evolutionary psychology for leftist anarchist types

I'm always surprised by the hostility to evolutionary psychology (ev psych) from the left (meaning further left than loyal Democrats), because I consider the science extremely supportive of the leftist-anarchist worldview. Since many bloggers cover political issues much better than me, maybe as a lefty-anarchist evolutionary psychologist, my blogging efforts would be well spent debunking some common objections to ev psych and highlighting some findings that should be of great interest to. My first pass will skip the references (I'm feverishly ill, but fired up), but if people comment and want the primary literature I'll be happy to provide it!

First of all, the theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying principle of biology. Since humans are biological organisms, we are no more exempt from the forces of evolution than any other life form. I actually am kind of uncomfortable calling myself an "evolutionary psychologist" because psychology, being the science of brain and behaviour, must be evolutionary; if a central principle or finding in psychology conflicts with evolutionary theory, something is wrong! Furthermore, evolutionary theory has been wildly successful at predicting and explaining animal behaviour, including human behaviour.

Misconceptions (feel free to suggest other objections for me to try to debunk!):

In a comment thread over at Jack's place, I encountered a few common misconceptions about ev psych, all of which I'd like to eventually address, respectfully. Among them (these aren't necessarily exact quotes, just my understanding of the objections raised):

1. "Sexual attraction is not scientific."

I think the intended meaning (correct me if I'm wrong) is that sexual attraction isn't a topic that science can attempt to understand. If that's the intended meaning, it is very wrong. We know a great deal about the science of sexual attraction; see my comments in that thread for an intro, and feel free to post questions in the comments.

2. "Ev psych is Lamarkism applied to mind."

Originally I wrote: Nobody (or close to it) takes Larmkian inheritance of acquired characteristic seriously in any field of biology, ev psych included. If you think otherwise, please provide specific references and I'll gladly take a look.

Update: I was a bit hasty with the outright dismissal of inheritance of acquired characteristics, because a lot of work in epigenetics is showing exactly that. Still, I don't know of much, if any, use of Lamarck's theories in ev psych; our models are Darwinian (and modern synthesis).

3. "Ev psych claims that human nature is fixed, which can't possibly be right given the extraordinary variety in human behaviour, culture, and social structure."

Indeed, it cannot possibly be right that human nature is fixed. Learning, conditioning, and plasticity are very important parts of understanding behaviour. I think this misunderstanding comes from a root confusion thinking that "genetically based" means fixed. A better way to think of it is that our genetic structure allows flexibility within a certain range.

One commenter highlighted the common occurrence of cross-species adoption, presumably as a way to argue "evolution could not possibly favor an animal investing so heavily in the offspring of another species?" The confusion here is between proximate and ultimate levels of explanation. Evolution by natural selection creates proximate mechanisms that are adaptive on average. That "on average" is key! In the case of cross-species adoption, the evolved proximate mechanism might be something like "take care of younglings in my nest." Since the vast majority of such younglings would be your own offspring, this behavioural tendency is adaptive on average. But there are many species, cuckoos for example, that exploit parental sollicitude mechanisms as a way to avoid the cost of raising their own offspring.

4. "Ev psych is innately conservative."

The next section mentions some key findings that I think are deeply subversive, but I'd be curious to hear what people think are the conservative aspects of ev psych.

Findings that lefties ought to like:

1. Inequality seems to be at the root of a variety of social ills.

Since natural selection can be conceived of as intrasexual competition for a share of the parentage of the next generation, it follows that inequality of outcome should be associated with heightened competition. Where there is a "winner take all" situation, for example in elephant seals, where one dominant male beachmaster gains the vast majority of sexual access to females and thus a large share of the parentage, we expect fierce competition, which we certainly see. Humans are no different! There is no better predictors of male-male homicide (from a cross-national scale, all the way down to neighborhood level) than income inequality (except possibly life expectancy, which I can address later if someone is curious). A variety of other social ills (e.g. a myriad of health outcomes, problem gambling, traffic fatalities) are also strongly correlated with income inequality. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but the findings are overwhelmingly supportive of the basic concepts of biology, and are equally supportive of the anarchist worldview of skepticism towards power structures! A common confusion is that these issues are related to absolute poverty, as opposed to relative poverty, but these correlations remain extremely strong once you control for various poverty measures (plus poverty is a relative concept anyway).

2. The classical economics model of humans as purely self-interested rational maximizers is totally inadequate.

Cooperation and conflict is my specialty within the field, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies debunking the conservative models common in economics. In fact one group of evolution-minded researchers has proposed that humans are innately cooperative, even in situations where we do not stand to gain ("strong reciprocity" theory); I find the details slightly misguided, but its popularity if nothing else is indicative of how seriously the discipline takes cooperation and altruism as a fundamental characteristic of human psychology.

Ok, that's all for now. I'll update or make new posts if I attract some attention.

This post makes way more sense than post are usually allowed to make

Before I get back to my latest stray cat rescue attempt, here are these things.

1.) Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, here is Noam Chomsky making way more sense than people are usually allowed to make.



2.) Courtesy of Walt, here is Santa Claus making way more sense than people are usually allowed to make.



3.) Nancy Pelosi fails the Jason Bourne Test and so she must go down. The Jason Bourne Test makes way more sense than tests are usually allowed to make.

Explain this phenomenon to me

I object to Bush's war and they bring up Sandy Berger. This has happened twice now, once with each parent, in incidents almost a full year apart.

[Berger was Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor who later stole classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing them down his pants. The lead prosecutor of the case indicates that he stole only copies and that no original material was destroyed, though this story is hotly disputed by Rush Limbaugh and the like, who claim without much factual basis that something much more sinister was happening.]

Who knows what the hell was going on there, but what kind of derangement is happening when you attempt to compare this to Bush's war crimes? Its like comparing the Columbine shootings to spray-painting some graffiti on a school wall. I can't even fathom what point they're trying to make by bringing it up. "Well you're saying that Bush illegally invaded two sovereign nations causing the slaughter of at least a million people, but this one guy who used to work for Clinton stole some documents!!"

emotional children

I just witnessed a young man and woman engage in a loud and profane shouting match as he walked away from her, shouting angrily as he left. This was around midnight near the local high school where I live. I wasn't sitting next to my window waiting for some excitement, so they must have been pretty loud. After it became clear to her that her attempts to lure him back ("if you fucking care anything about ... [unintelligible] ... you'll fucking come back here!!!!") would be unsuccessful she ran back to her car and sped away after him, driving dangerously fast.

As I find myself more and more bothered reading about whatever latest outrages are happening somewhere in this world, I suppose it would do some slight good for my own state of mind to keep in mind that human beings are fundamentally irrational. What little reason we do exhibit almost always comes from extensive experience or arduous training, neither of which come easily or often to most people. In their absence, we're driven by instinct, by emotion. And emotions are fucking insane.

I say this might help me because in some cases it would soften anger into sympathy, outrage into lament. You can't be mad at a crazy person can you? They're not responsible for what they do, right? Those kids pissed me off until I realized they don't realize what the hell they're doing. Now I just feel sorry for them, and anyone else in their path.

who is my ostrich?

This one-two punch has me looking for an ostrich to adopt. I think it will be my father. I already tried with other friends and family and it is basically impossible. I might have one other friend who might go for it, but it will take longer.

EDIT: Updated so that "two" actually has a different link than "one" which helps make sense of the whole ostrich thing.

blah phase

I go through phases.

I had been in a fairly productive phase where I was trying to make good use of my time, figure out my future, and pursue ideas that interested me. But the last few days I've been in an extremely unmotivated phase where everything is just "blah."

1.) I just came across this article. Basically some guy in Afghanistan converted to Christianity, so his community is demanding that he be executed. "Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf.

The article also notes that Mr. Raoulf is considered a moderate.

2.) I also came across this blurb, which notes that according to a recent study, 30% of African women think a woman deserves to be beaten for burning dinner.

When I'm not in a "blah" phase, I often think that I'd like to pursue some career where I help improve the human condition. Lately I've concluded that my greatest strength is rational thinking, and I've thought that the best way for me to feel good about my career is to somehow professionally encourage rational thought and behavior.

But when I'm in a "blah" phase, and I encounter stories like 1 and 2, I have a pretty hard time concluding that people aren't far beyond any help I could offer.

People aren't interested in rational thinking. Even if there was a nice way to tell someone that their irrational behavior is doing them more harm than good, and there generally isn't, they wouldn't care anyway. They'd spit in your face. Or if you were in Kabul, they'd hang you. And then they'd carry on with their idiocy.

Humans aren't built to live in a global society where we're often exposed to people who look, speak, and act a lot differently than themselves. We aren't built to have access to advanced scientific understanding of the world around us. And again and again and again our behavior reflects those basic facts.

I'm reminded of a Steven Pinker quote:

Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup... Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education...

It is my belief that the only way to avoid irrational insanity is through Pinker's "arduous education." But it is hard enough for a responsible person to educate one's self - how do we make sure everyone is so educated?

You can't just storm into Kabul and teach Abdul Raoulf that killing someone for what they say isn't something we should be doing. After all, his position is very reasonable and moderate in his world.

Or you could establish widespread public education throughout your country, and then still have a nation full of anti-science fundamentalists who believe that the world is 6,000 years old and that evolution is a conspiracy.

Blah.

In this phase, it seems like holing up in my house and hustling chumps for their kid's college fund seems like an appropriate way to make a living. Why bother trying to improve the world? I just should look out for myself. Self-interest.

Self-interest is the one reason people have to overcome their irrationality. They might be built to hate their neighbors with the different skin color and the funny accents, but it is in everyone's best interests to just trade with them instead of squandering their resources trying to kill each other. If everyone could just somehow realize this, so many problems would be solved.

But naturally, most religions teach people that self-interest is bad. Religion gives wonderful advice like "die for this cause, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife (trust me, there's an afterlife)" and "if someone hits you, offer to let them hit you again... that is what Jesus did!"

Fortunately the "turn the other cheek" people don't seem jumping to offer more suicide bombing targets to the "virgins in paradise" people.

So even if you could somehow educate all these people that certain aspects of their beliefs are actually self-destructive bullshit, and even if you could show that rational thinking has improved their lives with centuries of technological advances (except for the ones who believe that medicine is evil, of course), they'd still fuck it all up, and they'd be ready with plenty of pseudo-logical excuses.

I think it's missing part of the Pinker quote that really screws us over:

We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it... and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.

We're built to be so cause-and-effect oriented, and we know that death is at the end of every chain of choices we make. So all that fancy book-learnin' and logic don't make no difference cause we all end up in a grave. So why bother with it in the meantime? It is way too arduous. Fuck that, I'll just make up happy stories to believe in.

Blah.

Maybe the anti-science fundamentalists are right. Maybe technology is terrible, because without it we wouldn't have the global industrial society that we aren't built for. Maybe humankind would be better off if 99% of the world's population killed each other, and we'd go back to living in primitive hunter-gatherer tribes. On the brink of starvation, dirty, freezing, and ignorant. But hey, ignorance is bliss.

Of course I recognize that this whole depressing rant is part of the problem that it identifies. It is just a "pseudo-logical excuse" to justify my own irrational behavarior: the blah phase, the worthlessness of my daily pursuits, and frustration with being too lazy to change what I don't like about my life and the world.

How do I fight this? Or do I just keep playing poker and complaining about it.

science, education, generalizations

I recently linked to an article from the University of Maryland's student newspaper where the author describes a strange encounter between elite scientists and a creationist, and uses that encounter to make the generalization that scientists are out of touch with the general public. He goes on to defend science in general and suggest that scientists should more actively do the same.

I agree with the author that "Everyone who considers himself a rationalist should take just a few hours out of his life to learn the responses to the most common attacks on science." His point that the public is often more likely to be moved by an eloquent speaker than sound logic is an important one.

The Monitors chimed in with a great response that I want to highlight:

Although this isn't the best outlet to reach the masses, I have to say that, as both an "insider" and an "outsider" in the science world, there are many misconceptions about science and education.

The first of which is that scientists are not interested in education. Scientists train graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral students at a large rate. 26,000 Ph.D.'s were awarded in 2004 to science and engineering fields, this doesn't include medical doctors, psychiatrists, educators, etc who make up another 15,000. Do these students come out of the woodwork? No. They are trained from the fourth year of undergraduate until they finish their studies.

Another misconception is that scientists do not care about K-12 education and public outreach. First of all, it is not necessarily a scientist's ambition, nor place, to take part in such activities. After all, when's the last time your friendly neighborhood investment banker came and gave a kid-friendly lecture series at the local elementary school? Sometimes the subject matter isn't so appropriate, or the person isn't so qualified. However, many professional scientists do indeed take part in such activities, and they have as much passion as any teacher would. Scientists need students, they cannot function without them. They need their time, they need their insight, and they need the additional funding they bring with them. But undergrads don't just pop out of thin air, either, they come form high schools. Every physicist, chemist, astronomer, biologist, whoever, that I have spoken with, and I've spoken with hundreds, understands this, and many do their part for outreach. The Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute spends over $6M/year on public outreach. Countless programs system-wide incorporate public outreach components.

Another misconception is that kids don't know science because scientists don't want to teach them. A child is more likely to learn physics from an English or history major than a person with training in physical sciences. Conversely, a student is far less likely to learn English or history from a physical scientist than from an English/history major. This suggests a very powerful notion: there is a belief that scientists are not as capable of teaching English/history as an English/history major is of teaching physical sciences. Not only does this help explain the public disconnect with science, it also depicts a K-12 educational system that has lost its interest in teaching science. Further, you cannot expect one trained in English or history to be able to communicate the archaics of physical sciences.

So why is it such a surprise that there is a resurgence of anti-evolutionism? It's a relatively simple linear trend, just look at the time between now and the Renaissance. As scientific literacy increased, people became less and less reliant upon religious myths to explain events. For instance, the Chief Seismologist of Turkey is trying to assuage public fears that an earthquake is imminent due to the coming total solar eclipse at the end of March. Turkey is a far less scientifically cognizant society. Charles Darwin waited to publish his theory of evolution until his death, and was buried in an unmarked grave to avoid the desecration of his body. And then there's Scopes, etc. Until the age of invention, most advances in mechanics or chemistry, aside from items used for warfare of course, were basically considered witchcraft.

I'm rambling, but if we want to avoid ridiculous assertions like "intelligent design," which is only semantically different from creationism, then we had better dispel the idea of the scientist from the 1920's with crazy hair and in a white lab coat who's cross-breeding nuclear weapons and puppies. The problem lies at the root of society, and that's where the education has to begin.

A lot of good stuff there. I very strongly agree with the last sentence, and that is why I'm considering going back to school with a career goal of encouraging people to think and act more rationally.

I'm not sure how out of touch the science world is with the public, but I agree that a huge part of that community is very concerned about education and the popular perception of science. I'd guess that the 1920's style weirdos with the crazy hair that the Diamondback commentator encountered are the exception, not the rule.

What a joke

I first read about this issue here.

The Justice Department opened an investigation because Michael L. Dini, an associate professor of biology at Texas Tech University, insists on the following (from here) from anyone requesting a letter of recommendation to graduate school or medical school:

Criterion 3

If you set up an appointment to discuss the writing of a letter of recommendation, I will ask you: "How do you account for the scientific origin of the human species?" If you will not give a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation.

Why do I ask this question? Let’s consider the situation of one wishing to enter medical school. Whereas medicine is historically rooted first in the practice of magic and later in religion, modern medicine is an endeavor that springs from the sciences, biology prominent among these. The central, unifying principle of biology is the theory of evolution, which includes both micro- and macro-evolution, and which extends to ALL species. Someone who ignores the most important theory in biology cannot expect to properly practice in a field that is now so heavily based on biology. It is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make poor clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance may partly be the result of such decisions. For others, please read the citations below.

Good medicine, like good biology, is based on the collection and evaluation of physical evidence. So much physical evidence supports the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors that one can validly refer to the "fact" of human evolution, even if all of the details are not yet known; just as one can refer to the "fact" of gravity, even if all of the details of gravitational theory are not yet known. One can ignore this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one’s understanding of science and the scientific method. Scientists do not ignore logical conclusions based on abundant scientific evidence and experimentation because these conclusions do not conform to expectations or beliefs. Modern medicine relies heavily on the method of science. In my opinion, modern physicians do best when their practice is scientifically based.

Stop believing, start thinking.

This is important.


People just aren't rational when it comes to certain topics.

0.9999... = 1

Pretty funny thread on 2+2. Somebody posted a poll: Does 0.999... = 1?

It is funny because 0.99999... (where "..." means infinite more 9s) is equal to 1. But several people vehemently disagree about this mathematical fact.

Some of my favorites:

A.

You can show (using calculus or other methods) that with a large
enough number of 9s in the expansion, you can get arbitrarily close to
1.

SO in Math it does = 1 , however in reality it doesn't but its accepted that it is. So is the accepted answer its 1 , then yes, is it really no.

B.

They are not equal except in practical terms. It is similar to the question if I travel half the distance to my destination, then half again, on adinfinitum, will I ever reach my destination - no.

C.

I doesn't matter how many 9's there are in the .99999. The number you end up with is still some tiny tiny amount less than 1. That should be obvious but sadly looking at the results of the poll it isn't.

The guy in quote A is willing to draw a line between "math" and "reality." In other words "I don't care what all the experts who understand this issue say, my ignorant opinion is going to govern my reality."

The guy in quote B might have just proved to himself that he can never actually reach any destination.

The guy in quote C is so confident that his wrong answer is right that he actually looks down on people that understand the right answer to the question.

People's confusion on this matter stems from a flawed understanding of the decimal system, difficulty with the concept of infinity and poor math education. They cling to their sense of intuition which is good for concepts like 1, 2, or 10, but is woefully lacking when dealing with complex concepts like infinity. They even dismiss examples that appeal to intuition, like 1/3 = 0.333..., so 3/3 = 0.9999... = 1. Each intuitive step leads to an counterintuitive conclusion, so they ignore it.

Sometimes when people disagree, there is no right answer. Sometimes there is. Flawed reasoning is everywhere because proper reasoning isn't as easy as it seems. Sometimes sound reasoning results in a startling conclusion that defies intuition or conventional wisdom.

When your stance is different than a consensus of experts, maybe you ought to take another look at your stance. We'd all be better off if we were more open to the possibility that we're wrong.