The pinnacle of human evolution?
There is exactly 0% chance that this news that humans are not only still evolving but that our evolution has “sped up” after we developed what we think of as culture is going to make even close to a dent in the bullshit about how men and women’s brains are calcified into patterns set during a mythical hunter-gatherer time that suspiciously resembles the value systems of 1950s America. Armchair evolutionary psychologists were already treating “The Flintstones” like the greatest work of anthropology/biology ever concocted. The evidence that they’ve relied on, besides sitcoms, to argue that men evolved to go out in the world and do things whereas women evolved to have babies in between bouts of housework has always amounted to, “I should automatically win any argument with a feminist because I’m a man and god, aren’t women’s voices irritating?” Exhibit #1: The “martyrdom” of Larry Summers. The beauty of evidence-free “science” is that it’s impervious to any new evidence.
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden. It’s beyond clear that the main appeal of the bullshit theories that evolution “stopped” during some hunter-gatherer era is it gives certain kinds of men a fantasy of living in a time when women knew how to just clean up and shut up about it, and that there was no end of non-reciprocal sexual favors being supplied men in exchange for mammoth meat or whatever. Cooking, cleaning, baby-tending, and blow jobs all for the non-price of spending all your time out hunting with your buddies and quaffing Budweiser (Of course cavemen had Budweiser! What else does one drink while sitting in a mammoth blind?)—that’s the way life is supposed to be, and if feminists quit their bitching and just started cleaning something, they’d be happier in their natural environment. Surely.
But the idea that there was some prehistoric Eden and then a Fall of humanity that has led to the irritations and degradations of today pervades all sorts of subcultures in our culture. I don’t so much blame hardwiring as the story of Eden itself, which laid the groundwork for believing in the paradise-then-fall concept. Now you’ve got that myth rewritten as “science” for modern Americans. You can tell a lot about a person’s values by what they declare people didn’t have to do/tolerate in this Edenic paradise. The Biblical story is very straightforward—in paradise, people didn’t have to work to eat and childbirth was easy-breezy (and didn’t kill women left and right). In both cases, I would suggest that the desires of the Hebrews who wrote that book make a lot of sense. For your workaday sexist who envisions the prehistoric Eden, it’s all about foisting the shit work on women while getting out to do the more fulfilling work. The Larry Summers defenders are basically of that stripe, but with a special focus on not having to compete with women in the workplace. A lot of feminists fall into the trap of imagining an idyllic prehistoric time before the patriarchy was developed, and latch onto any fat goddess statute as evidence that the fall not only made women second class to men, but also imposed these anorexic beauty standards. I appreciate the urge to reach back into prehistory and argue what we already know, which is that sexism is not hardwired or inevitable, but color me skeptical about the theories of great matriarchies. Anyway, this new evidence that demonstrates we’ve done a lot of evolving after the patriarchy was well underway creates a serious roadblock for those who want to argue that we’re somehow hardwired for equality, and the patriarchy is a thwarting of human nature.
I tend to be skeptical of most arguments about hardwiring, if for no other reason than humans flout bona fide instances of “hardwiring” all the time and in fact seem to make a game of it. How many of you have tattoos? If so, you’ll know what I mean—part of the pleasure of getting one is the mind of matter aspects, the way it’s almost too easy to hold still and allow someone to inflict all this pain on you without flinching or running away, as your hardwiring tells you to do. You’re happy when it’s over for sure, but take pride in the fact that you got through it. I imagine that people who enjoy S&M take that mind over matter attitude to another level, enjoying flouting their hardwiring against both pain and ego. If people can so easily shrug off things so fundamental to human nature as pain, then it doesn’t do well for arguments the unavoidable nature of qualities that are not self-evidently biological like the urge to scrub sans bitching while your man spends all his time hunting.
82 Responses to “Evo psychologists, turn your phasers to “ignore””
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Actually, Jared Diamond’s book, The Third Chimpanzee, does some interesting things with what you’re talking about. This bizarre notion that we reached some kind of species “perfection” and we’ll never change; whereas he goes through all these steps that have affected us throughout history, and points out how different we are from our ancestors, and how different we’re likely to be in the future.
There’s some great points where he essentially slaps down a lot of sexist evolutionary theories, regarding evolving menstruation patterns and social relationships.
male gamete’, and which has no shoulds and musts to offer about human social behaviour, just the odd ‘oh, maybe this is why…’. After your post in defence of science yesterday - evolution notably included - it’s a bit odd to see you dismissing an entire branch of evolution research that explores its theories in a similar way to the rest of evolutionary science. Yes, some of it is shit peddled by morans, but we’d never dismiss the entirety of evolution because some of it is tenuous shit that’s been made up and misused by morans (ie. the social darwinists), would we?[Sorry, I missed a tag and totally fucked my comment there]
Just my personal theory here, but I’ve always assumed it’s a basically regressive instinct - a memory of early childhood where Mummy and (if you were lucky) Daddy sorted everything out and you got to spend your life exploring and playing while all your burdens - and all the powers over you - were carried by others.
As for the rest of your post, I appreciate your campaign against the armchair evopsychs, but I think it’s important to distinguish their shit from actual evopsych, which is mostly about animal behaviour rather than human beings, and which is based on undeniable facts like ‘female gamete > male gamete’, and which has no shoulds and musts to offer about human social behaviour, just the odd ‘oh, maybe this is why…’. After your post in defence of science yesterday - evolution notably included - it’s a bit odd to see you dismissing an entire branch of evolution research that explores its theories in a similar way to the rest of evolutionary science. Yes, some of it is shit peddled by morans, but we’d never dismiss the entirety of evolution because some of it is tenuous shit that’s been made up and misused by morans (ie. the social darwinists), would we?
Thene, Amanda makes it clear in the post that she is talking about “armchair evolutionary psychologists” — the kind who misuse science to peddle reactionary political and cultural ideas.
Thene, no intelligent person disputes that behavior is a product of genetics as well as socialization and environment. It’s when evolutionary psychologists tell just-so stories to claim that we evolved to live locked-into 1950’s gender roles that we get annoyed. After all, if we evolved that way, why were so many women so unhappy with the status quo?
Amanda, that’s an interesting article you linked to - I saw it a day or two ago. It always gladdens me to see research on this subject. It frustrates me to no end as a biologist to see so many people under the impression that we’ve stopped evolving somehow, because now we have culture and health care. I think it’s really just part of the desire of many people to be separated from nature - after all, if we’re just evolving like everything else, that’s one less thing that’s really special about us.
My major thought along these lines: History sucked for everybody.
You make this point a bit with “You can tell a lot about a person’s values by what they declare people didn’t have to do/tolerate in this Edenic paradise.” In Eden, hunters don’t get gored by the mammoths, war is a glorious endeavor despite all the death and maimings, and enslavement is a privilege reserved for wives and spoils of war.
But as you pointed out, this entire line of anthropological revisionism is fact-free. We should make the point, though, that it is revisionism.
The reality of history was a lot of hard work, people being nasty to one another, and no penicillin.
IIRC, pretty much every culture has an “Eden” story, even if it’s not called that. In ancient Greece, everything was fine until Pandora opened the box full of the world’s evils. It’s the same way that every group of adults has complained about how stupid/lazy/spoiled the younger generation is.
First off, anybody who really thinks we aren’t still evolving didn’t think evolution is a real phenomenon to begin with. Almost no lifeform on this planet is the same now as it was 100,000-years ago, let alone millions of years.
Second, regarding the Eden “hardwiring”, I think it’s just the ultimate extension of the age old idea that “things are worse now…” (regardless of when “now” is at the time the statement is made) “…than they used to be…”
If Eden was the beginning (to those who espouse its existence), then it represents the quintessential example of “things were better then”. It becomes a useful tool to get people to follow your dictates, holding “paradise” out as a possible reward for “good” behavior.
In fact, I’m pretty confident that the idea of “heaven” would have much less power if the “Eden” myth didn’t lay out a supposed “real life” example of perfection…
…and what mnemosyne said…
but I think it’s important to distinguish their shit from actual evopsych
Such a rare beast to almost be considered a myth in and of itself. Most “evo psych” is like, “Women drive like this, men drive like that, because of how our caveman ancestors would have handled cars.” Real science becomes indistinguishable, from, you know, science.
that humans are not only still evolving
This article does not say that. It specifically states that data on recent evolution is inconclusive. “The high rate of selection has probably continued to the present day, Dr. Moyzis said, but current data are not adequate to pick up recent selection.”
If you look at the graph, there is a steep decrease in the number of genes under strong selective pressure after the neolithic revolution.
Glad you’re attached to the “calcified humanity” theory, Josh. Did you know that humans still use sexual reproduction? And that each child is in fact genetically different from her parents?
I’ve often also found the creationist antagonism to evolution to be amusing, since they are also obsessed with the mechanics of sexual reproduction, and making sure they’re frequently used in white people, at least.
“I’ve often also found the creationist antagonism to evolution to be amusing, since they are also obsessed with the mechanics of sexual reproduction, and making sure they’re frequently used in white people, at least.”
…but not TOO frequently used - they wouldn’t want that to become a habit or something…
Evolutionary Psychology is pretty much complete bullshit pseudoscience. Everything it pretends to study has been better and more scientifically studied by other fields (evolutionary biology, biology, anthropology). There is absolutely no use for it aside from misogynists wanting to push sexist tropes.
Josh: for genes to be under strong selective pressure you have to have seriously high differences in relative mortality, which generally means seriously high mortality in general (e.g. lots of the classic genetic differences among humans from different parts of the world involve having lost 50% or more of the base population). That doesn’t happen so much any more — even the Black Death barely did that for a small part of the world. And, of course, selection is only one side of evolution — you need to generate the variations in the first place.
I’d like to weigh in with a slightly different take on the “Lost Eden” meme, by recognizing that for many/most of us, our view of the world pretty much gets fixed by early adulthood, which is when most people switch over from intensive learning to intensive doing. So the whole “kids nowadays” reflects the fact that the world changes, but our ideas about it don’t so much. In most professional fields, for example, you’ll find that a practitioner’s idea of what a “real” doctor/lawyer/engineer/programmer/whatever does tends to be strongly biased toward whatever was hot in the field when they were in their 20s. And the older ones almost always mutter about how things have gone downhill and important skills have been lost. There’s a minority who keep learning and changing throughout their careers. (How you feel about that may depend on what kind of changes…)
I see. Because I pointed out that you made a claim that is unsupported by the article cited in support of that claim, I must be attached to the “calcified humanity theory”. And this apparently has something to do with creationism as well. Good to know.
I’m glad you have a rudimentary understanding of sexual reproduction. Since you apparently can’t even read a simple graph, I was a bit worried there for a moment.
humans are not only still evolving but that our evolution has “sped up” after we developed what we think of as culture
Back when I was still in grad school, one of my Humanities professors was evaluating this kind of research from a cultural point of view. The one example that sticks in my my head is the correlation between your brain’s “cache” (your brain can hold about 3.5 seconds worth of streaming information stream before it needs to store that information to memory) and the line length of the earliest poetry forms from various languages around the world (ranging from around 3 to 4 seconds). The immediate question, then, is “Did the line length of early oral tradition poetry evolve to match our brain or did our brain evolve to match poetry?” My professor’s answer was “both”. (The book in which he describes this and other phenomena along these lines is Natural Classicism.)
His general argument is that physical attributes influence culture at the same time a culture influences physical attributes: he describes it as a reverse causality feedback loop. This was over 15 years ago, and I’m honestly floored to see that these ideas took that long to hit the “mainstream culture”.
men and women’s brains are calcified into patterns set during a mythical hunter-gatherer time that suspiciously resembles the value systems of 1950s America.
This always gets me: suppose I agree with their premise that our brains are stuck in 10,000 BC. What makes them think they have a freaking clue what human society looked like back then?
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden.
I’d go with “cultural”, personally: the whole “why does life suck so much?” theme starts back in Sumerian and Ugaritic texts, and you see it in just about every culture that touched the Tigirs-Euphrates valley. In the Scandanavian texts, you don’t see that theme: in fact, life is considered the brief “bright spot” in an eternity of darkness. The Vikings (er, those who could write, anyway) didn’t spend a lot of time whining about how badly life sucked: they had a much more Epicurean or hedonistic approach.
But since the some members of the Giglamesh and Enkidu crowd became the Jews and then the Christians, we have the “fall of man” thing throughout Western Civilization. I also blame the Manicheans, too, because I blame Zoroaster for just about everything.
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden.
I’m going for “both” as the answer here. I’m thinking schematization. Human brains are hardwired to simplify things, which often means imagining wholeness or unity where wholeness isn’t demonstrably present. Smaller, practical examples include imagining a whole box when you obviously can’t see all six sides of the box at once, or understanding that a four-legged thing with a waggy tail is likely to be a dog even if you haven’t seen a dog of that breed before. More problematic examples include stereotyping (”racist jokes are funny because they’re true!”) and ableism.
I seriously think this is how God was invented… Descartes actually has an argument “proving” God in which he argues something like this:
1. I can only imagine what I have seen.
2. Nothing is perfect.
3. I can imagine perfection…
4. Somebody Up There must have planted the idea in my head!
But that ability to imagine perfection is just the brain taking shortcuts and creating whole images and general categories out of the partial information available. That’s hard-wired.
The description of what God and Eden are LIKE, though? That’s cultural.
Wow, btw, the article is short, so everyone go read it! And then blast Josh for a cheap liar (quote he used is out of context as well).
I have lots of thoughts about this, collected over some years of musing, but then I’d have to try and be comprehesible, and I don’t wanna do that. Suffice to say that it would be really cool to have a time machine.
I have never seen a credible evolutionary psychology paper. Where can I find one? That isn’t covered by more capable fields?
“Because I pointed out that you made a claim that is unsupported by the article cited in support of that claim, I must be attached to the “calcified humanity theory”.”
It must be awfully nice to believe the sum total of evolutionary understanding is found in one small article in The New York Times. And the article certainly supports Amanda’s “claims” (BTW, in case it wasn’t clear to you before, Amanda is hardly the first person on earth to claim human evolution is still occurring).
Or do you just like to argue semantics for their own sake?…
It must be awfully nice to believe the sum total of evolutionary understanding is found in one small article in The New York Times.
That would be a devastating riposte if I had claimed that. Sadly, I didn’t and it isn’t. The post said: “this news that humans are not only still evolving….” And that phrase linked to the NYT article. Was there some other “news” that the post referred to?
And the article certainly supports Amanda’s “claims”
Actually, it doesn’t support the one “claim[]” that I am talking about. To wit, in case you missed it the first time: “The high rate of selection has probably continued to the present day, Dr. Moyzis said, but current data are not adequate to pick up recent selection.”
Amanda is hardly the first person on earth to claim human evolution is still occurring).
I never stated otherwise. My only point is that one shouldn’t claim that an article says A when in fact it says B.
About the Eden nostalgia… Evo Psych as used by the Flintstone school of armchair science seems to work like this:
(a) If the first humans did it, that’s what we’re supposed to be like.*
(b) Except for the nasty bits. Those were just valid for that time and place.
(c) If stone age culture does not fit 21st century reality, then 21st century reality ought to be ashamed of itself and should be changed.
(d) Except for the unhelpful stone-age relics within our internal make-up. Those must be overcome, of course.
(d) And I’m gonna tell you which is which.
I see. Because I pointed out that you made a claim that is unsupported by the article cited in support of that claim, I must be attached to the “calcified humanity theory”. And this apparently has something to do with creationism as well. Good to know.
I see. The article reinforces what anyone with two brain cells knows, that evolution doesn’t just “stop”, but you went out of your way to make sure that everyone knows that they don’t have to set aside their beliefs that evolution has stopped because of this—hey, it might have stopped yesterday!—and I’m supposed to assume? What exactly? I can’t imagine that you would go out of your way to reassure the people who believe that evolution has stopped for humans unless you find value in that nonsense.
“I never stated otherwise. My only point is that one shouldn’t claim that an article says A when in fact it says B.”
…actually ONE person quoted in the article says it could be A or B, but they’re not sure. So, in fact the article DOES NOT SAY “B”…
Amanda’s claim: “There is exactly 0% chance that this news that humans are not only still evolving but that our evolution has “sped up” after we developed what we think of as culture is going to make even close to a dent in the bullshit about how men and women’s brains are calcified into patterns set during a mythical hunter-gatherer time that suspiciously resembles the value systems of 1950s America.”
Her claim is in essence that followers of EvoPsych who use its “science” to “prove” women are innately inferior are immune to scientific evidence. (In this, they share their inability to accept facts with religionists, creationists and their “ID” fellow travelers, global warming deniers, etc.)
THAT claim has been supported by experience over and over for decades. The Times article was just the spur for (yet) another thread on that topic here at Pandagon.
I’m guessing that you are legalistic enough that no evidence will dissuade you from your beliefs on this subject (whatever they are - and honestly I don’t really care) so in a way you yourself are helping to prove Amanda’s point…
These “nature vs. nurture” arguments in general are fun and thought provoking. But if somebody trollishly comes in and starts derailing the discussion into a semantic argument about a single point in a single small article, instead of acknowledging the article’s central thesis is hardly unique or singularly unsupported - well, that’s just bad blogging behavior…
You aren’t supposed to assume anything. To the contrary, wild and unfounded assumptions appear to be the source of your errors. You’re supposed to summarize articles accurately and not misrepresent them to suit whatever axe you want to grind.
That you would grossly oversimplify the controversy as whether “evolution has stopped” or not demonstrates that you are as ignorant of the nuances of the science as the armchair evo-psych defenders you rightly deride.
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden.
I’m kinda hoping you were shooting for irony here.
The Bible didn’t invent the Eden myth (which itself has antecedents in earlier mythologies). Not all cultures have an Original Paradise myth, either.
Josh, the data is inconclusive but the article says that the rate of selection has probably continued to the present day. (And we definately did not stop evolving 50,000 years ago as some would have us believe.) Therefore according to the interpretation of the scientist who did the study we are probably still evolving. Would you prefer if Amanda had said: “the news that humans are (probably) still evolving”? And if so, aren’t you being a bit nitpicky?
There is no controversy over whether or not evolution in humans has stopped. A lot of people are under the misconception that because we have eyeglasses and wheelchairs that somehow we’re no longer under any selection pressures whatsoever. That’s false. Selection pressures change with the environment. And that doesn’t even include different types of selection, as Amanda mentioned earlier, like sexual selection or the selection that occurs because of selfish genes.
Since science journalists have no problem misrepresenting the scientists and the journal articles they are reporting on, I don’t have a problem with Amanda ripping apart their crappy writing.
Show of hands: did evolution or culture put that stick up Josh’s ass?
Josh, you realize that we’re all mutants, right? Not in the X-Men sort of way (although that would be cool), but in the way that mutated genes happen in every single generation. Since these are instrumental in evolution, it’s ridiculous to say there’s any sort of controversy that we’re still evolving; it’s established fact.
If look at the paper itself (at least the section I found quoted), he makes a stronger claim than the Times article suggests
It’s a little dense , but it’s he clear that he is making a hypothesis based on the actual evidence for increased selection over the period that culture starts to kick in for H. sapiens. So Joshm he is making the argument Amanda outlines.
Hey Amanda, delurking to mention some books you might find interesting:
Marjorie Shostak, NISA, the Life and Words of A Kung! Woman
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People
Mark Nathan Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory
There’s actually a fair amount of evidence about how gather hunters lived, and it would not sit well with these ev psych people.
Also this paper is two years old! This is the most current thing they could dig up?
I have a longer quote in moderation, ut a look at actual quotes from the paper indicate that Dr. Moyziz, et al. are saying exactly what Amanda says they said.
Here’s a link to a Jared Diamond piece that explains some of it:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm
relurking now
The big problem with evolutionary psychology is that it’s more of a political straw man than an actual theory. Just about everyone from BF Skinner on have suggested that the kinks in our cognition came about due to evolution. However evolutionary psychologists don’t seem to be interested in the same kinds of questions that facinate the speech and hearing folks who ponder how we get most of our language before the age of five, or the memory folks who look at interesting quirks in how and what we remember.
A wise professor I had quipped that the way to make a name for yourself is to stand on a soapbox and say that everyone else is wrong, regardless of facts. And the evpsych folks have done just that much to the dismay of cognitive and developmental pyshologists.
Silly feminist!! Women don’t have babies between bouts of housework, women have babies between bouts of hysteria.
Cultural evolution…
Despite Anthro and History textbooks which invariably include an illo of primitive man bravely wielding a spear against mastodon or some such giant beast, the archeological evidence indicates that the primary source of protein for ancient humans was small game like rabbits, which were caught in snares also set by women.
But man strong, he hunt big, everybody have feast of giant ribs, woman gather salad, is the meme still being pushed by, well, you name it.
Even in textbooks with the correct info, you get ancient man against a rearing giant, and women cowering.
Which says more about our cultural conditioning, than ancient humankind.
As someone into S&M, I’d say its the reverse, matter over mind. You learn to live and enjoy the hardwiring you personally have, not the hardwiring you want, or the hardwiring of the majority of others…
Amanda, I think it starts with the whole idea that our brains are “wired,” whether ‘hardwired’ or ’softwired’. The metaphor of the wire comes from an image of the nerve that has long been obsolete. Nerves and wires aren’t really similar. This is actually important - the evolved plasticity of the brain wouldn’t be possible without the chemical interactions that constitute the way the neurons function.
I hereby call bullshit on those who claim that evolutionary psychology should be split between people who speculate in blogs and ‘real researchers.’ The only difference is one group sits in an armchair with a PhD on the wall behind it. Sure, you can’t have a full account of human psychology without accounting for human evolution. But the central premises of evo psych as a research agenda — by which I mean a set of theories and goals that guide the research — just don’t hold up under any pressure. For a primer, try David Buller’s ‘Adapting Minds.’
But I do want to quibble with the use of ‘hardwired’ here. It is often presumed that ‘hardwired’ means ‘formed before experience’ when we talk about human brains. But this is not the case. As the human brain develops, our neural networks are trimmed in response to our environment. We do become hardwired — but that is part of a process of development that is absolutely dependent on the evolved plasticity of our brains.
In other words, the selective pressures of evolutionary change have favored the brain’s plasticity, not its calcification. But that does not mean we have no ‘hardwiring.’ It means that what hardwiring we have is the result of a developmental process that is responsive to our environments.
Add a bunch of evolutionary biologists to the list; Steven Pinker, for one, has made a career out of pretending to know more evolutionary biology than they do. And he must, because his ideas are so controversial.Roger and I must have posted while I was writing. I hadn’t thought about that shortcoming of the whole wire metaphor before — I think he’s right on.
I’m not sure if it is cultural or biological, but it sure seems that conservatives give primacy to a backwards looking approach to some kind of Eden while liberals look forward to some sort of Valhalla.
Vir Modestus: Hence the terms Conservative and Progressive.
I always figured that if evo psych was even remotely true it would have been human males who usurped their “natural” roles not the females. Aren’t most social mammals usually led by an alpha male alpha female team, where the male’s job is to be big/scary and reproduce and the female takes up most of the leadership roles (where to go next, keeping the group together and basically doing all the intergroup management). So wouldn’t this make the case that women should be running the show with men being used as fun playthings/warriors? See how easy Evolutionary Psychology is ? All you need is to use a little (and I mean a little) information and you can get it to back up any point you have … Evolutionary Psychology is true! Now turn over the presidency to a woman and all males join the army, it’s the traditional thing to do
DeadMan
You know, evo psych is not inherently male supremacist or reinforcing of the status quo. It’s just that when it’s used that way, it gets more attention.
I mean you can use evo psych to “prove” that because women invest more in conceiving and birthing children, that women will generally speaking make better decisions for children than men will, and that therefore if you love children women should be in charge of everything, and specifically if you love your own children you should defer to your wife on any decision that doesn’t directly affect your job.
I will bet you that if someone wrote a paper “proving” that men are inferior leaders because they do not value children as highly as women do, it would not get nearly the ink in the media that papers “proving” male leadership skills do, and the same people who are all “OMG! You just object to that paper proving that men like busty blonde chicks because you’re too PC for science!” would be swearing that the scientists behind the paper were ball-busting man-haters. Even though there is, in fact, much better evidence, from primatology and cross-culturally and historically, that women are better for children than men are and should be in charge of any decision that could affect children’s lives, than there has ever been to say that men will always like big-busted blondes.
The problem isn’t evo psych per se. The problem is sexist representation of evo psych, which heavily favors ridiculously sexist paradigms. But you can use evo psych to “prove” that we should be a matriarchy, that men are naturally violent and therefore we should cull their population like we do with cattle herds, or other female supremacy arguments that never get *any* play in the media.
I am not actually in favor of female supremacy arguments, BTW; I use them as judo against bad sexist evo psych arguments, not as arguments in their own right. Perhaps the real problem with evo psych is that you can use it to “prove” *anything* and therefore it should never be used to “prove” anything. It’s a lot of interesting, fascinating theories that are inherently unprovable, and I enjoy it a lot but I would never in real life use it to try to prove a damn thing.
The problem is sexist representation of evo psych, which heavily favors ridiculously sexist paradigms.
Well, and sexist evo psych researchers who carefully slant their research. David M. Buss once referred to a fellow group of evo-psych researchers as “fifth columnists” when they published a paper casting doubt on his theories about jealousy.
The NYT lede says:
“Researchers analyzing variation in the human genome have concluded that human evolution accelerated enormously in the last 40,000 years under the force of natural selection.”
After we left Africa, then?
there was no end of non-reciprocal sexual favors being supplied men in exchange for mammoth meat or whatever.
Actually, the majority of food a hunter/gatherer family eats comes from the gathering aspect. So the men weren’t even particularly useful for finding food. Just for providing sperm and keeping the other men away. And now that firearms and sperm banks have eliminated both needs, perhaps we ought to ask whether it is worth letting a man who doesn’t go down hang around.
Well, I think it’s abundantly clear that we need to give these armchair evo psycho people a new name. If we keep using science terminology to describe their wacko ideas, we’re just helping their ridiculous arguments. Any ideas for a new name?
Not related: my pinkie toes are odd, same as my dad and my sister. My dad says they are “advanced toes” and that eventually humans will only have four toes. I don’t believe him, but I still like to call my toes “advanced.”
“Given that most of these selective events likely occurred in the last 10,000 - 40,000 years, a time of major population expansion out of Africa followed by regional shifts from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, it is tempting to speculate that gene - culture interactions directly or indirectly shaped our genomic architecture (46, 47).”
Wow. The racists are going to have a field-day with that.
after the major population expansion from Africa, but only the dumb racists will assume that there’s not any selection going on across all human populations including those in Africa.
Oh wait, dumb racists is redundant.
that came out completely incoherent.
Dumb racists will think that selection only happened outside Africa, conflating timing with location.
What’s interesting to me is that there seems to be no middle ground between two opposite points of view. Which, given that life isn’t black and white, is somewhat amusing.
This isn’t just limited to the evo-psych thing. I see it in a great many other situations where there is suggested to be some difference between two groups over some subject.
There’s almost an instinctual reaction on the part of one side to suggest that this cannot possibly be true, and on the other side that it’s never wrong, and never the twain shall meet. It seems impossible for many people to occupy the center ground.
Use an example I saw recently. Before I state it, the following warning: I have no opinion on whether it is true or not, So don’t assume any psychology on my part.
There’s a suggestion that men are more inclined to be competitive than women, that, in general, they are willing to sacrifice more in order to win. If this is true, other things being equal, we would expect to see more men as company executives and politicians and whatnot than women because they are more willing to sacrifice things in order to “win” in those careers that women aren’t. Therefore, even in the absence of any social or structural barriers, odds are women will not be proportionally represented at those levels.
Again, as I said, I don’t know if it’s true or not. But assume that it is. Let’s say that in a given population men will be more inclined to sacrifice and risk in order to achieve high status than women.
Does that tell me anything about a random man and woman just starting their careers? No. A general fact is not the same as a universal fact. Just because, on average, a population might demonstrate a certain trait more often doesn’t say anything about the individual.
The problem, of course, is what I mentioned. Some people use that as an excuse to judge the individual in the form of prejudice. Others will deny that such a difference might exist.
Sorry I’m a little late to the party, but here I am, wielding my sheepskin of Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ power.
If you click through to my blog, my two most recent posts are reviews of *good* books about evolutionary biology. The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, Jake Page wasn’t quite up to my expectations, but it’s a good backgrounder. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney & Robert M. Seyfarth is outstanding.
That’s what I thought too, Alara, so I went out to look for the journals EvPsychos publish in and see what the run-of-the-mill is.I discovered that their most important journal, Evolution & Human Behavior, is actually full of the most appalling crap — it’s the scientific equivalent of badfic. Typical lead article: “Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?” *bangs head on wall* The editorial board is full of psychologists and sociologists, but not anyone who has any kind of knowledge of evolution.
As far as I can tell, it’s an entire field of study that’s full of crap.
There’s a suggestion that men are more inclined to be competitive than women, that, in general, they are willing to sacrifice more in order to win.
Here’s the problem, Keith: most of those studies are done on college students. In other words, people who have already had 20+ years of social conditioning.
If they did the studies on, say, 6-month-old infants, that might — maybe — be indicative of something. But to claim that people who’ve already had years of social conditioning are actually acting because of evolutionary forces is pretty tenuous.
Remember that study that came out a few months ago that claimed to “prove” that females have an instinctive attraction to pink? Once again, that study was done on young male and female college students who’d been hearing “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” for pretty much their whole lives. And we’re supposed to think that had no influence on preferences? Really?
The editorial board is full of psychologists and sociologists?
you mean crazy people and stoners?
It’s sausage. They take all kinds of facts, and grind them up, and no matter what the facts are, all they get is, an, uh, sausage party.
//papers like this allways make me look at the delicate balance between natural selection and genetic drift in evolution.
All those tiny nomadic groups splitting up= genetic drift. All the malaria resistance and lactose tolerance =selection. but would those traits be in those same groups if the drift lottery had worked out differently?
//what the hell is the evolutionary advantage of having really dry earwax? Asians got shafted.
one of those fun both/and kind of questions.
Hmm, in this article it’s found that:
“Key to helping signals from this organ travel up neurons to reach the brain is a gene called Trpc2. After they knocked out this gene in mice, Harvard molecular neuroscientist Catherine Dulac and her colleagues found that females displayed uniquely masculine sexual behaviors, such as chasing, mounting and thrusting pelvises against mice, both male and female, as well as giving out ultrasonic mating calls and sniffing derrieres.”
and:
“”Our work suggests that neuronal circuits underlying male-specific behaviors develop and persist in the female mouse brain, but are repressed by the normal activity of the vomeronasal organ,” Dulac said.”
Now people don’t have this gene, so the same results don’t apply, but if male behavior isn’t hard-wired in mice why would it be in people?
Also, I saw the evolution bit from a different source and it had this:
“Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, which makes people resistant to HIV/AIDS, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 percent of the European population.
…
“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time—it’s 100 to 200 generations ago,” he said. “That’s how long it’s been since some of these genes originated, and today they are in 30 to 40 percent of people because they’ve had such an advantage. It’s like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’”
It certainly seems like evolution is still going on.
You can count me as one who will deny that such a difference exists.
The very idea that men are more competitive than women is nonsense. It’s the ways they compete that we should be interested in.
Whereas men are taught to be ruthless in business and earn a high salary as their form of competition, women are taught to starve themselves, sublimate their needs and desires to a man’s, and rely on a man for their economic livelihood by becoming an unpaid domestic servant and child-bearer.
There are plenty of housewives in Newport Beach who would scoff at the idea that they’re not competitive or that they didn’t risk anything to get high social status through marrying their lawyer-husbands.
I’m studying cognitive neuroscience, and my girlfriend is studying gender studies. In the last couple years she’s turned me into an unashamed feminist and I’ve taught her a lot about science. We spend a lot of time looking for common ground between evolutionary psychology and feminist theory and have reached the conclusion that they are 100% compatible.
The biggest problem, it seems, is that both camps focus on the other side’s most radical proponents. This post is great, Amanda, because you point out those on both sides who go a bit too far.
The radicals on the evo psych side are what you call “armchair evolutionary psychologists,” those who say that because we evolved a certain way “that’s the way life is supposed to be,” the status quo is justified, so I guess I’ll go beat my wife. These people are obviously wrong: there’s now way a moral claim about what should or shouldn’t be could follow from an empirical claim about evolution.
I’m glad you pointed out how the radicals on the other side of the debate are wrong. These people believe that prehistoric humans were peaceful and egalitarian, and that injustice etc. are byproducts of our corrupt society. Mounds of evidence are showing that this is dead wrong. The problem is that many of these people seem to have grounded their moral beliefs in this empirical claim, and are unable to separate attacks on their empirical beliefs from attacks on their moral beliefs (true, sometimes the moral beliefs are attacked - usually by the assholes I refer to in the paragraph above who make this whole reconciliation thing so much harder).
In summary, the evo psychers who go too far take an empirical claim about evolution and prehistory (one that I believe to be mostly true) and use it to justify moral beliefs (that I believe to be disgusting). On the other hand, those who are most resistant to evo psych have moral beliefs (that I mostly agree with) which they think rely on empirical claims about the root causes of certain behaviors.
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden.
I think it comes from our experiences of being protected during childhood — or perhaps a recollection of life in the womb.
Remember that study that came out a few months ago that claimed to “prove” that females have an instinctive attraction to pink? Once again, that study was done on young male and female college students who’d been hearing “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” for pretty much their whole lives.
It’s a shame we can’t get data from the 19th Century, when it was the other way round. Blue was the delicate feminine colour, and pink (as a lighter red, the shade of blood! and violence!) was clearly the more masculine shade.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=238733
The editorial board is full of psychologists and sociologists, but not anyone who has any kind of knowledge of evolution.
Now you see, one of the reasons why these debates drive me up the wall is because just about all of psychology is evolutionary psychology in a way. Talk to 100 psychologists, and about 98 will agree with the principle that our cognition is grounded in a brain that evolved from primate ancestor brains rather than a brain that was created in one day by a designer god.
But what makes me really skeptical of “evolutionary psychology” is that they never seem to be interested in the really interesting aspects of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. So for example, there was a case of a colorblind man who is also has synthesia and sees numbers outlined by what he calls “Martian colors.” Synthesia has some very interesting implications for looking at how we interpret meaning from abstract symbols, a process that is probably shoehorned onto processes that had more to do with fruit and bugs 2 million years ago.
They are pathologically not interested in the machinery of written language comprehension, something that involves cross wiring visual symbols with other forms of language processing. And there is a case where the serious study of how we see “dog” and think of Benji or Rex The Wonder Dog, or Lassie has some practical implications for helping people with written language disabilities. They are not interested in the cognitive similarities and differences between visual languages like ASL and verbal languages like English.
Instead, we get some just so story about how pole dancers get tips. A subject that I’m pathologically not interested in. I don’t care about just so stories about gender roles over 100,000 years of evolution. Tell me about the constraints and limits of how people pick out relevant information from a complex world so I can design better and more humane user interfaces. Tell me about how people map visual symbols to linguistic ones so that I can teach language more effectively. Tell me about what we can expect across the population distribution so I can design instructional systems that work for a wide variety of learning styles. Tell me about changes in cognition across the lifespan so that I can make more humane care systems for my parents. All of these are needs that are grounded in the evolution of the human mind, but which are neglected by “evolutionary psychology” as a paradigm.
“Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?” *bangs head on wall* The editorial board is full of psychologists and sociologists, but not anyone who has any kind of knowledge of evolution.
Or of lap dancing. The reason earnings go down during the dancer’s periods is that they’re having their periods. You bloat, you don’t feel good, you probably take a day off because the customers don’t like getting bled on and you don’t want to change your tampon and wash every half hour.
What a bunch of dumbasses.
One of the points Jared Diamond makes in “Guns Germs & Steel” IIRC is that hunting/gathering selects *more* strongly for intelligence than does a settled agricultural lifestyle.
You all know that pre-20th century societies had high infant mortality from infectious diseases, right? Well, all of those diseases (except malaria) only became important in the past 10,000 years or much less. Far from natural selection being “halted” since agriculture, selection for disease resistance has become enormously stronger. Because farming cultures have unbalanced diets compared to h/gs, there’s also been strong selection for various nutritional specialities: gluten or lactose tolerance, for instance.
I think it extremely probable that what you might call the “genetic intelligence” of the average human has *decreased* in the last 10,000 years, because the chance an infant will make it to age 5 has consistently depended more on her disease resistance than on her parents’ intelligence.
Throw willingness to conform up there on the favored sons of natural selection. Since we agriculturalists have beaten the living shite out of the hunter/gatherers and whupped up on the sheepherders, gigantic city-states have become the order of the day, and those don’t like rebels and deviants.
On a different note, I have a VASTLY different take on the idea of Eden. It, and parallels, always represented not a physical paradise, but presentience. In the case of Eden in particular, it’s pretty clear that A&E were not full “humans,” as we see it, until they broke the rules. For a monkey, three squares a day and freedom from disease, combined with consequence-free copulation, is utter and complete paradise. Through in higher saphience and suddenly the ape realizes he’s in a prison — a nice prison, but a prison nonetheless. Bye-bye paradise.
I’m with Doctor Science on the issue of selection for intelligence, up to a point. Agriculture, which we’ve had for at least 10k years, is almost certainly less demanding than hunting and gathering, though probably less nourishing. On the other hand, it doesn’t select against intelligence, either.
Popular evolutionary psychology, of the “men are polygamous, women are monogamous” sort, is simply silly. We don’t even know if the conclusions the explanations purport to explain are even true. Moreover, the sorts of behavior described are well within the realm of culture and economics. If people already had rules regulating conduct (and once we got language, we had rules) and rudimentary economic knowledge, we don’t need genetic explanations.
(Long aside on the reprogrammability of the brain: a couple of years ago an earwax buildup left me mostly deaf on one side for a few weeks. I soon regained some stereo capability, perhaps by exploiting my other ear’s 3D discrimination, and once I had the ear cleaned I heard double for an hour or so. Our big brains are pretty plastic, infinitely adaptable.)
Let’s talk about white skin, blond hair and blue eyes. None of these is, as far as I can tell, actually an adaptive trait. Outside of Europe, the polar people have light skin but dark hair and eyes. The blue & blond traits have to be the result of sexual selection.
bad Jim:
Yes it does, because brains & immune systems are both hugely expensive to run — that’s why the immune system does most of its work while we’re asleep, because we can’t really run both at the same time. In H.sapiens populations, at least, I think there’s a third type of selection that hasn’t been studied much yet: artificial selection or domestication, via e.g. arranged marriages and other external social factors. The extreme human variation in superficial traits (such as skin color or hair texture) with not a whole lot of genetic variation is more like what you get with domestic animals than with wild populations.Evo Psych is a made up field. It is ALL better studies in other fields. It is completely unnecessary and should be discredited for the junk science that it is. Any support for it is giving credence ot the sexist pigs who are trying to paint on a veneer of legitimacy to tear women down.
Oops, *better studied.
Coming in very late because I have a pantload of papers to write, but:
Dr. Science, what you said inspires me to
pull a theory out of my assmake up an ev-psych theory about Why White People Are So Stupid:Consider in the Middle Ages, in much of Western Europe, the most intelligent people chose (or were chosen for) the monastic life, because literacy was considered a province of nuns and monks (and in the case of women, nuns were often the ONLY ones who knew how to read and write). Therefore, many of the smartest people failed to pass on their genes. And since this was pretty much exclusive to Europe, where the white people roamed, White People Became Really Stupid.
Owch. Now my ass hurts from pulling the theory out. But my point is the same as Alara’s, really - you can take a historical factoid (or make ‘em up, as most ev-psychs do for the Pleistocene, because how much do we really know about how people lived then? Jean Auel probably knows as much as anyone) and make it suit any agenda you wish to push.
And speaking of white people being stupid, I also read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel - and still remember his noting that he looked really stupid to New Guineans who knew how to build a fire from scratch, navigate through a dense rainforest, and so on; also how he thought that the average New Guinean was smarter than the average Westerner, due to more interaction with the environment and other people and less time spent watching TV.
Let’s talk about white skin, blond hair and blue eyes. None of these is, as far as I can tell, actually an adaptive trait. Outside of Europe, the polar people have light skin but dark hair and eyes. The blue & blond traits have to be the result of sexual selection.
I saw a theory that it was due to differences in diet and Vitamin D production — the Inuit and similar peoples were eating proteins like seal, which also have a hefty dose of Vitamin D in their blubber, but the Europeans weren’t doing that, so they adapted. Then someone else argued that was wrong, but I can’t remember why, so I’m back to being confused.
The extreme human variation in superficial traits (such as skin color or hair texture) with not a whole lot of genetic variation is more like what you get with domestic animals than with wild populations.
I think I could buy that, especially since many European tribes (like Goths and Vikings) were well-known for raiding up and down the coasts of Europe and taking whatever they wanted, including women/girls, so there was a literal selection going on.
However, I think we also tend to underestimate the number of non-Europeans with “European” coloring. Queen Noor of Jordan is blonde, blue-eyed, and 100% Lebanese. Simply from walk-down-the-street observation, there’s a wider range of hair colors and textures among Asians than many people assume (the assumption is usually “black” and “straight,” but it’s more like “a range of browns to black” and “between wavy and straight”). Etc.
On the contrary, mnemosyne, Queen Noor is a sterling example of why you shouldn’t go to Lebanon looking for ethnic purity: her mother was Swedish/English-American, her current blondeness is clearly bottled, and her eyes are hazel.
The rape&pillage selection you’re talking about would fall under the heading of “sexual selection”. What I’m talking about is the more pervasive way that third parties select humans’ mates. To pick the example you’ve introduced, Lisa Halaby’s marriage to King Hussein was not just a matter of their choice, but also of their families’ association and approval. This is where artificial selection or domestication acts: when outsiders control a creature’s reproduction.
On the contrary, mnemosyne, Queen Noor is a sterling example of why you shouldn’t go to Lebanon looking for ethnic purity: her mother was Swedish/English-American, her current blondeness is clearly bottled, and her eyes are hazel.
Which, again, kinda says the same thing I was saying: you can’t look at people in a particular area and say that they’ve looked the same for the past 10,000 years, because humans are constantly migrating, and it didn’t all happen within the past 50 years, either. Humans have been constantly traveling and migrating and mingling with other groups of humans even after particular groups were established.
IIRC, some of the people with the oldest genes on the planet are the aboriginal people in Australia, who are relatively isolated. For years, researchers looked at them and “knew” that they must have sailed straight from Africa, because they have dark skin, curly hair, and other outward signs that we all “know” Africans have. Recent genetic testing, however, has shown that not only are these Australians actually Polynesians (as was long suspected), the groups that they’re most distantly related to, genetically speaking, are continental Africans, even though they physically resemble them on a superficial level.
This is where artificial selection or domestication acts: when outsiders control a creature’s reproduction.
Oh, just go ahead and blame the patriarchy. We all know what you mean.
“Which, again, kinda says the same thing I was saying: you can’t look at people in a particular area and say that they’ve looked the same for the past 10,000 years, because humans are constantly migrating, and it didn’t all happen within the past 50 years, either. Humans have been constantly traveling and migrating and mingling with other groups of humans even after particular groups were established.”
I always figured that the fact humans can interbreed with no problems is prima facie evidence that we have never been too isolated from one another. Humans are too social (even an antisocial asshole like me) to stay away from other people for long…
Actually, I’m blaming the yentas.
*chortles…guffaws…giggles*
Dr. Science - I think it’s important to remember how controlled reproduction was for many people - not just women - throughout much of history. As Stephanie Coontz pointed out, arranged marriages were the norm, and no, young men really didn’t have much more choice than women did. Rich men could keep mistresses, but the vast majority of men had one wife who was chosen for them by their families.
Antonia Fraser, in her Wives of Henry VIII, pointed out how eccentric Henry VIII was thought to be by his kingly peers - imagine wanting to marry for love! In particular, King Francois of France, who did the usual royal thing (marrying the Holy Roman Emperor’s homely sister while keeping a pretty noble French mistress) thought that Catherine Howard’s adultery was worthy of many lulz. Oh that Hal, marrying a girl half his age for love, expecting fidelity - ROFL! There was also much consternation among royals and Henry’s nobles alike when Henry rejected Anne of Cleves - rejecting a suitable bride of noble birth “because she is ugly” just Was Not Done. Henry, in everyone’s opinion but his own, should have just sucked it up and stayed married to Anne. George IV had to suck it up and marry Caroline of Brunswick and father a child by her, even though he didn’t love her at all.
I can accept that free choice prevailed amongst us in our hunter/gatherer phase, because most h/g peoples don’t have strictly arranged marriages and allow both men and women freedom to divorce for any cause. Nisa, the subject of Marjorie Shostak’s bio, had three husbands, all of whom she divorced. But even h/g men and women were expected to take their families’ opinions in mind when marrying, and to pick someone “suitable.”
Yes, Ailurophile, that’s *exactly* what I’m talking about., and I’m betting it’s been going on for at *least* 100,000 years (all of H. sapiens). AFAIK no-one has yet considered what the genetic consequences of various types of arranged marriages might be, but it occurred to me that the closest parallel is domestication.
Many types of cats (and dogs) are what is called “natural breeds” — like Maine Coon cats or Japanese Bobtails. The technical definition is that natural breeds arise “without selective breeding”, but that’s nonsense. What they mean is that natural breeds arise without much *planned* breeding more than “breed the best to the best and hope for the best”. Many “heirloom” varieties of plants arose the same way: without the domesticating humans having a conscious, generations-long plan, but still having behavior and preferences that influence which domestic organisms survive.
And one thing that always happens with domestic animals is that even the most “natural” breeds come in more colors than are found in nature. The superficial diversity of human populations reminds me of the natural breeds of cats: mostly in color, somewhat in hair texture, face shape, etc. — as though we, too, have been lightly domesticated.
The superficial diversity of human populations reminds me of the natural breeds of cats: mostly in color, somewhat in hair texture, face shape, etc. — as though we, too, have been lightly domesticated.
Oddly, the first time I saw that comparison was when animator Chuck Jones made it in his book Chuck Amuck.
I miss him.