Evolutionary Psychology

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I know I'm back on my hobby horse here but can someone please point me in the direction of anything that has been written under this rubik whose basic argument doesn't fall apart after a basic empirical fact-check (which this 'discipline' doesn't seem to need because it's sciencey-science).

I write this as right now I feel I'm going to have brain aneurysm if I read one more time that the cause of obesity is linked to "our" (the first-person plural pronoun is never defined) dietary conditions/need to intake sugars/something to that effect during the Pleistocene.

And let's not get started on the problems of using contemporary hunter-gathering groups to study what the Pleistocene was 'really like'. And it's seeping in everywhere....

[DC Al Fine]

Evolutionary Psych isn't science obviously. It's usually used to speculate about why something is the way it is, but has zero predictive value. It's fun to speculate with, but it's fun to read your horoscope as well.

[ilikeverin]

You rang?

To some extent, it depends on how broadly you define "evolutionary psychology".  There are certainly some ways to define it that would fall under DC Al's definition.  But there are also plenty of studies that look at the evolution of animal behavior or related traits that you might not find particularly odious.  Consider the social brain hypothesis, for example, which says that brains have evolved to deal with the demands of social cognition (i.e., dealing with larger groups of conspecifics), such that animals with more complex social lives also have bigger brains, relative to the size of the rest of their body, to deal with the social complexity around them*.  Under this sort of view, humans are just kind of an interesting test case, given that we have pretty massive brains relative to our body size and pretty big social groups (see also: the fact that your discipline of anthropology can exist ).  The article I linked to has an updated view, which says something about the importance of pair-bonding to brain size.  Again, under this view, humans are, again, simply another data point, as a species with massive brains that's also relative more likely to pair-bond than a lot of other species.

...I tried

tl;dr: evo psych is done best when humans are seen as just another animal to be assessed.  (or, perhaps, evo psych is done best when humans aren't involved so that anthropologists get bored and don't bother us )

*Of course, you might notice the obvious missing/assumed link here, that larger brains --> "larger cognition".  This is, admittedly, more tenuous, just because it's darn hard to be able to assess the cognitive abilities of other animals.  Note that it's also "large brains proportional to the rest of body size"; birds have small brains in general, but many have big brains for their body size, which, for the sake of the correlation, squares well with the fact that birds seem pretty smart.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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The Bate Worked!!!11111

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Interesting, but I wouldn't consider that part of 'psychology' and certainly not 'anthropology' except as background information.

[ilikeverin]

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The Bate Worked!!!11111

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Interesting, but I wouldn't consider that part of 'psychology' and certainly not 'anthropology' except as background information.

Right; I agree it's definitely not anthropology, but I'd definitely put it somewhere near "psychology".  Maybe if not psychology per se, I'd definitely consider it necessary for understanding psychology. (I'm also not confident that I'd be in the majority among psychologists when I'd say that.  Maybe not even cognitive scientists, but I think I'm on firmer ground there... social science disciplinary divisions are confusing )  Where would you put the dividing line?  I know most of our previous angry debates were over gender and/or sex, and it looks like eating habits are on your list(?).

[Tetro Kornbluth]

You rang?

The Bate Worked!!!11111

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Interesting, but I wouldn't consider that part of 'psychology' and certainly not 'anthropology' except as background information.

Right; I agree it's definitely not anthropology, but I'd definitely put it somewhere near "psychology".  Maybe if not psychology per se, I'd definitely consider it necessary for understanding psychology. (I'm also not confident that I'd be in the majority among psychologists when I'd say that.  Maybe not even cognitive scientists, but I think I'm on firmer ground there... social science disciplinary divisions are confusing )  Where would you put the dividing line?  I know most of our previous angry debates were over gender and/or sex, and it looks like eating habits are on your list(?).

I would define 'Anthropology' as the study of human behavior (I'm o/c excluding biological/physical anthropology here which is not to say I don't consider it a valid field of study; much the opposite in fact) and 'psychology' as the study of human behavior. The fact that in doing so we end up studying two different things is an arbitrary division really. Ironically, cultural anthropology has ended up focusing on the really subjective stuff that can't really be measured but that's due to its history (and that of psychology too o/c...).

I'm not really concerned about the eating habits as an issue except that is a constantly repeated evolutionary psychology 'fact' which is blatantly and obviously false if one knows anything about worldwide obesity patterns and obesity in general.

(On that note, it would be nice if Pop neuroscientists stopped repeating their most, latest and greatest 'amazing findings'. Findings so amazing that I learnt all about them as a first and second year undergraduate reading Goffman).

Actually my rejection of EP is much more philosophical than the mere 'sex differences' dispute and more to do with the essentially conservative, static and functionalist view of society they promote. This is a view which really owes nothing to Darwin (not that I think that is particularly important but the 'folk Parsonian' tradition in American sociology which is what all practically all American Pop sociology is written in. If you want me to get really controversial, I would say the EP in practice is more Freudian than Darwinian and that's even including its more 'sophisticated' schools. Anyway, this is a view of society that would be laughed at by any serious anthro-or-sociologists. But hey Anthropologists are dangerous, dreamy hippies and sociologists are communists who don't do sciencey-science so that they can be safely ignored from the public debate. This stuff is going to be laughed at in two generations time and will look even more ridiculous than a lot of that 60s Marxo-Freudian guff that was popular (even in the mainstream media too, believe it or not) then.

[ilikeverin]

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The Bate Worked!!!11111

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Interesting, but I wouldn't consider that part of 'psychology' and certainly not 'anthropology' except as background information.

Right; I agree it's definitely not anthropology, but I'd definitely put it somewhere near "psychology".  Maybe if not psychology per se, I'd definitely consider it necessary for understanding psychology. (I'm also not confident that I'd be in the majority among psychologists when I'd say that.  Maybe not even cognitive scientists, but I think I'm on firmer ground there... social science disciplinary divisions are confusing )  Where would you put the dividing line?  I know most of our previous angry debates were over gender and/or sex, and it looks like eating habits are on your list(?).

I would define 'Anthropology' as the study of human behavior (I'm o/c excluding biological/physical anthropology here which is not to say I don't consider it a valid field of study; much the opposite in fact) and 'psychology' as the study of human behavior. The fact that in doing so we end up studying two different things is an arbitrary division really. Ironically, cultural anthropology has ended up focusing on the really subjective stuff that can't really be measured but that's due to its history (and that of psychology too o/c...).

Yeah.  I think a useful way to define it is psychology studies "human commonalities" while anthropology studies "human differences", though of course that puts a lot of research on the wrong side of the divide.  (Not to mention where on earth it puts physical anthropology, though from what I hear that's a debate you guys are having at the moment.)

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What counterevidence are you talking about?

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Ah, there's a problem: that whole word "pop" before neuroscientists.  As I get further into the field I become more and more amazed at how poorly the media represents findings within a field in its attempts to find something salacious or Important To Parents (tm) within the literature.  The latter I find particularly harmful.  I mean, sure, one of the things I love about being a cognitive scientist is the huge gigantic angry smackdown battles that take place all the time, so controversy is cool.  But for some reason the media takes every study that finds a correlation involving children and makes it into MEGA BIG NEWS BULLETIN OMG OMG OMG SAVE UR CHILDREN.  That's how those stupid "Baby Einstein" tapes came about - some poor university stiff started finding correlations between playing your kids tapes involving smart things and your kids ending up smart, the media turned it into PLAY MOZART FOR YOUR FETUS, without anyone raising the point for a while that oh wait a sec of course there'd be a correlation because only rich obsessive parents have the time and money needed to buy some Mozart CDs and sit there for hours playing their offspring such stuff.

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I actually don't disagree with this as much as you might think (and as much as I might have even a year ago).  I was distraught, during my history of sex class this spring, to find how much EP and its like have inherited the legacy of the Freudians and sexologists of the late nineteenth century.  Some of their arguments were eerily familiar.  Not to mention both Freudians and EPs are obsessed with sex in general.

One particular parallel that struck me was between modern EP thinkers and early feminists.  Early feminists picked up on the nascent scientific thought that the sexes are different from each other and used it to argue that there was a "unique" perspective that women could bring to politics and higher society that merited their enfranchisement and inclusion into political activity.  In particular, they cited the supposed "peace-loving" nature of women as something that might lead to a decrease in the amount of warfare and fighting more general between nations.  Fast forward to the times of evolutionary psychology, and suddenly a certain Mr. S. Pinker is making similar arguments; women, tending to be less aggressive than men, are to be trusted more with the reins of power because they'll be less likely to go to war and fight with other countries.  You basically could take discussions in either time period, move them to the other one, and they'd fit right in, except Pinker uses numbers more often.  It was uncanny.

(Actually, though: isn't it pretty much the closest thing to an anthropological Fact (tm) that men are more aggressive than women just about everywhere?  Got any counterexamples?)

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The 1960s Marxo-Freudian guff was the best.  I took a "Modern American Literature" class in high school where we read a lot of stuff (and watched movies, etc.) from the 50s/60s/early 70s and there were basically all Marxo-Freudian and it was adorable.  Also terrifying.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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I'm actually back in 'History' at the moment so I'm out of the loop quite a bit, but yeah it's been a bit of a debate. I wouldn't totally agree with your definition in general although it does describe somewhat the practice of both disciplines currently.

In contemporary American cultural anthropology it has be to said that interest in questions of generalities is pretty much none. Clifford Geertz, by far the most influential figure in the discipline, basically held such questions to be waste of time, tended to be scornful of those who tried to ask them and was dismissive of any potential theory of anything.

On this note, I will point yet again, that Skinner contrary to what I've yet on numerous occasions, had pretty much no influence on Anthropology in America (As opposed to Marxo-Freudianism, which alas, did). I mean if you going to attack an academic discipline, get basic facts right. In saying that EP at present has pretty much no historical sense whatsoever except it is canny enough to go on the whole "We-are-not-Social-Darwinists" denial routine.

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To pick one example that I've studied, Female obesity is very common in Mauritania (Here two unfortunatelies - one is that afaik no reliable statistics exist; Mauritania is a difficult country to get reliable information on and two I can't access any journals or such right now because I'm on my own PC but here is a guardian article about the phenomenon).

That article also demonstrates a problem with functionalist theories of social action as a whole. If a practice emerges due to it being a solution to some social need or problem why then do we often see it continuing well after the stated problem has disappeared? To take a much better known example, for a long time the materialist argument for the Jewish and Islamic prohibition on the eating of Pork had to, as Marvin Harris wrote, had to do with both protection from food poisoning* and the nature of herding and agricultural land in the Middle East in the 1st Millenium BC/AD (I've forgotten some of the details but that was the gist of it). Fair enough but neither of these are problems now so why doesn't the taboo just fade away? Why can the taboo still cause actual physical revulsion and sickness in some people should they happen to accidentally eat pork? And why is this true for some people and not others. There's probably (I don't know) a correlation between religious practice and believe and this but I doubt very much it even close to 100%. A similar question can be asked about why we don't eat insects - many other peoples do, but us European don't. Now I will admit that that last one may be genetic, I don't know but afaik there hasn't been much research done to really answer these questions.

* (Another problem with these theories and possibly a bigger one is that they assume, rather unwisely, that 1st Millennium BC/AD middle eastern goat herders, shepherds and farmers could make a correlation between the eating of uncooked or under-cooked pork and the sicknesses that can result for it. This would assume centuries of trial and error before the 'truth' was discovered. Is there any evidence for this in either the historical or archaeological record? Again, I don't know. Even so, if this was the case why make it a 'taboo' in a religious sense? Ancient peoples didn't eat a lot of things they suspected to be bad but they didn't necessarily mention it in their holy books.

*slight detour over*

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Stuff like this prevents you from being taken seriously. But yeah, you would have to be blind not to see them.

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I wasn't really criticizing neuroscience. I wouldn't except perhaps some neuroscientists. But PR is pretty important for discipline credibility.

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Feminism is a broad church and feminists arguments against, for example, female suffrage were not unheard of especially in Catholic countries.

Anyway, I don't think that was a particularly new thesis even in the 19th Century. I would be, at least, surprised if it was. I won't make much comment on this except this would have to explain Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, two not particularly renowned pacifists. Just to use two modern examples.

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I don't but as I said, I don't really care about this issue any more. I will add though that you will have to distinguish between what is usually termed 'structural violence' (violence that is caused by the habits and structures of institutions (and if I were to go further, discourse). The military being an obvious example) and violence that exists more outside of that realm, such two men in a bar having a fight. These are two quite different things really and the inability to distinguish between two is why I feel like screaming whenever I read "human beings are wired for war" (even louder if they don't define what 'war' is).

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I still want one of Reich's orgone machines.