Bolhuis JJ, Brown GR, Richardson RC, Laland KN (2011) Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. PLoS Biol 9(7): e1001109.
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.
This article, Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology, highlights many of the shortcomings of evolutionary psychology, and offers suggestions as to how the field might improve and modernize.
ReplyDeleteI'm in agreement with the proposed changes, as I argued in my previous comment, I feel evolutionary psychology definitely has aspects which are less than fully scientific. Many of the hypotheses simply seem to make sense given an evolutionary framework, but lack a method of verification or falsification. Personally, I was surprised to learn about how rapidly genetic changes may occur, and the idea we are adapted for life on a Savanah is not as well established as I had thought. The changes which Bolhuis et al. suggest would largely address these concerns. The scientists working in the evolutionary psychology framework should definitely make use of genetic models, and should be open to dropping any of the established tenants of the framework (like universalism or massive modularity), if evidence uncovered suggests the contrary. (Like all proper science)
If evolutionary psychology can do this, it will progress to being a more concrete science.
Delete"cognitive and behavioural neuroscientists have amassed a huge amount of research on the functioning of the nervous system, including the influence of genes on brain development. However, evolutionary psychologists rarely examine whether their hypotheses regarding evolved psychological mechanisms are supported by what is known about how the brain works."
generally, i agree with the idea, however, in the section above, the authors assumes that we have gathered sufficient information about how the neural mechanism operate and interact with psychological processes for someone to be interested in psychological processes to test their hypothesis regarding the neural processes. i am not convinced we are quite there yet and thus, although i agree that EP supporters could test their theory more rigorously i am not sure the neural front is the first I would want them to undertake.
My comment will be brief because I, boringly enough, agree with the main drives of this paper. Evolutionary Psychology is not a useless discipline, because certain things are of course evolved. For example, the average level of a given hormone produced by a population is subject to evolutionary pressures, and this has emergent properties, which we could reasonably postulate (e.g. aggression via serotonin or trust via oxytocin). Where EP goes wrong is in its dogmatic support of its “widely held assumptions” without due consideration of other, far more viable alternatives. Evidence is stacked against universal human nature, adaptive human behaviour in modern environments, and innate mate-selection preferences, yet EP nevertheless continues to hold all three (and other) mechanisms as being core.
ReplyDeleteA modern EP would “embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition” – and that’s a discipline I would respect.
"understanding behavior requires comprehension not only of its function and evolution, but also of its causation and development.... accounts of the evolution of brain and cognition cannot in themselves explain the brain's underlying working mechanisms"
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that evolutionary psychology cannot explain anything about the mechanisms, at all. Evolutionary psychology might provide somewhat plausible explanations to "why" a function has evolved but from that I can't see how it goes into "how". The studies with EP goes a bit further than behavioralism, but only scratches the surface at the underlying mechanisms. A lot of the results seems to be correlational (like the article said, using neuroimaging), but for reverse engineering, we need causation to find what is necessary and sufficient.
Also, do we need to consider environmental factors in reverse engineering cognition? What does the environment tell us about the mechanism? Environmental factors seem like they only modify the inputs and behavioral outputs of an organism. It doesn't seem like it would tell us anything about the mechanism underlying these outputs. It is useful in testing cognition but doesn't seem to explain cognition.
Regarding your last paragraph, I entirely agree. This ran in my head all throughout the readings ("Ok fine, but how does it explains cognition?"), and I think that this is the point that the Prof is going to argue next class. Of course, I guess one could still argue that EP may be useful in generating hypothesis but, as I argued in both of my comments, I don't think that all of our cognition powers are bound only by evolutionary forces.
DeleteOtherwise, how do you explain arts? It has often been argued that it's away to attract potential mates (like the colors on a peacock). But what if it simply is the result of our brain becoming more social, more emotional, etc?
Florence, there are so many different arts -- music, dance, painting, story-telling, poetry: Surely one explanation -- whether evolutionary or cultural -- cannot account for them all. They do seem -- like sports, thrill-seeking and fashions -- to be "spandrels" of various sorts (though that's hardly explanatory).
DeleteContinuing along the same train of thought as my 7a. skywriting ..
ReplyDeleteBolhuis et. al (2011) mention a solution of how to integrate cultural and genetic variables. They are providing the solution to the limitation Buss (as cited in Confer et. al. 2010) had found in evolutionary psychology. Their solution involves the use of “mathematical models [to explore] how genetic and cultural processes interact”.
They mention that “gene-culture dynamics are typically faster and stronger and operate over a broader range of of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics”. I believed that they were dismissing the work evolutionary psychology accomplish/ed. Also, I felt as though they would not include evolutionary psychologist’s work and ideas within these sets of data that they would accumulate from their mathematical models. However, when I kept on reading I figured out that they wouldn’t be dismissing evolutionary information because one of their goals is to “reconstruct the evolutionary history of human cognition” and through the use of “modern comparative statistical methods applied to cultural and behavioural variation and gene-culture coevolutionary theory to reconstruct human evolutionary histories”. What I find very different and still missing however, which is something I liked about evolutionary psychology is that it would pass the cultural differences to explain an ultimate, which is why I think they had in mind a universal genetic programme. They were perhaps trying to get at the times before different cultures played a role. Although culture probably evolved with a new set of cognitive abilities; I think it is still important to keep a look out for universals, and not to completely dismiss that they could exist (whether at the level of genes or cognition). Instead I really believe there is a mixture of both, and that we need to look for clues in both of these domains.
I agree with most arguments in this paper, as it suggests several scientific methods for examining theories in evolutionary psychology. I’m not sure how point (iv), “Recent work by developmental psychologists demonstrates how it is possible to detect the unlearned roots of cognition, such as deep, explicit conceptual understanding, through careful experimentation on young children”, would be applicable in evolutionary psychology. Although I do understand that it would be ideal to see how children are without too much cultural and developmental influences, at almost every age there will be some influence of culture. Even if the exposure is limited because the children are younger, testing, for example, phobias in children probably wouldn’t be accurate, since children are naturally curious, or, with less outgoing individuals, they are timid about everything. I don’t see how any useful results can be elicited from testing that age group. It seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to isolate evolutionary traits from learned cultural norms, even if testing were to be done in a younger population.
ReplyDeleteThe unexpectedly fast recent genetic evolution was, as far as I can tell, structural: adapting to new foods, new climates. It is not clear what -- if any -- of the recent evolution was cognitive. More likely, it was an adaptation to cognitive strategies (for example, to eat new foods, like big starches, which require a metabolic adaptation to be digested).
DeleteIn trying to determine why looking at young children would be useful, I would guess that it is because they have extremely limited exposure to their environments compared to older children or adults. I suppose that by "young children" they mean children who are closer to being newborns than those who are 2 or 3 years old. Thus, the traits or behaviours that are common to all these children are more likely to be products of heritability rather than influences of the environment. They have been passed down through the germ line and are more likely to be heritable. While looking at what is passed down through EP may tell us why cognition has evolved, I still don't understand how it can help us fine the causal mechanism of cognition, as this paper seems to claim.
DeleteWith regards to differences in cultures, I would think that evolution across cultures also differs and that it would be important to analyze cross-cultural differences in EP...I would assume that different geography, climate, and access to resources plays a huge role in cross-cultural differences in the evolution of certain behaviours.
Angela, in my opinion, looking at children can be useful in the context where you change their environment. Twin studies have been done in the past where for example they could take 2 adopted twins and keep one twin in a certain environment and the other in a completely different environment and then study the differences to sort out what could be hereditary and what could be due to the environment. In this case you can study children at any age as long as the change in environment was done as close to birth as possible. As for the part on finding causal mechanisms, I’m not sure twin studies would do anything more than showing correlations between one environment and one twin compared to the other twin. I’m therefore not sure how this would help reverse engineer the brain.
DeleteAs for your second paragraph, I agree completely with your comment that “that different geography, climate, and access to resources plays a huge role in cross-cultural differences in the evolution of certain behaviours” and I think that EP should take all these factors into account. It is very hard to standardize evolution over such a diverse population where culture, climate, access to resources etc could play such a big role and I think the paper states this quite well in this little paragraph: “The view that a universal genetic programme underpins human cognition is also not fully consistent with current genetic evidence. Humans are less genetically diverse than many species, including other apes , largely because human effective population sizes were small until around 70,000 years ago. None- theless, there is enough genetic variation to have supported considerable adaptive change in the intervening time, and recent thinking amongst geneticists is that our species’ unique reliance on learned behaviour and culture may have relaxed allow- able thresholds for large-scale genomic diversity”
But remember that "traits" that arise from learning, culture, cognition, are not genetic traits. The capacity for learning, culture, cognition is genetic, but not its outcomes (in this culture or that). EP's place in that is not clear...
DeleteI found the most interesting problem posed to EP is the question of whether or not we are adapted to previous worlds vs. to what extent we shape our environment according to our adaptations. That is something that is especially hard to track because of the intertwined, chicken-or-egg nature of our relationship to our environment. I find myself drawn to the "niche-construction perspective [which] argues that human beings are predicted to build environments to suit their adaptations, and to construct solutions to self-imposed challenges." I don't know how, moving forward, EP will be able to take into account the fact that so much of our environment is built and shaped by us - some of us are even living in virtual worlds for most of the day!
ReplyDeleteLater on, while returning to the idea of adaptive lag, the articles states that "from this theoretical perspective humans are expected to experience far less adaptive lag than anticipated by EP [88]. If correct, examining the relationship between evolved psychological mechanisms and reproductive success in modern environments will not necessarily be an unproductive task." So I have two responses to this last clause: first, isn't that what EP is already doing; examining the relationship between psychology and reproductive success? Is the nuance that I am missing the key factor of 'modern environments'? If the focus shifts to modern environments alone, can the discipline still be called 'evolutionary' psychology? I think this is all just terminology that is confusing me, so if someone could disentangle for me that would be great. Second, I couldn't resist commenting that the tone here is far from optimistic - if someone told me that my research was "not necessarily an unproductive task" I can't imagine I would be too pleased, but then again, so many advances in science and technology were originally thought to be ridiculous. I guess only time will tell how the evolution of evolutionary psychology plays out.
Esther,
DeleteIn response to your first set of questions, yes, I think that part of what EP is currently doing is “examining the relationship between psychological mechanisms and reproductive success”. I believe what the authors are trying to get at is that trying to find this link will shed SOME light onto these ideas such as adaptive lag. However, I also believe that this essay is a critique on the tenets of EP. For example, in their conclusion, the authors say that modern EP should be broader, more open, and “would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition.” Thus, the authors are saying that trying to find this relationship will give some insight, but as reproductive success is currently one of the main tenets that EP surrounds itself on, the picture it will give is limited in its scope. In other words, the discrepancy between the adaptive lag experienced by humans and the adaptive lag anticipated by EP cannot be simply attributed to a single tenet (in this case reproductive success).
To add on to my last comment and in an attempt to answer the second part of your questions, yes, I think that if the focus shifts to modern environments, the discipline can still be called evolutionary. I think that a modern environment can still create competition to select for certain beneficial attributes. Although these attributes may be different from desirable attributes thousands of years ago, the competition for selection can still exist.
DeleteI agree, mutations that would lead to a physical adaptation to survive to pollution in modern environments would probably be favored by natural selection for example.
Delete“Emerging trends in evolutionary theory, particularly the growth of developmental systems theory, epigenetic inheritance, and niche-construction theory, have placed emphasis on organisms as active constructors of their environments”
ReplyDeleteI can understand the general malaise that emerged when evolutionary psychology was first introduced. We like to think that our actions are governed by our own free will, and not because we are being orchestrated by thousands of years of evolution. In my previous comment, I did argue that evolution/adaptation is probably just ONE drive among others that govern our behaviors (and especially for complex mechanisms like higher-order cognitive processing). I also agree with the authors’ elaboration on brain plasticity; you may have the genetic structure that resulted from generations of natural selection, but environmental forces may shift your behavior unpredictably in a less-than-adaptive fashion. The same example that I gave in the last comment – that pornography can distort people’s norms and expectations of normal sexuality and consequently lead to sexual dysfunctions – apply to that scenario.
However, I found it funny that the authors only discussed brain imaging when they were arguing for studying causal mechanisms. This reminded me of the topic we covered a few weeks ago, in which brain imaging will explain the where/when of cognition, but not how. Of course, since the authors were interested in arguing that the brain rely more on domain-general processes than what EP claims, I would guess that imagining studies will be sufficient in confirming this. Seeing the brain acting in a holistic and interactive fashion during complex tasks is enough to debunk the domain-specific processes theory.
Frankly, I don’t see the point in debating whether the brain is more domain-specific or domain-general, because we could intuitively guess that the brain does both. What line of reasoning would be more relevant, in my opinion, is this: in which circumstances is the brain more acting in a domain-specific/general fashion, and how?
“Evolutionary psychologists commonly seek to study how the mind works by using knowledge of evolution to formulate, and sometimes test, hypotheses concerning the function of cognitive architecture” (Bolhuis et al., 2011).
ReplyDeleteTo begin, I must admit that I am very skeptical of the central tenants of evolutionary psychology, although I do think that Bolhuis and colleagues provided some interesting and important ways that evolutionary psychology could change by embracing a broader and more multi-disciplinary theoretical framework. My main issue with evolutionary psychology, which is my response to the aforementioned quote, is that the generation of hypotheses, specifically hypotheses linking evolution to human social behaviour, is a very anecdotal process and requires quite a large imaginative capacity. Sometimes the reasons that evolutionary psychologists provide for certain behaviours, such as the various explanations proposed for the emergence of homosexuality, are simply ridiculous. Because evolutionary psychological data requires researchers to essentially “brainstorm” reasons for why certain behaviours or physiological processes emerged in humans, I don’t think it really abides by the scientific method. Also, only a handful of psychologists have proposed most of the theories in evolutionary psychology, so it seems that it has been affected by a lot of researcher bias; this may limit the extent to which the theories can be applied cross-culturally. Also, because researchers in this domain use “knowledge of evolution” (whatever that vague statement means) to formulate hypotheses, the domain is clearly dogmatic in its research approach. Evolutionary psychology stems from Darwinian concepts of evolution, which although have been supported for many decades now, are not sufficient in explaining human behaviour. I think that, in general, evolutionary psychology trivializes the human experience to a few ideas that are incredibly far-removed from our current experience of the world.
DeleteI agree with all your concerns, which is why this sentence on page 4 stood out to me, “However, we should be clear that such studies do not test the evolutionary hypotheses themselves, but rather test whether the predictions about psychological mechanisms have been upheld”.
This is an interesting distinction. It seems nearly impossible to have definitive proof that a certain psychological mechanism looks a certain way because of its evolutionary underpinnings. What is the usefulness of examining whether predictions are upheld? This approach seems to place less explanatory power on evolution, while leaving room for evolution to inform our understanding of today’s world. Tracing back through ancient and more modern history can be a legitimate way to better understand the current state of society and the mind. Unfortunately, what I've seen of evolutionary psychology does a lot of what you describe - anecdotal "brainstorms" of possible explanations. This paper proposes more of a predictive power, which I think holds evolutionary psychology to a more tangible testing process. It seems like this process would reveal that evolutionary explanations centered around gene inheritance and reproductive success are not sufficient to predict the outcomes psychological mechanisms, and that other factors have had huge influence.
“A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multidisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines. Such a field would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition.”
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly what I am asking for not just from evolutionary psychology but all of cognitive science. The search for the whys/hows/wheres of cognition is not going to be found with one distinct method, and if we are still aiming to create that robotic Turing machine it will require many disciplines to do this. Yet, I am still confronted by this dual/mono format of thinking and theorizing, and even worse the anthropomorphism in evolutionary psychology is huge. I am not suggesting tests be done on animals, but I did notice that in both evolutionary psychology papers we are only concerned with human cognition. What about the cognition of other organisms? I, for one, would love to invent a submarine that could translate the cognition of deep sea creatures somehow so that I could hear/see/understand it.
Returning to what I’ve just said; why is there only a mono/dual division? What about the in between? I think that is the best place to try to make new ideas and new conceptions of cognition and what it means to be a cognitive organism in this in between. Do you have any ideas in the in between?
I agree with the recommendation given by this article to improve Evolutionary Psychology, like any science the involvement of neighboring fields is always helpful. I wish to make a comment on the impact culture could have on evolutionary psychology as it is having in the field of psychiatry. An emerging field called, transcultural psychiatry considers that the impact of culture on brain differences is larger than we think. As it was mentioned by the professor that introduced this subject in a psychology class last semester: most of the research being done is WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic and it underrepresents 87% of the world population. This is the problem fields like EP face at making universal conclusions about human nature as it is alluded to in this article: “The notion of universalism has led to the view that undergraduates at Western universities constitute a representative sample of human nature”. One particular demonstration of the influence of culture in brain differences involves the Central Coherence Theory (CCT) developed by Uta Frith and autism. The theory proposes that people with autism are very detail oriented and they have trouble seeing the big picture because of how the visual system works, such that instead of having a holistic viewing style, they have an analytic viewing style that focuses on certain things. A study compared autistic children from England and Singapore, and hypothesized that people with autism in Singapore would have a holistic viewing style, contrary to CCT (if I remember correctly this assumption was made on the basis that looking directly to the eyes is not reinforced in this society). The study found that contrary to the CCT autistic children in Singapore have a holistic viewing style rather than an analytical viewing style like Western children meaning CCT was not applicable to people with autism in Singapore. This suggest, and I believe many more examples like this will emerge that most of the research currently done and which is utilized to develop treatment across the world might not appropriately consider brain and behavioral differences that occur across cultures, which could result in misdiagnosis of the underrepresented population.
ReplyDeleteNever heard of the CCT or the study you referenced. That's really interesting! Just wanted to say that and recommend you our own Ian Gold's book he wrote with his brother called Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness. It focuses on schizophrenia, but has a similar focus on cultural context when making sense of "abnormal" behaviors. It's an easy read and really fascinating.
DeleteThank you so much for the recommendation! I will definitely take a look at it. And here is the study I referenced: Koh,H.C.,&Milne,E. (2012). Evidence for a Cultural Influence on Field-Independence in Autism Spectrum Disorder.Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42, 181–190 (Direct link on PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=10.1007%2Fs10803-011-1232-y)
Delete“Evidence from the human genome strongly suggests that recent human evolution has been affected by response to features of the environment that were constructed by humans, from culturally facilitated changes in diet, to aspects of modern living that inadvertently promoted the spread of diseases.”
ReplyDeleteThis should not be a surprise. If families have 2 children who survive to reproductive maturity, it does not mean the same to genetic diversity as when families have 8 children of which only 2 reach reproductive maturity. A population with families of the former kind will drift much more than a population of the latter kind. Drift creates the possibilities which make selection possible.
“[E]merging trends in evolutionary theory, particularly the growth of developmental systems theory, epigenetic inheritance, and niche-construction theory, have placed emphasis on organisms as active constructors of their environments.”
This trend moves away from the assumption of a given world to which organisms must conform to and towards a view of active codetermination “via a constant interplay between the individual and its environment.” Assuming a set world with a given state of affairs with ready-made niches waiting to be discovered emphasizes competition as the metaphor of choice for evolution. It is also likely to lead one into a representationalist approach to cognition, because good representations of the “real world” is what is supposed to support survival. Moving instead towards active world-making, where the organism enacts a world that needs only be coherent, one would expect much more diversity since the goals are not predefined; the metaphor of artful play takes over that of competition. This view also does away with the need for representations since whatever it perceives is the world set up by its constitution.
“Gene-culture coevolution may well turn out to be the characteristic pattern of evolutionary change in humans over recent time spans.”
To what extent it makes sense to separate nature and culture or, to put it in another way, to what extent we have the competence to make such a distinction is not clear. If animals tend to evacuate away from their main source of water, then it’s nature. If a community treats a body of water as sacred then it’s culture (?) Insofar as everything we call culture conditions the way we act, it also conditions the way we live, die and reproduce. Therefore, disregarding culture in evolutionary theory is clearly a non-starter.
“EP has proposed that the mind consists of evolved cognitive modules, a perspective referred to as the massive modularity hypothesis. Massive modularity is a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of Fodor’s original concept of modularity.”
ReplyDeleteEvolutionary psychologists have proposed massive modularity to be one of the four major tenets of their theory. Essentially, they believe the mind consists of domain-specific, modular programmes that can be shaped by the environment over time and evolution. However, I believe from the previous reading "Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain?" by Fodor we can see that the same concern Fodor has for neuroimaging can be applied to evolutionary psychology. Although evolutionary psychologists may be able to show that our behaviour is domain-specific and can be changed through evolutionary adaptations, this still does not give an explanation of cognition or behaviour at all. There is given no mechanistic explanation of cognition through evolutionary psychology as it is faced with the same limitations that neuroimaging faces. Even though we can show that it is true that certain capacities and behaviours are domain-specific, this adds nothing to our understanding of how or why mental states arise and how we would be able to reverse-engineer them.
A clarification about massive modularity hypothesis: what does domain-specificity mean exactly in EP? Does it mean that individuals have developed specific programmes that trigger specific behaviors in response to specific problems? Or is it more like ‘Fodor’s original concept of modularity’ that vision, for instance, is in a different module from the module for audition..?
DeleteI disagree that evolutionary psychology doesn't get to the problems we're trying to answer: how and why mental states arise. Cognitive science, at least the reverse engineering part, deals with the how part. Evolutionary psychology can deal with the why. If we can successfully reverse-engineered T3 robot, then we (according to the conditions of the Turing Test) have a model of how we do what we do, since we need to understand how in order to build a robot that can do it. In the superficial sense of the word, this T3 robot may also answer the why question, if we think of it in terms of mechanism (although to be this falls under the category of how). Even extending this to a T4 robot, we only understand why we do what we do in terms of mechanism. If A, then B. But the question, at least to me, is why if A, then B? Why not C? Why were we "programmed" for B not C? Evolutionary psychology tries to answer these questions by looking gene mutations, environmental influences, and other factors to explain why B. Evolutionary psychology most definitely has it's limitations (which are pointed out in the article) however it also has it's strengths, and I think it can provide some useful information to the task at hand even if it will not answer the question completely.
Delete(Think of what Searle shows: cognition cannot be ALL computation, but that doesn't mean that computation cannot be part of cognition. Evolutionary psychology cannot be all of the solution to answering why and how we do what we do, but it can be part of the solution.)
I feel a little difficult to read this paper and understand what the authors mean. It seems that they appreciate the existence of evolutionary psychology and think that it is useful when interpreting some human behaviors, but at the same time, they examine some views in evolutionary psychology and argue against them. In particular, the authors think that those views are just theoretical and explanatory, lacking scientific evidence to support them. For example, some evolutionary psychologists think there only exist domain-specific mechanisms, while neuroscience researches say there are also domain-general mechanisms. Thus, they seem to hope that evolutionary psychology could utilize methodology that is more reliable and more scientific to prove their hypotheses.
ReplyDeleteIf I am summarize this paper right, I will agree what the authors are suggesting. Evolutionary psychology, as I said in my previous commentary, seems a little explanatory. Although the authors from the previous paper said they use scientific methods and a lot of tests and experiments to get valid results, I believe, just as Bolhuis JJ et al. suggest, evolutionary psychology should look at other fields such as neuroscience, cognitive science, biology and genetics to see whether their findings can support or falsify their hypotheses.
After reading these two papers, I think evolutionary psychology serves more like an explanatory tool with regard to the human behaviors that evolve or change during a long period of time. It lacks some scientific backgrounds and thus some of the views in evolutionary psychology were or will be falsified, but I think it at least proposes a lot of hypotheses for researchers to examine and test. At the same time, it sees human behaviors as a product in a long time interaction between nature and nurture. It is something that other fields of psychology hardly look at.
At the same time, I hold doubts regarding to domain-general vs. domain-specific mechanisms. I do not know if I understand their differences or not. Domain-specific mechanisms seem to be more like innate things such as phobias and not eating food with toxins, as Confer et al. suggested and they are concerned by evolutionary psychologists, while domain-general mechanisms seem to be like mechanisms that enable us to do what we manage to do later in our lives and they are not innate. If I try to connect these with what we discuss in class (deliberately and on purpose), it seems that domain-specific mechanisms are what we said innate abilities like frogs are attracted by flies, while domain-general mechanisms are what we said learned abilities. If the connection I make is right, does that mean evolutionary psychology can only account for things that are innate and not for things that are learned? Does that mean the connection between evolutionary psychology and learning made by Confer et al. in the previous paper is not right at all? Can evolutionary psychology ever explains how we learn?
Evolutionary psychology needs to account for all innate tendencies, including innate capacities, such as the capacity to learn!
DeleteTraditional EvoPsych say our capacities are modular, context dependent, and all people have them. The newer EvoDevoNeuroPsych says that some of them vary locally, and that they are shaped by gene-culture co-evolution.
But these are all just vague generalities.
I find it interesting how the authors argue that universalism -- which they defined as "a species-specific repertoire of universal, evolved psychological mechanisms … This putative universal cognition can be rendered compatible with the observed diversity in human behaviour by recourse to context-dependent strategies." -- is a contentious and implausible hypothesis, yet evidences from comparative psychology studies have shown that there is "an unassailable case for the existence of domain-general mechanisms. The processes of associative learning are widespread in animals and have general properties that allow animals to learn about the causal relationships among a wide variety of events. For instance, a simple learning theory rule, known as the Rescorla–Wagner rule, has proved extraordinarily useful in explaining the results of hundreds of experiments in diverse animals…". I am not saying that the debunking of universalism is in anyway a support for modular models of EP, but it's interesting to think about how, even though we as humans don't all have the exact same underlying genetic pre-specified mechanisms, we do share certain associative learning mechanisms with (as the authors have suggested) honeybees, goldfish and many primates. Then it should be safe to assume that humans as a species share at least some universal pre-specified processing and learning strategies, which can be altered and re-programmed in response to differential environmental influences. If we consider the human mind as something that's shaped by a constant interaction between the inherited genetic makeup, epigenetic influences and learning in response to the environment, then to what degree does nature and nurture each contribute to the eventual differential outcomes?
ReplyDelete“ Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen [77] famously proposed that understanding behaviour requires comprehension not only of its function and evolution, but also of its causation and development [78], and he argued that a complete understanding of behaviour involves addressing all four of these questions.”
ReplyDeleteThe article makes some great points in how methods in evolutionary psychology need to be reexamined. It is very valid to bring up Tinbergen’s criteria for understanding behaviour. The fault I find with the authors analysis though is his elaboration on methods for understanding causality. He points to fMRI studies and advances in genetic studies as the answer to this problem. In my opinion he is diminishing the difficulty of actually finding causal mechanisms in cognition and is definitely overstating the utility of neuroimaging. After reading the paragraph where he asserts that psychological adaptations can be understood at the level of the nervous system, I couldn’t help but hearing Harnad in my head. “So what?” If we consider neural imaging in evolutionary psychology, are we really answering the original question or are we really just answering questions based off assumptions?
It is ironic that this article states "the notion of universalism has led to the view that undergraduates at Western universities constitute a representative sample of human nature, a view that has been subject to criticism from anthropologists and psychologists", since in taking care to emphasise the consideration and import that evolutionary psychology grants to the environment which purportedly shaped human psychology, they seem to set a certain model of human existence from which our current, extensively-adapted psychological mechanisms would have arisen. For example: "By constructing their worlds (for example, by building homes, planting crops, and setting up social institutions), humans co-direct their own development and evolution". It would probably be better to say that by constructing an idealised version of cultural development, the writers co-direct their idea of the development of human psychology within a framework that shows their inherent biases towards particular types of societies. They explain psychological change by valuing particular characteristics of civilisations (sedentary settlements, agriculture) over others (nomadism) through current-day cultural lenses, in addition to marking it as a sign of societal progress akin to animal husbandry or advanced metalwork.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, citing animal models as (wavering) evidence of a faster genetic evolution, and the drastic change during the Pleistocene epoch in order to lessen the importance of gradualism, and presumably narrow the window in which genetic adaptation may have occurred, does nothing to reduce the amount of convincing I'd need to believe EP's case—only the period of time in which evidence is still required in conjunction with accurate identification of the era's details. Here I am reminded of comparative linguists attempting to reconstruct proto-languages from current ones: correspondences that uphold entire theories and relationships may be disputed by a possible inaccuracy regarding the region of growth of a particular type of birch tree. This is, of course, not to suggest that psychological or genetic malleability approaches that of language, but the fallibility of making propositions about humans upon propositions about history is familiar.
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ReplyDeleteThis article was very stimulating and there is little of it I disagree with, so instead of criticism I want to explore the strengths and limitations of an EP framework free from the constraining beliefs that
ReplyDelete“Human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that cognition is domain-specific, that there is a universal human nature “
For starters, by relinquishing these believes we are free to change the environment of evolutionary analysis from the mysterious prehistoric African Savannah of traditional EP and instead look at any time period where there is data to found. Now Evolution isn’t just an invisible hand that lets a species adept to its environment at an immeasurably slow pace, but rather a dynamic, multi-faceted process that can be studied at the resolution of a life-span and influences the subject as much as the subject influences it. Now we can start analyzing genes over time, and take all the data we have about lifestyle at any given place and time and attempt to flesh out the impact of certain behaviors on gene evolution. Ultimately it could result in a fully fleshed out model of gene-environment evolution that is able to predict which genes will influence which psychological traits and abilities, and vice versa.
All of these capabilities are infinitely more fruitful, but they come at a price. If evolution is happening at a much faster rate than we anticipated, than we have undergone much more change since pre-historic times than was once anticipated. As such, when we look for the properties of our brains, such as environmental manipulation and a gift for learning, that lead us to be capable of this rapid evolution, we would first have to dig through all the genetic drift that has happened as a result of those capabilities. Unfortunately, The farther we look back in time the less we know what it was like to live in that time period, until we reach the vast expanse of relative ignorance that is the Pleistocene.
“ The Pleistocene was
apparently far from stable, not only being variable, but progressively changing in the pattern of variation [25,26]. The world experienced by members of the genus Homo in the early Pleistocene was very different from that experienced in the late Pleistocene, and even early anatomical modern Homo sapiens that lived around 150,000 years ago led very different lives from Upper Paleolithic people (40,000 years ago) “
Now we are stuck with an expanse of time where we apparently possessed the critical cognitive capabilities to make us human, in a changing environment, and with no idea how the capabilities were formed. The problem is that as far as we can look back, we’ve had these capabilities, and knowing now that specific tendencies change at a much quicker pace than these abilities, we have no tools to find their origins. In this respect, EP must hand the torch to cognitive science
Aha this is exactly what I was thinking when I read the other piece: “While evolutionary analyses may generate clues as to the mechanisms of human cognition, these are best regarded as hypotheses, not established explanations…Evolutionary psychologists have conducted hundreds of empirical studies to test the predictions generated by consideration of evolutionary arguments. However, we should be clear that such studies do not test the evolutionary hypotheses themselves, but rather test whether the predictions about psychological mechanisms have been upheld.”
ReplyDeleteI so completely agree! Here is an example that the authors use to help illustrate what they are getting at. An evolutionary psychologist hypothesizes the following: natural selection has favoured the psychological trait of being able to “detect cheaters in social situations.” The evolutionary psychologist tests this hypothesis by conducting an experiment in which he tests whether people are quite good at detecting cheaters in social situations. He finds out that people are. Can he conclude that natural selection favoured this trait? Ie, because people who can recognize people who will help them survive are more likely to survive and reproduce? No! Because we could be good at detecting cheaters for a whole bunch of other reasons, some which might have nothing to do with natural selection!
The authors of this piece propose that there is a way to actually test the original hypothesis properly and that “[a] modern EP would, as standard practice, conduct empirical studies designed specifically to test between multiple competing adaptive and non-adaptive explanations, and would test the evolutionary, historical, as well as the proximate, aspects of its hypotheses.” So it isn’t enough to assert that humans are good at detecting cheaters, we would need to test whether natural selection is a good explanation for why we are so good at detecting cheaters. And we would also need to find out if this trait has anything to do with our genetics – not necessarily by identifying the corresponding gene – but by taking the look at whether or not this trait is present across cultures and throughout history. No easy feat!
I generally agree with this paper. I too see that a universal "human nature" is not useful to us. "From this perspective, the mind shifts between pre-specified behavioral outputs in response to differential environmental influences." This seems counter-intuitive and it would probably be best that there are minimal innate capacities and tendencies which could be built upon via learning from our environment.
ReplyDeleteAs for modularity, once again, it would make sense to do as AI did an shift to a more integrated view of domains. It seems obvious to me that the brain is heavily interconnected, often sending feedback from one area to another. I would not call this domain-general but also not domain-specific. Clearly the brain works as a unit but to me, Confer et al. make a good point when they say "domain-general mechanisms such as "rationality" fail to provide plausible alternative explanations for psychological phenomena discovered by evolutionary psychologists," (115).
As for the rest, I appreciate the goals of EP that help us understand human behavior, but currently imaging techniques, as recommended by the authors, are not good enough to show causality.
I do respect the goal of evolutionary psychology as to "conduct empirical studies designed specifically to test between multiple competing adaptive and non-adaptive explanations, and would test the evolutionary historical, as well as the proximate aspects of its hypotheses." That is, to employ more modern techniques and consider the research done in other disciplines that could immensely help with such studies, particularly in the areas of causal mechanisms and development (of the human mind via the "interplay between the individual and its environment." )
“A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multidisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines.”
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand about evolutionary psychology, the reforms suggested in this article would be quite helpful in terms of keeping it relevant as a discipline. I think my bad attitude towards it stems from the mildly off-putting hypotheses that it’s generated in the past (many of which have since been falsified…For example: the hypothesis that males have an evolved preference for virginity in selecting long-term mates.) It would be awesome if controversial hypotheses like these were to go through rigorous testing before they were published in the first place. This paper cites a study that showed that neural activation in the orbitofrontal cortex in response to male faces increases during the follicular phase. Another study mentioned in the Confer et al. paper showed that rating the item’s relevance in the survival scenario produced better recall performance than did any of the other well-known memory-enhancing technique. These strike me as good examples of EP participating in the tendency for related disciplines to present sound statistical evidence from well formulated experiments along with its hypotheses.
My question: If the goal is to reverse engineer a cognitive model indistinguishable from a cognizing human alive in 2015 could we actually be doing ourselves a disservice by following evolutionary psychology? Could theories about how cognition has changed in order to become more adaptive over thousands of years actually distract us from the challenge at hand?
Fundamentally, I agree with the notion that the best way forward for EP is to integrate itself with other disciplines, in fact, it almost establishes itself as "para-science" to begin with, suggesting that it can be used mostly to help other fields find valid lines of questioning to pursue when answering "how?" questions. If I have one point of contention with this paper, it is with the notion that it seems to miss the fact that universalism in evolutionary psychology can factor in environmentally mediated development. While it is true that we "build our world" and that this shapes our growth, the fact that we can shape our environment likely comes from specific evolutionarily defined capabilities (sight, proprioception, etc.), so it is evolution that has allowed us (and all other organisms) to have some agency over our conditions, so any developmental changes caused by our agency is a result of our evolutionary capabilities. Evolution is a factor of two things: our genes, and the environment, acting as a filter for those genes. As such, evolution is not defined by innate qualities than cannot be influenced by environment, but rather qualities that allow us to interact, change, and be changed by our environment. As such, while I agree that universalism in the sense of a genetic definition of mind should not be pursued, I believe that universalism in the sense of a genetic definition of potential modes of interaction with our environment, and potential modes of (individualized) adaption to that same environment is one potentially useful application of evolutionary psychology.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading the criticisms at the beginning of this paper, I was reminded of one particular point in the previous article (Confer et al.),“How does evolutionary psychology take culture into account?”
ReplyDeleteTo answer the above question, the authors discuss the relationship between EP and culture. They break it down into evoked and transmitted culture.
Evoked culture is “a differential output elicited by variable between-group circumstances operating as input to a universal human cognitive architecture”. Transmitted culture is defined as “the subset of ideas, values, and representations that initially exist in at least one mind that come into existence in other minds through observation or interaction”. Therefore, could evoked culture explain certain “recently” evolved traits? Consider a culture where it is forbidden to marry someone of a particular cognitive capacity. Would this cognitive capacity be “knocked out” of their culture? Consequently, could culture have influenced other types of early cognitive abilities? At the end of Bolhuis et al.’s paper, they claim that “the key concepts of EP have led to a series of widely held assumptions (e.g., that human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that cognition is domain-specific…” This seems to suggest that cognitive capacities are not rooted in any type of EP, but this notion of culture seems questionable.
This article presents some ideas for the integration of recent scientific findings to Evolutionary Psychology (EP). According to the authors, the fundamental ideas of traditional EP are: the idea that our psychological mechanisms have slowly (Gradualism) adapted to invariant features of our environment (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness), that our minds are mostly constituted of modules that provide adaptive solutions specific to different types of problems (Massive Modularity) and that there is a ‘Universal Human Nature’ emerging from this evolved mind that simultaneously explains universal behaviors and environmentally triggered behaviours.
ReplyDeleteThe authors argue that recent findings have put into question these assumptions and present some solutions as to how to adapt EP to these findings and what empirical data should be useful in this regard. The reflection is driven by Tinberg’s statement that in order to understand behavior we must address function, evolution, causation and development. Authors suggest that although evolutionary theory can hardly provide explanations for causal mechanisms of behavior, its theories can provide hypothesis for these cognitive mechanisms.
Interesting as evolutionary psychology is, I am not sure how useful it is through a cognitive science lens. This is to say that I don't know how helpful the findings are for answering questions like how has the mind evolved to do what it can do and why did it evolve to be able to do these things? We could say that it is biologically advantageous to have developed minds like ours with capabilities like language for example. But is it really advantageous? Couldn't we have gathered from inductive learning to accomplish things necessary for survival? I definitely agree that it is an important field and made good points in modifying previous principles but for the purposes of our lectures, I do not think Darwinian reasoning has a lot to offer.
ReplyDeleteEpigenetics is another idea that leaves something to be desired. I believe in it as a possibility but it seems to have such inconsistent results. We say that from generation to generation certain things become pronounced or hidden depending on environmental context. I do not know how this could be relevant when discussing something as abstract as the mind. Furthermore how would that account for instances of depression in families without a history of illness? Or even for something as simple as our diets (as I mentioned in my comment on the other article), why do we still crave high calorie foods when obesity is becoming a more prevalent problem? There is a good chance I do not have a great enough grasp on epigenetics to make such arguments though.
ReplyDeleteLike many of my peers, I agree with a lot of this article. I'm also open minded to the idea that evolutionary psychology may be of some use. However, for the sake of fleshing out a different argument, my comment will take a different stance.
ReplyDelete"None of the aforementioned scientific developments render evolutionary psychology unfeasible; they merely require that EP should change its daily practice"
Evolution clearly has an impact on cognition to some extent, but I actually think that this article touched upon a few issues that seem big enough to me that I wouldn't be sad to see evolutionary psychology nearly disappear unless researchers have some genetic correlates to support their claims or are working with small infants who have not learned much from their environment.
Most of the research I've encountered concerning adult behaviors has been jarringly pushed forward with bold, ridiculous claims even in supposedly "clear cut" cases like mate selection or sex differences. Of course, if this were simply a case of bad science I would be more open to the feild despite it's limitations. Unfortunately, evolutionary theories are typically held in disproportionately high regard when you consider how weak their supporting evidence is. The net result is that any person who does not fit the evolutionary psychology theories of the moment must weather the societal impact of misinformation originating from the feild (admittedly, sometimes the media has a hand in this, but researchers rarely do much to correct these issues or even seem to instigate them for their own benefit -- even this article carefully sidesteps the issue). In particular, it seems apparent to me that the feild has been used to perpetuate racist, sexist, and homophobic societal narratives by providing incredibly weak but nonetheless influential "scientific backing" for these narratives.
"However, we should be clear that such studies do not test the evolutionary hypotheses themselves, but rather test whether the predictions about the psychological mechanisms have been upheld"
I believe this should be emphasized much more than it currently is, as it's really the only way to make sense of findings in evolutionary psychology. Moreover, I would argue that if researchers are testing hypotheses about psychological mechanisms and not evolutionary hypotheses, they would be well-advised to decouple these hypotheses from evolutionary theories entirely and focus on studying "psychological mechanisms people are often born with" or "innate psychological mechanisms". Attaching the term "evolution" is misleading as it's frankly beyond the reach of testable hypotheses in psychology yet alludes to a very well-defined and generally accepted train of inquiry.