Adelphiasophism
Science, Politics and Evolutionary Psychology
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Monday, 21 April 2003
Alas Poor Darwin
Alas Poor Darwin is a collection of essays edited by Steven and Hilary Rose, arguing against “evolutionary psychology”, apparently the latest version of sociobiology. The editors seem to have substituted political correctness for socialism, and, though this book has good intentions, it often sounds amazingly potty and futile. Too futile and potty for this reviwer to get through, but presumably the editors knew what their aims were when they described them in their introduction. One reason for the pottiness and futility is that the authors seem to lash out at everyone you have ever heard of in evolutionary theory from Daniel Dennett through E O Wilson to Richard Dawkins.
Even more amazing is that these people are keeping religion alive in their approach to the applications of evolutionary theory. The book seems to want to sweep a host of people with different outlooks into one bucket. Moreover the complaint is political not one of science. The religious bias is meant, of course, to be a political one, religion being intrinsically highly conservative, but that all makes it difficult to get a grip on precisely what the complaints are from a scientific viewpoint.
The whole book would have been better approached on the basis of the validity of the science rather than from the hypothesis that people have secret agendas beyond the science. Thus the editors highlight a work that purports to show that rape is an evolutionary strategy. That rape should have an evolutionary justification could obviously have implications for society, but the social implications cannot refute the science, if it is correct. If the science is wrong then the social implications are vitiated.
That is why this is a frustrating book. It degenerates to name calling and back stabbing when the reader just wants to know the evidence. The authors are fond of pejorative words like the old favourites “determinist” and “reductionist”. Anyone who comes to a scientific conclusion based on the scientific evidence and not political correctness is a determinist or a reductionist. This is not correctness in any but a typically religious sense. The religious sense of truth is whatever suits the religion or supports its dogmas. That is what political correctness is.
Evolution and Civilization
Yet science cannot be dogmatic. It should not surprise anyone, least of all a Darwinist, that a billion years of evolution has left us with some genetically specified behaviours that are not acceptable to civilized society. Latterly, we have evolved intelligence so that we can know whether our behaviour is appropriate in a given situation or not. Intelligent adjustment of behaviour according to circumstances ought to be more flexible than any instinctive response, and have greater survival value. So, it is a quite different question to ask whther a human adaptation is properly shown to have an evolutionary base, and whether it is therefore appropriate in a civilized society.
It might be proved to be utterly natural in evolutionary terms for a dominant male to kick sand into the eyes of the wimp on the beach, but a society consisting mainly of wimps can decide that such behaviour should be curbed under the force of law. This refutes the claim that whatever is shown to have an evolutionary basis defines some sort of evolutionary fatalism. The survivor of changing conditions is likely to be the species that can adapt to them, not the one that sticks to its evolutionary conditioning. Adaptations can be useful in one circumstance and not in another. Intelligence allows the animal to decide through experience when it should behave “naturally” and when it should consciously do something else. For human beings, the development of civilization in the last 4000 years is a profound change that might make much of previous evolution redundant. The intelligent humans that realise it will be the ones who survive.
Much of what Rose and his essayists complain about seem to be not science but fanciful speculations by some scientists—what is called scientism. Quite honestly, such speculation is often what shows people the potential of science, makes it interesting for them, and attracts publicity for science. Whether people see it as useful or disastrous, though, it is not science. Mary Midgley is one of the authors in the volume to have railed against scientism, but all that is needed is for the misconception that such crystal ball gazing is science to be exposed as outlining possibilities, not describing what is known. It is conjecture, and conjecture is creative, but it can mislead those who do not appreciate that science is not merely what some prominent scientist thinks.
Literary criticism, philosophy and theology are among the subjects available for study that permit gurus to expound and collect a following of admirers, whether they are right or not. Science is not in the same category. Science has to be shown to work. Philosophers, theologians and literary critics are used to accepting the opinions of their authorities as being some sort of truth. It is not truth in any scientific sense, and however interesting it might be, it has no scientific value until its validity is tested empirically and its bounds of application determined. The speculations of scientist free to allow their minds to roam over future possibilities are no better.
This is a crucial point. If sociologists and social psychologists decide that evolutionary biology has implications for social organization who can simply deny them this right. The Roses think they should not on the grounds that it is reductionism, using the word as some sort of swear word. No one has a copyright on the science of evolution, and the way that science works is that good science is fruitful, meaning it leads to progress because it has widespread implications and leads to fresh discoveries. That is what scientific progress is. The spread of ideas, even barmy ones, should not be curtailed except by criticism of them. Ideas fail when they are shown to be wrong, not by banning discussion of them. Science should not have its border guards telling you where you might travel and where you might not.
Science or Propaganda
What these authors seem to complain about is that the views engendered by sociologists and psychologists who applied evolution in their fields did not do it scientifically, and the scientifically illiterate hacks who fill our newspapers and TV stations jumped on to the bandwagon and spread a lot of this ill-founded speculation when they had no war propaganda to spread instead. The proper thing for scientists to do is simply to refute it, not to try to stop it from happening. Part of that would be to campaign for greater scientific literacy among the hacks but that perhaps is asking too much.
In fact, the authors in this book often do show that knowledgeable scientists have refuted the fanciful and unscientific speculation in a host of exemplary books. That is science at work, and for some of these authors of a Marxist background, it is dialectical too, so what is their beef? The beef is a valid one. It is that these wrong and semi-digested theories are used politically as the programmes of right wing political parties. Again, the correct strategy is to counter these errors with proper science, not with prohibition. When evolutionary psychology makes “unsupportable assertions”, as they say it does, the correct response is to show the error and to argue the correct case. It must be done scientifically and not by counter assertion alone.
Since the editors say that “developing alternative explanatory perspectives” to evolutionary psychology is an aim of the book, it must be that at present there are none, or they are insufficiently developed. Developing them is admirable, but the hypotheses that stand are those that are scientifically tested. It is the ability of evolutionary psychology and any “alternative perspectives” to stand up to rigorous testing that decides what is true, and not simply that some authority has an alternative to some hypothesis they do not like on political grounds.
Desire and Mitigation
And, remember, in social terms a true evolutionary explanation is not mitigation. An old cartoon theme is that of the caveman clubbing his mate and dragging her off by the hair. Doubtless many people, if not most, think this is an extreme depiction of some germ of evolutionary truth, but even if it is, it is no mitigation of rape, or any assault on women. Modern humans are conscious and thinking creatures able to take control of our lives whatever underlying adaptation inappropriate to civilization we might have. If we are shown genetically to have some such adaptation then we ought to know it, so that when an illegal or undesitrable urge arises in us, we can resist it consciously.
Few people find it too much trouble to find a urinal or lavatory when they need one, and fewer still submit immediately to sexual urges when they arise in company. Those who do might be acting perfectly naturally, but in civilised society no one protests at the artificial restriction of their evolutionary adaptations when they are arrested for their inconsiderate behaviour. It is better for us to know what we are up against than to remain confused and uncertain.
Thus when a man called Robert Wright tells us that people cannot control what they do when they are biologically disposed to act in a certain way, he is talking through his hat. Even at the beginning of civilization, when laws were imposed to keep order in urban society, the lawmakers were fully aware of their purpose. Though they obviously had no scientific basis for it, they knew that people could not be allowed to do whatever their whims or instincts impelled them to do. The man that has the urge to pee in a shop doorway would be advised to find a public convenience. It is natural for us all to go about naked, but few decide to do it in our northern climates, and those that do are rarely tolerated for long by our legal systems, influenced as they are by Christian prudery.
It is simply no excuse that we have adapted in some way or other, if that adaptation is now considered undesirable in civilized society, so Wright is quite wrong. The whole point of intelligence is that it can overrule instincts, evolutionary impulses, or whatever anyone would like to call them. If anyone should doubt it, then let them test it by experiment instead of spouting their untested opinions as if they were established truths. For most people 5000 years of civilisation is a long if not well controlled experiment that might show it is better not to restrict our instinctive behaviour unnecessarily, but that we can tolerate restrictions quite well, even severe ones.
The fact is that the people being criticized by Rose, “et al”, often are not being scientific but are simply giving opinions on the basis of only partly understood science. The essayists in this volume often sound the same, but with a different opinion. It is easy to tests skills like verbal skills and spatial skills, and by doing it, it is well established that women are verbally superior to men, but men are spatially superior to women—on average. It seems insane, if, knowing this, society has to ignore it. Women can be expected to dominate society as politicians, orators, writers, presenters, teachers, and so on, while men can be left to play football and cricket, and perhaps be bricklayers. It sounds quite idyllic. But since everyone can be appropriately tested for these skills, there is no need to classify people on the average. Skills can be individually tested and then careers planned on the basis of people’s abilities. What is wrong with that?
Welfare or Abandonment?
Another beef of the Roses’ authors is that evolutionary psychology offers an excuse for dismantling the welfare state. Dorothy Nelkin, a sociology professor of New York University, writes:
Why support job training, welfare or childcare programmes when those targetted are biologically incapable of benefitting from the effort?
It seems an eminently sensible question, but does not force the conclusion that welfare and improvement programmes should be abandoned. The answer is back again with science. Do we really know that these people are biologically incapable of benefitting? We might know that they are not benefitting as much as we would like, but do we know why? If we find out that some people have a biologically conditioned disadvantage, we need to devise methods that will benefit them despite the disadvantage, help them overcome it, or help them avoid it. Right wing selfishness will use any such arguments to accentuate social inequality, but it is up to those who are civilized to use science to ensure that the poor and disadvanteaged are not ignored and marginalized. So, welfare programmes, training and child care should be checked scientifically so that people able to benefit do benefit. There is no point for the disadvanteged people or the state to impose programmes that are valueless, simply because it is politically correct. It means making sure our welfare programmes actually work.
Nelkin says, no doubt rightly, that the appeal of evolutionary psychology is political—to uphold the “status quo”—and is quasi-religious. If this is so, then its political and religious arguments can be countered in kind, but it remains true that, if it is wrong, ultimately it will be shown to be wrong scientifically. Its claims can be exposed as false or verified by testing. The force of any reactionary claim can be undermined by demanding that rigorous scientific evidence be produced. Without it, such views are only opinion.
Even prominent socio-biologists like E O Wilson accept that the field suffers from a “scarcity of information” and that the “rules that guide behavioural development are largely unexplored”. These frank admissions by a man considered to be some sort of ogre must undermine any arguments of those besotted with exaggerated ideas about sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. Without adequate rules and information, all the travel agents for these unexplored regions are doing is guessing that the trip will be enjoyable, and such guesses can be little more than expressions of a political position. Inadequately prepared trips into the unknown are more than likely to be disastrous.
Wilson goes on to say, we discover, that though the shortcomings are conceptual, technical and deep, they are ultimately soluble. That is an optimistic view to hold, but, though it gives the impression that the solutions will be favourable, it is quite unscientific to assume they will be.
