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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
I took an enormous amount of malicious pleasure from this post at Crooked Timber, discussing the frivolous nature of evolutionary psychology just-so stories. In essence, one of the problems for evolutionary psychology is that it tends to offer genetic explanations of every facet of human nature, irrespective of evidence and without any significant prospect for either verification or falsification. The same people who denounce studies such as postmodernism will freely introduce concepts such as memes, which are then spoken of as if there was any empirical evidence for their existence. The most obvious example of this is Steven Pinker's dismissal of modern art as being a cultural aberration, when he neatly forgot that popular art of the kind he views as being most compatible with human nature has been the exception and not the rule when it comes to the formation of literary canons. But beyond that, one can be quite sure that someone somewhere will have posited an evolutionary explanation for each and every aspect of our behaviour (not excepting the plumbing of kitchen sinks).
The more disturbing aspect is the question of political bias. Just as the age of Marx and Freud excluded such explanations in favour of environmental theories, I often feel that the present age is doing precisely the same thing in reverse. Certainly, in this case the genetic factors have associated environmental triggers and I tend to feel that the nature/nurture distinction is meaningless; since it is rarely possible to conceive of one without the other. In particular, the idea that human nature exists as a fixed quantity in the absence of a blank slate, is inherently conservative, being one of Hirschman's central tropes in the Rhetoric of Reaction (not to mention fitting a Hobbesian/Burkean worldview far better than that of Locke or Dewey). Of course, this may simply be a matter that the conclusions of evolutionary psychology are simply more amenable to a right-wing standpoint and that to avoid this is a matter of denial, rather than a question of bias being behind the theories to begin with. But the fact that there are left-wing Darwinians like Singer and Dawkins suggests to me that this is much a matter of interpretation as of evidence.
Update: Here's a rather good example of these problems, a piece by Steven Pinker dismissing evolutionary explanations for religion:"Pinker began his argument by refuting what he called “three spurious adaptationist explanations of religion:” the suggestion that people embrace religion for its comfort, its sense of community and its ethical value. Although he admitted that those three theories may be true, he questioned their merit in explaining the universal, widespread popularity of religion. Pinker furthermore dismissed the idea of religion as a “source of higher ethical yearnings” and an unambiguous moral guide. “The Bible is a manual for rape, genocide, and the destruction of families...Religion has given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, Inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers...and mothers who drown their children in the river,” he said."
As it happens, my own view of religion is essentially very similar to what Pinker outlines here. The problem is the distinction he advances between evolutionary adaptation and by-products (Spandrels as Gould would have called them; odd to hear Pinker using a Gouldian argument) seems a rather arbitrary one in this context. Although I've always found the argument that religion is a guarantee of social order a poor argument for defending religion (since in such an argument the question of whether any deity actually exists is irrelevant) it does seem to have an obvious application, particularly if we consider the extensive evidence for a neurological basis to religion.
Update: An interesting piece from The Scientist further reinforces some prejudices:"EP is no more speculative, argue proponents, than any branch of psychology. Indeed, EP may be less speculative since it incorporates evolutionary constraints... But like Darwin's theory when first presented, most of EP, says Atran, currently entails consistency arguments: plausible but unproven rationales. It remains to be seen, he argues, whether EP will blossom into a fecund area of study like Darwin's work or go the way of phrenology."
It strikes me that evolutionary grounding actually makes evolutionary psychology less reliable than standard psychology for the very simple reason that the process of evolution is not something that can be easily observed while the question of whether a feature is an adaptation, a spandrel or a evironmental influence becomes arbitrary.Labels: Science
posted by Richard 4:42 pm
