I find myself more interested in the limitations of evolutionary psychology, rather than the current applications of it. While evolutionary psychology is quite interesting, taking it seriously can be difficult if there is no genetic or biological system that helps make the theory plausible beyond what we would like to believe to be true.
It's interesting to me that we are still struggling to find evolutionary (or any) reasons for things like things that reduce the likelihood of reproductive success that "cannot be explained by mismatches with,.... our psychological mechanisms by modern day novel environmental inputs." - Which, what does this really mean? That we cannot reconcile the psychological mechanisms we are meant to have with those we develop due to new situations? More clear are the examples of homosexuality and suicide. I would even dare to include suicidal thoughts, and debilitating social disorders. None of these things are helpful in evolution in the sense that they are helpful in the reproductive success of such individuals. Are these just genetic mutations? Yet, suicidal thoughts and desires can be tamed, controlled, and sometimes even dismissed. Most people occasionally think of such things - what would it be like to be hit by a bus? But these thoughts do occur, and seem to be useless evolutionarily. Though, I speculate that these passing 'suicidal' thoughts of 'normal' people, perhaps aid in reminding them that they should be more cautious in crossing the street because they could get hit and die. As for homosexuality, I have no speculations and nor do I have any desire to speculate, because I don't want to fall into a trap that concludes that it is due to some unfavorable mutation. To me, it doesn't really matter if sexual preference is genetic or not, it doesn't matter and we should just let people live...
Anyway. The "lack [of] detailed knowledge of many selection pressures that humans faced over the millions of years of their evolutions," is quite a serious lacking. Everything we use as fact is really just hypothesis. If one of these hypotheses at a higher level, to unravel, we would have to reconsider how we consider the world and our evolution. There are of course certain things we "know to a reasonable degree of certainty" but they are not particularly helpful in telling us how exactly our ancestors behaved.
At the end of the day, evolutionary psychology is still struggling, as the rest of the scientific disciplines concerned with cognition. We cannot explain the variation among the sexes, nor the variation within the sexes, nor of course, those who do not fit in trend of their own sex. So I ask, the hypothetical robot we supposedly can create that can behave just as a human, how the heck do we decide it's biological predispositions - if they are not universal? What kind of environment should it be "raised" in? What should we expect from such an education? There is so much variability in human cognition and capacity that I do wonder if it is at all possible, or worth it, to find generalizations. I know as humans we love to find categories into which we fall, but categories are black and white - you fit in one or the other. Yet this isn't true for most. Everything about humans falls on some sort of spectrum with some sort of distribution. How do we accurately extrapolate from this? Can we?
I thought this article really answered the problems of EP, I didn't really find any point to criticize on but I would like to talk about the points made against the ideas that "human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments", and that "there is a universal human nature".
First the fact human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments can’t be true since whathever happened in evolution in the past years is the same thing that is happening now. The environment with which we are interacting with is constantly inducing changes in the way we behave. This happens through a regulation of gene expression at an epigenetic level and at mutational level. For the epigenetic level, there is no reason why it would happen back then but not now. They evolution psychologist said that the times we live in are changing too fast for us to adapt in time but from the idea that learning comes from an evolutionary basis this doesn’t makes sense since our leaning abilities have evolved for this kind of situation. What would we do if we weren’t able to re-categorize and re-order the connections we made in this world ? We would just be stuck while the world is moving on and that can’t be very good.
Second that there is a universal human nature, I think there is some sort of universal template instilled in all of us for example our tendencies for desires and aversions; however, (and this comes back on the idea of modern environment adaptation) what you learn makes a huge impact on our behavior and rightly so. For example, we might all be born with a heightened fear of snakes but if we lived in a culture where we learned to deal with them in a way where there is no confrontation and no frustration then we would overwrite this fear we would re-categorize that symbol so to speak.
“Cultural practices are likely to have influenced selection pressures on the human brain, raising the possibility that genetic variation could lead to biases in the human cognitive processing between, as well as within, populations.”
This quote, summarising the significant effects of gene-culture coevolution, is perfect for emphasizing the imperfections of gradualisms in explaining psychological adaptiveness in human beings. In my opinion, gene-culture coevolution is a great example of a positive feedback mechanism, which exponentially increases the diversity and variation amongst human psychological mechanisms, as compared to other species including primates. Furthermore, it emphasizes the bidirectional relationship between organisms and the environments they exist in. Just as an ameba exists in a physical environments and mammals exist in social and physical environments, human exist in both the former environments as well as a cultural one. It seems as though the relationship between the type of organism and the type of environment will, together, govern the rate of psychological evolution. This emphasizes the importance of assessing more recent, cultural environments in assessing adaptive psychological mechanisms.
Cultural influences, which may bias human cognitive processing between and within populations, provides reason to suspect flaws in a universal human nature proposed by classical evolutionary psychologists. Between distinct cultural populations, there seem to be clear variations in mate preference, polygamist versus monogamist behavior, preference of different foods (different cultures might find different foods to taste better than the foods of another culture) and many other psychological traits. Within populations of the same culture, these vast psychological differences exist as well. This makes me question whether all organisms with 46 chromosomes, really share a universal basis for psychological behavior. Yes, as the classical evolutionary psychologists might suggest, perhaps there is a universal program that may be differentially activated by different environments or social conditions, but the persistent adaptability of the brain due to developmental, epigenetic, and plastic dynamics lead me to suspect that adaptive psychological mechanism are closely linked to the current environments as opposed to universally ingrained programmes. Of course there must be some fundamental genetic basis for human cognition. All organism with 46 chromosomes, defects and mutations placed aside, have the potential to learn language, categorize material, and express emotions, But the extent to which we are capable to do these things (the variations that exist amongst people) must depend on a multitude of factors (development, plasticity, gene expression, etc…) that are closely related to one’s contemporary cultural environment
Adam, I think that you're writing off the potential of a universal human nature too soon. This course has been focused on understanding how and why humans can do what they do. The Turing Test (specifically T3) is the way to test any models we create. However, a successful T3 robot does not have to embody every expression of human nature that exists--the robot just needs this potential. You mention this yourself lower in your text--all 46 organisms have the potential to be a certain way. I think this potential is what evolutionary psychologists really mean by universal human nature. They use evolution to establish our potential, and to trace how the potential translates into behaviour. Obviously, certain cultures evolved to use potential in different ways, which is reflected in the environment. However, evolutionary psychology can still find overarching potentials which are themselves a product of evolution, and can be viewed as universal.
Still trying to figure out why we would ever need such an over-generative tool, I found this about language:
"Human communication does not proceed by transferring one mental representation from one brain to another. It consists of inferences from other people's behavior and utterances, which rarely if ever leads to the replication of ideas. That such processes could lead to roughly stable representations across large numbers of people is a wonderful, anti-entropic process that cries out for explanation." Pascal Boyer, 2015
The propositions we make digitally approximate our world, so that we can share it with anyone and everyone.
So many people give Southern Americans (not to be confused with South Americans, although the term applied to any individual would indicate a fair measure of confusion) a hard time about not "believing" in evolution. As they should. But lets not make evolution out to be some simple fact of life, that everyone ought to have figured out on their own. I still do not entirely understand evolution. Fortunately, there's a Children's Book: http://grandmotherfish.com/grandmotherfish.pdf
“ In summary, there is no uniform human genetic program”
As this article points out, evolutionary psychology fails when it tries to essentialize the human, but succeeds when it shows the simultaneous boundedness (via evolutionary history/specificity) and boundlessness (via novel environments and the plasticity of the brain) of the human cognitive faculties. Evolutionary psychology, as the Confer et. al paper claimed, is interactionists rather than deterministic, meaning evolution, passed down genetically, are a part of an interactive cycle that both causes and is determined by responses to novel (contemporary) environments. How would we be able to create this simultaneous boundedness and boundlessness in a T3 robot? Could we create the conditions for a T3 robot to pass down its learned knowledge onto other Robots in a form of culture? In the form of reproduction? Would this be necessary? What evolutionary psychology is saying is that the history of a species (the specific historical incidents which led to the brains current state) is not incidental to our cognitive faculties, but is instead paramount to it. If evolutionary aspects are paramount to not only the creation of our cognitive faculties, then a computational approach which reduces the mind to an implementation (read historically specific) independent code cannot be correct. The evolutionary history that got us to our cognitive faculties cannot be fully abstracted out of our cognitive faculties, but is instead always grounding them. How do we ground a T3 robot without such an evolutionary history?
The paper uses evidence from different subjects (genetics, neuroscience, etc.) to criticize the four major tenets of Evolutionary Psychology: adaptedness, gradualism, modularity, and universal human nature. Personally, I found the evidence from the paper is very convincing. EP is taking these tenets for granted without further testing/proving it. All the experiments done by EP are just trying to prove that some psychology capacity follows the four tenets of EP, and thus can be explained by EP. But that does not mean that Psychology capacity is evolved. There could be other reasons. Just like the author suggested, what EP needs to do is to be more involved with other subjects, bringing evidence from different sides to make their explanations more valid.
I think the modifications to the tenets of Evolutionary Psychology proposed in this paper are definitely important revisions. Particularly, I agree that more emphasis should be placed on attempting to identify some genetic account for phenomena that Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain. I'm also more inclined to believe that can only provide some type of anecdotal account of things, which might have explanatory force but ultimately it can also just be general brainstorming and anchoring the hypothesis in evolutionary theory to make it seem more legitimate.
I really appreciated this paper, especially after reading the first one on ev psych. What stood out for me was the point on universalism. In the view that many of our behaviours are determined by human nature, or evolved mechanisms that all people are born with, so that "the mind shifts between pre-specified behavioural outputs in response to differential environmental influences." This ignores the role of culture in influencing behaviour and the malleability of the brain.
Something that also really resonated with me in the context of this class was that "Niko Tinbergen famously proposed that understanding behavior requires comprehension not only of its function and evolution, but also of its causation and development". This is what the hard problem of consciousness is all about. The authors write that to answer why mechanisms developed evolutionary psychologists should use modern technologies like neuroimaging and genetic techniques. They also emphasize describing adaptations at the level of the nervous system. Development (the how) could be studied further by looking at individual and social learning, and studying child development.
I find myself more interested in the limitations of evolutionary psychology, rather than the current applications of it. While evolutionary psychology is quite interesting, taking it seriously can be difficult if there is no genetic or biological system that helps make the theory plausible beyond what we would like to believe to be true.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me that we are still struggling to find evolutionary (or any) reasons for things like things that reduce the likelihood of reproductive success that "cannot be explained by mismatches with,.... our psychological mechanisms by modern day novel environmental inputs." - Which, what does this really mean? That we cannot reconcile the psychological mechanisms we are meant to have with those we develop due to new situations?
More clear are the examples of homosexuality and suicide. I would even dare to include suicidal thoughts, and debilitating social disorders. None of these things are helpful in evolution in the sense that they are helpful in the reproductive success of such individuals. Are these just genetic mutations? Yet, suicidal thoughts and desires can be tamed, controlled, and sometimes even dismissed. Most people occasionally think of such things - what would it be like to be hit by a bus? But these thoughts do occur, and seem to be useless evolutionarily.
Though, I speculate that these passing 'suicidal' thoughts of 'normal' people, perhaps aid in reminding them that they should be more cautious in crossing the street because they could get hit and die.
As for homosexuality, I have no speculations and nor do I have any desire to speculate, because I don't want to fall into a trap that concludes that it is due to some unfavorable mutation. To me, it doesn't really matter if sexual preference is genetic or not, it doesn't matter and we should just let people live...
Anyway.
The "lack [of] detailed knowledge of many selection pressures that humans faced over the millions of years of their evolutions," is quite a serious lacking. Everything we use as fact is really just hypothesis. If one of these hypotheses at a higher level, to unravel, we would have to reconsider how we consider the world and our evolution. There are of course certain things we "know to a reasonable degree of certainty" but they are not particularly helpful in telling us how exactly our ancestors behaved.
At the end of the day, evolutionary psychology is still struggling, as the rest of the scientific disciplines concerned with cognition. We cannot explain the variation among the sexes, nor the variation within the sexes, nor of course, those who do not fit in trend of their own sex. So I ask, the hypothetical robot we supposedly can create that can behave just as a human, how the heck do we decide it's biological predispositions - if they are not universal? What kind of environment should it be "raised" in? What should we expect from such an education?
There is so much variability in human cognition and capacity that I do wonder if it is at all possible, or worth it, to find generalizations. I know as humans we love to find categories into which we fall, but categories are black and white - you fit in one or the other. Yet this isn't true for most. Everything about humans falls on some sort of spectrum with some sort of distribution. How do we accurately extrapolate from this? Can we?
I thought this article really answered the problems of EP, I didn't really find any point to criticize on but I would like to talk about the points made against the ideas that "human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments", and that "there is a universal human nature".
ReplyDeleteFirst the fact human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments can’t be true since whathever happened in evolution in the past years is the same thing that is happening now. The environment with which we are interacting with is constantly inducing changes in the way we behave. This happens through a regulation of gene expression at an epigenetic level and at mutational level. For the epigenetic level, there is no reason why it would happen back then but not now. They evolution psychologist said that the times we live in are changing too fast for us to adapt in time but from the idea that learning comes from an evolutionary basis this doesn’t makes sense since our leaning abilities have evolved for this kind of situation. What would we do if we weren’t able to re-categorize and re-order the connections we made in this world ? We would just be stuck while the world is moving on and that can’t be very good.
Second that there is a universal human nature, I think there is some sort of universal template instilled in all of us for example our tendencies for desires and aversions; however, (and this comes back on the idea of modern environment adaptation) what you learn makes a huge impact on our behavior and rightly so. For example, we might all be born with a heightened fear of snakes but if we lived in a culture where we learned to deal with them in a way where there is no confrontation and no frustration then we would overwrite this fear we would re-categorize that symbol so to speak.
“Cultural practices are likely to have influenced selection pressures on the human brain, raising the possibility that genetic variation could lead to biases in the human cognitive processing between, as well as within, populations.”
ReplyDeleteThis quote, summarising the significant effects of gene-culture coevolution, is perfect for emphasizing the imperfections of gradualisms in explaining psychological adaptiveness in human beings. In my opinion, gene-culture coevolution is a great example of a positive feedback mechanism, which exponentially increases the diversity and variation amongst human psychological mechanisms, as compared to other species including primates. Furthermore, it emphasizes the bidirectional relationship between organisms and the environments they exist in. Just as an ameba exists in a physical environments and mammals exist in social and physical environments, human exist in both the former environments as well as a cultural one. It seems as though the relationship between the type of organism and the type of environment will, together, govern the rate of psychological evolution. This emphasizes the importance of assessing more recent, cultural environments in assessing adaptive psychological mechanisms.
Cultural influences, which may bias human cognitive processing between and within populations, provides reason to suspect flaws in a universal human nature proposed by classical evolutionary psychologists. Between distinct cultural populations, there seem to be clear variations in mate preference, polygamist versus monogamist behavior, preference of different foods (different cultures might find different foods to taste better than the foods of another culture) and many other psychological traits. Within populations of the same culture, these vast psychological differences exist as well. This makes me question whether all organisms with 46 chromosomes, really share a universal basis for psychological behavior. Yes, as the classical evolutionary psychologists might suggest, perhaps there is a universal program that may be differentially activated by different environments or social conditions, but the persistent adaptability of the brain due to developmental, epigenetic, and plastic dynamics lead me to suspect that adaptive psychological mechanism are closely linked to the current environments as opposed to universally ingrained programmes. Of course there must be some fundamental genetic basis for human cognition. All organism with 46 chromosomes, defects and mutations placed aside, have the potential to learn language, categorize material, and express emotions, But the extent to which we are capable to do these things (the variations that exist amongst people) must depend on a multitude of factors (development, plasticity, gene expression, etc…) that are closely related to one’s contemporary cultural environment
Adam, I think that you're writing off the potential of a universal human nature too soon. This course has been focused on understanding how and why humans can do what they do. The Turing Test (specifically T3) is the way to test any models we create. However, a successful T3 robot does not have to embody every expression of human nature that exists--the robot just needs this potential. You mention this yourself lower in your text--all 46 organisms have the potential to be a certain way. I think this potential is what evolutionary psychologists really mean by universal human nature. They use evolution to establish our potential, and to trace how the potential translates into behaviour. Obviously, certain cultures evolved to use potential in different ways, which is reflected in the environment. However, evolutionary psychology can still find overarching potentials which are themselves a product of evolution, and can be viewed as universal.
DeleteStill trying to figure out why we would ever need such an over-generative tool, I found this about language:
ReplyDelete"Human communication does not proceed by transferring one mental representation from one brain to another. It consists of inferences from other people's behavior and utterances, which rarely if ever leads to the replication of ideas. That such processes could lead to roughly stable representations across large numbers of people is a wonderful, anti-entropic process that cries out for explanation." Pascal Boyer, 2015
The propositions we make digitally approximate our world, so that we can share it with anyone and everyone.
So many people give Southern Americans (not to be confused with South Americans, although the term applied to any individual would indicate a fair measure of confusion) a hard time about not "believing" in evolution. As they should. But lets not make evolution out to be some simple fact of life, that everyone ought to have figured out on their own. I still do not entirely understand evolution. Fortunately, there's a Children's Book:
ReplyDeletehttp://grandmotherfish.com/grandmotherfish.pdf
“ In summary, there is no uniform human genetic program”
ReplyDeleteAs this article points out, evolutionary psychology fails when it tries to essentialize the human, but succeeds when it shows the simultaneous boundedness (via evolutionary history/specificity) and boundlessness (via novel environments and the plasticity of the brain) of the human cognitive faculties. Evolutionary psychology, as the Confer et. al paper claimed, is interactionists rather than deterministic, meaning evolution, passed down genetically, are a part of an interactive cycle that both causes and is determined by responses to novel (contemporary) environments. How would we be able to create this simultaneous boundedness and boundlessness in a T3 robot? Could we create the conditions for a T3 robot to pass down its learned knowledge onto other Robots in a form of culture? In the form of reproduction? Would this be necessary? What evolutionary psychology is saying is that the history of a species (the specific historical incidents which led to the brains current state) is not incidental to our cognitive faculties, but is instead paramount to it. If evolutionary aspects are paramount to not only the creation of our cognitive faculties, then a computational approach which reduces the mind to an implementation (read historically specific) independent code cannot be correct. The evolutionary history that got us to our cognitive faculties cannot be fully abstracted out of our cognitive faculties, but is instead always grounding them. How do we ground a T3 robot without such an evolutionary history?
The paper uses evidence from different subjects (genetics, neuroscience, etc.) to criticize the four major tenets of Evolutionary Psychology: adaptedness, gradualism, modularity, and universal human nature. Personally, I found the evidence from the paper is very convincing. EP is taking these tenets for granted without further testing/proving it. All the experiments done by EP are just trying to prove that some psychology capacity follows the four tenets of EP, and thus can be explained by EP. But that does not mean that Psychology capacity is evolved. There could be other reasons. Just like the author suggested, what EP needs to do is to be more involved with other subjects, bringing evidence from different sides to make their explanations more valid.
ReplyDeleteI think the modifications to the tenets of Evolutionary Psychology proposed in this paper are definitely important revisions. Particularly, I agree that more emphasis should be placed on attempting to identify some genetic account for phenomena that Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain. I'm also more inclined to believe that can only provide some type of anecdotal account of things, which might have explanatory force but ultimately it can also just be general brainstorming and anchoring the hypothesis in evolutionary theory to make it seem more legitimate.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated this paper, especially after reading the first one on ev psych. What stood out for me was the point on universalism. In the view that many of our behaviours are determined by human nature, or evolved mechanisms that all people are born with, so that "the mind shifts between pre-specified behavioural outputs in response to differential environmental influences." This ignores the role of culture in influencing behaviour and the malleability of the brain.
ReplyDeleteSomething that also really resonated with me in the context of this class was that "Niko Tinbergen famously proposed that understanding behavior requires comprehension not only of its function and evolution, but also of its causation and development". This is what the hard problem of consciousness is all about. The authors write that to answer why mechanisms developed evolutionary psychologists should use modern technologies like neuroimaging and genetic techniques. They also emphasize describing adaptations at the level of the nervous system. Development (the how) could be studied further by looking at individual and social learning, and studying child development.