British physicist David Tyler discusses recent evolutionary psychology speculations about the origin of religion: … the “potential answers” Culotta mentions at the outset have the word potential in bold and the rest is in the imagination. What is strikingly lacking in these studies is any questioning of the materialist mindset of the researchers. The most significant way they follow Darwin is in excluding any thought that intelligent design issues need to be addressed before we can properly understand humanity. Indeed, the researchers set up a culture that portrays teleology as anti-science. Culotta reports on the findings of cognitive psychologists working with some undergraduate students: “When the undergrads had to respond under time pressure, they were likely to agree with nonscientific Read More ›

A friend wrote to ask me about “evolutionary” psychology claims that humans are promiscuous because of our evolutionary history with chimps and bonobos.

I replied:

Those people stoop to just about anything, don’t they?

As per your summary, “Evolutionary biologists consider that bonobos and chimps are the most closest species according to our evolutionary tree or bush, and since both species are very promiscuous, they infer that this behaviour was present in our common ancestor with them, and that promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history. ”

Let’s picture ourselves in the Toronto Zoo’s primate sanctuary. It comes out that one enterprising bonobo male has impregnated all the females, willing or no. So? It’s inconvenient, because the zookeepers will need to find new homes for most of the expected offspring. If they think it’s a big enough problem, they can always put the females on the Pill hereafter, right? Or put him in a separate enclosure. Otherwise, as we say here, that’s just life wandering its way through time.

Okay, now let’s picture ourselves in a courtroom at the Old City Hall Courthouse. The judge is hearing oral arguments from the defense lawyer for a serial rapist. The defendant’s lawyer says that due to the behaviour of chimpanzees and bonobos, “promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history,” so we should go easy on his client.

I think the judge and the prosecution would be competing to interrupt at that point, and most local jurors and onlookers would be aghast.

What’s missing from the analysis is that lots of characteristics may be part of our evolutionary history, but humans uniquely possess the ability to select among characteristics which ones we think we should encourage.

A guy could be a serial rapist – or he could take a folk dancing class and meet a nice girl. The former choice will likely get him a set of leg irons at the Courthouse and the latter a rental tux and free carnation at the City Hall wedding chamber.

It is not an argument for any form of human behaviour whatever that it may have been in our evolutionary history, because all sorts of behaviour has been in our evolutionary history, including a great many behaviours never practiced by chimps or bonobos.

Also, at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Here is my latest MercatorNet article, dissecting the caveman theory of psychology, explaining why evolutionary psychology is so rapidly losing credibility: “Is human behaviour really based on the survival strategies of our Pleistocene ancestors?” Well, the stone hatchet is certainly poised over our iconic cavemen. A recent Scientific American podcast admits as much, and without the narrator throwing a panic attack either. Why this? Why now? And why such equinamity? Secular materialist thinkers have as deep a desire as anyone to understand the wellsprings of human nature. But they are much more restricted in where they can look. From the very beginning of the organized “human evolution” movement, starting with Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man, they have mined Read More ›

True, I am always making fun of “evolutionary psychology,” but it is such an easy target. Who dare say that this item wasn’t prompted by the current economic climate?:

“After eons of evolution, men are hardwired to overspend and max out credit cards to attract mates, a study last year concluded.”

Of course it did.

You can be sure that the study would not have concluded that the generations of men who drove hard bargains out of necessity – for whom it was a matter of honour to do so – are our far more representative ancestors.

Ooga ooga.

Also just up at the Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Everybody seems to be taking a whack at evolutionary psychology these days, and David Brooks gets in his shot in “Human Nature Today” (New York Times, June 26, 2009).

Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.

Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.

Sharon Begley’s account, in my view, was not overdrawn, it was overdue. Re “Spent” – this sounds-like forgettable book takes evolutionary psychology to the shopping mall to show what we are genetically “hardwired” to buy and why, according to six (count ’em) big traits. Read More ›

I’ve been trying for years, to get hold of some evidence that anyone at all who thinks Darwinian evolution plausible actually stops short of the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution – something so completely ridiculous that no one who takes it seriously can be considered a contributor to rational thought.

Apparently, some do stop short. And nice to know, for sanity’s sake.

In “On Second Thought … Scientists are supposed to change their minds when evidence undercuts their views. Dream on” (January 3, 2009), Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, spills the beans (as if we hadn’t seen them spilled all over the floor a long time ago – but never mind):

The most fascinating backpedaling is by scientists who have long pushed
evolutionary psychology. This field holds that we all carry genes that led to reproductive success in the Stone Age, and that as a result men are genetically driven to be promiscuous and women to be coy, that men have a biological disposition to rape and to kill mates who cheat on them, and that every human behavior is “adaptive”—that is, helpful to reproduction. But as Harvard biologist Marc Hauser now concedes, evidence is “sorely missing” that language, morals and many other human behaviors exist because they help us mate and reproduce. And Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych’s most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field “may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over” 50,000 years ago, Pinker says. How has the view that reproduction is all, and that humans are just cavemen with better haircuts, hung on so long? “Even in science,” says neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, “a seductive story will sometimes … outpace the data.” And withstand it, too.

Well, it’s reassuring that some people are beginning to rethink this idiocy. As I have often pointed out, it’s all part of what we know that ain’t so. To the extent that anyone takes it seriously, it can do serious harm.

Look, let me be clear about this: There is stuff in brain science that really is so.

A blood clot could indeed kill or paralyse you. You could develop a tumour that is difficult to excise. Alzheimer is a late life illness you can fight off only by the most stringent measures, and even then you may lose the battle. But that is what’s true, and no one can deny it.

The evolutionary pyschologists’s “cave men with better haircuts” is just a time-waster in a world where serious neuroscience issues must be addressed.

Hat tip: Brains on Purpose.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog that supports The Spiritual Brain: Read More ›

It offers a paean of praise to Dutton (and Steve Pinker) who “know” that great tenors could “spot the savanna with little Pavarottis” by catching the ear of ladies:

Natural selection is one thing, but the stronger, and more entertaining, basis for Dutton’s case for an evolutionary aesthetics is sexual selection, which Darwin explored in The Descent of Man. A clear tenor voice wouldn’t help Pleistocene man outrun a jaguar, but it might ingratiate him with the ladies — remember the guitarist on the stairs in Animal House? — allowing him to spread his genes widely and spot the savanna with little Pavarottis. Dutton describes the possession of artistic talent as “an ornamental capacity analogous to the peacock’s tail” — or to a florid vocabulary. These traits signal a certain robustness or intelligence, which are attractive qualities in a potential mate.

First, if Pleistocene man (with whom Katie Couric has never booked an interview, no matter how passionately she believes in him) couldn’t deep-six a jaguar, Read More ›

A friend on his lunch break sends me this – the latest nonsense from “evolutionary psychology”:

Google News Alert

Bruce Schneier: More on the Broad View of Security CSO – Framingham,MA,USAFor example, a lot of the seemingly irrational security trade-offs that the behavioral economists have documented can be explained by the evolutionary …See all stories on this topic

Have you heard? Gossip can be good for you Chicago Tribune – United States Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn’t …See all stories on this topic

Does religion provide an evolutionary advantage? Science a Gogo – USA He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains – including neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology – that religious beliefs and religious …See all stories on this topic

Look at that middle story: I wonder whether a study detailing how gossip isn’t good for you – relative to minding your own business and getting on with the job at hand – would see the light of day … ?

One thing to note about EP is its utter predictability. It always seems to be about whatever foolishness is noised about in pop culture. If the talk show circuit likes it, it is definitely science. And who could possibly argue with that? Read More ›

Can this really be happening? Or am I going to wake up from some Nutcracker Suite fantasy tomorrow morning to discover that the cat is violently sick, due to a regrettable attempt to eat the Christmas flower arrangement? Get this: In Scientific American (December 19. 2008), a load of evolutionary psychology rubbish gets nailed. In Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology, David J. Buller notes, “Some evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence”. Well, that is an appropriately scientifically modest way of putting it. And my best guess is that David Buller will not lose his position at Northern Illinois University Read More ›

Indeed, the extraordinary social skills of humans, compared with other primates, may be honed by constant practice with imagined or absent partners.

Recently, commentator Dinesh D’Souza came up with an aid package for a most unlikely – though doubtless deserving – recipient. He considered it a scandal that George Obama, half-brother to the American Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, lives in Third World poverty in a shack in Kenya:

Read More ›

Bill Dembski scooped me on the latest idiocy of Darwinism’s idiot child, evolutionary psychology:

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman’s breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

and on Fred Reed’s hilarious take on it. Reed, of course, knocks the stuffings out of the pillow. Responding to “Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not”, he notes,

I think of those millions of pitiful Chinese women, sobbing quietly in corners, “Oh, how can I let him know I’m interested when I have these horrible dark eyes? Maybe I can write him a letter….”

One thinks also of the advice Naomi gives Ruth in the Book of Ruth. I doubt Boaz knew what colour Ruth’s eyes were. It’s not clear how he could.

Still, we need to put a pin on the map for this latest outburst of evo psycho … Read More ›