'Boys are made to squirt and girls are made to lay eggs. And if the truth
be known, boys don't very much care what they squirt into.' Crude and inelegant
it may be, but Gore Vidal's pithy quote neatly sums up the argument of evolutionary
psychology.
The human mind is built from genes, the argument goes, the sole purpose of
which is to reproduce themselves. The genes, which have been selected for
through the process of evolution, programme the mind with a set of behaviours
best designed to carry out their selfish aims. The reproductive strategies
of men and women are different, so they have been programmed to exhibit different
behaviours. The whole edifice of human society and culture is built on the
need for genes to reproduce themselves, and on the different needs of men
and women.
It's an argument that might strike some people as being at least as crude
and inelegant as Vidal's summary, but it is one that has become increasingly
acceptable, fashionable even. Darwinian thinkers like Richard Dawkins and
Steven Pinker have become science superstars. A multitude of non-scientists,
including Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg have
become proselytisers for the new vision of Man. From Cosmo to Time
the media has been increasingly seduced by the charms of the new science.
Leading evolutionary psychologists regularly pitch in with the Darwinian view
on contemporary political debates, from Richard Wilkinson discussing the evolutionary
basis of health inequalities to Steven Pinker ruminating in New Yorker
magazine on the evolutionary significance of Bill sharing a cigar with Monica.
Fashionable, perhaps, but is it credible? That's the question I want to address
in this essay by looking at three basic premises of evolutionary psychology.
First, that human beings are not born as blank slates, but are preprogrammed
with specific knowledge about the world into which they are about to enter.
Second, that most human behaviours, as well as social structures, have been
selected for through the course of evolution, and that the ultimate (if not
proximate) cause of such behaviour is the need to spread genes. And third,
that many of the social problems which beset humanity arise from the mismatch
between our genetic heritage (which is adapted for a Stone Age environment)
and the world in which we live today. In effect we are Stone Age men living
in a space age world. The first argument, I want to show, is largely correct,
the second largely wrong, and third is specious nonsense.
For most of the past half-century, the orthodox view within psychology, anthropology
and social science has been that human beings are born as blank slates. The
human infant learns entirely through experience, and its behaviours, attitudes
and personality are moulded wholly by the culture into which it is born. Most
scientists acknowledged that humans had a number of basic instincts and an
innate propensity to learn, but felt that these did not amount to much given
the almost infinitely plastic and impressionable nature of the mind. Finally,
according to this orthodox view, the human brain works like a general purpose
computer, using much the same method of reasoning to tackle every problem,
whether reading a book or making a marriage proposal. Few went as far as Jean-Paul
Sartre who claimed that 'there is no human nature... Man simply is. He is
what he wills.' But the spirit of Sartre's sentiment has infused much of what
Darwinists today dismissively dub the Standard Social Science Model, or SSSM.
In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that the blank slate view
of the human mind is untenable. A human infant which began life with an empty
head would be in a similar predicament to Funes, a character in a Jorge Luis
Borges story. Funes never forgot anything, and subsequently spent the whole
day recalling the events of the previous day. The infant, similarly, would
not know which stimuli to attend to, and which to ignore, or how to transform
relevant stimuli into meaningful perceptions, ideas and concepts. An infant,
therefore, like Funes, needs a mechanism to filter incoming data and to attach
meaning to them. It would already have to know something about the world into
which it is about to be born.
Over the past two decades psychologists have devised ever more inventive experiments
to tease out what this 'something' might be. We now know, for instance, that
infants possess knowledge about the physical world that they could not possibly
have acquired through experience. They know what constitutes a physical an
object, that objects do not normally pass through each other, and that they
do not normally materialise or dematerialise at will. Infants seem to have
an innate concept of the difference between animate and inanimate objects,
and an intuitive preference for the human face.
Perhaps the most spectacular advance in the understanding of innate knowledge
has been with an infant's linguistic ability. Forty years ago Noam Chomsky
instigated a revolution in cognitive psychology by suggesting that children
learn language by learning rules of grammar. These rules, he suggested, are
somehow hardwired into the brain. Chomsky called these innate rules a 'universal
grammar' and suggested that the same universal grammar underlay all human
languages.
Over the past four decades Chomsky's insights have proved very fruitful. Research
from a variety of disciplines has shown linguistic capacity to be both natural
and universal. It is natural because it is almost impossible to stop a child
learning its native tongue. When a child encounters maths, it has to memorise
the multiplication table and the complexities of long division. When it learns
to play the piano, it must laboriously learn the notes and the chords and
then the way that these combine to form musical phrases. Yet when it learns
its native language, it uses such complex grammatical constructions such as
the conditional subjunctive, or the past perfect tense without knowing that
it is doing so, and possibly without ever knowing in its lifetime that it
has done so thousands of times over.
Language is universal because not only do all human cultures possess language,
but they possess language of similar complexity. As the anthropological linguist
Edward Sapir put it, 'When this comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with
the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunting savage of Assam.'
Unlike reading or mathematics or engineering, the sophistication of language
is not altered by historical or social development. Language, therefore, seems
to be both distinct from other cognitive skills and innate.
All these considerations have led cognitive psychologists to replace the blank
slate with a 'modular' view of the mind. The mind possesses innate knowledge
about the world. This knowledge is contained in a collection of distinct modules,
or mini-minds, each specialised to perform a distinct task: understand physical
relations, analyse visual data, process speech, and so on. Most cognitive
psychologists believe that the mind is only partly modular - largely in the
processing of language, perception and emotion. Cognition, many argue, results
from more general brain processes.
Not so, respond evolutionary psychologists. Virtually all thought processes,
they suggest, are modular and innate. Moreover, they argue, modules are not
simply innate (hardwired into the brain) but evolved (designed by natural
selection to perform functions important to the survival and reproduction
of the organism).
The starting point of evolutionary psychology is not so much how the brain
works today, as how it would have worked some 50 000 years ago. The brain,
they observe, is an evolved structure and it evolved to solve the problems
characteristic of our hunter-gatherer past. 'Evolutionary processes are the
"architect" that assembled, detail by detail, our evolved psychological
and physiological architecture', the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby wrote in their landmark paper 'The psychological foundations of culture'.
Because each type of problem faced by our Stone Age ancestors had a unique
form, trying to solve them all with a single reasoning device would not have
been very useful. The most successful early humans would have been those individuals
whose brains provided specific solutions to specific problems. In other words,
the smartest ancient human brains would have been composed of dozens of different
instincts (or 'modules'), each designed by natural selection to aid survival
and reproduction in a Stone Age environment. For evolutionary psychologists
all human behaviours are adaptive - they were chosen by natural selection
because they increased the ability of the individual to reproduce. According
to Cosmides and Tooby, these ancient modules would have included ones for
'face recognition, spatial relations, rigid object mechanics, tool-use, fear,
social exchange, emotion perception, kin-oriented motivation, effort allocation
and recalibration, child care, social inference, sexual attraction, semantic
inference, friendship, grammar acquisition, communications-pragmatics, and
theory of mind'.
Since the modern mind is not genetically that different from that of our ancestors,
Cosmides and Tooby argue, so our minds too must be comprised of these modules.
As with our ancestors, our mind is a nest of instincts, all adapted for a
Stone Age life.
The Cosmides and Tooby model makes for an interesting, and in some ways a
plausible, theory. The trouble is, it simply does not necessarily fit in with
what we know about the ways in which the human mind actually works. The modern
mind is characterised not by its modularity - a capacity to respond to many
tasks in a fast but rigid fashion - but by its flexibility, an ability to
think laterally, and to use analogy and metaphor.
Take, for instance, something as basic children's play. 'Give a child a doll
and she will start talking to it, feeding it and changing its nappy', the
archaeologist Steven Mithen points out. 'That inert lump of moulded plastic
never smiles at her, but she seems to use the same mental process for interacting
with it as she does for interacting with real people.' In the evolutionary
psychology scheme of things, the brain contains two innate, specialist modules,
one of which allows us to deal with animate objects, and the other with inanimate
ones. There is some empirical evidence that this may be the case. But in treating
an inanimate doll as if it were an animate being, the child is seems to be
tearing up the psychologists' blueprint. She is displaying a form of lateral
thinking not permitted by a strict modular model. Had our ancestors also mistaken
inanimate objects for animate ones, they would not have survived for very
long, and we would not be here, debating this point.
Evolutionary psychologists respond that their critics misunderstand the nature
of flexibility. 'Having a lot of built-in machinery', Steven Pinker argues,
'should make a system respond more intelligently and flexibly to its inputs,
not less'. Humans are intelligent 'not because we have fewer instincts than
other animals but because we have more. Our vaunted flexibility comes from
scores of instincts assembled into programmes and pitted in competition.'
This, however, misses the point. Human flexibility arises not because our
various instincts are allowed to compete with each other, but because we are
able to integrate and eventually transcend the disparate views available to
any single module or instinct. It is this ability to create a more integrated
view of the world that we call reasoning. By definition modular problem-solving
works with less than all the information that a creature possesses. Eventually,
however, the mind has to synthesize the results of all those modular computations
to create a human-like view of the world. And this, as the philosopher Jerry
Fodor points out, cannot be a modular process.
Fodor was one of the original proponents of the modular view of the mind.
But he is highly critical of contemporary evolutionary psychology, because
of its advocacy of what he has dubbed 'massive modularity'. In his early work,
Fodor used the existence of visual illusions as an argument for the existence
of modules. Even though we know that certain things are illusions, we cannot
see them in any other way, however hard we may try. Vision, therefore, seems
to work independently of other types of knowledge; in other words it seems
to work as an isolated module.
But our very ability to recognise that an illusion is not real, Fodor points
out, shows that there must be more to cognition that the work of modules:
The moon looks bigger when it's on the horizon; but I know perfectly well that it's not. My visual perception module gets fooled, but I don't. The question is : who is this I? And by what - presumably global - computational process does it use what I know about astronomical facts to correct the misleading appearances that my visual perception insists on computing? If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had better be somebody in charge; and by God it had better be me.
Fodor is suggesting that a brain full of modules, and only full of modules,
could not give rise to self awareness. And self-awareness, as we shall see
later, is crucial in understanding what it means to be human.
Human beings possess innate knowledge about our world. The human mind, to
some degree at least, is composed of specialised modules, each dedicated to
solving particular tasks. But there seems to be little wisdom in viewing the
mind simply as a nest of instincts. There is, on the contrary, considerable
reason, both empirical and theoretical, to believe that the mind cannot be
built in the way the evolutionary psychologists wish it to be. While language
and basic perceptual systems such as vision or the understanding of physical
systems, have been shown to be modular, very little else has. Certainly, there
is little evidence that the higher level cognitive skills on Cosmides and
Tooby's list exist as modules in the mind.
The second premise of evolutionary psychology – that human behaviours
and social structures are solely the products of natural selection - is even
more problematic. This claim rests on two beliefs: first that modern behaviours
are analogous to those of our ancestors; and second, that, short of evoking
Divine intervention, natural selection is the only force that could have shaped
the human mind and society. Like the claim for a modular mind, this argument
is based on a view of how humans would have conducted themselves 50 000 years
ago. But how do we know the behaviour of our ancestors? Behaviour, unlike
bone, does not fossilise. Precisely because these are ancient humans, living
before the development of much technology, archaeological evidence is scant.
And there are certainly no ancient humans still living for us to observe.
It's a problem faced by many disciplines - archaeology, for instance, or palaeoanthropology
- which have to reconstruct an ancient past from scant evidence. But it is
a particular problem for evolutionary psychologists because their whole discipline
rests on understanding modern behaviour in the light of ancient behaviour.
There are a number of ways evolutionary psychologists try to get round this
problem. One is to assume that the lives of contemporary hunter-gatherers,
such as the !Kung San of southern Africa or the Ache of South America, provide
a window onto the lives our ancestors. Since humans, over the vast proportion
of our evolutionary history, lived as hunter-gatherers, so any evolved behaviours
would be adaptations to a hunter-gatherer life. Hence studying the behaviours
of contemporary hunter-gatherers should tell us which modern behaviours are
adaptive and which not.
There is a long history of psychologists and anthropologists viewing 'primitive'
groups as relics of an ancient past. It's a claim at the heart of nineteenth-century
racial anthropology. I am not suggesting that the arguments of evolutionary
psychologists are racist in any way - far from it. But many of the problems
that underlay racial anthropology also underlie evolutionary psychology.
To begin with, why should we assume that the lives of 'primitive' societies
today resemble those of ancient humans? Both may be hunter-gatherers, but
the !Kung San, the Ache and others, are likely to have changed and developed
over the past fifty or hundred thousand years. After all, no one would claim
that modern agricultural societies resemble those of the earliest farmers
ten thousand years ago. Why make the same assumption about hunter-gatherers,
especially over a much greater time span?
There are many reasons to question the assumption that the psychological traits
and behaviours of contemporary hunter-gatherers are necessarily evolved adaptations.
Consider, for instance, the claim by some Darwinists that we possess an 'intuitive
biology' module - an innate evolved capacity to understand and order the natural
world. A number of anthropologists have pointed out the remarkable similarities
between the way that 'primitive' societies classify the living world and the
Linnaean system of classification at the heart of modern biology. According
to Scott Atran, cross-cultural studies suggest that people universally group
local plants and animals into kinds that correspond to the genus level in
the Linnaean classification. People also classify kinds into higher level
forms such as trees, grass, birds, fish, quadrupeds, and so on, many of which
coincide with the biologist's notion of class.
For evolutionary psychologists, the fact that hunter-gatherers have developed
such superb taxonomic skills without the benefits of modern science reveals
these skills to be innate and evolved. But if this were true, then, given
their common genetic constitution, people living in modern industrial nations
should be as capable as hunter-gatherers of classifying animals and plants.
Quite clearly, they are not. Put the average Englishman on a desert island
and you’d quickly find that his 'natural' abilities were less than intuitive.
The taxonomic skills of hunter-gatherers may well be inherited through their
cultures not their genes. Evolutionary psychologists are confusing innate
knowledge with folk knowledge - the knowledge developed within non-scientific
cultures. Folk knowledge, such as that of hunter-gatherers, they assume, must
be intuitive. But why? Non-scientific peoples are as capable of reasoning
about the natural world as are scientists. The empirical reality of the biological
world, together with a common propensity of human cultures to categorise at
some minimal level (a propensity that may or may not be innate) is sufficient
to explain similar taxonomies among different peoples. It is simply nonsense
for Steven Pinker to write that because 'Most people feel, along with biologists,
that the caterpillar and butterfly are the same animal, and the caterpillar
and centipede are not, despite appearances to the contrary', so this demonstrates
an 'intuitive' capacity to classify living forms. In fact, it simply demonstrates
that we have learned that caterpillars give rise to butterflies but are unrelated
to centipedes, just as we learn that whales should be classified not with
fish but with mammals - and just as Australian Aborigines or the !Kung San
learn the differences between birds, fish and quadrupeds.
The absurdities of using contemporary hunter-gatherers as templates for ancient
humans can be seen in an example in EO Wilson's book On Human Nature.
Here, Wilson examines sexual roles among the !Kung San. Wilson observes that
the !Kung do not impose sex roles upon their children, little girls apparently
being treated in much the same manner as little boys. As adults, women gather
mongongo nuts and other plant food, usually close to the camp, while men range
further to hunt game. But, writes Wilson, '!Kung social life is relaxed and
egalitarian and social tasks are often shared. Men often gather mongongo nuts
or build huts... and women occasionally catch small game.'
!Kung San society, then, shows some but not much sexual differentiation. Where,
however, the !Kung San have settled into an agricultural form of life, the
sexual roles are much more entrenched. Wilson suggests that as societies develop,
so sexual roles become more demarcated: 'When societies grow still larger
and more complex, women tend to be reduced in influence outside the home,
and to be more constrained by custom, ritual and formal life.'
Wilson's claim that social complexity necessarily leads to greater sexual
differentiation may be somewhat dubious but it is not a totally unwarranted
assumption. A reasonable interpretation of this might be that sexual differentiation
is a product of social development. To find the causes of the subordination
of women in modern society, then, one should look at the organisation of modern
society.
This, however, is not Wilson's conclusion. According to Wilson sexual differentiation
is the product of a natural process - hypertrophy. Hypertrophy normally refers
to an increase in the size of a tissue or organ, often in response to an increased
workload. A similar process, Wilson suggests, has led to sexual differentiation
in modern societies. 'Like the teeth of baby elephants that lengthen into
tusks, and the cranial bones of the male elk that sprout into astonishing
great antlers', he writes, 'the basic social responses of the hunter-gatherers
have metamorphosed from relatively modest environmental adaptations into unexpectedly
elaborate, even monstrous forms in advanced societies.'
Speculation may be the stock in trade of evolutionary psychology, but even
by Darwinian standards this is spectacularly wild. To begin with, hypertrophy
is a developmental, not evolutionary, process. It refers to a process that
takes place within an individual's lifetime, not within a species across evolutionary
time. It also refers to a process of physical, not a behavioural or social,
change. As a scientific theory goes, it's about on par with the belief that
aliens built the pyramids. None of this prevents Wilson from arguing that
a whole host of other social phenomena, including racism and nationalism,
are also 'hypertrophic modifications of the biologically meaningful institutions
of hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal states.' It's an argument that belongs
more to the Eric von Daniken school of science-as-wishful-thinking than to
any theory derived from Charles Darwin.
What Wilson is really doing is taking a modern behaviour - in this case sexual
discrimination - translating it back into hunter-gatherer life, and assuming
that these early behaviours must be 'biologically meaningful' since the only
force acting on ancient humans was natural selection. He then notices that
the same behaviour appears in modern humans. So, hey presto! the modern behaviour
must also be the result of natural selection. When the conclusion is smuggled
into the method, it is not surprising if you always end up with the conclusion
that you desire - in this case that modern human behaviour is the product
of natural selection.
This circularity is common to much of evolutionary psychology thinking. Take,
for instance, Cosmides and Tooby's list of modules. How do they know that
ancient humans possessed those modules? They don't. They describe, rather,
modern behaviours, needs and knowledge and then assume that ancient humans
can also be understood so. Far from using ancient behaviour to understand
modern behaviour, evolutionary psychologists use modern behavioural categories
to reconstruct our ancestors' minds.
In any case, even if we did know the behaviour patterns of early humans, this
would not necessarily help us understand the roots of modern behaviour. This
is because of the problems of using analogies as a scientific tool. Metaphor
and analogy are very important to scientific reasoning because they allow
us to view phenomena in new and distinct ways. Perhaps the most evocative
and influential modern scientific metaphor is that of the 'selfish gene'.
Richard Dawkins' memorable phrase illustrates the strengths of metaphor in
science. It replaces the drab mathematics of population biology with a wonderfully
illuminating picture of how natural selection might work. But it also illustrates
the dangers of metaphoric thinking. All too often writers, including sometimes
Dawkins himself, seem to forget they are dealing with a metaphor and argue
as if genes actually were independent agents acting out their selfish desires.
In the case of the selfish gene its metaphoric nature is apparent to all,
though some may forget it on occasion. In dealing with the relationship between
modern behaviour and that of ancient humans, however, many Darwinists fail
to grasp at all that they are dealing with an analogy, not a true material
relationship.
Modern life is very different from Stone Age life. We partake in a myriad
of activities, from going on holiday to wearing a condom, from watching TV
to holding political demonstrations, that did not exist in the Pleistocene.
How, then, do we translate from modern behaviour to ancient behaviour, and
vice versa? By assuming that modern behaviours are in some way analogous to
ancient behaviours. Cornering the futures market is like moving in for the
kill in a hunt; following the party line at Westminster is akin to submitting
to the authority of the alpha male; and so on. Too often, however, evolutionary
psychologists fail to appreciate that these are simply imaginative analogies,
of the kind that a poet or a novelist might use, and treat them instead as
if there existed a real relationship between the two behaviours. 'It is poor
science', Rosalind Arden pointed out in her recent debate in Prospect
with Kingsley Browne, 'to pretend that stockbroking is like hunting and that
staying at home with a small screamer is what women have evolved o cope with.'
Indeed it is. But, unfortunately, much of evolutionary psychology rests on
such assumptions.