lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

---

This is what the founders of evolutionary psychology are doing these days, BTW

The new science of human nature: explaining why your face contorts in the way it does when you are angry, and not in some other way

It seems a bit uncharacteristic of you to scoff at a paper without giving reasons.  The authors propose a specific, falsifiable hypothesis for why expressions of anger contort the face in the way that they do.  It’s right there in the title.  

And as a problem in evolutionary biology, the evolution of human emotions has a pretty august history, so I don’t get what’s prima facie ridiculous or even unusual about trying to study it.  I could very easily imagine some of my colleagues doing a similar paper on birds, with no one batting an eye.

This isn’t to say that there couldn’t be specific problems with this paper, but what are they?  

My post was really unclear, but I’m not scoffing at the paper, which is actually pretty cool.  I’m scoffing at my many-years-old memories of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which is roughly 500 pages of “if only people took ev psych into account, they would agree with my specific political positions on a great variety of topics,” and also with Tooby and Cosmides’ claims that their research program is taking psychology back to the drawing board in an attempt to correct the massive defects of an otherwise pervasive “Standard Social Science Model.”

Stuff like the linked paper is in fact cool, but it is a bit of a downer to realize that it is what evolutionary psychology actually tends to be when you have been told that evolutionary psychology is so revelatory as to radically constraint which political, moral, and aesthetic views are reasonable.  (The latter is pretty much what The Blank Slate actually says, as far as I remember; then again, I am recalling the memories of a 16-year-old in search of grand unified theories, who found Pinker instead of Ayn Rand or whoever)

Oh, my bad, then.  I was pretty confused by the original because it didn’t seem like you to do the point and guffaw thing.

Without committing myself to defending TBS to the hilt, was it that heavy-handed?.  While I don’t recall Pinker advocating specific political positions (I would peg him as a political moderate?), there are definitely political positions–held by serious people–that a more sober view of human nature kind of rules out.  Chomsky, for example, takes it as just obvious that large-scale human societies can and should operate according to the distributional principles that govern family life.  Parents don’t rent rooms to children, so why should hoteliers? And Pinker’s like: Noam, I love you bro, but can you think of one very important difference between a parent and a child, and two people chosen at random?  &c.

I think a similar point can be said for the “SSSM”: the strawprofessors who hold these outlandish views really are out there, in positions of prominence.  

I don’t think evo psych need be particularly revolutionary– it’s just a call for consilience with everything else we know about humans.  Skimming over the link, I don’t know what I could say I really disagree with, except a quibble about the stone age mind (various agricultural populations have undergone a variety of selective sweeps…)  But in general, thinking about how a given cognitive phenomenon might have evolved is a powerful tool for understanding it, and whatever the correct psychological theories are, they have to be consistent with the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.  Maybe this view is radical among psychologists and led to some aggressive salesmanship, but from my seat in the bio department it seems like a pretty good move on the whole.  At the very least, EP is usually criticized for wildly outlandish just-so stories (though rarely does one receive even one example upon request).  Getting heat for being too mundane, too incremental, is a kind of progress :)

Oh, yeah.  I totally agree with Pinker that certain views, along the lines of the unholy trinity he talks about (Blank Slate / Noble Savage / Ghost in the Machine) can be found all over the intellectual world and seem to be at involved suspiciously often whenever someone’s saying something that seems too silly for their stature.

If the book had just been about that, it would have been fine – in fact, if the argument had been simply “these themes crop up all the time in ideas that don’t pan out well,” I would be much more on board with it.  However, it is unlike that hypothetical book in two ways.  First, Pinker isn’t just saying “you can’t really imagine the world like one big happy family” and other such duhs.  He’s making … well, as I remember, a whole bunch of specific political statements.  Not necessarily extreme political statements, but specific ones, forming a full portrait of moderate American secular conservatism.  “Equity feminism was good but gender feminism is weird and screwing up our campuses.  STEM gender gap is because women just aren’t interested in science.  You can’t teach men not to rape (Thornhill and Palmer).  Cops are an important deterrent even when you think they might not be (I don’t remember this chapter very well but from what I can reconstruct I think I was pretty heavy-handed).  Modern art is pretentious pomo crap.  Communism can’t possibly work.  Parenting doesn’t really have an effect on children (I admit this is the odd one out)”

And the second issue is that a lot of this is supposed to result from ev-psych.  Like, from specific ev psych works, such as Thornhill and Palmer, and also from the general sense that ev psych as a research program has vindicated roughly the notion of “human nature” in something very close to the sense that American conservatives might use the phrase and understand it amongst themselves.

Which is a pretty big claim – not as in implausible, but as in requiring a whole lot of incremental work to pencil in all the fine details of this vision of man, make sure it really checks out cross-culturally (the ev psych people don’t do this as often as you would hope), etc.  Instead you have stuff like “why the angry face involves these muscles rather than the other muscles,” which is fun science but not exactly the bridge between me and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Or like the Cheater Detection Module!  I love the Cheater Detection Module!  It’s Tooby and Cosmides’ big example of how they found an adaptive mental module predicted by evolutionary theory which vindicates their modular swiss-army-knife view of the mind as vs. the SSSM and so on.  What was their prediction?

Well, see, in the ancestral environment … logic was costly.  For some reason.  You could use up a large proportion of the body’s glucose for the brain, you could make the brain so big it makes childbirth dangerous and necessitates a period of years where the newborn can’t act independently because it’s still wiring up its 10^15 synapses.  But still!  All that raw power isn’t enough to let you have a general-purpose logical conditional subroutine that tells you stuff like “if you want to test P –> Q then look for (~Q and P).”

No, no, you’ve gotta save that stuff for special occasions.  Adaptive occasions.  Like when your people agreed that you can only do the Thing (P) after you have Become A Man (Q) but young Grog over there is not yet a Man (~Q) and yet he is doing the Thing! (P).  For this special situation, checking for social rule violation, the very same logic subroutine you could have made general-purpose kicks in and figures stuff out.

This was the most adaptive design choice as predicted by Tooby and Cosmides’ highly detailed and biologically informed model of the energetic and computational constraints faced by the brain in the ancestral hahahahahaha oh god who am i kidding

This (that people do the conditional thing better when it’s a social rule) was an already known result from an existing psych experiment called the Wason Selection Task.  There have been various stabs at explaining it (such as Dan Sperber’s “relevance”).  Tooby and Cosmides stepped into the ring with their new theory which amazingly, wonderfully explained the mysterious Wason Selection Task, by predicting that … people evolved … and it was useful to detect cheaters … and logic was somehow hard … you had to make a special module to do this … you could actually fit this kind of hard-coded structure in the genome and it was worth doing so … it’s certainly conceivable that it worked out that way, that the intersection of all the constraints we don’t know happened to produce that as an optimum … 

It wasn’t a prediction, it was a postdiction.  They never would have thought of it if the Wason Selection Task hadn’t already existed.  Which, as science, is not great.

So anyway, somehow you stack up a bunch of that kind of stuff, and a bunch of other studies that are mostly on American college sophomores but it’s all kind of proving “human nature” in this big self-confirming web anyway, right?, and you put all this junky stuff together, and you hear the words “human nature” ringing in your ears, and all of a sudden you’re sitting in an office in the American Enterprise Institute and you’re like, how did I get here?

(via lambdaphagy)