It's so unobjectionable that there's not much to say about it. But perhaps somebody will prove me wrong.
The article may be unobjectionable (I don't actually know; I haven't read it yet), but I predict that at least one person will object to the post.
Having now read the article, it's quite good.
The NYer publishes articles about science that don't get retracted?
Has anyone collected all the "back on the veldt" stories to give us a complete picture of paleolithic homo sapiens? I predict that such a compendium would be extremely funny.
Someone I know/used to know/wouldn't be surprised if any other UKUnfoggeteers knew too is writing this - http://www.womanology.co.uk/ I've been loath to link because, awkwardly, I am worried about being mentioned, but it does seem like perfect Mineshaft fodder.
It's embarrassing that the New Yorker is now publishing articles by people who don't seem to be aware that Claudius is Hamlet's uncle.
Also, "how ridiculous that evo-psych is so interested in evolutionary explanations for women's physiology! I will now speculate for 200 words on evolutionary explanations for women's physiology".
On the veldt, men who speculated about what women's physiology had been like in the trees were able to impress mates with their erudition, so now for evolutionary reasons it's hard for men to resist speculating on veldty female physiology.
It's embarrassing that the New Yorker is now publishing articles by people who don't seem to be aware that Claudius is Hamlet's uncle.
Also technically his stepfather, no? After he marries Gertrude.
Point is, though, that stepfathers are more likely to be violent than fathers because they aren't genetically related to their children. This doesn't apply to Claudius, who is actually related to Hamlet. It's a bad example.
You're not going to trick me into defending ev psych again, oh no.
Anyhow, that article's pretty dopey, and awfully reductionist for somebody who is apparently offended by reductionism.
FOR INSTANCE:
In theory, if you did manage to trace how the brain was shaped by natural selection, you might shed some light on how the mind works. But you don't have to know about the evolution of an organ in order to understand it.
Also:
Natural selection would have played some role in the development of any such general aversions, which may have their origins in distant species, somewhere far back down the line that leads to us. But that's another story, one that evolutionary psychologists have less interest in telling, because they like tales about early man.
That's dopey, too. None of the work on fear of spiders argues that it's specifically a human trait, also evolutionary psychologists are gaga for comparative animal cognition research, also it's an ev psych argument.
In conclusion, I agree with ajay and essear, but have to go work on my talk.
12: Genetically, he should beat Hamlet 1/2 as much as he beats his own kids and 1/4 as much as he beats himself.
UKUnfoggeteers
I keep briefly interpreting UK as University of Kentucky before the context settles in to turn it into United Kingdom, despite *never once* having meant the former here. Does this provincialism make my ass look big?
14: Not if he assumes that killing Hamlet will result in Gertrude coming back into oestrus. This is yet another missed plot strand that should be included in the remake of The Lion King.
I found this
To confirm any story about how the mind has been shaped, you need (among other things) to determine how people today actually think and behave, and to test rival accounts of how these traits function. Once you have done that, you will, in effect, have finished the job of explaining how the mind works. What life was really like in the Stone Age no longer matters. It doesn't make any practical difference exactly how our traits became established. All that matters is that they are there.
17 He was away at University immediately prior to the action, but in Shakespeare's time that could make him anything over about 14. If he's a bit on the young side it would explain him being such a wuss, but who knows.
I think it's actually sort of insulting to compare that dumbass article to the often fairly cogent arguments rallied against ev-psych-as-she-is-spoke here.
If it makes you feel better, I haven't read the article and have no intention to do so. As soon as I saw "New Yorker" I looked at the cartoons and then put it away.
What does evolutionary psychology tell us about (i) the issue of whether Hamlet was fat and (ii) how that sword-exchange-thingy in the Hamlet-Laertes duel actually worked in Shakespeare-era dramaturgy?
On the veldt, men easily distracted by cartoons lost access to the youngest, most fertile women to the men who knew enough to skip the listings section, "Talk of the Town" if Hertzberg is writing about unicameral legislatures, Denby's reviews and that Nussbaum woman lecturing the poor subscriber about the moral superiority of the same television series that the Internet was boring him to death about months ago.
if they are hard wired it's a fool's game trying to change them
I don't know if this is true. It's possible that you can see Trait X manifest across a lot of contexts because it's something of an attractor state, given our genetic inheritance, and that a sufficiently powerful context that influences people not to manifest Trait X can succeed. For example, I think it's reasonable to both believe that the existence of rape is in part well-explained as a manifestation of an evolved male sexuality that in some contexts can be aggressive, violent, and undiscriminating because it conveys a selective advantage, and that changing the context could powerfully affect the incidence of rape.
24 is a powerful argument against the quoted passage in 18 as well, of course. Actually a rather more powerful one.
It makes a bloody huge practical difference how traits became established because if they are hard wired it's a fool's game trying to change them.
I, too, think it makes an important difference how traits are established. Plain-old Darwinian evolution is hugely important to biology, and a functional science of evo psych would be similarly important.
But the unfortunate thing about evo psych is its insistence hard-wiring as an explanation. Human beings have a lot of choices in how they behave.
And now I am off to have my laughable attempts at "science" torn to shreds.
But the unfortunate thing about evo psych is its insistence hard-wiring as an explanation. Human beings have a lot of choices in how they behave.
As Katherine Hepburn says in "The African Queen", "Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put on this world to rise above".
26 was said better in 24 and 25.
I think I'd prefer my Trait X to be something like Wolverine's healing factor or at least nice hair, rather than a propensity to sexual violence.
18, 26: What irks me about the 'hardwiring' claim -- that if a trait is really hardwired, it's a waste of resources to try to change it -- is that it frequently gets pulled out as an argument to resist a social change that's demonstrably happening, or has demonstrably happened in at least some societies. If something were an innate, unchangeable facet of human nature, no one would need to be lobbying against change, change just wouldn't happen.
32: what, you don't support the Campaign to Save Binocular Vision?
24: I think you are right that traits are more likely to be attractors than really hard wired and I'm oversimplifying a bit in 18. A more nuanced way to put it is that if the attractor exists it has to be taken into account in any effort to change it the frequency of the associated behavior. I'm just irritated by the glib dismissal of "why?" as an interesting question in the article, as it seems to me that the answers to questions of that sort are important in figuring out what is and isn't possible.
32: On the veldt we were hardwired for a 1950s white suburban middle class lifestyle.
There's no doubt that evolutionary psych suffers from a bollocks problem, but so did psych generally during it's formative years. I'm convinced that there is something real and useful in among the swirling clouds of nonsense.
35: I'm really torn about it. I don't know jack about the actual respectable science end of evolutionary psych -- all the stuff that drives me nuts is what makes it into the Science Times and so on. But the pop-science end of it seems so thoroughly poisoned by people pushing their views of how people naturally are as evolutionarily hardwired that I start suspecting that anything actually interesting and useful is going to have to come from a research community that's not tightly connected to the people producing all the 1950s Orange County-style veldt crap.
But I really don't know from the state of the respectable science out there.
How well can people characterize the phenotypes associated with human behavior? I think not very well, personally. Competition and cooperation seem like useful abstractions for essay-style thinking and for individual decisionmaking, but as entities of study...
Without clear phenotypes, it's pretty hard to say much.
Gary Marcus writes nicely about neural development; a common pattern is that there are rough developmental templates hardwired for various cognitive patterns (like grammar) which are finished in the course of the organism's development. If a propensity to cooperate is like this, putting people into orderly pens might produce more sheep and fewer wolves.
Marcus link
36: in genral, the higher-order (more abstract, more social) the behavior, the more likely the actual science is to be hand-wavey and untrustable. But that goes for regular ol' non-evolutionary psychology/neuroscience/whatever. And then assume that pop science writers are taking the very fruitiest claims from the very fruitiest science and then spinning them into elaborate yarns miles away from the data.
There are those in this thread who could well take issue with portions of the above paragraph.
I'm actually very prone to believing in a strong link between genetics and behavior on an individual level -- anecdotally, cognitive/behavioral family resemblances seem too strong to be explained as all environmental (and to be transmitted in a way where environment doesn't make sense offhand). So I'm primed to believe in some sort of evolutionary psychology as valid and interesting, I just have trouble with most of the actual results that get reported.
39. So your mother was also argumentative?
our deeds are fetters we forge ourselves, but the world brings the iron.
My trailing complaint about 18 is, surely the plasticity of a behavior is one of the things we have to test in the present? As primate researchers occasionally cross-transplant between species, and sometimes discover that aggressive or cooperative behavior is learnt in very simple primates?
but the world brings the iron.
Excepting the odd meteorite
Tweety is doing yeoman's work here; it's not that I know much, but I stopped trusting the New Yorker article once it decided that it could dismiss an entire line of research because it derived from an experiment conducted with fruit flies in 1948. Well then!
The article seemed like it was correcting for bad lazy science journalism by doing bad lazy science journalism, with the characteristic "smart undergrad counterintuitive essay" style beloved of our journalistic elites.
And then assume that pop science writers are taking the very fruitiest claims from the very fruitiest science and then spinning them into elaborate yarns miles away from the data.
I dunno. I don't think you can blame the science writers (much) for this. E.O. Wilson, to pick an example, is correctly regarded as a scientific luminary, but he's as much into elaborate bullshit yarns as anyone, and he's far from alone. There's just a phenomenal amount of nonsense emanating from this field.
It's like economics: Theoretically a useful science, but in practice, mired in foolishness.
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Well, that talk went better than the last one. I think if I keep working/presenting on this stuff until I actually have answers to the questions people keep asking, I'll know quite a bit.
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I think if I keep working/presenting on this stuff until I actually have answers to the questions people keep asking, I'll know quite a bit.
This is the point, n'est-ce-pas?
Well, pretty much, yeah. I've moved on from being unable to answer questions like "so why are you doing this?" and am now getting questions like "is there any reason to believe this will work?"
You know you're getting somewhere when the relevant question is "My God, what have I done?"
Preferably with a lightning storm in the background.
You know you're getting somewhere when the relevant question is "My God, what have I done?"
"Oh, right, minorly advanced the state of human understanding in a hopefully useful way."
"Now to find some babies and BREAK THEIR BRAINS!"
50: Wait, when did the research drift away from DEATH ROBOT. Bring that project back.
Oh, okay. I will have minorly advanced the state of KILLER ROBOT understanding in a hopefully useful way.
(Quite possibly, come to think of it.)
I thought the robot was supposed to make drinks.
The cocktail robot research community is already pretty impressive.
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So I'm going to be in DC and NYC at the end of October/beginning of November. Who wants to sex Mutombo?
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You could do it at the original "Who wants to sex Mutumbo" location.
I think a core issue is that humans most likely evolved to be extremely plastic and responsive to our cultural environment for a huge number of higher-order traits. We are incredibly dependent on culutral learning and imitation for core survival skills. This book gives a nice pop-sci overview. When you combine evolved plasticity with the incredible difficulty of confirming evolutionary explanations for even physical traits which *are* completely hard wired the situation is pretty hopeless.
It makes a bloody huge practical difference how traits became established because if they are hard wired it's a fool's game trying to change them.
I think the article was actually trying to get at an important point (albeit in a stupid way) by saying the origin of traits 'doesn't matter'. Obviously the origin and evolution of traits is interesting and important. But if you want to know something about human traits, from how they operate to whether they are hard wired, it is probably a better bet to examine the actual human beings around you right now than it is to start doing guesswork about evolution. We have a vast amount of information about real societies and real people, and can add to it through study and experimentation today.
Agree this was a pretty mediocre article though.
58: There's a decent chance I'll be in DC on or around Halloween, and the added draw of a meetup would make it even likelier.
Well, I thought I liked it when I read it last night after drinking a couple beers. I don't care enough to read it again to check.
Now that's the spirit!
What kind of beer do you drink in Alaska?
More importantly: in Alaska, what color do the Coors Light cold-activated cans turn?
I certainly wouldn't know.
Because, obviously, it's always cold in Alaska, so you never see them in an unturned state.
That would be one possible interpretation of my statement, yes.
Although it does require interpreting Stanley's question as being about what color they turn when they are de-activated by warmth, which isn't the most natural reading to me.
58, 62: A meetup would be fun. (Although I've never been clear about the business with Mutumbo?)
Anyway, Alaskan beer is good stuff. I like the amber.
Naked Archaeologist today said someone published the claim that autism-spectrum behavior annealed in the alleles because it's effective for solitary hunter-gatherers, e.g. those living in very resource-sparse environments, who would need to be systematic and have excellent memories for trivia rather than managing multi-digit Dunbar numbers.
There didn't seem to be any actual evidence, but I was (a) persuaded despite (b) not checking any of this because I was (c) crawling over my semiarid field mapping every dirt-pile larger than 2cm, and recognizing individual plants. It's so easy to believe Just So stories that tell me I'm okay.
Although it does require interpreting Stanley's question as being about what color they turn when they are de-activated by warmth, which isn't the most natural reading to me.
No, it doesn't. If they're always cold then you could plausibly claim that you don't know which are the parts that change color and which are the parts that don't.
Sorry to see that they don't sell Moose Drool in Alaska. It'd probably do pretty well there.
I'm going low carb nowadays, though, so I'll be drinking whiskey when I'm there next month. Teo, has the microdistillery thing hit ANC yet?
78: Ah, I see. I hadn't thought of that interpretation.
(I also couldn't tell you a single thing about Coors Light except that if you're going to someone's house, you shouldn't be bringing any.)
Sorry to see that they don't sell Moose Drool in Alaska. It'd probably do pretty well there.
Oh, they do, and judging by how many liquor stores seem to carry it I'm sure it does.
Teo, has the microdistillery thing hit ANC yet?
Not that I know of, but I'm not really into hard liquor so I wouldn't be the best source for that sort of knowledge. There's a place near me that makes a big deal out of the artisanal bourbons they serve, so that might be something to look into.
I'm not sure I really see how whiskey counts as low-carb, though.
I wonder about this as well! I would like it to be low carb, certainly.
http://www.carbs-information.com/carbohydrate-alcohol/whiskey.htm
I see there's a vodka maker in Anchorage. Truuli. I've not been much of a liquor drinker either, although I've been know to enjoy a bit of well aged single malt now and then.
I see there's a vodka maker in Anchorage. Truuli.
Oh yeah, I've heard of them. They made the news for some crazy infused vodka they made a while back. I forget what it was.
Wait, I must have been thinking of some other distillery. It looks like Truuli is just a single vodka, and isn't infused with anything. Here's an interesting post on the name.
Alaskan amber is pretty tasty and very drinkable.
77 makes a lot of sense if you've ever done any survival training too. Essentially you become a mushroom spotter. Either you develop an obsessive interest in gill colours, stem fluting etc, or you die.
Also "annealed in the alleles" is a great phrase.
Apparently the original may have been "Who will sex Dikembe tonight?" which, the article says (and I agree) is far better - it has the implications that
a) inevitably one of you is going to, all we have to do is work out who it is and
b) it's a one night only offer. Tomorrow, it will be someone else.
I've recently been reading up on textual criticism and the synoptic problem, and that Mutombo article is really amusing in that context.
If I'd been reading up on textual criticism and the synoptic problem, I'd probably find almost anything unrelated really amusing as well. It's like when you get back home from Vietnam and think everyone's really tall.
But the point is that it's totally related! It's all about trying to reconstruct the exact wording and context of a saying whose early history is oral but which was eventually standardized in written sources. Many of the same issues come up.
92
And I thought it was just some unfogged weirdness.
32
... If something were an innate, unchangeable facet of human nature, no one would need to be lobbying against change, change just wouldn't happen.
But it would make sense to lobby against spending a lot of money trying to change something innate. Which is what I think a lot of educational spending amounts to (not that this has anything to do with evolutionary psychology per se).
And the claim isn't generally that change won't happen but that an attempt to move from a present location A to a more desirable location B will likely instead (because of basic human nature) end up in a less desirable location C.
I didn't know the specific derivation of "just so" until I read this. I assumed it was a descriptor someone else used for Kipling's stories, more like:
"And that's how the leopard got its spots?"
"Just so."
So what's the best single source for the right ... epistemic attitude to bring towards ev-psych as a field? I was thinking Cosma would have written something perfect, but I couldn't find the sort of thing I had in mind.
This is partly because I got into a bit of an argument last night with a woman who thought my dismissive attitude towards sex-difference studies was Anti-Science.
We had sex, too, interspersed with the arguing. She must never know about this place.
I still think you should send her here, though. What could go wrong?
I got into a bit of an argument last night with a woman who thought my dismissive attitude towards sex-difference studies was Anti-Science.
On the veldt, women with blind unquestioning faith in authority tended to get their children vaccinated, and thus more of their offspring survived to breed.
99. For the anti-EP perspective, probably David Buller. Counter argument here.
I recommended the Buller book here, before. My recollection is that opinions on it from those who read it were mixed. I liked it, but it's been a while.
I found the Buller book interesting, but I don't think it's what x's friend is looking for. Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, is good on how weak sex difference studies particularly tend to be.
99.1: Cosma is basically positive towards ev psych done right.
That actually sounds like what x is looking for, if he's got anything accessible on what "done right" means.
Hm. He glances on it in this old review.
And here is his page specifically on Evo. Psych.
re: 108
I don't think Buller is against it [evolutionary explanations of human behaviour] in principle, either, fwiw.
112. In broad enough principle, I don't see how you can be against it without denying that humans evolved.
Well, right. Whatever the effects of culture, a large part of the. cognitive differences between people and squirrels isn't going to be about culture.
Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, is good on how weak sex difference studies particularly tend to be.
Ha! I know her! Or I used to when we were kids.
Sure, but then the broad enough principle could be that evolution directs our brains to be, say, "big", and the rest is environmental.
Things get hairier when you're trying to decide if you think the phenomena in this paragraph are fundamentally the products of evolutionary adaptation:
Moreover, the mind is not a single, general-purpose computer, but a collection of them, of "mental modules" or "mental organs," specialized as to subject matter, each with its own particular learning mechanism ("an instinct to acquire an art," in a phrase Pinker lifts from Darwin). This modularity is evident in studying how children learn (recall Pinker's background in language acquisition), and also from tracing the effects of brain lesions which, if sufficiently localized, impair specific abilities depending on where the brain is hurt, and leave others intact. Just as, bar[r]ing developmental defects, wounds, or the ravages of disease, all human beings have the same physical organs, we all have the same mental organs, whose general structure is, again, the same from person to person.
Does anybody else ever get that feeling that they're delivering exposition in a shitty movie?
"As you know, chris, ttam and LB..."
Never thought of it quite that way, but sort of yes.
Didn't we establish theme music for many recently? Next step, avatars or the website where cut-and-pasted dialogue is combined with minifig cinematography.
Wasn't a paid version of this the idea behind Second Life, which glossy magazines explained in 2009 to be the future of the internet?
A couple years ago, I think because of a recommendation here, I read Lise Eliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain, which was an interesting survey of sex differences and the extent to which studies in children show them to be possibly innate versus due to socialization.
the website where cut-and-pasted dialogue is combined with minifig cinematography
Or Machinima. Unfogged dialogue spoken by armoured space marines against the background of a strange alien world.
That actually sounds like what x is looking for, if he's got anything accessible on what "done right" means.
Yes, basically. I'm willing to confess that I've probably gone over too far in the direction of dismissal. Thanks for the suggestions.
re: 113
Yeah, but proponents of some of the cruder forms of EP often accuse their critics of something like that. Mysticism, or some sort of crude opposition to the concept of adaptation, or whatever.
125: See Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate, arguing against pretty much exactly that strawman.
The EP argument is funny in that the crude pop-science form is very strawman heavy on both sides: "Funny how the paleolithic veldt looked just like Leave It To Beaver" vs. "For a bunch of liberals who get all bent out of shape about creationism, it sure seems weird that you don't believe in evolution above the neck."
125, 126: to be fair(-er), premises not unlike those were relatively prominent in psychology as late as the middle of the 20th century (and of course a lot of 20th century psychology took of from the empiricists, who believed it wholesale). So it's not so much a straw man as a real man who ceased to exist some decades ago.
You could even argue (that is, people do argue) that some strains of cognitive science have not moved so far away from the purely empiricist position. So what seems like a straw man in The Blank Slate may be really more like an uncharitable reading of Pinker's ideological opponents from the '60s and '70s.
Isn't the hedging you have to do there ("not unlike those" and "so far away") what makes it more of a strawman? I mean, the ridiculous position is that evolution has no effect on human behavior and cognition. Being skeptical about any particular evolutionary effect, on the other hand, may be wrong, but it's not absurd in that way.
Isn't the hedging you have to do there ("not unlike those" and "so far away") what makes it more of a strawman?
Eh, I probably didn't have to do that hedging. I just didn't feel like digging up cites. I agree that it's a ridiculous position, and I don't think that many actual scientists hold it these days. But if you go back to the '60s and '70s there were certainly plenty of people arguing that 1. the idea of functional modules in the brain is nonsense and that 2. there are no non-experiential limits on the plasticity of the human brain and 3. that evolution has nothing useful whatsoever to tell us about human cognition. I mean, there are still people arguing those things -- the last argument, for instance, was made as recently as the link in the OP.
It really wasn't until the late '50s or so that there was any empirical evidence for the innateness of any cognitive function. So it might seem per se obvious now that evolution plays a role in the structuring of mental ability, but I'm not sure that it was obvious then and I'm also reasonably sure that at the time you could make the counter-argument on relatively sound scientific ground (and people did).
Remember, Wilson's Sociobiology didn't come out until 1975. These ideas are fairly (okay, forty years, but still) new.
Not really -- see, e.g., this from the article:
In theory, if you did manage to trace how the brain was shaped by natural selection, you might shed some light on how the mind works.
The article is aggressively skeptical about EP in practice, but it's not taking the position that evolution couldn't be informative about cognition.
(None of which is to say that it was a terribly meaningful or comprehensible situation for Pinker to be staking out in 2002. But what that book actually consisted of was a pop-science codification of an argument he'd been having/making for decades. It just happened that he didn't quite realize that the argument had been thoroughly won (at least in terms of public conception of these issues) by the time he wrote the book. It makes for dopey reading, but he wasn't exactly trying to attack a straw man.
Anyhow, going back to the field history, the wire mother experiments were performed in 1966; think about the intellectual context that would lead somebody to believe those were important results to establish.
Not really contradictory -- saying that studying the evolutionary roots of any behavioral trait isn't a practically useful way of learning about psychology may be wrong, but it's not the same as the absurd claim that nothing about cognition evolved.
137 to 135, and I don't understand 136. If people had conceived of cognition as evolved, the results of the wire mother experiment would have been a priori obvious? If that's what you're saying, I don't follow you, and if it's not what you're saying, I really don't follow you.
137: the absurd claim that nothing about cognition evolved.
If you look at 129 this is not the argument I accuse the dude in the OP of making.
138: if people had believed that there were likely to be innate cognitive traits then the idea that maternal attachment was not one of them would be a priori sort of absurd, yes. The position that Harlow was trying to debunk with those experiments held that parental attachment was a learned response to the availability of food.
Also, the idea of innate mental modules depends on the idea that there is actually functional specialization in the brain, which is a hard argument to make when the most prominent voices in your field argue against either the accessibility of mental representations to study or the actual existence of mental representations in the brain (depending who you asked), which was the situation that obtained until sometime in the '70s, pretty much.
"Has nothing useful to tell us" and "isn't practically useful" are importantly different, no? The first is a claim that the data isn't there, and the second is a claim that it's not a useful way of getting at it.
But more importantly, saying that evolutionary psychology isn't likely to be useful might be wrong, but it's not equivalent to a claim that evolution didn't have an effect on cognition. The latter is the strawman, that I've seen only put forth by EP proponents as a position held by opponents.
if people had believed that there were likely to be innate cognitive traits then the idea that maternal attachment was not one of them would be a priori sort of absurd, yes.
You're stretching a priori pretty far here. How would it be absurd to think that babies could have evolved to attach to whoever fed them? Isn't that how ducklings work? (I don't actually know anything about imprinting in ducklings, but assuming whatever it was that made me think that's how they work is right.)
the wire mother experiments were performed in 1966
Wow. I would have guessed two decades earlier.
Nope. Wire mommy got to watch her stories while she raised the kids.
The latter is the strawman, that I've seen only put forth by EP proponents as a position held by opponents.
That's probably approximately accurate when talking about the past 1.5-2 decades or so (and was exactly my reaction upon first reading the blank slate) but I would suspect (and here we're going to run into "don't feel like digging up a cite" again) it was argued quite seriously (and not unpersuasively) more recently than you might expect (certainly I'd imagine that it came up plenty in the behaviorist literature).
I'm pretty sure that BF Skinner believed in evolution, he just thought that it didn't matter for cognition because the mind was fundamentally shaped by experiential factors and nothing else. So that doesn't seem like a straw man at all. In other words, we evolved to have basically plastic brains shaped by experience, as did other animals. And it's that line that the early ev psych people were pushing up against.
Caveat: I have no idea what I'm talking about, really.
The NYorker article is a little bit different; it just seems like superficially appealing sophistry.
Target brand oyster crackers are actually quite good. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, ev psych proponents!
97.1: No. Shortsightedness is for many people innate/genetic. That simply doesn't have anything to do with whether it is worth spending a lot (or a little) money on eyeglasses to try to change it.
Well, ok, for example: do we think the Cinderella Effect studies are telling us something useful about human psychology, in a way that, absent the evolutionary arguments, we'd be likely to miss?
I don't think Skinner was committed to a blank slate position on cognition. See, e.g., this of his from 1984 (emphasis added):
We behave in a given way both because we are members of a given species and because we live in a world in which certain contingencies of reinforcement prevail. Thus, we avoid going over a cliff, we dodge objects, we imitate others, we struggle against restraint, we turn toward a movement seen out of the corner of an eye and all for two kinds of reasons: contingencies of survival and contingencies of reinforcement. It would be hard to say how much of the strength of the behavior is due to each. Only a first instance can be said to be necessarily innate, and first instances are hard to spot. An example of current interest is aggression. We may have an innate repertoire of aggressive behavior, but similar behavior is generated by many contingencies of reinforcement. It does not matter whether a given instance is phylogenic or ontogenic unless we are concerned with doing something about it. When we are, the variables to be changed must be identified.
Obviously, he thinks learned behavior is very very important, but he's not ruling out direct evolutionary effects on human behavior.
150: Wire mommy was always nicer than wire stepmommy
This is pretty awesome (tiny bit NSFW towards the end)
http://www.autostraddle.com/150-years-of-lesbians-144337/
151: I wandered off, but coming back it's worth pointing out how late in his career that publication is. By that point he was very much out of the psychological mainstream and was probably trying to counter the cognitive (which is to say functional modules and innateness) types (such as Pinker, who had briefly been an assistant professor in the department two years prior) who were taking over his department. He had to grant that possibility, in other words, to be taken seriously at all. But he was very much arguing the opposite view, I think.
Is About Behaviorism, from 1974, ten years earlier, early enough to count? I can't cut and paste, but if you search inside on Amazon books for 'evolution' he says the same sorts of things as in the blockquote.
Obviously, he has huge disagreements with people like Pinker, but I don't think they can be characterized as a denial that evolution affects cognition and behavior.
Skinner lived a long time. Walden Two was from 1948. I'm not sure Skinner would have been relevant anymore in 1974? Old people usually aren't.
Skinner lived a long time.
Every time he tried to die, the students stopped paying attention.
Well, I'm not arguing that he was right about anything at all, or that if he believed in evolution as a partial explanation of human behavior then no one ever believed in a complete blank slate, or anything like that. Just that Halford brought him up as an example of someone who did think that evolution "didn't matter for cognition because the mind was fundamentally shaped by experiential factors and nothing else" and with respect to whom the blank slate wasn't a strawman, and that seems to me to be false at least after 1974.
I thought the deal with Skinner, which I tried to shorthand above, was that he thought external stimulus was sufficient to explain behavior. In other words, he wouldn't deny that the external stimulus has to get processed through an organism that's the product of human evolution, but that everything is a behavior and every behavior is produced as a response to some kind of external stimulus. So (aside from creating the overall structure in which the behavioral leaning takes place) evolution doesn't matter for cognition -- there are no inherent mental modules sufficient to produce any given behavior. You've evolved a mental structure that allows you to adapt to external stimulii, but there aren't functional modules in your brain that are guiding your behavior as a result of evolution.
So, e.g., we've evolved in such a way that we are capable of developing something called "love" for our parents in response to our need for food, but that we need the positive reinforcement of the access to food to generate love. That's very very very different than the idea that the brain is "hard wired" to exhibit certain behaviors as a result of evolution alone.
But, as I say, I really don't have much idea what I'm talking about.
Not totally relavent, but there was a pro-Skinner article in the atlantic this year:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-perfected-self/308970/
Can Pinker help you lose weight?
156
... Old people usually aren't.
Ouch.
You guys might be talking slightly at cross-purposes here. What people are often talking about when they say loosely that evolution is 'important for human cognition' is not just that humans start with some unlearned cognitive mechanisms that are evolutionarily selected for, which is something that behaviorists/associationists/anti-modularists would typically agree with.
Any old-school behaviourist would have been (as Quine said) 'knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate mechanisms of learning-readiness. The very reinforcement and extinction of responses, so central to behaviorism, depends on prior inequalities in the subject's qualitative spacing, so to speak of stimulations'. And, as LB's quote from Skinner shows, they can easily say "sure, it's evolutionarily selected for that certain stimuli (pleasurable ones) reinforce behaviours and others (painful ones) inhibit them". So LB is right about what she is literally claiming.
But I think Sifu's point was in effect that when people say that evolution is 'important for human cognition' in the sexy sense, they're not talking about the idea that we have general learning mechanisms that are adaptations, but about the idea that we have domain-specific mechanisms (ones that help us learn about particular subject-matters as opposed to others) e.g. a language-learning module or modules, mathematical modules, a face-recognition module.* And why Slate-types find the domain-specific idea titillating in a way that they don't with the general-learning capacity, is that it opens up the possibility that e.g. men and women typically differ in the strength of these modules, that women typically have a better face-recognition module and men a better spatial-relationships module (part of the toolkit of mathematical modules) because on the veldt ... blah ... more socially-oriented... blah... throwing spears... blah.
*Where this also differs from behaviourism is that the domain-specific mechanisms are supposed to be genuinely cognitive, helping us learn facts, rather than just develop reflexes. Skinner is open to the idea that aggessive behaviour might be the result of an innate propensity, because that sort of innate disposition can be explained without invoking internal representations of the world; but he'd be against innate tendencies corresponding to genuinely cognitive modules.
Skinner is open to the idea that aggessive behaviour might be the result of an innate propensity, because that sort of innate disposition can be explained without invoking internal representations of the world
Yup. The tabula rasa not-exactly-straw man that Pinker is actually arguing against is one who is arguing that (innate) internal mental representations are irrelevant or nonexistent. This was a very common argument, to the point of being the mainstream of social science up until maybe the early '70s.
It's the bell bottom pants of psychology.
I think that role is spoken for.
164 cont'd: which, if you're a cognitive psychologist (and actually I think probably if you're Skinner) is tantamount to saying that evolution has no meaningful role on behavior.
164: Related views as I understand it are still about, even in proximity to cognitive science.
There's a great bit in the review when Dennett asks mock-plaintively: "Don't these authors despite anybody?". (Hands raised in sorrowful incomprehension: "I ask you, where's the contempt?")
Oh my, Dennett taking on Eleanor Rosch?
For all my protestations in this thread I tend to be much more instinctively sympathetic to the empiricist lineage than the hardcore nativists, although obviously everything is muddy synthetic middle views these days. But yeah I dunno the data-driven models of the cognitive revolution have not proven to have so much in the way of practical legs when it comes to implementation.
But all that aside who fights with Rosch? She's awesome and so weirdly, obviously right.
N.B. neuroscientists tend to be much more empiricist than psychologists. Make of that what you will.
Oh, I think he quite liked the book overall. He was just worried it was a bit too ecumenical.
Merleau-Ponty is totally due for a comeback.
Man. He makes that book sound awesome. I want to be an enactivist!
Well, mostly, some of the inclusions in that ring are a bit off-putting.
I should read that Rod Brooks.
Thanks OoM! That review is sort of swell.
Merleau-Ponty is totally due for a comeback. ... I want to be an enactivist!
Sure, a bit of social Merleau-Ponty now and then sounds harmless. Before you know it you're on to the hard stuff.
These debates on innateness of mental structures vs. environmental determination go back hundreds and probably thousands of years, they are much older than the last couple of decades of psychology. Plato describes an innate 'mathematics module' in the Meno Lacking Darwin he describes it as the memory of an idea planted there by God at the original creation of one's immortal soul. Plato is always a fond of a good metaphor but the basic idea of an innate knowledge module is recognizable. A couple of centuries ago you get Leibniz vs. Locke on innate ideas.
The broad notion that experience and innate structure are both very important in shaping the mind seems to just be obvious to any observant human being. (The hard and very non-obvious work sciencey part is figuring out how exactly that shaping works). Psychological theories that push to one extreme or the other -- either claims of a 'tabula rasa' or claims that even high-order cultural roles are biologically pre-determined -- often seem to be embedded in some larger ideological project. E.g. extreme associationism and the idea of the 'tabula rasa' were promoted by political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke who were looking for a psychological base for Enlightenment theories of social engineering. And I don't think it's a coincidence that pop evolutionary psychology is associated with right-wing politics and a reaction to perceived 60s utopianism.
or, social engineering is the wrong description of Locke in particular, but his politics was grounded in his psychology, in the idea that individuals and society are both free/self-authored.
social engineering is the wrong description of Locke in particular
Well, he did give it a shot at one point.
The debates about innate mental structures do go way back.
It's worth distinguishing here (a) the traditional question of whether we have innate knowledge (innate 'principles' involving innate 'ideas'), which empiricists like Locke would answer with a "no", from (b) related traditional questions about the innate 'faculties' or 'powers' of the mind (psychological mechanisms) through the use of which you come to know things, where the question wasn't "are there any (such faculties or powers)?" but "what sorts are there?". Even empiricists like Locke didn't deny that that there were some such innate fundamental cognitive mechanisms; they just thought that they were going to be ones that applied very generally (association, memory) and didn't require innate knowledge in order to work.
I think the thread in the traditional debates that foreshadowed the contemporary modularity debate most closely relates more directly to the second question than the first. (Of course, the questions are related in that rationalists thought that we have some cognitive mechanisms, like those via which we come to know mathematical theorems, that do require innate knowledge in order to function.)
(Just a drive-by comment - as usual, I can't stick around, unfortunately. Apologies.)
Sort of related to the discussion of mental structures, this is cool.
If I'm understanding it correctly, that's awesome. Parrots name their chicks and the chicks continue to use the same name when they grow up?
If they use a different name than what is one their card, they have trouble flying because of issues with TSA.
183: Now you can fear them by name.
Parrots name their chicks and the chicks continue to use the same name when they grow up?
Yeah, that seems to be the conclusion. It's not clear from the post how widespread this might be outside the one species that was studied, but it's pretty cool regardless.
I mean, this one study can't really establish whether they actually continue to use the same names, since it only looked at the period when they were chicks. But it does show that the parents seem to name them, and previous studies have apparently shown that individual parrots have unique names, so it's pretty reasonable to conclude that adults' names are the same ones they were given as chicks.
Has anyone collected all the "back on the veldt" stories to give us a complete picture of paleolithic homo sapiens? I predict that such a compendium would be extremely funny.
I don't know, but someone has compiled just-so stories from prominent conservatives to create a history of the U.S.. (From the New Yorker, no less.)
186: The budgie who must not be named.
Parrots are the best. If apes hadn't evolved first, parrots (or at least some other kind of bird) were clearly next in line to evolve into a superintelligent species. Perhaps in a few million years we'll have battles between the next species of human and a new superintelligent parrot species.*
*No I am not writing erotic slash fiction about the human/parrot future conflict, why do you ask?
If apes hadn't evolved first, parrots (or at least some other kind of bird) were clearly next in line to evolve into a superintelligent species.
Corvids are also impressively smart. I'd put them slightly ahead of parrots in probability of evolving into a superintelligent species.
No I am not writing erotic slash fiction about the human/parrot future conflict, why do you ask?
I might know someone who's interested.
Someone should try to create parrot/crow hybrids to get the language skills of the former and the problem-solving ability of the latter. Then take over the world.
I think James Alan Gardner has a birdy intelligent species, with some erotic regurgitation. Not erotic for any of the humans nearby, though.
Thanks to you people and your strange topics, I had a dream that I went to a lecture given by Ron Paul in which he explained how evolution has resulted in some people unsuited to gymnastics on the pommel horse. This was illustrated by pictures of people whose thighs had square crosssections. I woke up before he applied the lesson to economics.
Pommel horse ability, like Ron Paul, is innate.
197: That's amazing. My recent spate of intense work has left me having weirdly detailed dreams about spreadsheets.