Lots of people think David Brooks’s evolutionary psychology romance (The Social Animal) flopped. That surprised me. Who knows, it may signal a wholesome change in the wind: Not every stale idea or exhibition of poor taste can be rescued by throwing the word “evolution” about or invoking “neuroscience.” Consider “Mean Street: What David Brooks Got Wrong and Montaigne Got Right” by Evan Newmark (The Wall Street JournalMarch 11, 2011): …sorry, but I won’t be reading the entire book. The magazine piece was enough for me. It just didn’t ring true – and for good reason. It isn’t. To make his case, Brooks invents “Harold” and “Erica”, two imaginary 21st century overachievers, and tells how their lives and fates are determined Read More ›

Yes, the abandonment was recounted in “E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Altruism Shakes Up Understanding of Evolution” by Pamela Weintraub. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson’s 1975 Sociobiology was thought to give evolutionary psychology some respectability. Wilson, who learned his trade studying social insects, promoted the idea of kin selection – that people are genetically programmed (“bred into their bones”) to behave in socially constructive ways in order to help the genes they share with others get passed on. For example, a woman looks after her sister’s children to help the genes she shares with her sister get passed on. And she looks after her new neighbour from Rangoon’s children to help … hey, … wait a minute. So the scientific world Read More ›

(targeting customers of the more familiar bodice-ripper and cherry-chomp brands)

David Brooks, who used to know tripe when he saw it, now gives us this, praising pop evolutionary psychology:

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophyA core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

Yes. There is a name for that: fascism

Fascism, at heart, is a belief that surrendering to an emotion engendered by an idea can bring about an earthly utopia. In politics, the idea is usually appears as a messianic leader, but in current psychology, anyone with some neuroscience training can generate these visions using machines, drugs, or narratives that get published as research on human subjects.

And it is always very difficult, at best, to explain to people that, on Earth, utopia is the trade name for hell.

Anyway, Brooks unintentionally outlines the problem better than any detractor could by retailing this loathsome love story: Read More ›

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

… my sister’s husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn’t wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they’ve gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society’s disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of “free will” or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual — an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this: Read More ›

My Salvo 15 Deprogram column: LUCY SPEAKS Evolutionary Psychology Is Now Taking Your Questions When Britain’s Guardian newspaper first introduced its “evolutionary” agony aunt (advice columnist in America) in 2009—to honor 150 years of the culture birthed with Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species—I thought, “Aha! a send-up, to be sure.” I was wrong, but in fairness, when the evolutionary psychologist speaks, even an expert can’t always tell. No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly about Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and winner of the Wellcome Trust Award for Communication of Science to the Public. For the 2009 Darwin bicentennial celebrations, Jahme, who holds an M.A. in evolutionary psychology, put together Read More ›

Philosopher Cordelia Fine, who wrote a book on the neuroscience and other studies of the differences between men’s and women’s brains – and found most of them flawed – pauses to target a classic in evolutionary psychology: Why girls prefer pink. … psychologists and journalists now speculate on the genetic and evolutionary origins of gendered color preferences that are little more than fifty years old. Little more than how many years old? Read on: For example, a few years ago an article in an Australian newspaper discussed the origins of the pink princess phenomenon. After trotting out the ubiquitous anecdote about the mother who tried and failed to steer her young daughter away from the pink universe, the journalist writes Read More ›

Over at HuffPo, Professor Matt Rossano, Head of the Department of Psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University, has posted a thought-provoking article entitled, “Thomas Aquinas: Saint of Evolutionary Psychologists?”

Let me say at the outset that Professor Rossano is a very fair-minded scientist, who has made a genuinely sympathetic attempt to answer the question, “How did religion come to be?” from a secular perspective. In his recent book, Supernatural Selection (see here for a brief synopsis and here for a look inside the book), he acknowledges that “religion is vitally important to morality” and that “religion does make us more moral,” although he strongly disagrees with the notion that without religion there can be no morality (and he argues that Aquinas did, too). Provocatively, Rossano even goes so far as to say that “Religion made us human.” Statements like these clearly put him at odds with the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

In his latest article, Professor Rossano discusses the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and argues that in many ways, Aquinas anticipates the principles used by evolutionary psychologists today to explain human behavior. Rossano focuses on the institution of marriage, and shows that many of the concepts which figure in “parental investment theory” – a theory invoked by evolutionary biologists to explain parental behavior in the animal world – can also be found in Aquinas’ discussion of marriage, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, question 122. He goes on to argue that Aquinas, if he were alive today, would be an evolutionist, and in the title of his article, even goes so far as to nominate him as the patron saint of evolutionary psychologists!

To his credit, Professor Rossano gets a lot right about Aquinas: most of his factual assertions about Aquinas’ philosophical views are correct. However, his attempt to marry Aquinas’ thinking with evolutionary psychology is doomed to failure. Here’s why.
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Caroline Crocker, of American Institute for Science and Technology Education (AITSE), writes me to comment,

Scientific Integrity and Dr. Hauser

Can being disorganized lead to scientific fame?

Harvard University scientist Marc Hauser became famous for his work in cognitive evolution. As a psychologist who investigates the neurological basis for morality and works with primates and people, you would think he would know better than to, at the least, keep inadequate records or, much worse, fabricate data. But, Dr. Hauser is on “academic leave” after a Harvard University faculty committee found him “solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct”.

The history of the problems is long, starting in 1995, but the Harvard investigation was only initiated in 2007. Perhaps enough students had complained or maybe the comments from peers were becoming too embarrassing. Now Michael Ruse’s concern is that the field of evolutionary biology itself will suffer from bad publicity.

But surely this should not be the main concern! Dr. Ruse makes the point that Dr. Hauser may have been under pressure to attract grant money, graduate students, and postdoctoral students–and this is mostly accomplished through publication. The pressure may have been exacerbated by the fact that Dr. Hauser holds a prestigious position at a leading university. In other words, Dr. Hauser may have succumbed to political, financial or even ideological temptation to forgo scientific integrity–thereby publishing at least three unsubstantiated scientific papers, possibly misleading numerous other scientists, and wasting countless tax dollars.

What is the answer? Raising the profile of scientific integrity in our nation. We need, as Kate Shaw said, to “encourage responsible science, experimental replication, and an even more thorough review process.”

Many will know Crocker as the scientist who got the boot from George Mason University for questioning the Prophet Darwin. I understand she will be posting here after she finalizes her book.

That said, here’s The Edge on Marc Hauser:

Along with Irv Devore, he teaches the Evolution of Human Behavior class, a Core Course at Harvard with 500 undergraduate students. The interdisciplinary course, “Science B29” (nickname: “The Sex Course”), has been running for 30 years, was started by Devore and Robert Trivers, and is the second most popular course on campus, behind “Econ 10”. Section teachers over the years comprise a who’s who of leading thinkers and include people such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and Sarah B. Hrdy. In 1997-98, he sponsored a trial run of “Edge University” in which the students in Science B29 received Edge mailing as part of required reading in the course. Read More ›

“That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.”

~G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday

I am endlessly intrigued by Evolutionary Psychology. I found this evolutionary psychology journal, and it’s just too good not to share. Here are a few articles, and a quote from their respective abstract:

1. Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mating: The Case of Mating Age

Parents and offspring have asymmetrical preferences with respect to mate choice. So far, several areas of disagreement have been identified, including beauty, family background, and sexual strategies. This article proposes that mating age constitutes another area of conflict, as parents desire their children to initiate mating at a different age than the offspring desire it for themselves. More specifically, the hypothesis is tested that individuals prefer for their offspring to start having sexual relationships at a later age than they prefer for themselves to do so.

Read More ›

Darwinists have long had a problem with the fact of human longevity, compared to that of chimps. Presumably, that is because they need equivalence between humans and chimps. The article referenced here, from Nature, takes, for once, a skeptical view of Darwinist claims.

I don’t see why an explanation is required at all. If you live like a chimp, you will die like one. Nowadays, if you live like a responsible human being with a mind, you can reach eighty years old quite easily in a technologically advanced democracy. (You know, Rabbi ben Ezra, and “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be …) The rabbi’s  thoughts are only meaningful for creatures with a mind.

So this  skepticism re the “news from Darwinism”, rightly casting doubt on how grandmothers help natural selection, points to  the ridiculous disgrace that Darwinism has become, while dominating the academy for so long:

These researchers found that among Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Hadza, mothers faced a trade-off between foraging for food for themselves and any weaned offspring, and caring for new infants. But if grandmothers helped with foraging, they were rewarded with healthier, heavier grandchildren who weaned at a younger age. Over evolutionary time, this fitness boost could have selected for women who survived long past menopause, an anomaly among humans’ evolutionary kin.

“Chimps almost never live into their forties in the wild, but most humans, if they’re lucky enough to make it to adulthood, live beyond the childbearing years,” says Hawkes.

Further support for the grandmother hypothesis came from studies of other subsistence cultures, as well as from historical records, although not all studies back up the hypothesis. (Ewen Callaway, 24 August 2010 Nature )

Contrary to such claims, aged seniors can be a considerable burden on their families, and are normally cared for due to reasons of affection, morality, religion, etc. In other words, reasons that begin with the assumption that we are thinking beings in real time, making decisions.

Some true key causes of increased human longevity (all of which require an active mind) are Read More ›

If you want to hear some silly explanations of crying (weeping), go here. One theory is that crying may have evolved as a kind of signal — a signal that was valuable because it could only be picked up by those closest to us who could actually see our tears. Tears let our intimates in — people within a couple of feet of us, who would be more likely to help. “You can imagine there’d be a selection pressure to develop a signaling system that wouldn’t let predators in on the fact that you’re vulnerable,” says Randy Cornelius, a psychologist at Vassar College. College is often a waste of money. Any human can see when another is crying, close or Read More ›

Look, I tried. I practically had a nervous breakdown trying to think up anything as ridiculous as this that was not obscene. I am not into that. You need to pay or sign up for something (which probably means contuaally being  pestered for some promotion) to see the rest of this story from the National Enquirer of science mags, New Scientist, on why the large human brain can be explained by cooking food. Strikes me that useful information would work the other way around. You start with a large brain, and … voila! Escoffier!! I doubt it works the other way round.

Here is my post at Examiner on why. I thought it would never happen, actually. But I should have remembered – all psychology fads are inherently ridiculous because they are attempts to evade the depth of the human condition with some silly new idea. They collapse under the weight  of their own folly.