Evolutionary Psychology Week 12 Some problems with evolutionary approaches

1. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12Some problems with evolutionary approaches AimTo encourage you to think further about the EEA and the utility of the concept of psychological adaptations RewardAt the send of this session you should be better able to develop a critique of evolutionary approaches to human thought and behaviour

2. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 –Some problems with evolutionary approaches Running order ... • The EEA revisited • The social and the physical EEA • Confusing the past and the present • Psychological adaptations as idealisations • Adaptations and added value • Lessons from the past

3. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited The social and the physical EEA • There’s only so much brain power you need to subdue a plant or a rock, the argument goes, but the other guy is about as smart as you are and may use that intelligence against your interests. You had better think about what he is thinking about what you are thinking he is thinking. As far as brainpower goes, there’s no end to keeping up with the Joneses (Pinker, 1997: 193).

4. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited The social and the physical EEA • They have set out early, this band of six purposeful individuals, striding across rolling, grassy terrain punctuated here and there by flat-topped acacia trees. The sky hovered between gray and pink as the sun rose close to breaking the line of hills in the east, on the other side of the vast lake ... Everyone had heard the sabre-toothed cats during the night, repeated choruses of throaty moans, a sure sign of a hunt in progress. Even though the band felt itself relatively safe at its riverside camp a mile from the lake, there was always tension when sabre-toothed cats were near. Only a year ago a child had been attacked when he strayed from the watchful eyes of his mother and her companions. Returning hunters, the same group of men who were setting out this day, arrived just in time to drive the predator away. But the boy had died some days later from the loss of blood and the kind of rampant infection that can be so deadly in the tropics. Not surprisingly, this morning’s discussions urged extra care on the women and their offspring, gathering tubers and nuts near the camp, and the men on their hunt. These men too were predators. (Leakey & Lewin, 1992: 3-4).

5. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited The social and the physical EEA • That the hunting party took place in a specific place, at a specific time by a specific species of hominid. • What attitude toward specific other species was. • What the home-range was. • The nature of intra-sexual selection and the nature of inter-sexual competition. • The nature of parental investment together with kin and reciprocal strategies toward that end. • The development path of children, including sex differences. • The length of puberty for both sexes. • The occurrence and length of menopause. • The size and constitution of the group. • That this species had an aesthetic sensibility. • That this species had language and used it for specific purposes.

6. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited Confusing the past and the present If something is a feature of the present it is a feature of the past. • ... the size of intimate human groups has changed little across evolutionary time … The absence of genetic kin is probably the greatest difference between the [typical academic] department’s social organisation and that of a hunter-gatherer tribe ... In terms of the sociality of the situation, the way kinship, reciprocity, group size, resource distribution, and so on impact on social organisation of a typical group, the sociality of a modern academic department may differ little from that of our Pleistocene ancestors. (Crawford, 1998: 287). • Null hypothesis

7. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited Confusing the past and the present Circular arguments • Let us say that X is an extant human mind • All extant features of X are adaptations • All adaptations are products of the past • All adaptations can be discerned in the present • These premises promote two conclusions • If something is a feature of the past then it is a feature of the present, • and • If something is a feature of the present it is a feature of the past. • The criticism is that the conclusions say nothing more than the premises used in their support.

8. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches The EEA revisited Conceptual integration • Because modern hunter-gatherers are often presumed to provide a reasonable picture of early human foragers, and living apes are closely related to modern humans, studies of these two groups might provide an insight into early hominid life. Such field studies are no doubt significant, but any more specific inferences about the behaviour and ecology of early hominids must rely on material evidence from the geological record. (Potts, 1992: 326).

9. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Psychological adaptations as idealisations • An adaptation is more than a mere collection of phenotypic properties which, in a particular individual, happen to have the effect of enhancing reproduction ... An adaptation is a recurrent design that reappears across generations and across individuals ... This means that the phenotype of an individual organism must be carefully distinguished from the design of the phenotype – fitness should be assigned to designs, not to individuals (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992: 394).

10. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Adaptations and added value • What happened to the concept of instinct? • Never went away – ethnologists - replaced by other comparable terms • Rejected by behaviourism and replaced by the concept of habit - ceased to become clear what value the term added to findings • Can instincts be given up in psychology?

11. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Adaptations and added value • Can instincts be given up in psychology? • “Fundamental desires” – Dunlap, Elements of Scientific Psychology (1922). • Unit of reaction – Kuo, Psychology without Heredity (1924) • “Human proponent reflexes” – Allport, Social Psychology (1924). • “Native impluses” – Ellwood, The Psychology of Human Society, (1925) • “Primary desires” – Dunlap, Civilized Life (1934) • “Motives” – Gurnee, Elements of Social Psychology (1936) • “Dependable motives” – Woodworth, Psychology (1929) and, • Klinberg, SocialPsychology (1940, 1953). • “Drives” - Murphy, Murphy and Newcomb, Experimental Social Psychology (1937). • “Viscerogenic and psychogenic needs” – Murray, Explorations in Personality (1939)

12. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Adaptations and added value The concept of habit ... I can see no way of distinguishing usefully between instinct and habit … All reactions are instinctive: all are acquired … Practically, we use the term instinctive reaction to designate any reaction whose antecedents we do not care, at the time, to inquire into; by acquiredreaction, on the other hand, we mean those reactions for whose antecedents we intend to give some account. (Dunlap, 1919: 92). A resignation of the pursuit of cause.

13. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Lessons from the past Edwin Boring • ... I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that scientific truth, like juristic truth, must come about by controversy ... It seems to me that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it in a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defence of nothing whatsoever (Boring, 1929; 98).

14. Evolutionary PsychologyWeek 12 - Some problems with evolutionary approaches Lessons from the past Edwin Boring ‘Negativism of progress’ . • We might suggest that evolutionary psychology “is past its prime as a movement because movements exist upon protest and it no longer needs to protest” (Boring, 1929, p. 111). Does evolutionary psychology have a great future behind it?