I contend that your contention is bogus in the context of at least this thread. Which is the point I advanced on the last page.
Loren, you didn't advance any point on the last page, least of all the point that I was wrong. You just half-posited that people who disagree with you are wearing ideological blinders; very classy!
You most certainly did not engage with any of my actual contentions.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Evolutionary psychology is committed to a very specific picture of human cognition--massive modularity of narrowly tailored functional circuits--as well as to a specific picture of evolution--the settling of those narrowly tailored circuits in selective response to a largely uniform "hunter-gatherer" environment over an evolutionarily significant time frame. These theses are in no way obviously true, and, they are most definitely not necessary commitments for anyone who wants to talk about evolution or psychology.
I don't believe that is (universally, or dogmatically) the case. Most of the EPs I know would say that those are the ones they address at the moment - because specialised modularity has a much more obvious consequence than complex interactionary tendencies (plus it can be modelled much more easily). Also, if you attend any decent EP conference you'll hear a lot of people talking about other environments and other, for want of a better word, paradigms.
Most behavioural genetics is very primitive at the moment too - but there is no dogmatic primitivism in the field, merely issues of practicality and understanding.
I took that claim (about modularity) from Feral and also the SEP:
In a recent presentation of evolutionary psychology's theoretical tenets Tooby and Cosmides provide the following list (2005):
1. The brain is a computer designed by natural selection to extract information from the environment.
2. Individual human behavior is generated by this evolved computer in response to information it extracts from the environment. Understanding behavior requires articulating the cognitive programs that generate the behavior.
3. The cognitive programs of the human brain are adaptations. They exist because they produced behavior in our ancestors that enabled them to survive and reproduce.
4. The cognitive programs of the human brain may not be adaptive now; they were adaptive in ancestral environments.
5. Natural selection ensures that the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs and not a domain general architecture.
6. Describing the evolved computational architecture of our brains “allows a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena” (18).
Specifically, I was referencing #5--the idea that the computational structure of the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs rather than a domain general architecture. That claim--which is presupposed by the methodology of attributing a specific psychological commonality, e.g. fear of snakes, to a specific adaptively selected circuit--may have some plausibility, but it is certainly not obvious or necessarily the case.
Assuming the present field of evolutionary psychology to be obviously or necessarily the only way to investigate our evolution in relation to our psychology just betrays a lack of understanding of the details. It's not all in a name, folks.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
Specifically, I was referencing #5--the idea that the computational structure of the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs rather than a domain general architecture. That claim--which is presupposed by the methodology of attributing a specific psychological commonality, e.g. fear of snakes, to a specific adaptively selected circuit--may have some plausibility, but it is certainly not obvious or necessarily the case.
Er, no evolutionary psychologist denies the existence of general problem-solving capacity in the brain. It is the belief that in general, more than might be expected is handled by specific circuits. It's not dogmatic. I've talked to Tooby specifically about this; the disagreements are not about the existence of modules or not, but to the degree that one can make assertions about their properties or structures. The most dogmatic EPers, from your point of view, are those who are barely EPers in the first place (like Stephen Pinker).
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Specifically, I was referencing #5--the idea that the computational structure of the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs rather than a domain general architecture. That claim--which is presupposed by the methodology of attributing a specific psychological commonality, e.g. fear of snakes, to a specific adaptively selected circuit--may have some plausibility, but it is certainly not obvious or necessarily the case.
Er, no evolutionary psychologist denies the existence of general problem-solving capacity in the brain. It is the belief that in general, more than might be expected is handled by specific circuits. It's not dogmatic. I've talked to Tooby specifically about this; the disagreements are not about the existence of modules or not, but to the degree that one can make assertions about their properties or structures. The most dogmatic EPers, from your point of view, are those who are barely EPers in the first place (like Stephen Pinker).
I wasn't trying to claim that the evolutionary psychologist believes that there can be no general architecture in the brain whatsoever, just that, as you say, in general more than might be expected is handled by specific circuits, to a degree that makes possible certain assertions about their properties and structures. That may not have been clear.
My point was mainly just that this is an honest empirical hypothesis about the brain, but it is in no way the only such honest empirical hypothesis, nor is it a foregone conclusion.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
My point was mainly just that this is an honest empirical hypothesis about the brain, but it is in no way the only such honest empirical hypothesis, nor is it a foregone conclusion.
Well, that is true - but you will find plenty of evolutionary psychologists who will say things like "we need a better model for interactionary networks in the brain and how they are influenced by the genetic program for brain development before other hypotheses can be meaningfully analysed" - which I think is a fair position, and not quite the negation of opposing positions that plenty of chaps seem to believe is standard in the field. Just like every field, there are those who think they have all the answers (like Pinker), but most would happily say that they can only do some.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
My point was mainly just that this is an honest empirical hypothesis about the brain, but it is in no way the only such honest empirical hypothesis, nor is it a foregone conclusion.
Well, that is true - but you will find plenty of evolutionary psychologists who will say things like "we need a better model for interactionary networks in the brain and how they are influenced by the genetic program for brain development before other hypotheses can be meaningfully analysed" - which I think is a fair position, and not quite the negation of opposing positions that plenty of chaps seem to believe is standard in the field. Just like every field, there are those who think they have all the answers (like Pinker), but most would happily say that they can only do some.
You obviously have more of an in depth understanding of the state of the field than I do, so I can't really interact at a nitty gritty level there. What I'm mainly responding to is HamHam and Loren's magical non-inference: "we have evolved, and we have psychologies, ergo evolutionary psychology is nuts awesome."
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
we have evolved, and we have psychologies, ergo evolutionary psychology is nuts awesome.
But now I know it can be nuts awesome, I insist that it is
We might as well say, humans have appendices, trees don't, and the difference must be because of appendices serve some sort of vital function in human beings that's not required in trees. Can you explain to me exactly how evolutionary psychology can answer this question with a scientific linkage to evolution?
That's quite an easy question to answer using phylogenetics. It's a meaningful evolutionary question, albeit if you give the word serve the appropriate tense.
I mean, how exactly does a psychologist prove that evolution was the driver in the emergence of a given cognitive trait? They don't know how the cognitive trait arose; they can't measure the effect of said cognitive trait on an individual's ability to reproduce successfully; they can't account for the differences and/or similarity in cognitive traits within a given population/between individuals.
It's not that they can't full stop, it's that they can't do it very well. That's a huge difference. The science is young and developing and will get better, just like the field of conventional psychology.
I was talking about the field of evolutionary psychology as it is currently. I don't deny its future potential, just that currently it's all full of trash pseudoscience designed to misinform and mislead the general public. The major issue is this: with physiological traits, we know how they arise... mostly. We make an observation of a physiological trait; we can infer how it comes to be; we can investigate and demonstrate that inference; then we can investigate the genetics (or epigenetics or whatever) that causes that physiological trait and establish a causative statement to explain the existence of that physiological statement.
With a psychological trait, we make an observation; we have no idea how it comes to be; we can't investigate or demonstrate its mechanistic cause; we can't investigate that cause and establish a causative statement to explain its the existence of the trait. It would be like seeing the appendix and trying to explain its existence not knowing anything about genetics; we'd come up with all sorts of bizarre explanations... which we did back in the day, with Lamarckism and traditional Darwinism and social Darwinism, because we just saw things and tried to explain them without any actual investigative ability. If I may phrase this in the form of an Internet meme:
1. We observe that homosexuality exists.
2. ??????
3. We conclude that homosexuality exists because it causes higher fitness in individuals!
It's putting the cart before the horse. There's nothing intellectually wrong about it, as innocent theorizing; I tend to try and explain all things in evolutionary terms, but I don't try to pass it off as science or statements of undeniable truth, which most evolutionary psychologists seem to do. And it's absolutely objectionable to me, because during my brief stint as a high school teacher, I realised the depth with which some of this pseudoscience has penetrated in the field of education.
Round here, the Toronto District School Board is advocating "boy-focused education", targeting the differences between boy and girl brains as a means to improve academic achievement. While I don't deny that it is likely that male and female brains differ, we have absolutely no idea how they differ nor do we have any quantitative understanding of how those traits in which they differ are distributed amongst the genders nor do we even really have strictly two genders - see GBLTs. Do gay males have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Do lesbians have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Maybe it's not even that simple, and different... er... types of gays and lesbians have different brain "genders". And even then, this is all assuming those behavioural differences between boys and girls we observe are genetic in origin; they might not even be!
That's why I object to evolutionary psychology. Not because of its possibilities, but because of its present state. It's (largely) a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about pretending they know what they're talking about to push various social agendas upon the general public. If an evolutionary psychologist would care to admit that their beliefs are unproven and simply hypotheticals based on circumstantial evidence and existing science, then I've got no beef. But by and large, that's not how the field currently manifests. (And this is coming from a guy with a serious interest in systems biology, another field that doesn't really have much yet in the "causation that is actually demonstrably true" category.)
Edit: Also, to say that the field of evolutionary psychology is young and will eventually get there, like the field of good ol' reliable psychology isn't exactly reassuring to someone like me who's got an academic background in biology and evolution and has read people like Freud and has had some cursory experience with mental health care.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
With a psychological trait, we make an observation; we have no idea how it comes to be; we can't investigate or demonstrate its mechanistic cause; we can't investigate that cause and establish a causative statement to explain its the existence of the trait. It would be like seeing the appendix and trying to explain its existence not knowing anything about genetics; we'd come up with all sorts of bizarre explanations... which we did back in the day, with Lamarckism and traditional Darwinism and social Darwinism, because we just saw things and tried to explain them without any actual investigative ability. If I may phrase this in the form of an Internet meme:
Well, it depends what you mean by psychological trait. How do you feel about the discipline of neuroscience in general?
1. We observe that homosexuality exists.
2. ??????
3. We conclude that homosexuality exists because it causes higher fitness in individuals!
It's putting the cart before the horse. There's nothing intellectually wrong about it, as innocent theorizing; I tend to try and explain all things in evolutionary terms, but I don't try to pass it off as science or statements of undeniable truth, which most evolutionary psychologists seem to do. And it's absolutely objectionable to me, because during my brief stint as a high school teacher, I realised the depth with which some of this pseudoscience has penetrated in the field of education.
That's just using strong adaptationism as a premise though, which not everybody does when it comes to mental phenomena. And besides, a more accurate version of that would be:
1) homosexuality exists
2) it does not seem to be simply genetic or environmental, but...
3) twin studies give us enough to believe that there is some element of genetics to it
4) Intuitively, this seems odd; perhaps intuition is wrong?
5) Some models show that under certain conditions this type of behaviour might provide selective advantage for x y z reasons
6) Therefore being gay is not necessarily an evolutionary disadvantage
That, to me, is not particularly repellent. I think, again, you're feeling the force of the publicists rather than the gents themselves - plenty of publicisers of evopsych are huge dogmatic blowhards, but many of the chaps themselves are really quite guarded. Although I completely agree that its effect on education and the public perception of certain issues has been pretty bad.
Round here, the Toronto District School Board is advocating "boy-focused education", targeting the differences between boy and girl brains as a means to improve academic achievement. While I don't deny that it is likely that male and female brains differ, we have absolutely no idea how they differ nor do we have any quantitative understanding of how those traits in which they differ are distributed amongst the genders nor do we even really have strictly two genders - see GBLTs. Do gay males have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Do lesbians have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Maybe it's not even that simple, and different... er... types of gays and lesbians have different brain "genders". And even then, this is all assuming those behavioural differences between boys and girls we observe are genetic in origin; they might not even be!
This to me feels like the fault of sociobiologists... !
I briefly worked looking at evidence for various educational schemes (the only person who really came out of anything well was Carol Dweck, lovely woman), and there's a lot of crap around - I would just think of it more as a consequence of mistaken genetic determinism combined with sociobiology rather than evolutionary psychology, which has more surfed in on those conclusions with post-hoc justifications in the public mind than produced them in the first place.
It's (largely) a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about pretending they know what they're talking about to push various social agendas upon the general public.
I really don't agree with the social agendas part. The people using the research as their talking point, yes - but the scientists themselves? Much less so, I think. Of course, if you have any examples I will freely admit there may be some, as there are always a few scientists with a political bent around, but I haven't personally encountered many.
If an evolutionary psychologist would care to admit that their beliefs are unproven and simply hypotheticals based on circumstantial evidence and existing science, then I've got no beef. But by and large, that's not how the field currently manifests. (And this is coming from a guy with a serious interest in systems biology, another field that doesn't really have much yet in the "causation that is actually demonstrably true" category.)
Aww, systems biology gets a bad rap but I have no beef with it at all. As far as I'm concerned it's just our first steps into a more interactional approach to a lot of really interesting biological problems, so the relative lack of big results signals to me more that people are still getting to grips with 6-way interactions than the idea that there's something wrong with the field itself. I have the love for systems biology!
Also, to say that the field of evolutionary psychology is young and will eventually get there, like the field of good ol' reliable psychology isn't exactly reassuring to someone like me who's got an academic background in biology and evolution and has read people like Freud and has had some cursory experience with mental health care.
Imo, evolutionary psychology is a little better off than Freudian and Skinnerian psychology - if only because the intellectual climate is a lot more rigorous than it used to be. But I'll happily admit that a lot of it will probably turn out to be wrong.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
That said ... I guess I don't understand why people feel so strongly about evo-psych? Are there actually people in this thread—or in non-fringe settings—who say that because our primate ancestors were genetically disposed for certain behavior, that behavior is justified?
I've seen a lot of people argue that men are like this, and women are like this, so women suck at math naturally.
And use bullshitty evo psych explanations.
I mean, it's all on the internet, so who knows how serious they are. But it does create a gender essentialist atmosphere, which is.. obnoxious and unjustified. And the more people that think like that, the fewer people will test for other possible factors. Which is where the truth usually seems to lie.
So, I think it can be harmful. Most of the opposition comes partially from that point of view, I believe.
But isn't it a foregone conclusion that people like that are morons?
As far as sex differences, obviously there are genetic differences. I don't know about brains, but women typically aren't as strong or as fast as men, and this has a genetic/evolutionary basis (because we evolved from primates with high sexual dimorophism).
I just think it's important to separate the questions of whether there are differences, and to the extent to which those differences matter, or can be superseded through cultural traits. (For example, the fact that men are typically stronger than women shouldn't mean anything in terms of "should women play sports/join the military/work/etc" and is also ripe with exceptions, myself being a prime example)
Sorry I'm so delayed, I live on the West Coast and sleep in late.
Qingu, there is sexual dimorphism in the brain. Women's brains are on average 10% less massive. In addition, there are certain centers that have neural layouts differently.
Sidenote: the studies done on trans women indicate that one specific nucleus of theirs tends towards the same dimorphic state as natal females. Which is kind of neat.
Anyway, there certainly are differences between men and women when it comes to certain features of the brain. The thing is, you can't really infer anything from this. Intelligence isn't really correlated to raw brain size very well. Furthermore, unlike the body, the brain is pretty plastic. So even if, hypothetically, women were genetically worse at spatial reasoning, if they lived in a world where spatial reasoning was seen as something that women did better than men, then women would probably do better than men at spatial reasoning tasks, because the brain would adapt. So, because of plasticity, any slight differences in ability will be superceded by societal conditioning.
Secondly, you can't really test for some natural ability. To do this, you'd need to rule out cultural traits, which would generally be done by using test subjects who are unaffected by culture. This is, however, impossible. People are affected by culture before they're born. Women in Jordan will give birth to heavier boys or lighter girls if they know the birth sex beforehand. The birth weights are more similar if they do not know.
The main problem I was alluding to is that people in general aren't educated in science. I can look at an article saying "women like pink because they evolved to see fruit" and I'll instantly be suspicious, because as long as hospitals have pink and blue used to distinguish babies sexes, the experiment wasn't properly controlled. I know that everyone in America grows up in a culture where blue and pink are used to signal "For you!" and "Not for you!" on toys, and I know that that's going to have a huge effect, that can't be controlled for. Furthermore, I'll know that pink used to be the men's color, so it's likely another level of bullshit. And furthermore, I know that the idea of favorite colors being evolved in a sexually dimorphic way is rather unlikely, so they'd need strong evidence. This is on top of the fact that I'll realize (as I do for every study) that there's a good chance that the study itself showed a 1% or some other such tiny preference for pink over red, or blue, or green, so that even if the study were controlled properly (an impossibility if it deals with culture!), it probably doesn't actually mean much of anything.
I realize that half of those are problems with the state of reporting on scientific articles, but hopefully I also showed that it's difficult, if not downright impossible, to demonstrate an inherent mechanism for sexually dimorphic abilities. It's even harder to do with sexually dimorphic behavior, because behavior is such a complicated thing.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
I can look at an article saying "women like pink because they evolved to see fruit" and I'll instantly be suspicious, because as long as hospitals have pink and blue used to distinguish babies sexes, the experiment wasn't properly controlled.
I would just like to say that the woman who did this research, Anya Hurlbert, did it as a fun bit of joke research with her PhDs and had no idea it would be taken so seriously. Blame the newspapers! :P
Anyway, there certainly are differences between men and women when it comes to certain features of the brain. The thing is, you can't really infer anything from this. Intelligence isn't really correlated to raw brain size very well. Furthermore, unlike the body, the brain is pretty plastic. So even if, hypothetically, women were genetically worse at spatial reasoning, if they lived in a world where spatial reasoning was seen as something that women did better than men, then women would probably do better than men at spatial reasoning tasks, because the brain would adapt. So, because of plasticity, any slight differences in ability will be superceded by societal conditioning.
IMO you don't even need to go with conditioning. Most of these problems come from people who don't get that you can't really "hardwire" the sexes in that way, and 2% of variation between individuals being explained by sex is really... just not very important!
If you just show people a nice gaussian distribution and show them what it actually means, most are rather unimpressed.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
edited May 2010
Oh, I didn't mean classical conditioning or anything. Just that people are essentially huge social sponges and you can't test someone for something and expect to be able to remove cultural baggage :P
But, yeah. People being stupid is a big problem. And thinking that people can be hardwired as something. Humans are so very plastic.
That's just using strong adaptationism as a premise though, which not everybody does when it comes to mental phenomena. And besides, a more accurate version of that would be:
1) homosexuality exists
2) it does not seem to be simply genetic or environmental, but...
3) twin studies give us enough to believe that there is some element of genetics to it
4) Intuitively, this seems odd; perhaps intuition is wrong?
5) Some models show that under certain conditions this type of behaviour might provide selective advantage for x y z reasons
6) Therefore being gay is not necessarily an evolutionary disadvantage
That, to me, is not particularly repellent. I think, again, you're feeling the force of the publicists rather than the gents themselves - plenty of publicisers of evopsych are huge dogmatic blowhards, but many of the chaps themselves are really quite guarded. Although I completely agree that its effect on education and the public perception of certain issues has been pretty bad.
Right. Like I said, I think the field can be reasonable, and in fact, I'm actually excited about the possibility of the field. If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
But I largely respond to what I've seen, and most of what I've seen in the field of evolutionary biology are these unfounded conclusions masked in biological "science", such as the G+M boy brain/girl brain quiz I posted above. There are simply too many unknowns involved - inheritance? variation? fitness? - that any conclusions that are drawn can't really be scientifically valid. If people are working on this stuff without making the sorts of grandiose conclusions I hear, like men are better at spatial orientation because they needed to hit mammoths with spears, I've got no beef with them, like I said. It's the harm that the field does in terms of using pseudoscience and ill-formed causations to influence the general public that I find highly objectionable.
Though I'll note that I find that's true of much of the evolutionary "science" that filters into the mass media. The old "humans evolved from monkeys" is a familiar, infuriating refrain, although usually it's not as explicit now with using humans, but rather something more like pandas evolved from bears sort of thing.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
You can test babies. As early as you can get them. They look at certain faces longer. They look at certain colors longer. Unless you want to argue that society has had time to condition those who are a matter of days old.
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
I think hippo that the other thing is that certain academic disciplines feel that evopsych is both regressive and treading where it shouldn't go - and consequently, a lot of evopsych is reported by people who don't really like the field anyway. I wouldn't say it's the most popular of disciplines, and I certainly have heard the "do you know what those wicked evopsych chaps are saying/doing now" refrain a lot :<
You can test babies. As early as you can get them. They look at certain faces longer. They look at certain colors longer. Unless you want to argue that society has had time to condition those who are a matter of days old.
I just posted this above: "Other scientists have tried and failed to replicate the finding that day-old boy babies look at objects while newborn girls look at faces."
But I'll point out all the confounding factors that exist: race, transgended individuals, androgen insensitivity syndrome, XXY, XXX, XYY individuals, varying and overlapping levels of androgens/estrogens in males and females, fetal sensory exposure, fetal environmental exposure.
In general, even if you can find a statistically anomalous psychological phenomenon, you cannot in any way, using current science, deduce what caused that phenomenon. We might note that male babies tend to do this and female babies tend to do that, but it may have nothing to do with their maleness or femaleness. You can establish a correlation, but not a causation so the causative statement re. evolutionary fitness is completely unsupported and unjustifiable.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
I remember seeing that baby macaques play with their "gender-appropriate" toys for longer when they are, er, appropriate. IE female babies played with dolls for longer than male dolls, and vice versa with trucks. Think it was Simon Baron-Cohen though, so not sure how long ago it was.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
You've also got twin studies and adoption studies. You can also test every culture on the planet. When something like the .7 waist to hip ratio shows up as a universal, the culturalists have some 'splainin to do.
You can go into animal studies where you can do profoundly unethical things like controlling for hormone levels more directly.
I guess its fine if the evidence isnt good enough for you. Advance your own explanation and evidence. Or that we dont know and cant know.
You've also got twin studies and adoption studies. You can also test every culture on the planet. When something like the .7 waist to hip ratio shows up as a universal, the culturalists have some 'splainin to do.
You can go into animal studies where you can do profoundly unethical things like controlling for hormone levels more directly.
I guess its fine if the evidence isnt good enough for you. Advance your own explanation and evidence. Or that we dont know and cant know.
Evidence for correlation. No evidence for a causative mechanism. You can, but people don't, so until then, it's just making unsubstantiated claims to explain phenomena with no real understanding as to how to discriminate between the truthfulness of those claims. Again, it's like seeing human appendices and trying to explain them without having any understanding of vestigial organs and genetics.
I'm not disputing that such correlations exist or that psychology can observe real phenomena. I'm just not understanding why evolutionary explanations are being thrown in when they don't come from any discrete data nor do they add anything to our understanding of the phenomenon. When we see the .7 universal, we ALL have some 'splaining to do, and just because it's couched in "evolutionary" terms doesn't mean the explanation is good.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
Pretty much everything is evolution. Its either memetic replicants or genetic ones.
And the people doing the .7 studies are actively working on that explanation. They look at all the things that cause it to change. They look for things its related to.
As previously covered, studying this stuff is hard. There are all sorts of things to get in the way. But we're trying.
Pretty much everything is evolution. Its either memetic replicants or genetic ones.
And the people doing the .7 studies are actively working on that explanation. They look at all the things that cause it to change. They look for things its related to.
As previously covered, studying this stuff is hard. There are all sorts of things to get in the way. But we're trying.
And like I said, I don't object to the fact that we're working towards the right conclusions. I'm saying the conclusions that evolutionary psychology is drawing now seem to me to be mostly shit, and might as well just be made up because they're designed to fill in a causation gap between observation and evolutionary theory, rather than finding the actual causation. It's a mimicry of science more than actual science: in order to be true, certain things need to happen, so let's make those things happen, and now it's true!
I remember seeing that baby macaques play with their "gender-appropriate" toys for longer when they are, er, appropriate. IE female babies played with dolls for longer than male dolls, and vice versa with trucks. Think it was Simon Baron-Cohen though, so not sure how long ago it was.
Which is probably a significant flaw right there. How is someone supposed to know what a truck is and how it would be played with without anyone explaining it to them? And once you introduce instruction into the matter, you introduce the biases of the instructors.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I remember seeing that baby macaques play with their "gender-appropriate" toys for longer when they are, er, appropriate. IE female babies played with dolls for longer than male dolls, and vice versa with trucks. Think it was Simon Baron-Cohen though, so not sure how long ago it was.
Which is probably a significant flaw right there. How is someone supposed to know what a truck is and how it would be played with without anyone explaining it to them? And once you introduce instruction into the matter, you introduce the biases of the instructors.
You can just drop the toy in without doing anything. But unless the observer is not actually present, there's going to be feedback. People spend more time with male than female babies, for example, without realizing that they're doing it.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
I don't see how data is going to help with that. People usually make their choice before they even begin to argue based on how important being special is to them or take a moral stance. Any data is going to be interpretable by both parties as equally supportive. And a should stance isn't going to be swayed by data at all. After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
See?
It's a logical problem.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
I don't see how data is going to help with that. People usually make their choice before they even begin to argue based on how important being special is to them or take a moral stance. Any data is going to be interpretable by both parties as equally supportive. And a should stance isn't going to be swayed by data at all. After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
See?
It's a logical problem.
I started writing a response and realized that I am just interpreting the data as supporting myself.
But I'll say anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference. Whether something is evolutionarily or environmentally decided doesn't affect that the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter. We have the same amount of freedom to say "I don't care if we evolved that way, it's not right" and "I don't care if this what culture says, it's not right."
Actually, I guess both sides could see that argument as useful. They'd just differ on the amount of freedom we have to choose what we want to do.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
If you explain enough things such that the notion of self becomes a middleman that doesnt do anything, then it can be eliminated from the equation entirely. To that extent, the unraveling of more information is a threat, which is one of the reasons I think people are so hostile towards the field.
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
IMO the concept of free will is a really bad joke that has been played on the world by theologians for far too long.
Which is probably a significant flaw right there. How is someone supposed to know what a truck is and how it would be played with without anyone explaining it to them? And once you introduce instruction into the matter, you introduce the biases of the instructors.
You just leave them on the floor then move the monkey into the room. They don't even need to see or make contact with a single person.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
I don't see how data is going to help with that. People usually make their choice before they even begin to argue based on how important being special is to them or take a moral stance. Any data is going to be interpretable by both parties as equally supportive. And a should stance isn't going to be swayed by data at all. After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
See?
It's a logical problem.
I started writing a response and realized that I am just interpreting the data as supporting myself.
But I'll say anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference. Whether something is evolutionarily or environmentally decided doesn't affect that the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter. We have the same amount of freedom to say "I don't care if we evolved that way, it's not right" and "I don't care if this what culture says, it's not right."
Actually, I guess both sides could see that argument as useful. They'd just differ on the amount of freedom we have to choose what we want to do.
I...don't have an opinion on your argument because I kind of didn't understand what you were trying to say.
Let me explain. First you said "the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter" -> determinism.
Then your next line was "We have the same amount of freedom to say" -> Free will?? Then you spoke about freedom again?
Also, the two sides of the deterministic-free will debate aren't genes versus environment, because both are potential causal explanations.
Basically I'm just ???? all over the place.
Could you do me a favour and take another crack at this for me? I'd like to get you but I got no idea.
After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
IMO the concept of free will is a really bad joke that has been played on the world by theologians for far too long.
I just want to check that you know this comment was sarcasm, hence "See?" as in "See how messed up the logic is?"
Also while I hate descartes metaphysics with a passion, I can't help but feel a smidgen of pity for the man. In the time he was writing, denying religion was a potentially life threatening endeavor....
Also little known fact: first person to put forth the fallacy that mental events are substantially different from physical events (descartes dualism, which lead to his free will deterministic dualism) was actually Gallileo.
If you explain enough things such that the notion of self becomes a middleman that doesnt do anything, then it can be eliminated from the equation entirely. To that extent, the unraveling of more information is a threat, which is one of the reasons I think people are so hostile towards the field.
When someone first explained this to me and told me this is what my denial of self lead to:
A philosophical zombie, p-zombie or p-zed is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain. While it behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain), it does not actually have the experience of pain as a putative 'normal' person does.
The notion of a philosophical zombie is mainly a thought experiment used in arguments (often called zombie arguments) in the philosophy of mind, particularly arguments against forms of physicalism, such as materialism and behaviorism.
My first thought was "This is a problem?"
Well I tell a lie it was "Woot I'm a zombie!"
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
I just want to check that you know this comment was sarcasm, hence "See?" as in "See how messed up the logic is?"
yy
I just love hating on free will. It is one of those concepts that so many people tacitly accept without ever actually bothering to work out what it is and why it is really, really stupid.
it is difficult to test any specific evolutionary theory
Why?
You can test phylogenetic hypotheses quite reasonably most of the time, especially in cases with decent fossil records. You can test quite a few other hypotheses with good modelling (this is pretty much the only testing you can give most of the EP questions, although you can get some pretty interesting results RE: things like how punitive fairness affects free rider problems).
Well let's take a common evo psych claim. How would you test, for example, the notion that men are better at spatial reasoning than women due to some genetic adaptation (ignoring for the moment the fact that this is just a sexist holdover from ideas that women can only excel at "soft" disciplines and are emotional rather than rational)?
I could see some reasonable methods of testing whether the trait exists, difficult as that may be, but how would you actually test the evolutionary aspect of that proposal?
Modelling to see if it's a selective advantage.
Seeing if similar dimorphism evolved in any similar but not directly related species.
I don't think anthropology really deals with the the behavior of human ancestor species.
Evolutionary psychology would, at it's most basic definition, be the study of biologically evolved traits and behavior as they apply to psychology. There is obviously bound to be some overlap because many problems can be approached from different angles.
Right. I get the idea of what evolutionary psychology should do. I just don't see how the evolution part of it is actually at all pertinent. I don't deny the possible utility of the field... it just seems to have none at the moment.
I mean, how exactly does a psychologist prove that evolution was the driver in the emergence of a given cognitive trait? They don't know how the cognitive trait arose; they can't measure the effect of said cognitive trait on an individual's ability to reproduce successfully; they can't account for the differences and/or similarity in cognitive traits within a given population/between individuals. Where exactly does evolution come into play here? What's the process by which an evolutionary psychologist come up with his evolutionary explanation for the existence of a cognitive trait?
Evolution is pertinent because it provides additional boundary conditions.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I just want to check that you know this comment was sarcasm, hence "See?" as in "See how messed up the logic is?"
yy
I just love hating on free will. It is one of those concepts that so many people tacitly accept without ever actually bothering to work out what it is and why it is really, really stupid.
Werl.
In fairness.
Most of our moral systems and all of our legal system is based around the idea of personal responsibility that only works if the individual is considered to have a choice.
So I can see why someone might go "WOAH THERE" even if it is stupid.
And, I mean, deterministic moral systems have tended to not work out so good....
*cough* eugenics *cough*
But I really hope that someone out there is thinking really hard about how to make a good moral system based on determinism that actually works and isn't terribad because digging in the heels isn't going to work forever.
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We all know what it's like to make choices. We all know what it's like to touch things. It feels like your finger is making contact with the keyboard. On the level that we live our lives, it's obvious and intuitive and built into our entire worldview and outlook that "touching things" means, well, touching things.
But on the level of physical reality, it turns out touch is an illusion, that the sensation of touch is actually caused by electromagnetic forces repelling each other, and that there is empty space in between your fingers and keyboard.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that touch "doesn't exist." It surely exists on the level of our conscious experience, it's just a category our brain invents to interpret the world. Making choices is also a category our brain invents to interpret the world.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that touch "doesn't exist." It surely exists on the level of our conscious experience, it's just a category our brain invents to interpret the world. Making choices is also a category our brain invents to interpret the world.
Free Will as a concept has bonus ringfencing. It has theological ringfencing, and philosophical ring-fencing, and all kinds of strange knock-on effects on how people perceive the world and other people. I genuinely think of it as being a corrosive mental presence.
But I really hope that someone out there is thinking really hard about how to make a good moral system based on determinism that actually works and isn't terribad because digging in the heels isn't going to work forever.
I don't think the opposite is determinism. You could throw out a strong-emergence based system, I guess, as a way to avoid both determinism and conventional free will.
Determinism, at least in the conventional philosophical sense, has always seemed a little silly to me.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
I don't see how data is going to help with that. People usually make their choice before they even begin to argue based on how important being special is to them or take a moral stance. Any data is going to be interpretable by both parties as equally supportive. And a should stance isn't going to be swayed by data at all. After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
See?
It's a logical problem.
I started writing a response and realized that I am just interpreting the data as supporting myself.
But I'll say anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference. Whether something is evolutionarily or environmentally decided doesn't affect that the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter. We have the same amount of freedom to say "I don't care if we evolved that way, it's not right" and "I don't care if this what culture says, it's not right."
Actually, I guess both sides could see that argument as useful. They'd just differ on the amount of freedom we have to choose what we want to do.
I...don't have an opinion on your argument because I kind of didn't understand what you were trying to say.
Let me explain. First you said "the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter" -> determinism.
Then your next line was "We have the same amount of freedom to say" -> Free will?? Then you spoke about freedom again?
Also, the two sides of the deterministic-free will debate aren't genes versus environment, because both are potential causal explanations.
Basically I'm just ???? all over the place.
Could you do me a favour and take another crack at this for me? I'd like to get you but I got no idea.
Sorry, I'm afraid the thoughts weren't profound. I'll take another crack at it, though. Also, for the sake of understanding my position, I'm a pretty hardcore... well, not determinist, but I think free will is.. a silly idea.
So, it was said that analysis of whether or not people are evolutionarily predisposed, or hardwired, to enjoy certain things would be a way to end the free will versus determinism debate. I took this to mean that the more behaviors that are hardwired, the more easily one could argue that there is no free will. Conversely, this implies that the more behaviors are culturally influenced, the easier it would be to argue free will.
I was arguing that it didn't matter either way. There is no functional difference between the scenario "women are predisposed to like pink because they're genetically hardwired to like pink" and "women are predisposed to like pink because they live in a culture where women are supposed to like pink." From the point of view of the individual, the reason for a predilection for a specific color doesn't matter.
Which is to say, whether you were wired at birth to like pink or were wired by society to like pink, you are now wired to like pink, and you had no choice in the matter (both being processes beyond your control.)
I was going to argue that either way this supports a non-free will account, but then I realized that you were right in your post - my choice was already made up before looking at the data, and a supporter of free will would just argue that in either of the hardwiring or the cultural conditioning cases, we have the freedom to choose whether or not to follow our urges. In other words, to a free willy, both cultural and evolutionary artifacts are things that we can freely choose whether or not to accept, or partake in, because the accounts are again, functionally equivalent. I think they'd be wrong, but whatever.
So then I concluded that whether or not you believe in free will, you would probably accept the following scheme of an argument:
P1. A predilection can be either evolutionary or cultural
P2. Evolutionary causes are functionally equivalent to cultural ones.
P3. We have X amount of freedom to overcome our evolutionary conditioning.
C1. We have X amount of freedom to overcome cultural conditioning.
Where the X varies based on your position.
So I basically was just saying that because of differing premises, people would get out whatever they put into that argument, and that whether or not behaviors are more influenced by evolution or by culture, people have the same amount of freedom to overcome that, whatever that amount of freedom is.
I hope that at least clarifies what I was trying to say a little.
@surreality, what exactly are you proposing re: free will?
I find that free will disagreements tend to revolve around deep level semantic ambiguity more than anything, unless of course a religious person is involved (and even then, Calvinism, etc)
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
@surreality, what exactly are you proposing re: free will?
That at its core, free will is a concept that involves rejection of influence - and an uninfluenced decision maker is a meaningless non-being.
I came dangerously close to some next level Podly shit there, but I ducked it. Are you proud of me?
Free will is also formulated as a false dichotomy (free will vs. randomness) with neither concept entirely coherent.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
I mean, there's also the problem of people's intuitive definition of free will being nonsensical (not just philosophical formulations). The whole thing drives me nuts, especially when I see otherwise sensible analytic philosophers flipping out over it.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I mean, there's also the problem of people's intuitive definition of free will being nonsensical (not just philosophical formulations). The whole thing drives me nuts, especially when I see otherwise sensible analytic philosophers flipping out over it.
The dominant position in contemporary analytic philosophy is compatibilism, aka the notion that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
Oh I'm not peeing on all of philosophy, just saying I have had some bad free will experiences with some philosophers!
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Loren, you didn't advance any point on the last page, least of all the point that I was wrong. You just half-posited that people who disagree with you are wearing ideological blinders; very classy!
You most certainly did not engage with any of my actual contentions.
I took that claim (about modularity) from Feral and also the SEP:
Specifically, I was referencing #5--the idea that the computational structure of the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs rather than a domain general architecture. That claim--which is presupposed by the methodology of attributing a specific psychological commonality, e.g. fear of snakes, to a specific adaptively selected circuit--may have some plausibility, but it is certainly not obvious or necessarily the case.
Assuming the present field of evolutionary psychology to be obviously or necessarily the only way to investigate our evolution in relation to our psychology just betrays a lack of understanding of the details. It's not all in a name, folks.
Er, no evolutionary psychologist denies the existence of general problem-solving capacity in the brain. It is the belief that in general, more than might be expected is handled by specific circuits. It's not dogmatic. I've talked to Tooby specifically about this; the disagreements are not about the existence of modules or not, but to the degree that one can make assertions about their properties or structures. The most dogmatic EPers, from your point of view, are those who are barely EPers in the first place (like Stephen Pinker).
I wasn't trying to claim that the evolutionary psychologist believes that there can be no general architecture in the brain whatsoever, just that, as you say, in general more than might be expected is handled by specific circuits, to a degree that makes possible certain assertions about their properties and structures. That may not have been clear.
My point was mainly just that this is an honest empirical hypothesis about the brain, but it is in no way the only such honest empirical hypothesis, nor is it a foregone conclusion.
Well, that is true - but you will find plenty of evolutionary psychologists who will say things like "we need a better model for interactionary networks in the brain and how they are influenced by the genetic program for brain development before other hypotheses can be meaningfully analysed" - which I think is a fair position, and not quite the negation of opposing positions that plenty of chaps seem to believe is standard in the field. Just like every field, there are those who think they have all the answers (like Pinker), but most would happily say that they can only do some.
You obviously have more of an in depth understanding of the state of the field than I do, so I can't really interact at a nitty gritty level there. What I'm mainly responding to is HamHam and Loren's magical non-inference: "we have evolved, and we have psychologies, ergo evolutionary psychology is nuts awesome."
But now I know it can be nuts awesome, I insist that it is
I was talking about the field of evolutionary psychology as it is currently. I don't deny its future potential, just that currently it's all full of trash pseudoscience designed to misinform and mislead the general public. The major issue is this: with physiological traits, we know how they arise... mostly. We make an observation of a physiological trait; we can infer how it comes to be; we can investigate and demonstrate that inference; then we can investigate the genetics (or epigenetics or whatever) that causes that physiological trait and establish a causative statement to explain the existence of that physiological statement.
With a psychological trait, we make an observation; we have no idea how it comes to be; we can't investigate or demonstrate its mechanistic cause; we can't investigate that cause and establish a causative statement to explain its the existence of the trait. It would be like seeing the appendix and trying to explain its existence not knowing anything about genetics; we'd come up with all sorts of bizarre explanations... which we did back in the day, with Lamarckism and traditional Darwinism and social Darwinism, because we just saw things and tried to explain them without any actual investigative ability. If I may phrase this in the form of an Internet meme:
1. We observe that homosexuality exists.
2. ??????
3. We conclude that homosexuality exists because it causes higher fitness in individuals!
It's putting the cart before the horse. There's nothing intellectually wrong about it, as innocent theorizing; I tend to try and explain all things in evolutionary terms, but I don't try to pass it off as science or statements of undeniable truth, which most evolutionary psychologists seem to do. And it's absolutely objectionable to me, because during my brief stint as a high school teacher, I realised the depth with which some of this pseudoscience has penetrated in the field of education.
Round here, the Toronto District School Board is advocating "boy-focused education", targeting the differences between boy and girl brains as a means to improve academic achievement. While I don't deny that it is likely that male and female brains differ, we have absolutely no idea how they differ nor do we have any quantitative understanding of how those traits in which they differ are distributed amongst the genders nor do we even really have strictly two genders - see GBLTs. Do gay males have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Do lesbians have "boy brains" or "girl brains"? Maybe it's not even that simple, and different... er... types of gays and lesbians have different brain "genders". And even then, this is all assuming those behavioural differences between boys and girls we observe are genetic in origin; they might not even be!
That's why I object to evolutionary psychology. Not because of its possibilities, but because of its present state. It's (largely) a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about pretending they know what they're talking about to push various social agendas upon the general public. If an evolutionary psychologist would care to admit that their beliefs are unproven and simply hypotheticals based on circumstantial evidence and existing science, then I've got no beef. But by and large, that's not how the field currently manifests. (And this is coming from a guy with a serious interest in systems biology, another field that doesn't really have much yet in the "causation that is actually demonstrably true" category.)
Edit: Also, to say that the field of evolutionary psychology is young and will eventually get there, like the field of good ol' reliable psychology isn't exactly reassuring to someone like me who's got an academic background in biology and evolution and has read people like Freud and has had some cursory experience with mental health care.
Well, it depends what you mean by psychological trait. How do you feel about the discipline of neuroscience in general?
That's just using strong adaptationism as a premise though, which not everybody does when it comes to mental phenomena. And besides, a more accurate version of that would be:
1) homosexuality exists
2) it does not seem to be simply genetic or environmental, but...
3) twin studies give us enough to believe that there is some element of genetics to it
4) Intuitively, this seems odd; perhaps intuition is wrong?
5) Some models show that under certain conditions this type of behaviour might provide selective advantage for x y z reasons
6) Therefore being gay is not necessarily an evolutionary disadvantage
That, to me, is not particularly repellent. I think, again, you're feeling the force of the publicists rather than the gents themselves - plenty of publicisers of evopsych are huge dogmatic blowhards, but many of the chaps themselves are really quite guarded. Although I completely agree that its effect on education and the public perception of certain issues has been pretty bad.
This to me feels like the fault of sociobiologists... !
I briefly worked looking at evidence for various educational schemes (the only person who really came out of anything well was Carol Dweck, lovely woman), and there's a lot of crap around - I would just think of it more as a consequence of mistaken genetic determinism combined with sociobiology rather than evolutionary psychology, which has more surfed in on those conclusions with post-hoc justifications in the public mind than produced them in the first place.
I really don't agree with the social agendas part. The people using the research as their talking point, yes - but the scientists themselves? Much less so, I think. Of course, if you have any examples I will freely admit there may be some, as there are always a few scientists with a political bent around, but I haven't personally encountered many.
Aww, systems biology gets a bad rap but I have no beef with it at all. As far as I'm concerned it's just our first steps into a more interactional approach to a lot of really interesting biological problems, so the relative lack of big results signals to me more that people are still getting to grips with 6-way interactions than the idea that there's something wrong with the field itself. I have the love for systems biology!
Imo, evolutionary psychology is a little better off than Freudian and Skinnerian psychology - if only because the intellectual climate is a lot more rigorous than it used to be. But I'll happily admit that a lot of it will probably turn out to be wrong.
Sorry I'm so delayed, I live on the West Coast and sleep in late.
Qingu, there is sexual dimorphism in the brain. Women's brains are on average 10% less massive. In addition, there are certain centers that have neural layouts differently.
Sidenote: the studies done on trans women indicate that one specific nucleus of theirs tends towards the same dimorphic state as natal females. Which is kind of neat.
Anyway, there certainly are differences between men and women when it comes to certain features of the brain. The thing is, you can't really infer anything from this. Intelligence isn't really correlated to raw brain size very well. Furthermore, unlike the body, the brain is pretty plastic. So even if, hypothetically, women were genetically worse at spatial reasoning, if they lived in a world where spatial reasoning was seen as something that women did better than men, then women would probably do better than men at spatial reasoning tasks, because the brain would adapt. So, because of plasticity, any slight differences in ability will be superceded by societal conditioning.
Secondly, you can't really test for some natural ability. To do this, you'd need to rule out cultural traits, which would generally be done by using test subjects who are unaffected by culture. This is, however, impossible. People are affected by culture before they're born. Women in Jordan will give birth to heavier boys or lighter girls if they know the birth sex beforehand. The birth weights are more similar if they do not know.
The main problem I was alluding to is that people in general aren't educated in science. I can look at an article saying "women like pink because they evolved to see fruit" and I'll instantly be suspicious, because as long as hospitals have pink and blue used to distinguish babies sexes, the experiment wasn't properly controlled. I know that everyone in America grows up in a culture where blue and pink are used to signal "For you!" and "Not for you!" on toys, and I know that that's going to have a huge effect, that can't be controlled for. Furthermore, I'll know that pink used to be the men's color, so it's likely another level of bullshit. And furthermore, I know that the idea of favorite colors being evolved in a sexually dimorphic way is rather unlikely, so they'd need strong evidence. This is on top of the fact that I'll realize (as I do for every study) that there's a good chance that the study itself showed a 1% or some other such tiny preference for pink over red, or blue, or green, so that even if the study were controlled properly (an impossibility if it deals with culture!), it probably doesn't actually mean much of anything.
I realize that half of those are problems with the state of reporting on scientific articles, but hopefully I also showed that it's difficult, if not downright impossible, to demonstrate an inherent mechanism for sexually dimorphic abilities. It's even harder to do with sexually dimorphic behavior, because behavior is such a complicated thing.
I would just like to say that the woman who did this research, Anya Hurlbert, did it as a fun bit of joke research with her PhDs and had no idea it would be taken so seriously. Blame the newspapers! :P
IMO you don't even need to go with conditioning. Most of these problems come from people who don't get that you can't really "hardwire" the sexes in that way, and 2% of variation between individuals being explained by sex is really... just not very important!
If you just show people a nice gaussian distribution and show them what it actually means, most are rather unimpressed.
But, yeah. People being stupid is a big problem. And thinking that people can be hardwired as something. Humans are so very plastic.
It's fantastic.
Right. Like I said, I think the field can be reasonable, and in fact, I'm actually excited about the possibility of the field. If, one day, we're able to unravel some of this stuff, then we might actually have a resolution to the free will vs determinism debate... although if it resolved in favour of determinism, we might require a massive societal overhaul.
But I largely respond to what I've seen, and most of what I've seen in the field of evolutionary biology are these unfounded conclusions masked in biological "science", such as the G+M boy brain/girl brain quiz I posted above. There are simply too many unknowns involved - inheritance? variation? fitness? - that any conclusions that are drawn can't really be scientifically valid. If people are working on this stuff without making the sorts of grandiose conclusions I hear, like men are better at spatial orientation because they needed to hit mammoths with spears, I've got no beef with them, like I said. It's the harm that the field does in terms of using pseudoscience and ill-formed causations to influence the general public that I find highly objectionable.
Though I'll note that I find that's true of much of the evolutionary "science" that filters into the mass media. The old "humans evolved from monkeys" is a familiar, infuriating refrain, although usually it's not as explicit now with using humans, but rather something more like pandas evolved from bears sort of thing.
I just posted this above: "Other scientists have tried and failed to replicate the finding that day-old boy babies look at objects while newborn girls look at faces."
But I'll point out all the confounding factors that exist: race, transgended individuals, androgen insensitivity syndrome, XXY, XXX, XYY individuals, varying and overlapping levels of androgens/estrogens in males and females, fetal sensory exposure, fetal environmental exposure.
In general, even if you can find a statistically anomalous psychological phenomenon, you cannot in any way, using current science, deduce what caused that phenomenon. We might note that male babies tend to do this and female babies tend to do that, but it may have nothing to do with their maleness or femaleness. You can establish a correlation, but not a causation so the causative statement re. evolutionary fitness is completely unsupported and unjustifiable.
You can go into animal studies where you can do profoundly unethical things like controlling for hormone levels more directly.
I guess its fine if the evidence isnt good enough for you. Advance your own explanation and evidence. Or that we dont know and cant know.
Evidence for correlation. No evidence for a causative mechanism. You can, but people don't, so until then, it's just making unsubstantiated claims to explain phenomena with no real understanding as to how to discriminate between the truthfulness of those claims. Again, it's like seeing human appendices and trying to explain them without having any understanding of vestigial organs and genetics.
I'm not disputing that such correlations exist or that psychology can observe real phenomena. I'm just not understanding why evolutionary explanations are being thrown in when they don't come from any discrete data nor do they add anything to our understanding of the phenomenon. When we see the .7 universal, we ALL have some 'splaining to do, and just because it's couched in "evolutionary" terms doesn't mean the explanation is good.
And the people doing the .7 studies are actively working on that explanation. They look at all the things that cause it to change. They look for things its related to.
As previously covered, studying this stuff is hard. There are all sorts of things to get in the way. But we're trying.
And like I said, I don't object to the fact that we're working towards the right conclusions. I'm saying the conclusions that evolutionary psychology is drawing now seem to me to be mostly shit, and might as well just be made up because they're designed to fill in a causation gap between observation and evolutionary theory, rather than finding the actual causation. It's a mimicry of science more than actual science: in order to be true, certain things need to happen, so let's make those things happen, and now it's true!
Which is probably a significant flaw right there. How is someone supposed to know what a truck is and how it would be played with without anyone explaining it to them? And once you introduce instruction into the matter, you introduce the biases of the instructors.
You can just drop the toy in without doing anything. But unless the observer is not actually present, there's going to be feedback. People spend more time with male than female babies, for example, without realizing that they're doing it.
I don't see how data is going to help with that. People usually make their choice before they even begin to argue based on how important being special is to them or take a moral stance. Any data is going to be interpretable by both parties as equally supportive. And a should stance isn't going to be swayed by data at all. After all if free will is necessary for morality then science should change to reflect this.
See?
It's a logical problem.
I started writing a response and realized that I am just interpreting the data as supporting myself.
But I'll say anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference. Whether something is evolutionarily or environmentally decided doesn't affect that the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter. We have the same amount of freedom to say "I don't care if we evolved that way, it's not right" and "I don't care if this what culture says, it's not right."
Actually, I guess both sides could see that argument as useful. They'd just differ on the amount of freedom we have to choose what we want to do.
IMO the concept of free will is a really bad joke that has been played on the world by theologians for far too long.
You just leave them on the floor then move the monkey into the room. They don't even need to see or make contact with a single person.
I...don't have an opinion on your argument because I kind of didn't understand what you were trying to say.
Let me explain. First you said "the individual is set in whatever way they are without choice in the matter" -> determinism.
Then your next line was "We have the same amount of freedom to say" -> Free will?? Then you spoke about freedom again?
Also, the two sides of the deterministic-free will debate aren't genes versus environment, because both are potential causal explanations.
Basically I'm just ???? all over the place.
Could you do me a favour and take another crack at this for me? I'd like to get you but I got no idea.
I just want to check that you know this comment was sarcasm, hence "See?" as in "See how messed up the logic is?"
Also while I hate descartes metaphysics with a passion, I can't help but feel a smidgen of pity for the man. In the time he was writing, denying religion was a potentially life threatening endeavor....
Also little known fact: first person to put forth the fallacy that mental events are substantially different from physical events (descartes dualism, which lead to his free will deterministic dualism) was actually Gallileo.
When someone first explained this to me and told me this is what my denial of self lead to:
My first thought was "This is a problem?"
Well I tell a lie it was "Woot I'm a zombie!"
yy
I just love hating on free will. It is one of those concepts that so many people tacitly accept without ever actually bothering to work out what it is and why it is really, really stupid.
Modelling to see if it's a selective advantage.
Seeing if similar dimorphism evolved in any similar but not directly related species.
That sort of thing.
Evolution is pertinent because it provides additional boundary conditions.
Werl.
In fairness.
Most of our moral systems and all of our legal system is based around the idea of personal responsibility that only works if the individual is considered to have a choice.
So I can see why someone might go "WOAH THERE" even if it is stupid.
And, I mean, deterministic moral systems have tended to not work out so good....
*cough* eugenics *cough*
But I really hope that someone out there is thinking really hard about how to make a good moral system based on determinism that actually works and isn't terribad because digging in the heels isn't going to work forever.
We all know what it's like to make choices. We all know what it's like to touch things. It feels like your finger is making contact with the keyboard. On the level that we live our lives, it's obvious and intuitive and built into our entire worldview and outlook that "touching things" means, well, touching things.
But on the level of physical reality, it turns out touch is an illusion, that the sensation of touch is actually caused by electromagnetic forces repelling each other, and that there is empty space in between your fingers and keyboard.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that touch "doesn't exist." It surely exists on the level of our conscious experience, it's just a category our brain invents to interpret the world. Making choices is also a category our brain invents to interpret the world.
Free Will as a concept has bonus ringfencing. It has theological ringfencing, and philosophical ring-fencing, and all kinds of strange knock-on effects on how people perceive the world and other people. I genuinely think of it as being a corrosive mental presence.
I don't think the opposite is determinism. You could throw out a strong-emergence based system, I guess, as a way to avoid both determinism and conventional free will.
Determinism, at least in the conventional philosophical sense, has always seemed a little silly to me.
Sorry, I'm afraid the thoughts weren't profound. I'll take another crack at it, though. Also, for the sake of understanding my position, I'm a pretty hardcore... well, not determinist, but I think free will is.. a silly idea.
So, it was said that analysis of whether or not people are evolutionarily predisposed, or hardwired, to enjoy certain things would be a way to end the free will versus determinism debate. I took this to mean that the more behaviors that are hardwired, the more easily one could argue that there is no free will. Conversely, this implies that the more behaviors are culturally influenced, the easier it would be to argue free will.
I was arguing that it didn't matter either way. There is no functional difference between the scenario "women are predisposed to like pink because they're genetically hardwired to like pink" and "women are predisposed to like pink because they live in a culture where women are supposed to like pink." From the point of view of the individual, the reason for a predilection for a specific color doesn't matter.
Which is to say, whether you were wired at birth to like pink or were wired by society to like pink, you are now wired to like pink, and you had no choice in the matter (both being processes beyond your control.)
I was going to argue that either way this supports a non-free will account, but then I realized that you were right in your post - my choice was already made up before looking at the data, and a supporter of free will would just argue that in either of the hardwiring or the cultural conditioning cases, we have the freedom to choose whether or not to follow our urges. In other words, to a free willy, both cultural and evolutionary artifacts are things that we can freely choose whether or not to accept, or partake in, because the accounts are again, functionally equivalent. I think they'd be wrong, but whatever.
So then I concluded that whether or not you believe in free will, you would probably accept the following scheme of an argument:
P1. A predilection can be either evolutionary or cultural
P2. Evolutionary causes are functionally equivalent to cultural ones.
P3. We have X amount of freedom to overcome our evolutionary conditioning.
C1. We have X amount of freedom to overcome cultural conditioning.
Where the X varies based on your position.
So I basically was just saying that because of differing premises, people would get out whatever they put into that argument, and that whether or not behaviors are more influenced by evolution or by culture, people have the same amount of freedom to overcome that, whatever that amount of freedom is.
I hope that at least clarifies what I was trying to say a little.
I find that free will disagreements tend to revolve around deep level semantic ambiguity more than anything, unless of course a religious person is involved (and even then, Calvinism, etc)
That at its core, free will is a concept that involves rejection of influence - and an uninfluenced decision maker is a meaningless non-being.
I came dangerously close to some next level Podly shit there, but I ducked it. Are you proud of me?
Free will is also formulated as a false dichotomy (free will vs. randomness) with neither concept entirely coherent.
The dominant position in contemporary analytic philosophy is compatibilism, aka the notion that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive.