work. We know that habitat determines social structure in humans, with technology as a major factor. Foragers vary a tremendous amount in their behaviors, depending in large part on the ecology in which they live. Forager group size, often considered to be an important intermediate variable between ecology and social structure, varies tremendously with habitat. There are even foragers with stratified societies and slavery, and there are foragers who live in such small isolated groups that they need special cultural conventions to get together now and then in order to socialize, find mates, and so on.

There is also variation in important social norms beyond that which can be explained easily by ecology. For instance, it is probably fairly rare for an Efe Pygmy woman’s offspring to have been fathered by anyone other than that woman’s husband at the time of birth (though with serial monogamy a woman may have different children fathered by different men). In contrast, the Ache and other foragers of the Amazon seem to pay little attention to who is the father of whom, and it is common for a woman to have children fathered by several different men other than her long-term husband. These are very, fundamentally, even dramatically different social systems, found in tropical rain forest foragers. Efe Pygmy men compared to Baka Pygmy men spend dramatically different amounts of time caring for their own children. Add to these examples the diversity that must arise in groups living across a range of different habitats, and we pretty much have destroyed the argument of one social environment in which we evolved for two million years. If the basis of the modern evolutionary psychology argument is falsified, the rest of the argument may be … well, weak at best.

When this argument … that the social Pleistocene was a weak idea … was proposed, the counter argument was this: Sure, the social environment changed, but there are still some basic things that are always the same: Predators and the need to mate being key.

Fine. So now, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), which this thing … this time period … is called is “Predators and mating.” How do we distinguish, then, between evolution in humans vs. evolution in mammals, or even tetrapods, or for that matter, organisms, in general?

We don’t.

Then, consider the foragers used as exemplars in the studies done today in evolutionary psychology. A disturbing trend has emerged over the last five or ten years: The use of groups that are not foragers as though they were foragers. For some reason, it is very common today to see evolutionary psychologists claim that the homicide rate and level of violence among Pleistocene foragers was very high. There is, however no evidence whatsoever to support this. When we look at the evidence that is being adduced, we find that several groups of food growers, horticulturalists such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon, have somehow been included in the sample of “foragers.” I can’t decide if this is ignorance (the researchers have no clue what they are doing), intellectual dishonesty (the researchers need violent ancestors so they cook the data) or merely a tradition of indifference (the researchers use some data they got somewhere that someone else used, so they use it uncritically).

The Yanomamo and other groups like them do indeed have high rates of violence and homicide. It has been effectively argued that this violence arises because thy have horticulture. The thing that makes them different from foragers in terms of habitat and ecology also makes them different from other groups in terms of behavior.

Having said this, there is evidence for plenty of violence in human history. Many of the earliest remains of Homo sapiens (including the “archaic” forms such as Neanderthal) show boney damage that could be interpreted as the result of interpersonal violence (though other explanations have been suggested). Personally, I think that we went through a phase of high levels of frequent interpersonal violence which was mitigated by the invention of effective longer distance projectiles. The bow and arrow democratizes the fight, and makes killing a) easier to do without brute strength and b) less likely to happen because once people can “shoot” each other easily they may be more compelled to negotiate. The evidence that recent foragers were highly violent is not as ubiquitous as that for earlier humans, and tends to be geographically spotty, and can probably be explained by the same hypothesis of the effects of killing technology.

Then there is the argument about the modules. Let’s assume that the research that shows how modules seem to work and what they seem to “look like” functionally is good. The fact that humans are running around with modules today does not mean that these modules are genetically programmed. It is very possible that module-like structures in our neocortex arise during development, de novo, in each of us, and that these modules are similar across groups (but perhaps different sometimes by gender) because of overall similar developmental trajectories. The cases of modules failing, say, to detect cheating if the cheating is modern (non-Pleistocene, if you will) in context is unimpressive. In one famous study, people were shown to be very good at detecting cheaters when the cheater was someone possibly lying about their age to get a drink in a bar, but very poor at detecting cheaters when the cheater was a file folder in an esoteric filing system that may or may not have been filed correctly. In other words, when comparing actual social cheating to a glitch in a filing system, humans were pretty good at the social cheating part but not so good at the arbitrary artificial strange filings system. We are not impressed.

There are dozens of reported gender differences, with piles of research demonstrating them. But when we look more closely, we often see that the either a) the methodology of the research sucks or b) the gender difference, while likely real, changes, goes away, or even reverses as times change, suggesting that the difference is (was) cultural.

I’m sure there are gender differences. Part of the reason I think that is an inappropriate argument: I think there are gender differences in behavior because there must be. Such an argument is not evidential and does not lead us to a legitimate conclusion. Rather, it leads us to a set of valid hypotheses, if done right. However, I am utterly unconvinced that most gender differences are hard wired. There are probably some. Testosterone poising of neural tissue (indirectly) during development probably accounts for the fact that there are almost no male simultaneous translators. The neural ability to do this difficult thing is retains in some females but lost in almost all males during puberty. That is not genes coding for neural connections, but it is genes coding for different endocrine systems which then, through a series of negative and positive feedback systems, cause hormonally mediated changes in the body (including the brain).

Perhaps hormones make men like sports and women like shoes. But if so, it is not very consistent. My wife has three pairs of shoes and one purse. I have two pairs of shoes and four laptop bags. My brother-in-law knows more about sports than anyone in my wife’s sports-oriented family. But his new wife knows twice as much as he does, even though no one in Andrew’s family has quite admitted this out loud yet. I can track my own interest in both baseball and football as a function of a female mate or friend who had such an interest, with my involvement being a way to socialize and get along. I find sports interesting enough to pay attention and to enjoy it, but if I want to know what is going on, I have to ask the female I’m watching the sport with (often, but not always, my wife). Yes, I guess I’m following my true genetic nature: I’m somewhat promiscuous as to whom I watch the game with.

Sex differences are probably real and probably important, but they may not be hard wired as often as people think they are, or hard wired in the manner people think. We would expect a species like humans, born with this big blank brain and subjected to many extra years of learning as children, to develop these differences as a function of culture rather than genes. That, to me, is the most likely null model. I’m not sure I would attribute a priori much likelihood to a genes-up model of human behavior. How the heck would that work, anyway?

See also Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?

But seriously … I’d like to do something today that I’ve been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid grounding in Behavioral Biological theory. At the very outset you need to know that this is not about Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is something different. I’ll explain some other time what the differences are. For now, we are only speaking of fairly traditional Darwinian behavioral theory as applied generally with a focus on sexually reproducing organisms, especially mammals, emphasis on humans and other primates but with lots of birds because they turn out to be important.

I’m not going to give you the science; Here I’m just going to give you the books. In all cases I’ll provide links to the Amazon page, because that has become a sort of default quick and dirty way of recognizing a book (you often get to see a picture). In many cases, however, these books are not available new, so you’ll have to find them in your local library or used book store, or on-line somewhere. There are only a few that, if found used, should be expensive owing to rarity or some other value-enhancing feature. Some have been so widely used in classrooms that they are readily available at used book stores near campuses, if you can find such a beast.

You will notice that most of these books are old. That is because Behavioral Biology reached a point a few years back when two things happened: 1) It had matured to a standard academic discipline so things like anthologies of the hottest new papers or “oh wow” books by key writers in the field were no longer as common and 2) It started to be eclipsed, in trade publication, by Evolutionary Psychology, which is unfortunate.

OK, I said this was about the books and not the science, but I’ll give you a little bit of science as a framework for the literature bomb I’m about to explode.

Darwin’s Natural Selection has genomes evolving due to differential fitness of specific alleles. There is co-evolution among genes, some of which are in the same bodies, some not, some in the same species, some not, so we get Sexual Selection and various other co-evolutionary phenomena.

Behavior happens, and is facilitated in tetrapods and fish and so on by neural systems which have some basic capacities. Neural and sensory systems, information processing systems, etc. can be shaped by Darwinian selection on the genome or by selection (still likely Darwinian more or less) on the behavior itself when said behavior is passed on extra-genetically, as extended phenotype, culture, memes, whatever you want to call it. This applies mainly to mammals, and within mammals, more in primates and within primates, more some apes. So there is parallel evolution in some species between genes and behavior, which are always interacting with each other.

Neural and sensory systems should evolve to enhance fitness. But fitness can be extended beyond alleles of genes, and include, just like co-evolution does, genes in other parts of the genome, others of the species (the other sex, other ages, etc.) and other species. So, things like Kin Selection can emerge whereby individuals act in the interest of their gene-sharing kin, not just themselves. Perhaps there are higher levels of selection as well.

As behavior evolves, Darwinian influences on it are limited. The degree to which genes can determine behavior in a given species is not determined by adaptive design, but rather, by phylogenetic constraints, developmental issues, and yes, to some extent, adaptive design. No matter how cool it would be to have a brain programmed by genes to recognize when another person is telling you a lie, the genetic coding for this behavior does not exist in humans mainly because it did not exist in primordial mammals or other vertebrates, where the basic brain system we have today was first developed by evolutionary processes. No matter how cool it would be to be born able to produce language, we are not born this way because our ancestors were not born this way and our brains do not develop this way. Many, perhaps most, important behavioral features of brainy primates can’t be coded into genes because of the way brains evolved over tens of millions of years. So Natural Selection, Kin Selection and other kinds of selection on behavior work through a variety of proximate means in humans, including fine tuning of things like “drives” or other psychological features that can be somewhat adapted during development as well as the culture we require to be human and a fair amount of reinvention of roughly the same wheel again and again and again.

Foundations of Behavioral Biology

The basics are to be found most efficiently in some excellent textbooks. If you do not know all the in formation provided across most of the chapters of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s textoobk Sex, Evolution and Behavior, then you simply need to read that book. Some of it is outdated, but really, where there are studies that have been supplanted by more recent work, those studies are not usually wrong, just classic. Obviously, you would read a book written 20 something years ago as a book … that is not current. But it is basic. This book must be supplemented with the material in Robert Trivers Social Evolution. It was Trivers that took basic stuff like Natural Selection and Kin Selection and made them part of a larger toolkit of behavioral science, and in particular, introduced the all important Parental Investment Theory, which turns out to explain a fair amount of the patterning we see in bird and mammal behavior.

Here, I will pause for a bit more theory. Kin Selection theory explains why bees commit suicide, but worked (in our minds) initially with bees where there was a single queen mothering all the offspring and not too many male drones. But then suicidal and other behaviors was observed in bees without this social pattern, and lots of insects (and mammals) with the same peculiar pattern of genetics that bees and ants have were found to have bee-like patterns of behavior. Co-evolutionary patterns are often found in one or two species, make total sense from a Darwinian point of view, but then the young turks (graduate students usually) find numerous counter examples showing that the predicted patterns don’t hold up. Since I just made a huge statement (above) about patterns, I’d better point out that it may well be that most cases, or at least many cases, do not fit the rules! Does this mean that the rules are invalid, that there is no Natural Selection or Kin Selection, or Parental Investment, etc. etc.? No, usually not. What it usually means that when people discovered, for instance, an explanation for sex bias in Red Deer offspring (high ranked females have male offspring, other females have female offspring) they assumed that this adaptation was so cool that it must occur in all mammals, and then they discovered that it is actually rather rare in primates and may occur in the end in only a few mammalian species, and seemingly not in humans. For instance. But this does not mean that the so-called Trivers-Willard hypotheses (which you will find described in Social Evolution and elsewhere) is wrong. Rather, this subset of parental investment theory is expected to work only under certain circumstances. And this is true of all of these behavioral models.

Think of these evolutionary models as being like currency behaving in a rather straightforward economy, but where that economy is only a subset of a larger economy involving barter, coercion, bribery, some very intense marketing and with con artists everywhere. Under many conditions the money will change hands in predicted patterns, following the rules, but under most conditions, while the expected values and directionality of exchange is a force, it is only one of many forces. And, the system is likely very dynamic. It may turn out that we don’t live in a world where evolutionary stable strategies … co-evolutionary systems that are stable over the long term are maintained because there is no “better” (more fitness enhancing) alternative … are very rare because, in fact, conditions are constantly changing. ESS’s may be rare, but that does not mean that the evolutionary forces and the definition of what is “stable” are non existent. They are just living the life of Sisyphus.

Advanced Behavioral Biology

I would start the next phase of learning with one of my favorite books, one I’ve used many times in classes: Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) by, as it turns out, Robert Trivers. This volume includes many of the key papers that were behind the literature cited above that you’ve just finished reading, along with interesting introductory material by Trivers, giving context. You will be more than prepared to read the source material, to understand it better than most people will if encountered on its own, and to see its strength’s and shortcomings. Do report back.

You can read Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) either before or after the following two items, which are by the authors of one of the above mentioned textbooks, and which provide excellent empirical studies of human behavioral biology using strict Darwinian approaches. Both of these books may be fairly hard to find: Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior and The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today series) by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.

Proximate Mechanisms: Hormones and Neurons Galore

Now that you’ve got a good exposure to the basic theory and to some empirical species-wide studies (of humans) let’s step back for a moment and look at the biology a bit more closely. First, you have to understand endocrinology and related neurobiology at several levels, and you also need to entertain yourself with some excellent writing. So, read Mel Konner’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit followed by Robert Sapolsky’s The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament.

To put this in the most important context (as it relates to the most important human adaptation) now read Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, or watch the documentary Childhood (at least the first hour of it).

At this point you are ready to explore the human brain, it’s evolution, and the evolution of language. You’ll want to start with Terry Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.

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h3>It’s People!!!

Now that you have the basic behavioral biology, the proximate mechanisms related to hormones, development, neural systems, etc. under your belt, and a bit of real life application to human culture and society, it is time to explore the women and the men of the species. You might want to glance first at the infanticide literature. It turns out, despite protestations by Men’s Rights Advocates, that a lot of what happens in human culture and related human evolution has to do with the fact that men are dicks, and male committed infanticide is a big part of that. You’ve already explored that with Daly and Wilson and Cinderella, above. Now have a look at Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females or a selection of the papers therein. Or skip that part and take my word for it.

Either way, your next stop should be with Sarah Hrdy and these two books by her, in order: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Then, on to the boys with Richard Wrangham: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. When you are done reading that, you’ll need some Frans DeWaal to calm down.

Report back!

The theme of this book is as the title says, evil … at several scales, and understanding evil from a neuro-psychological perspective. Here, the genes themselves are actually relatively unimportant except as part of the necessary steps to build a human brain which then, in turn, can sometimes be an evil one. As a member of the military (having served in numerous interesting capacities) and the adoptive mother of two children from Milosevic-torn former Yugoslavia, Oakley brings an interesting personal side to the worlds of mind games, Machiavellian behavior, and ultimately, psychopathy. And as David Sloan Wilson mentions in his forward, Oakley serves effectively as this book’s Indiana Jones like guide through the neurophysiology of the brain. Most poignantly, Oakley sees the essence of humanity through her direct and indirect experience with her own sister, who is described as “an amoral woman who died under mysterious circumstances.”

I think if you start to read this book you will have a hard time putting it down. A lot of questions you may have will be addressed. More questions will be raised than answered. … And you may never look at your sister the same way again.