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Topic: human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc. (Read 947 times) |
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the.bricoleur
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human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc.
« on: 2004-08-16 05:13:52 » |
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I stumbled across this post and thought that since it was critical of memes, EP, Pinker, Dawkins, etc. it would stir some interesting debate. It was itself sparked by talk of human nature.
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I accept the reality that humans are a product of naturalistic evolution, and that people aren't naturally "good" or entirely culturally determined. However, I disagree a great deal with the ideas of Pinker, Dawkins and their ilk.
Humans have two natures. One is human nature "in the raw", so to speak; the other is human nature in a given society. That's not to say that there aren't any constants; but humans are still undeniably shaped a great deal by their social surroundings.
In tribal society, the group was valued above the individual, and this was part of their nature. In slave states, people were thought to be divided into "Natural Kinds", some naturally mastering others. And in feudal society, your "nature" was determined by your place in society, which was largely determined by the family into which you were born.
In each of these societies, ideas of human nature were informed by ideology; that is, the dominant ideas of the time -- the ideas of the ruling classes. They were usually the ones who were educated, and were always the ones who controlled the production of knowledge.
The rise of capital brought with it a new idea of human nature: atomistic individualism. The best summary of this view is probably Thatcher's (in)famous remark that there's "no such thing as society", just individuals and their families. The community is no more than the sum of its parts.
With the rise of capital came the advent of modern science. The traditional idea of science -- still unfortunately held by many today -- was that it was "value-neutral" and uninformed by ideology.
But science is just as ideologically driven as anything else. Some people will observe things that others do not or perceive them differently, based on their values and experiences, and ask different questions and so test different hypotheses for the same reasons. Experimentation and conclusion making also reflects such biases. And peer review often serves only to enforce orthodoxy.
These scientific ideologies are what Kuhn called paradigms. Most scientists, throughout most of their careers, are merely solving puzzles within a certain paradigm. Occasionally, research will produce anomalous results that don't match the dominant paradigm, and so all sorts of cumbersome supplementary hypotheses will have to be created. But a paradigm can always be salvaged. The motions of the planets can be predicted very well utilizing pre-Copernican paradigms.
Paradigms are typically upset only by introducing ideology. And until such upsetting events happen, most scientists will be expected to work within a paradigm if they want to advance their careers.
So it should come as no surprise that there is a long tradition of atomism and reductionism in Western science. It reflects the dominant values of Western society.
In addition to all these pressures, there's the simple fact that most scientists in the West are white, male, and well-off; and many of those actually involved in important research run in elite circles, interacting with captains of industry and political powerbrokers, attending the same parties, sending their kids to the same schools, and so on.
* * *
Darwin's theory of evolution was quickly seized upon by so-called "social Darwinists" to justify inequalities, somewhat to his dismay, and by eugenicists. Of course, in retrospect, his theory didn't provide a very solid basis for the views of either camp, and it is clear that in many cases they did't really understand Darwinism.
Nonetheless, grave human rights abuses were committed in the name of eugenics. Most states passed mandatory sterilization laws. Even many Leftists drank the Kool-Aid.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, such ideas became understandably unattractive, and it was thought that culture played a greater role than biology. Perhaps most symbolic of this shift was the UNESCO statement declaring that there was no evidence of innate differences between "races", and that inequalities between them are social in origin.
By the 1960s, however, the lessons of the Holocaust had been largely forgotten. Anti-war demonstrations filled the streets and blacks, Chicanos, and women struggled for equal rights. Not coincidentally, a string of "pop ethology" books claiming to "prove" humankind's inherent wickedness -- The Naked Ape, The Imperial Animal, and The Territorial Imperative -- were published that decade.
There was open talk of lobotomizing rioting blacks. And in 1969, Arthur Jensen published his infamous article in the Harvard Educational Review arguing that early intervention programs were doomed to failure because of the inherent stupidity of African Americans.
So we can see a recognizable pattern. When suspect classes act to improve their social position, those "above" them move to assert their privilege. Jensen likely attended his share of cocktail parties in which rich white folks denounced blacks for not "knowing their place", and these values no doubt informed his "research". (In fact, there's some evidence of some downright conspirational behavior among the Jensen camp, but that's another story.)
By the 1970s, the backlash was in full effect. Numerous stories proclaimed the early death of feminism, and women were supposedly overwhelmed by supposedly total equality they'd already acheived and consequently depressed, indicating that they weren't fit for the business world. Post-war prosperity came to an end, and the New Right began its steady ascent, fueled by angry white men looking to asset their position vis-a-vis uppity women and minorities. Atomistic individualism was reborn.
It was against this backdrop that in 1975 Harvard published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson. It received the kind of promotion that few academic books ever get. The press loved it and plugged it like crazy. It came in a coffee table format and had a sizeable glossary of academic terms -- obviously intended for mass consumption.
Most of the book was a decent overview of animal societies, but that's certainly not what Harvard -- a university with deep ties to elite interests -- wanted to promote. They were interested in the 2 chapters on human societies, in which Wilson insinuated and in some cases said outright that humans are naturally greedy, territorial, violent, and racist; and essentially argued for the reduction of sociology and anthropology to biology.
Of course, there wasn't the slightest bit of anthropological, psychological, or sociological evidence to back up Wilson's assertions. Wilson's ideas were attacked by several colleagues, including eminent scientists such as Richard Lewontin, Jon Beckwith, Ruth Hubbard, and Stephen Jay Gould. The American Anthropological Association almost passed a resolution condemning the book. This intellectual tug-of-war became known as the Sociobiology Wars, and was in many ways a prelude to today's Science Wars.
Evolutionary psychologists like to try to explain the controversy as nothing more than a bunch of left-wing scientists who objected to Objective Science only because they disliked its political implications. This is a gross oversimplification that doesn't even approach the whole truth.
Objective science is impossible. Wilson's biggest critics were indeed left-wingers, but they stated their bias out front and allowed the reader to decide.
Wilson, on the other hand, has never been transparent about his politics. In an early post-Sociobiology interview, he claimed to be a right-libertarian; these days he's frequently claimed to be a "lifelong liberal Democrat", though how one could claim to be such a thing while at the same time insisting that women could never make it in the business world and that it might be wise to let poor people starve is beyond me, and I suspect that it's merely a PR move. Indeed, in his private correspondence, Wilson has spoken approvingly of the ideas of Canadian professor J. Phillipe Rushton, who postulates a negative correlation between penis size and intelligence, such that blacks are naturally less intelligent than whites.
An interesting side note: many are familiar with the story of students storming the stage and dumping ice water on Wilson during a debate between he and Gould at an AAAS conference. Less well-known is the fact that the students were black, and that after being attacked, Wilson exclaimed that he felt like he’d been speared by a band of aborigines.
Wilson's admirers also point out they he's into environmental causes. But hell, so were the Nazis. Ecology wasn't really associated with the Left until relatively recently, and in fact conservationism was throughout most of American history allied with the political Right.
In any case, no one accused Wilson of having a conscious political bias. They rather accused him of having an ideological, not-necessarily-conscious biases formed by his social position and the values of his society at the time. It's very easy to have on without the other. As I noted, many leftists were enthusiastic eugenicists.
So it wasn't just a concern of politically motivated scientists. It was a matter of scientists who saw sociobiology as little more than an expression of the dominant ideology. To paraphrase Gould, as scientists, they already dealt with several uncomfortable facts, not least among them the fact that they someday would die.
Wilson was soon joined by his colleague Robert Trivers, as well as Richard Dawkins, David Barash, and others. Most of them, like Wilson, sprinkled their texts with political statements. One has to wonder: if they objected so vehemently to be criticized on political grounds, then why were they so eager to make policy recommendations?
In part because of the attacks of Lewontin and his peers, most sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers didn’t really take sociobiology seriously. There were exceptions, of course, and a number of important researchers – notably Napoleon Chagnon – worked within a sociobiological paradigm.
* * *
By the 1990s, backlash was in full swing. The Right was in power. Real wages had fallen significantly since 1973, unemployment had risen steadily, and more and more were without health insurance. Minorities, women, gays, immigrants, and secularists were blamed. On talk radio and in the public arena, thinly-veiled racism and sexism became acceptable, and those who objected were accused of “political correctness”.
The ideological stage was set. In 1992, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby published The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. EP is nothing more than “rebranded sociobiology”, as Dawkins said. But in this decade, its ideas became extremely popular. At last, a “scientific” justification for the culture wars and attacks on the social safety net!
In addition to this ideological force, there was another factor driving EP: the now-massive influence of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms in government, the media, and academic and professional organizations.
And I honestly do think that some EPs are driven by something like a religious impulse. For more on this point, check out “Less Selfish Than Sacred?” by Dorothy Nelkin in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose and “The Dream of the Human Genome” by Richard Lewontin in It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions. There’s a postmodernist philosopher who’s been mocked by the science warriors or asking, “Do you believe in DNA?” But he wasn’t asking whether or not people believe literary in DNA; of course they do. He was asking if they believed in D-N-A in the same way that they believe in G-O-D.
* * *
Now I’ll try to articulate a critique of evolutionary psychology from a scientific perspective.
Evolutionary psychologists subscribe to what others have called, and what I would call, ultra-Darwinism. The tenets of ultra-Darwinism are as follows:
· The gene is the only unit of selection.
· All traits can be explained as adaptations.
· Evolution occurs gradually; and even if it doesn’t, there’s nothing of value in punctuated equilibrum.
The most objectionable (to me) of these claims, yet the most ubiquitous, is that the gene is the fundamental unit of selection.
At one time, DNA was thought of as just another molecule. Then, in the earlier half of this century – a time when atoms were thought to hold the key to everything in physics – institutions responsible for funding research demanded that life scientists discover biological atoms.
And so this paradigm has been prevalent for decades now. But it’s beginning to crumble. The assertion of a previous poster that people are just “genes + memes” really made me cringe.
There’s much more to organisms than genes. Genes aren’t the only things that are inherited. Cytoplasmic gradients, membrane templates, centrioles, methylation patterns, gut microorganisms, chemical traces from the maternal diet, and fetal olfaction are also inherited (among other things), and are just as important to evolution and development.
Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “a gene for” anything. The great majority of traits are controlled by more than one gene, and most genes perform more than one task. There’s a very complex web of diverse, interlocking interactions. The genome can’t be separated into sections coding for discrete “traits”.
Dawkins defends himself on this point by referring to “coalitions” of genes cooperating for survival. But since genes don’t map on to discreet traits, the only coalition can be that of the whole organism.
Dawkins’ defenders would say, then, that the difference between genic selectionism and organismic selectionism are merely aesthetic. Even Dawkins has said that the former can be represented as the latter. But this doesn’t work, because a good scientific theory has to be predictive. And the gene-centric view of evolution is not predictive – but the organismic view is (see “Artificact, Cause, and Genic Selection” by Elliott Sober and Richard Lewontin). Genes are at best just bookkeepers.
Perhaps more important than all of the above, culture is also inherited, and it plays a huge role in both human and nonhuman animals. And it can’t be reduced to “memes” anymore than the organism can be reduced to genes. Memetics, though now part of pop culture and fashionable among cyberculture types, isn’t taken seriously by much of anyone in the social sciences. In truth, it’s already been tried; it was called cultural diffusion, and it largely died out half a century ago.
The next claim – that all traits are adaptive – is obviously false. Many traits have no adaptive value; they’re merely structural byproducts or leftovers from previous forms. Further, natural selection isn’t the only mechanism of evolution – there’s also drift and molecular drive.
EPs usually deny being panadaptationists, but this denial is rarely reflected in practice. Perhaps the most ridiculous instance of such thinking in recent memory was Pinker’s claim that mowing our lawns is a throwback to the African savannas. In fact, the practice originated in early modern English enclosures' leaving large sheep meadows that could then come to represent wealth even more purely without the sheep.
Punctuated equilibrium is important because it brings to light three significant points: first, species are real, not arbitrarily defined. Second, species tend to remain relatively stable over long periods of time.
Most important to this debate, though, is the fact that of punk eek is correct, then each species should be specialized to perform certain tasks. Humans, unlike other animals, are generalists. Their specialty must therefore be culture.
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It’s also becoming increasingly apparent that EP’s vision of the mind is seriously flawed. Pinker tries to make it sound in his book like neuroscience has vindicated his views. In fact, in recent years, there’s been a drift away from modular views of the mind, in favor of connectionist approaches. Pinker is part of an ever-shrinking minority. Many researchers in the area don’t accept the modularity of the mind, and most of those who do don’t feel that the human mind emerged as an adaptation. Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky are both exemplars of this latter stance.
Another big problem with EP’s idea of the mind and brain is that of gene shortage. The Human Genome Project has discovered that humans have only around 30,000 genes. That’s around 33 billion synapses per gene, and less than three times as many as a fruit fly.
Pinker says that this doesn’t matter; that gene interactions are more complex in human beings. Indeed they are more complex, but that still doesn’t allow for innatist arguments to be sustained. Paul Ehrlich puts it best:
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It might be argued that since a relative handful of genes can control our basic body plan—one’s height depends on millions of the body’s cells’ being stacked precisely— a handful could also determine our behavioral phenome. Genes initiate a process of development that might be analogized with the way a mountain stream entering a floodplain can initiate the development of a complex delta. Why, then, couldn’t just a few genes have evolved to program millions of our behaviors? In theory they might have, but in that case human behavior would be very stereotyped. Consider the problem of evolving human behavioral flexibility under such circumstances of genetic determination. Changing just one behavioral pattern—say, making women more desirous of mating with affluent men—would be somewhat analogous to changing the course of one distributary (branch in the delta) without altering the braided pattern of the rest of the delta. It would be difficult to do by just changing the flow of the mountain stream (equivalent to changing the genes) but easily accomplished by throwing big rocks in the distributary (changing the environment).
This partial analogy seems particularly apt in that it is apparently difficult for evolution to accomplish just one thing at a time. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is the complexity of interactions among alleles and phenotypic traits, especially pleiotropy and epistasis. Because there are relatively so few of them, most genes must be involved in more than one process (pleiotropy). Then if a mutation leads to better functioning of one process, it may not be selected for because the change might degrade the functioning of another process. And changes in one gene can modify the influence of another in very complex ways (epistasis). Second, because they are physically coupled to other genes on the same chromosome, the fates of genes are not independent. Selection that increases the frequency of one allele in a population will often, because of linkage, necessarily increase the frequency of another. Selection favoring a gene that made one prefer tall mates might also result in the increase of a nearby gene that produced greater susceptibility to a childhood cancer.
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Talk about EEA.
* * *
EPs like to accuse sociology, psychology and anthropology of adhering to something they call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), essentially holding that the mind and behavior are infinitely malleable. This is a strawman argument with almost no basis in reality. It serves the same purpose as the “liberal media” claims of the political Right – bullying public forums into giving your ideas more time and credence than they deserve by manufacturing false claims of bias.
No European sociology holds such a view of human nature. Marx clearly had an idea of a fixed human nature, as did Comte, and Weber as well. The concepts of the labor theory of value, anomie, alienation, rationalization, and the iron law of oligarchy all attempt to say important things about human nature. My own background is in sociology, and I really have no idea how Tooby and Cosmides can make some of the claims they make.
Psychology and psychiatry have been dominated by biological approaches for the last quarter of a century, thanks in no small part to the disgusting influence of drug companies on those professions. It’s even been suggested that psychologists should be given the right to prescribe drugs and that psychiatrists shouldn’t learn psychotherapy. Humanistic psychology has an idea of human nature by definition. And only the most radical behaviorists ever claimed that organisms have no innate mental capacities.
Anthropology, similarly, has been characterized by a number of theoretical perspectives, all of them implying something different about human nature. Pinker quotes Boas, Mead, and Montagu out of context to make them sounds like they were Blank Slate-ists, but anyone who’s at all familiar with their work knows they’re not. Mead especially was (contrary to the contentions of EPs and their allies) very receptive to biological approaches, as anyone who’s read Male and Female can attest. She was single-handedly responsible for preventing the AAA from officially condemning E.O. Wilson.
* * *
But the most damning criticisms of EP – or at least, those with which I’m most familiar – are those of its “just-so stories” and “phantom facts”.
Here’s the EP method:
1. State that some behavior or belief is a human universal.
2. Assume that it’s innate.
3. Construct a story of what might have happened in the “environment of evolutionary adaptation” (EEA) to create such an innate predisposition.
Given such a dubious method, EPs are even more susceptible to bias than real scientists. This has resulted in them:
1. Stating that behaviors or beliefs are universal, when in fact they are not.
2. Falsely assuming that because a behavior or belief is universal or nearly so, it must be biologically innate.
3. Constructing a stories based on evidence that is outdated, contentious, or nonexistent.
Incest avoidance is not universal. Male dominance is arguably not universal today, and almost certainly wasn’t in the past.
Universality is just as well explained by materialist, cultural, and ecological theories as biological ones.
And as far as the just-so stories go: they’re legion. In the following passage (from “10,00 Years of Tribal Warfare: History, Science, Ideology, and the ‘State of Nature’”), anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson discusses how EPs have either misread or lied about the work of Napoleon Chagnon:
quote:
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Beyond this particular issue, it is truly surprising to see how many psychological Darwinist theories on war and aggression crash against Chagnon's ethnography. Contrary to Cosmides and Buss, Chagnon makes it clear that Yanomami men do not initiate raids in order to capture women. Contrary to Daly and Wilson, to Wiener and Mesquida, and to Maschner and Maschner, Yanomami wars are not impelled by young bachelors but by middle-aged married men. Young men are frightened apprentices. Also contrary to Daly and Wilson, Pinker, and Hrdy, there is no suggestion that Yanomami men demand the killing of children a new wife brings from a previous marriage. Contrary to Wrangham and Peterson, Yanomami warfare does not follow the same pattern as that of Gombe chimpanzees, such as in patrolling borders or only attacking when there is no danger of losses. Also contrary to Wrangham, they do not parallel Gombe mating patterns of males remaining at home while females relocate to other groups, as the Yanomami preference is village endogamy, occasional external alliance marriages notwithstanding.Contrary to E.O. Wilson-in no less than the foreword to the trade edition of Yanomamo-Yanomami warfare is not territorial. Chagnon emphasizes that it is impossible to find in it a territorial purpose or consequence. Contrary to Tooby and Cosmides, all three elements of their hypothetical evolved "risk contract for war," involving risks, punishments and rewards, are contradicted by Chagnon's descriptions. Contrary to Shaw and Wong, allegiances in war do not follow genetic relatedness. True, Chagnon does suggest that in analyzing "The Axe Fight," but before his turn to sociobiology, he stated repeatedly that male blood kin are as likely to be adversaries as allies in violence. Finally, contrary to Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ghiglieri, Fox and others, Yanomami are not reacting in war with instinctive hostility to strangers or against those who are culturally different. Chagnon stresses they usually fight individuals they know only too well.
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Chagnon himself, of course, has never taken issue with these portrayals. Ideology comes before scholarship.
* * *
Finally, there are some other recurring methodological flaws in research conducted by EPs and behavioral geneticists (most of whom are actually psychologists). These are borrowed from Steven Rose’s Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene:
1. Reification – converting a dynamic process to a static phenomenon. For example, violence is a term used for certain interactions between persons or between organisms and their environment. EPs convert it to a static phenomenon, “aggression”.
2. Arbitrary agglomeration – lumping together diverse reified reactions as if they were all the same thing. Aggression is used to describe “fights between football fans, strikers resisting police, racist attacks on ethnic minorities, and civil and national wars”. But clearly they’re different things.
3. Improper quantification – heritability estimates are generally meaningless as applied to humans.
4. The assumption of the norm – assuming that such quantifications are normally distributed.
5. Spurious localization – trying to locate a reified, arbitrarily agglomerated, improperly quantified trait in a certain part of the brain or a gene.
6. Confusing correlation and causation.
7. And forgetting that “the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”
* * *
My own view of human nature is this:
Humans are intensely social animals. They are also the only animals that have fully developed language, the only animals that make tools, and the only animals that are consciously self-creative.
Because of these traits, cultural evolution has been and probably will always be the engine of human history. Humans are animals, but they are not just animals. We are special. We alone have the ability to master our environment.
The mind is not massively modular. Emotions are largely innately specified, but cognitive functions are not. The human mind is best envisioned as a network of “weights” corresponding to various simple cognitive functions that are made lighter or heavier by experience.
Nature and nurture are inseparable. There is a dialectical relationship between the two. Humans are born with certain innate disposition to construct their surroundings in certain ways; these surroundings in turn effect affect their personalities and behaviors, which in turn encourages them to further construct their environments in certain ways, which further influences the mind and behavior, and so on.
Humans nature is shaped in the first place by the natural environment, which gives way to technological and so economic innovation. The economy impacts human nature in certain ways, which gives way to culture. Culture reinforces and influences economy; and radical cultural change is almost always a product of radical economic change.
The human mind is not a blank slate or separate from the body. And people are not all the same, either in potential or in actuality. But culture and learning does play a considerably larger role than genes.
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
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Re:human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc.
« Reply #1 on: 2004-08-16 07:08:44 » |
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[bricoleur]
human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc.
I stumbled across this post and thought that since it was critical of memes, EP, Pinker, Dawkins, etc. it would stir some interesting debate. It was itself sparked by talk of human nature.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
That was well worth posting. It can keep us busy for months. I have to be away for a couple of weeks but I'll jump right in as soon as I am back.
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michelle
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Re:human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc.
« Reply #2 on: 2004-08-17 15:04:17 » |
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Who was the original poster? I'm going to print it out and think about it for several hours... it makes a lot of sense, but in a similar way to Taoism - "things are the way they are because there is no other way for them to be" sort of mindset. Must digest before speaking!
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Beyond the gate of Experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.
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michelle
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Re:human nature - critical view of EP, memes, Dawkins, etc.
« Reply #4 on: 2004-08-20 11:55:46 » |
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Thanks for the link! Excellent reading. 
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Beyond the gate of Experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.
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