Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology [Paperback]

Alas, Poor Darwin is a disparate collection of essays by scientists, philosophers and social commentators all attacking the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. It's a familiar set of complaints: evolutionary psychology is "simplistic", "reductionist" and "adaptationist". But many of the attacks are just political and there's a blatant attempt to smear the subject with morally bankrupt beliefs like eugenics. So what exactly are the nasty ideas advocated by these deluded evolutionary psychologists? Well, er......

1) The mind is what the brain does.

2) The brain is a biological organ that shows enormous adaptive complexity.

3) The only known non-miraculous mechanism that can account for the origin of adaptive complexity is natural selection.

4) Hence, many (though certainly not all) aspects of our psychology are likely to have been moulded at least in part by natural selection. The brain is not a general all-purpose problem-solving device. It solves some classes of problems brilliantly and others surprisingly badly. The evolutionary psychologists are simply asking why? Their answer, in broad terms, is that the brain (and hence the mind) is brimming with specifically evolved features that are adaptively useful - or at least were in the ancestral environment in which we evolved. Furthermore, these features are likely to be present in all neurologically normal members of our species. They include not just things like visual awareness and the other senses, but many other psychological attributes such as sexual desire, the emotions, the ability to gauge the mental states of others and perhaps even the way we think about logical problems.

5) Because different mental adaptations are specialised to solve different types of problems, the mind is likely to be modular. In this view for example, the capacity for language is a specifically evolved mental feature whose adaptive complexity clearly reveals the fingerprints of natural selection. By contrast, the idea that language just emerged as a non-selected by-product of a general increase in brain size (Stephen Jay Gould' s "spandrel" theory), seems utterly ridiculous and really is a "Just So Story".

I'll take Hilary and Steven Rose seriously when they provide examples of societies with no anger or sexual jealousy; societies whose members smile when they are disgusted; societies where young men are more sexually attracted to 90 year old women than to 20 year old women or societies where no one wants to form friendships and alliances. Of course evolutionary psychologists accept the importance of "learning" and "culture" to influence our minds. But "culture" doesn't just float around us like some mysterious ectoplasm. It's the product of interacting minds, the product of our brains. Now the adaptive complexity and developmental plasticity of the human brain are precisely those features that make culture possible - but these are both evolved properties that need explaining in their own right.

Like the proverbial curate's egg, this book is good in parts, though indigestible when taken whole. The worst essay is from the postmodernist Charles Jencks. His contribution is little more than pretentious hot air. Indeed, it's so daft that at first I half thought it might be an Alan Sokal-style hoax. Can the scientists do any better? Some, like Patrick Bateson have important and subtle things to say. Others such as Gabriel Dover are content merely to attack straw men. But mostly the authors just ritually condemn the usual suspects. Pinker, Dawkins, Wilson et al are WRONG, so there! But what's the alternative? All we get is a lot of hand waving about how it's so very, very complicated. This is not to say that individual evolutionary psychologists have got it all right. Like any science, there is good work and bad work. Predictably, the Roses criticise Randy Thornhill's theory about rape. Fair enough; but there is much better than this. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen's insightful studies on autism are first rate, and clearly influenced by the ideas of evolutionary psychology, yet they don't get a single mention in the whole book. Steven Rose in particular should reflect that his own field (the biochemical basis of vertebrate memory) was initially dismissed by many biochemists as cranky and ironically, "too reductionist". There was good reason for this scepticism as some embarrassingly dire stuff was done in the very early days. But that doesn't mean that the whole enterprise was fundamentally misguided. Indeed today, with proper controls, the field is perfectly respectable.

So, the evolutionary psychologists may well be wrong about specific details and some of their theories probably are too simplistic; but it's a start and at least they're doing experiments. As for the claim that it is morally pernicious, well this is just the naturalistic fallacy. But if you really do insist on a moral message, it could be argued that evolutionary psychology caries a cautiously positive one: that the wide cultural variations between different peoples are more apparent than real, because fundamentally, deep, deep down, our minds are all built to the same basic recipe.

I came to this book coloured by my impression that Steven Rose makes overly simplistic objections to Dawkins-like gene-centric biology. However the majority of arguments concentrate on the scientific failings of evolutionary psychology (EP). The concept of the evolutionary origins of traits is beyond doubt but EP takes a much more simplistic view that 'any' identifiable trait can be given a 'just-so' explanation that is often clearly over-simplistic. However the articles are also coloured by the 'Science Wars' between the natural and social sciences and also political concerns. The political objections are mostly unfair and involve picking on people from a different social context in the past to smear future practitioners without addressing the scientific arguments directly. The social science objections are generally an internal scientific debate that is irrelevant to most. Despite a number of straw men there are valuable objections to Pinker-like language of thought theories and specific simplistic EP theses that stress extreme nativist ideas which have been widely criticised (e.g. Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness). The contributors generally accept the value of EP but criticise the current naive practice of it (which, in some ways, reflects the glib evolutionary arguments that can sometimes be seen in biology) even if some writers do commit the naturalistic fallacy and conflate the scientific and political (of course sociologists of science might say the two are inseparable but then leave themselves open to the same objection).

Like many edited books, the contributors' approachs to the subject matter differ so as to make it difficult to provide an overall review. The editors admit as much, observing that the contributors "do not speak with a single voice" (p9), which seems to a coded admission that they frequently contradict one another. For example, Fausto-Sterling chides evolutionary psychologists for sexism in viewing the female orgasm as a mere by-product (women "did not even evolve their own orgasms" (p176) she complains) while Gould (p103-4) chides them for purportedly viewing every trait as an adaptation and ignoring the possibility of by-products.
Some chapters are essentially irrelevant to the project of evolutionary psychology. One, that of Dawkins-stalker (and part-time philosopher) Mary Midgley, critiques the separate field of memetics. A singularly uninsightful chapter by 'disability activist' Tom Shakespeare and a colleague seems to say nothing with which an evolutionary psychologist would disagree.
Only at the end of their chapter do they make the obligatory reference to 'just-so stories', and, more bizarrely, to the "single-gene determinism of the biological reductionists". Of course, evolutionary psychologists emphasise to the point of repetitiveness that, while they may employ this as a form of shorthand, nothing in their theories implies a one-to-one concordance between single genes and behaviours. The irrelevance of some chapters to their supposed subject-matter makes one wonder whether some contributors have ever actually read any of the primary literature in the field - or whether their entire knowledge (or lack thereof) of evolutionary psychology is filtered through to them via the critiques of their fellow contributors.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith's chapter is a critique of what she refers to as nativism. It may have value as a critique of some strands of EP. However, the nativist thesis she associates with evolutionary psychology is rejected by many evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Human Evolutionary Psychology) and not integral to evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology posits that behaviour have been shaped by natural selection to maximise the reproductive success of organisms in ancestral environments. It therefore allows us to bypass the proximate level of causation by saying that, how ever the brain is structured and develops in interaction with its environment, given that this brain evolved by a process of natural selection, it must be such as to produce behaviour which maximises the reproductive success of its bearer under ancestral conditions (the 'phenotypic gambit'). The issue of nativism is therefore bypassed.

SJ Gould: A Convert?
Undoubtedly the best known contributor is the late Stephen J Gould. Such is his renown that he evidently did not feel the need to actually contribute an original chapter to the volume, but rather felt it sufficient to recycle a NYT book-review.
It is a critical review of a book (Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Penguin Science)), itself critical of Gould. Neither the book nor the review by Gould deal primarily with the field of evolutionary psychology, but rather address more general issues within evolutionary biology.
The most remarkable revelation of this chapter is that the best-known and most widely-cited erstwhile opponent of evolutionary psychology, is apparently no longer any such thing. On the contrary, he now views evolutionary psychology as potentially "quite useful" (p102).
Most strikingly, he acknowledges that "the most promising theory of evolutionary psychology [is] the recognition that differing Darwinian requirements for males and females imply distinct adaptive behaviours centred on male advantage in spreading sperm as widely as possible... and female strategy for extracting time and attention from males" (Ibid.). In other words, he accepts the position of evolutionary psychologists in that most controversial of areas, innate sex differences.
His criticisms of evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, retread familiar grounds. He repeats the tired charge of 'ultra-Darwinism', whereby evolutionary psychologists purportedly view every trait as an adaptation (p103-4). This claim is easily rebutted by simply reading the primary literature. For example, Daly and Wilson see the high rate of homicide of stepchildren, not as adaptive, but as a by-product of discriminative parental solicitude, whereby parents care less for such children (The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today)). Similarly, the authors of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Bradford Books), are divided as to whether rape is an adaptation or a by-product of men's greater desire for commitment-free sex.
[Evolutionary psychologists generally prefer the term by-product to Gould's coinage 'spandrel'. The invention of jargon to baffle non-specialists (e.g. referring to animal rape as "forced copulation" as the Roses advocate: p2) is the preserve of subjects suffering from 'physics-envy', according to 'Dawkins' First Law of the Conservation of Difficulty'.]
Gould then claims sociobiological theories are untestable. As evidence, he cites Robert Wright's claim (The Moral Animal), that our sweet tooth evolved "in an environment in which fruit existed but candy didn't". Bizarrely he chides Wright for citing "no paleontological data about ancestral feeding" (p100), ignoring the fact that Wright is a populariser not an academic. (Gould evidently believes we need "paleontological data" to demonstrate that fruit is not a recent invention and that chocolate bars are not.)

Straw Men and Fabricated Quotations
Rather than countering the claims of actual evolutionary psychologists, contributors resort to misrepresenting and caricaturing evolutionary psychology. In the case of co-editor, Hillary Rose, this crosses the line from rhetorical deceit to outright defamation of character when, on p116, she attributes to David Barash an offensive quotation violating the naturalistic fallacy by purporting to justify rape by reference to its biological function. "If nature is sexist, do not blame her sons," she quotes Barash, a reputable academic, as writing.
However, Barash simply does not say the words she attributes to him on the page she cites or any other page in The Whisperings Within. On the contrary, after a discussion of the adaptive function of rape among mallards, he merely ventures tentatively that, although vastly more complex, human rape may be analogous.

Is Steven Rose a Scientific Racist?
Steven Rose is not a creationist. He is therefore obliged to reconcile his opposition to evolutionary psychology with recognition that the brain is a product of evolution. Ironically, therefore, this leads him to employ evolutionary arguments against evolutionary psychology.
For example, Rose defends group-selectionism (p257-9). Similarly, he argues that sufficient time has elapsed since the Pleistocene for complex adaptations to have evolved (p1-2). Finally, he rejects a modular model of the human mind (p260-2). If Rose is right on these matters, it would suggest, not the abandonment of an evolutionary approach to psychology, but rather the need to develop a new evolutionary psychology stressing the importance of these factors.
Actually, this new evolutionary psychology may not be all that new. Rose may find he has unlikely bedfellows.
Group selectionism (which implies that conflict between groups such as races is inevitable) has already been defended by figures such as Kevin Macdonald (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples) and Philippe Rushton (1989). Similarly, the claim that sufficient time has elapsed for significant evolutionary change to have occurred since the dawn of agriculture necessarily entails the belief that sufficient time has also elapsed for the different races to diverge (10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution). Finally, as Rose himself observes (p261), rejection of modularity is consistent with emphasis on the general factor of intelligence (but see Kanazawa 2004 for a view of general intelligence as itself a domain-specific module.)
Therefore, in rejecting the tenets of mainstream evolutionary psychology, Rose inadvertently advocates, not so much a new form of evolutionary psychology, but rather an old form of scientific racism.
Of course, Rose is not a racist. On the contrary, he has built a literary career smearing those he characterises as such. However, descending to Rose's own level of argumentation (i.e. guilt by association), he is easily characterised as such. By rejecting many claims of evolutionary psychologists - about the EEA, group-selectionism and modularity - he ironically plays into the hands of the racists he purportedly opposes.

Kanazawa, S. (2004) 'General Intelligence as a Domain-Specific Module' Psychological Review 111(2) 512-523

Rushton, JP. (1989) 'Genetic similarity, human altruism and group-selection' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12(3) 503-59