Evolutionary Psychology is the study of how attributes of human psychology evolved biologically by natural selection. I and others have averred many times that it is mostly a pseudoscience. EvoPsych proponents balk and take offense. We cite numerous papers by experts in evolution and psychology who agree with us. They claim they’ve been refuted. We ask where. They suddenly stop talking to us.
That’s a common sequence of events. I’m going to here collect all the information backing our claim. Any and all rebuttals to what I here argue, that you think are worth reading, I want to have collected in comments, so do please add any. Just make sure they actually address what’s here, and not just repeat what’s here refuted.
Also be aware that this article is as long as it is because EvoPsych proponents employ whack-a-mole apologetics (“But you didn’t address x,” and it’s always a different x the moment you do address x). Consequently, I am covering all the bases.
The Basic Problem
The basic thesis of EvoPsych is sound: some attributes of human psychology must have evolved biologically by natural selection. The problem is, figuring out which ones did, in which respects, and to which extent, and what the actual selection process was (i.e. what function was being selected for). There being virtually no data available to answer any of those questions, leaves EvoPsych a vain dream in most cases. We simply can’t know. And claiming to know when you can’t is a defining feature of pseudoscience.
There are more criteria of pseudoscience met by EvoPsych in practice, as I’ll show shortly. But first I want to point out that the qualifiers are important: not all EvoPsych is pseudoscience. Some of what gets through is good science, or at least as scientific in its suggestions as we find in cosmological science (the bulk of whose results do not consist of claims to have discovered what’s true, but rather what possible hypotheses fit the data and thus need to be tested in future). And also: A lot of what people find eyerollingly stupid about EvoPsych is actually a product of the media (as famously demonstrated by Rebecca Watson), or almost as often pseudoscientific loons (like these guys), misreporting or misusing the results of EvoPsych. For which EvoPsych proponents can’t be blamed, other than for not doing more to combat this abuse and misrepresentation of their field than they should be (the way ordinary evolutionists do to combat the misinformation about and misuse of their research by creationists). Indeed EvoPsych proponents should be more involved in publicly combating the nonsense that their science is abused for (including racism, sexism, and misogyny).
But the good stuff is there. For example, mathematical demonstrations of kin selective and other effects on differential reproductive success (or DRS) of having a small ratio of homosexual members in a family or social group, combined with some corroborating sociological and biological studies (neurology, genetics, fetal development), makes a plausible case for a selective pressure causing a more-or-less stable cross-culturally observed ratio of homosexuality in a population (varying also by cultural confounding pressures). It is not a proof. We cannot claim to know this is the case (after all, homosexuality may just be an accidental byproduct of normal genetic mixing that has no particular evolutionary purpose other than the experimental variation that sexual reproduction itself partly evolved for in the first place). But it’s at least good science to say it’s a viable hypothesis that has some support, as long as we admit it has not been confirmed, and more research is needed.
Notably, this example also illustrates the pseudoscientific aspects of EvoPsych as well, as attempts to refute this hypothesis have relied on studying modern homophobic societies with family structures and economies not at all like our biological ancestral regime, as if these reflected the societies in which the attribute evolved—and not even acknowledging that these cultural confounding factors nullify the value of their result. Ignoring culture is a major cause of EvoPsych pseudoscience. If not the major cause.
Another example of where EvoPsych has scientifically plausible ideas (even if still again not proven) is explaining the many multiply and cross-culturally confirmed cognitive biases. Though notably not all have been confirmed to exist in other cultures, some have to some extent, like Agency Overdetection. Here much less support has been gleaned from biology and other studies. But the phenomenon is well confirmed, both as existing, and as more likely being a genetic attribute of brain architecture and not a cultural product. And mathematical calculation can show it benefits DRS over any other setting on the sensitivity to agency detection (from positive to negative across the range), without requiring many unproven assumptions. In the statistical aggregate, it costs more to under-detect agency than over-detect it. So there is a very plausible selective pathway for our brains to have evolved into limited over-detectors.
Notably, this example also illustrates the complexity of EvoPsych that gets lost in translation to the public. Much speculation is promulgated about the EvoPsych origins of religion, much of which is just that, unproven speculation, sometimes implausible speculation, or even disproven speculation. How much of that is the fault of EvoPsych proponents not policing their own enthusiasm, vs. amateur and media misrepresentations, would be a chore to determine. But in reality there are not likely any evolved psychological traits for religion. Not only because “religion” is a conglomerate of too many disparate things (from actual physical institutions to ritual behaviors to belief systems, all highly varied and complex), but also because evolution is far more likely to have selected much more fundamental cognitive behaviors than that, which only happen to contribute to religion as a byproduct.
Agency over-detection is an example: if it is an evolved psychological feature, it was not selected for because it promoted religion; it was selected for because it promoted survival in a much more expansive way than that, wholly apart from religion. That it also happens to cause us to erroneously believe the world is governed by spirits (and after the cultural construct of one-leader hierarchical governments influenced us, “spirits” became “Spirit,” though still assisted by an administrative apparatus of “spirits” called angels and saints, and often even opposed by yet more spirits called demons, Satan, ghosts, etc.) was an accidental byproduct of the function, not something it was selected to produce. And EvoPsych proponents often fail to distinguish between selected and accidental traits (in fact, they frequently don’t even realize that they need to, before they can ever generate a valid result), producing a common fundamental flaw in their methodology, which also contributes to its frequency of pseudoscientific results, in the form of declaring unwarranted certainty in results that are so wholly fallacious that they cannot even be said to be supported by the evidence presented, much less confirmed.
Again, not all EvoPsych exhibits these flaws. But a lot of it does.
Defining Pseudoscience
Some defining features of pseudoscience are:
- It pretends to be science (rather than philosophy or science fiction).
- It declares a certainty far out of proportion to the evidence (it is not properly empirical).
- It relies on, and continues to defend, fallacious inference procedures (it does not learn).
- It makes claims that are unfalsifiable in principle.
- Or declares as known, claims that are unfalsifiable in practice.
- Or never subjects its claims to falsification tests.
Not all of these features must be present for a claim (or a particular research paper) to be pseudoscience. But the more that are present, the more pseudoscientific it is. The only features that must be present are the first two: it must be pretending to be science; and it’s declarations of certainty must be out of all proportion to the evidence presented. Thus, for example, when cosmologists publish papers on the Ekpyrotic Theory of the Big Bang, proposing that the Big Bang is the outcome of two universes having collided, they do not claim to know this is what happened or even that it’s likely. They merely show that the theory is consistent with existing data and therefore warrants further testing if any tests can be devised (and some of their published research indeed involves finding ways to test it). That’s not pseudoscience. If, however, they claimed that this is probably what happened, simply because it fits the data, they would be promulgating pseudoscience. Indeed, by then they would also be meeting the third criterion: fallacious inference-making. And if they argued it is true and no further tests were needed (or could even rebut them), they’d be meeting one or all of the last three criteria: asserting nonfalsifiable conclusions can be known.
Pseudoscience can also be identified when it relies on false claims (the way Creation Science does). Though I hope that does not commonly happen in EvoPsych, experts have found examples (as Jerry Coyne has documented twice; and admittedly, I found several examples myself—as we’ll see). Pseudoscience can also be identified by the rhetorical tactics used by its defenders. For example, they will use the Esotericism Fallacy, e.g. “Only an astrologer can criticize astrology.” They will insist no one is qualified to judge the merits of EvoPsych as a science except proponents of EvoPsych as a science. Which is, of course, a circular argument, and actually a uniform example of actively avoiding falsification tests. Other tactics include quote mining (e.g. misrepresenting what critics have said so as to avoid responding to what the critics actually said) and goal post moving (e.g. admitting most EvoPsych is only speculative; then elsewhere claiming most of its conclusions are known facts, or acting as if they are) and ad hominem (e.g. “I despise that particular evolutionary biologist; therefore I don’t need to respond to their scientific arguments”). Any science that has to be defended with such devices is automatically suspect as a pseudoscience. Keep an eye out for how many EvoPsych proponents resort to them (even in response to this very article).
But in published research, EvoPsych’s most common failing is its fallacious methodology, often consisting of not even acknowledging the need to describe, much less pass, any adequate falsification test. (1) This is most commonly the case in its frequent failure to even confirm that a behavior widely exists cross-culturally (i.e. universally), a fundamental requirement of assuming it is biologically evolved and not a product of culture. (2) EvoPsych also rarely finds any genetic correlation to a behavior, even though that would almost be necessary to verify it is an evolved trait and not a cultural one (since even a universal behavior could still be a product of convergent cultural evolution, and thus not in fact a sign of biological basis). (3) More problematic still is the rarity of ever even acknowledging the need to rule out accidental (byproduct) explanations of a behavior, much less actually doing so, yet this is one of the most important falsification tests for EvoPsych claims, the failure to pass which guarantees an evolutionary causal claim will always remain speculation and not fact (thus placing it in the same camp as Ekpyrotic Big Bang Theory: a useless result to all but future researchers).
(4) And one of the most common confounding factors for creating accidental behavior effects will be the sudden radical changes in our environment caused by civilization and technology. Genes selected for small-scale tribal survival in the wilderness with primitive technologies will certainly interact with modern civilization and technologies in wholly unpredictable ways, which cannot have been selected for as if magically known in advance. Thus, if you cannot confirm a behavior existed pre-civilization, or was evolved within the very short span of civilization, you cannot confirm that it is a behavior selected for, rather than an accidental byproduct of some other behavior that was selected for.
Agency Overdetection and its pathway to scripture-based monotheism is an example: in no way can we say we were biologically evolved to believe in scripture-based monotheism. We evolved to use language and tools (which combined to accidentally produce writing) and to over-detect intelligent agents in nature (among other things), which just happened to have the accidental byproduct of producing scripture-based monotheism in some cases (in fact, pretty much only once, the others just being developments thereto: Islam came from Christianity which came from Judaism), and, by mere historical contingency, the cultures that acquired that just happened, again by accident, to be the ones that gained rapid advantages in the technological leveraging of power (political, economic, and thermodynamic), thereby overrunning the earth. Cross-culturally, and historically, we can confirm that monotheism is in fact bizarre, not the human universal, and likewise any scripture-based religion in general. It therefore is not a selected-for product of evolution. It is an accidental byproduct of it, and indeed only when conjoined with other unrelated accidents (such as of the rise of civilization and its corresponding technologies and structures).
This makes EvoPsych almost impossible to practice as a genuine science. What it wants to know, is almost always simply impossible to know (at least currently). And consequently, much of its research product ends up more on the pseudoscience end of the spectrum.
To demonstrate this, I will first show why we can expect this to be the case even before examining specific examples illustrating it. Then I will examine what expert critics have said. Then I will look at the best defense of EvoPsych to date, and show that it does not in fact answer these criticisms. Sometimes it even validates them. (I may in future complete a survey of an issue of a popular EvoPsych journal to illustrate these problems as well, but I found that too excessive in time and word count to include here. The following content is sufficient to make the necessary points clear.)
First, Psychology Itself Is Not That Reliable
Based on recent realizations that scientists don’t do math as well as they think, mathematicians who know what they are doing have started predicting that published papers passing peer review in fields like psychology can actually have an expected false positive rate of at least 30% (or worse). This is known even apart from the findings of John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLoS Medicine 2.8 (2005), which found this problem pervades the sciences; but psychology is known to be among the worst. Multiple studies show that roughly 1 in 3 results claimed to have been “confirmed” by any psych paper’s data, won’t actually have been. Add in more causes of error, besides not knowing how math works, and that rate goes up.
That prediction was empirically proved for psychology by the Reproducibility Project, which found that only 36% of peer reviewed science papers in psychology could be replicated (see also Lots of Bad Science Still Gets Published at Vox). And that’s not the predicted 1 in 3 failure rate but almost 2 in 3; so the reality is even worse than mathematicians expected. That project also found that even of the replicated papers, on average the effect size of the phenomenon reported was half that claimed by the original paper. Overall, original papers were more likely to have given false results when the effect size reported was small—in fact showing a relationship: stronger effect sizes correlated with higher rates of replication (when the original study had a large enough sample size). That’s a significant observation when we realize that EvoPsych papers often find rather small effect sizes (e.g. variances of just ten to twenty percentiles, rather than, say, forty to eighty). And this is all apart from the growing problem of scientific fraud plaguing all fields of study now.
The RP report made this sound observation:
It is too easy to conclude that successful replication means that the theoretical understanding of the original finding is correct. Direct replication mainly provides evidence for the reliability of a result. If there are alternative explanations for the original finding, those alternatives could likewise account for the replication. Understanding is achieved through multiple, diverse investigations that provide converging support for a theoretical interpretation and rule out alternative explanations.
This is crucial, because this is also a criticism of Evolutionary Psychology, which is almost entirely based on inferring causal theories to explain a documented phenomenon, without performing any adequate tests to rule out alternative explanations. The RP researchers note that you can’t do this. If you document a phenomenon, that’s all you have done. You have not therefore confirmed any explanatory model of why that phenomenon exists. Moreover, these researchers found that even just trying to document a phenomenon is highly unreliable in psychology. Only 1 out of every 3 times will an effect be confirmed when double-checked. They admit that failure to replicate does not entail the original results were false, but what it does do is eliminate the ability to claim the effect has been documented. With one paper confirming and another disconfirming, you are back to square one: no reason to believe the effect exists.
Second, Adding Evolutionary Hypotheses Increases That Unreliability
This is basic law of conjunction: the probability of two things being correct must necessarily always be less than the probability of one of them being correct. Famously illustrated by the Conjunction Fallacy. So, since EvoPsych depends on claims being correct in both Evo and Psych, and the latter alone has a reliability rate of only 1 in 3, then the conjoined reliability rate must necessarily be less than 1 in 3. How much less?
Evolutionary Psychology is probably at least twice as unreliable as psychology alone, because EvoPsych makes a double claim: not just that an effect exists, but that it was caused by evolution (and not even merely that, but usually it claims a specific scenario as to how evolution produced the effect, and why). That is what makes it “Evolutionary” Psychology and not just Psychology. We now know that barely 1 in 3 of the effects claimed as documented in psychology actually hold up. That means we can expect the same in EvoPsych: only 1 in 3 of its claimed effects can be trusted to hold up under further scrutiny. But EvoPsych also makes claims about what caused that effect, highly specific claims at that, and notably those claims are almost never based in evidence.
It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Evo side of EvoPsych is more reliable than Psychology. Psychology has access to observable data, and abundant data at that. And yet it only succeeds 1 in 3 times. The evolutionary hypotheses proffered to explain that data have nearly no access to any observable data. And even at their wildly best, never have better access to it. That means the rate of success on that side cannot plausibly be higher than 1 in 3 as well. The conjunction of both therefore will have a reliability rate of 1/3 x 1/3 = 1/9. That means we can reasonably expect only 1 in every 9 claims made under peer review in the field of EvoPsych will turn out to be true. That translates into the success ratio of 10% to 90%.
Which means we can reasonably expect 90% of all EvoPsych is false.
And presently we have no means to determine which claims of EvoPsych are in that 90%. Because the Evo side of it cannot be replicated at all, for lack of access to the data. At most we might be able to bump its success rate closer to 1 in 3 in some cases, if we can at least confirm to a very high certainty that a claimed psychological phenomenon exists. But then the rate of success of proffered explanations of that phenomenon will remain the base rate of success for that side of the equation, which we just determined cannot plausibly be greater than 1 in 3. In fact, it almost certainly must be less.
Unlike the psychological effect itself, which can be confirmed by a direct observation of data, and confirmed to ever greater certainty by increasing the sample size, claims as to how and why it evolved are often based on zero data because scientists cannot observe the population in the past as it was evolving the psychological trait, and usually cannot observe any data pertaining to that process either, and generally EvoPsych researchers never do the next best things, such as make comparative behavioral studies of genetically similar species (e.g. apes) or isolate any genes correlating with and thus causing the studied behavior (and studying their variation within the current population and from our other ape relatives).
And that’s even after assuming that the behavior evolved at all, as opposed to being a product of culture—or a new interaction between genes and the now completely changed environment we live in owing to civilization. If—often unbeknownst to us, because we don’t have time machines with which to check—the behavior is a new one, caused by this change in environment, it is even less likely to have been selected for biologically, at least to produce any fundamental change within the global human population, since civilization as an environment is 4,000 years young at most, or even 200, or even 30 years young depending on which social structures or technologies may be causing the new behavior. EvoPsych almost never rules out either alternative cause (culture rather than genes; or changing behavior caused by recent, and comparatively radical, changes in environment that were not selected for but are, in consequence of the unexpected side-effects of civilization, accidental). After all, we can’t go back 10,000 years and conduct double blind psych studies on people of the time to confirm the effects are the same as observed today. And unless we were so lucky someone had already done it, we can’t do that even for people of thirty years ago.
There is one other thing EvoPsych can do to compensate for this near complete inaccessibility of the data, or the extreme difficulty of conducting fruitful genetic or multicultural or interspecies behavioral studies, and that’s demonstrate mathematically that a behavior will increase Differential Reproductive Success as against alternative variants of the behavior. That isn’t easy to do—often the alternative behaviors are too varied to control for; often the actual effect on DRS requires too many unchecked assumptions on the part of the researcher; etc. But this is also rarely done anyway. And it is not always very reliable, not only because of those confounding problems, but also because it only confirms that a behavior could have been genetically evolved by selection, not that it did. If a behavior arose from cultural selection, it would have the same effect on DRS, without having been genetically coded at all.
The most obvious example of that is modern science: we were not biologically selected to invent vaccines or grow crops without the sun (as we now can do) or colonize outer space (and thus survive an extinction impact event). Yet these things have had, will have, or can have, a positive effect on the DRS of the human populations with access to them. In fact, it will be the exact same effect as if these behaviors had been genetically selected for. But how much of human behavior is like this? Mating behavior, for instance, is highly cultural. In fact, most of what we think of as “marriage” is actually a product of the radically altered conditions of civilization, being a product of the invention of land ownership (and other property, such as herd possession), a very recent change in our genetic history. We thus find radically wide variations in practice—from the polyandry of Nepal and some areas of rural China (and the wife sharing known among various tribes across the world), to the monogamy of the Greco-Romans (which we inherited), to the polygyny of the Israelites and other cultures. Never mind the phenomena of homosexuality and bisexuality, which defy straightforward EvoPsych narratives of what sex evolved to be for. And yet EvoPsych depends on a lot of unproven assumptions about, for example, the biological evolution of sex-related behavior. Reality is likely to be more complicated. We can already observe that it is.
When we consider all of this, claiming the Evo side of EvoPsych is as reliable as the Psych side sounds farcical at best. It surely cannot possibly have a reliability as good as the 1 in 3 psychology has. I therefore have to conclude the percentage of published EvoPsych results that are actually false or unproven must exceed 90%. Probably by a lot.
Third, Many Qualified Experts Concur
Okay. Let’s survey. I will here only quote actual scientists (of evolution, anthropology, or psychology).
- Jerry Coyne
Jerry Coyne himself (ironically as you’ll soon see) wrote a paper about “The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology,” called “Of Vice and Men,” for the New Republic in 2000. His opening line is, “In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics,” and then he declares, “The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is ‘evolutionary psychology’, or the science formerly known as sociobiology.” That’s a damning assessment.
Coyne is an evolutionary biologist. His conclusions include:
- “Evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection.”
- “Evolutionary psychologists routinely confuse theory and speculation.”
- Of most of its claims: “Plausible? Maybe. Scientifically testable? Absolutely not.”
- “Evolutionary psychology functions very much like an ideology” and is used to support ideologies.
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“So much of evolutionary psychology…is utterly lacking in sound scientific grounding.”
- Evolutionary psychologists often “use rhetorical tricks that mislead the general reader about their arguments.”
- EvoPsych consists of too many “just-so” stories that “do not qualify as science” and “do not deserve the assent, or even the respect, of the public.”
- It too often mistakes tautologies for empirical insights.
- It too often ignores evidence that contradicts its claims.
- It too often ignores the role of culture and the fact that cultural evolution can produce identical results.
- And, above all, evolutionary psychologists ignore the fact that “Human civilization…arose in only the last one-tenth of one percent of the interval since we branched off from our primate ancestors” and therefore “current observations…bear little relation to forces acting in our ancestors,” yet evolutionary psychologists will “proceed to argue for [a] direct-selection hypothesis by using statistics from modern Western societies.”
- And occasionally, they even grossly misrepresent the evidence.
His prize example: the pseudoscientific monograph A Natural History of Rape. That is a prime example of EvoPsych as pseudoscience. It’s failure to adhere to any credible methodology has been thoroughly documented by dozens of experts.
But apart from that particular example, Coyne notes in general the especially pernicious problem of the inability to rule out accident as the cause of an observed behavior: refusing to pass this basic and necessary falsification test (largely because of the practical inability to take the test) is what nullifies most conclusions in EvoPsych. The persistence of EvoPsych in publishing despite this is what makes the bulk of it a pseudoscience.
And even “byproduct” theories are hard to verify. Though all behavior is a “byproduct” of evolution, that does not mean—again as Coyne himself points out—that any guess you may have of how that byproduct was generated (what the actual selected attributes underlying it are) is scientifically correct. Guessing is not science. Publishing guesses and calling them science is pseudoscience. Unless, of course, all you are doing is proposing a hypothesis for future study, and not proposing a conclusion that you have determined to be even likely the case. But too much in EvoPsych slips from one to the other without warrant. And that’s what makes it largely a pseudoscience.
Coyne now says in the fifteen years since that the field has gotten better. Though he gives no examples of this. Instead he just gives another list of untested speculations. And ironically, he counts the “falsification” of the homosexual kin selection theory as an example of good science, when it is in fact a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience in EvoPsych (as I noted above). Indeed, it exhibits several of the same failures that Coyne himself criticized in the field generally. He has evidently forgotten his own arguments—or isn’t reading the research papers he is now endorsing.
The paper that Coyne thinks falsified the hypothesis of auxiliary selection effects causing homosexuality ignored evidence to the contrary (the thesis is confirmed in cultures closer to our ancestral structures) and studied the wrong society (modern Western homophobic civilization), two things Coyne himself warned made work in EvoPsych pseudoscientific. The authors declared their conclusion’s certainty out of all proportion to the evidence in light of these facts, even as they concede these facts. Though, indeed, they didn’t even consider how their observations would differ in the paleolithic’s decidedly non-Western and non-modern condition of extended family co-location in an economy where, for example, physical combatants defending a family are far more valuable than coined money that didn’t even exist. Worse, other EvoPsych proponents, not just Coyne himself but even actual EvoPsyc researchers under peer review (Confer 2010, discussed below), cite this as “falsifying” the thesis, even though it was wholly incapable of doing so (nor could others, which have committed exactly the same errors). This is what we mean by pseudoscience.
Coyne should heed his own advice from 2011:
Every time I write a piece…that’s critical of evolutionary psychology, I get emails from its practitioners, chewing me out for being so hard on their field. And my response is always the same: I’ll stop being so hard on your field when you guys start being more critical yourselves. If you policed your own discipline better, I wouldn’t have to.
Amen.
Even when Coyne tried to defend EvoPsych with the aid of Steven Pinker and asked Pinker what EvoPsych has accomplished of note, Pinker gave him two paragraphs of response that never answered the question. Not even with a single example. That doesn’t bode well.
- Richard Lewontin
Another renowned critic of EvoPsych is the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin. In The Spandrels of San Marco Revisited: An Interview with Richard C. Lewontin (2015), evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson queries him about his misgivings, and they include a lot of the same ones, and he hasn’t changed his mind about this even after forty years of observing the field (from when it was originally called sociobiology).
Lewontin decries “a tendency to try to find, in every instance, some selective advantage for things,” and thus developing the cursed “just so” stories that typify EvoPsych. Because, in fact, “there are a whole variety of forces that give rise to observed traits and they are not all directly selected for,” whereas EvoPsych is always trying to be overly simplistic and reductive. But biological, psychological, cultural, and environmental reality doesn’t work that way. They are far too complex, and their interaction far more complex still. Consequently he thinks EvoPsych is too arrogant. “We do not have any hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change,” and we need to admit that in most cases we just can’t know what happened. As he says (emphasis mine):
As either a philosopher or biologist, [we ought to] ask in a particular case what is the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a particular story is true or not true. Most of the time we’re going to have to say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we haven’t the foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution.
And yet, EvoPsych refuses to admit this simple truth, and has become instead “a branch of academic life that consists entirely, as far as I can see, of making up what would seem to be plausible stories.” And as scientists, “I would say that’s not what we are in business to do.”
Amen again.
Lewontin also catches them in their tautological thinking with an example:
For example … [in E.O. Wilson’s seminal book on sociobiology] it is written that aggression is a part of human nature. It says that in the book. It lists features of human nature and aggression is one of them. So then I have said to Ed and others of his school, what do you do about people who have spent almost their entire lives in jail because they refuse to be conscripted into the army? What do you think the answer is? That is their form of aggression.
In other words, aggression is natural to humans, because every conceivable behavior is aggression. Even non-aggression is aggression. Vacuous, unfalsifiable tautologies are practically definitive of pseudoscience. As Lewontin says, “If everything can be said to be a form of aggression, even the refusal to be physically aggressive, what kind of science is that?” Indeed.
- P.Z. Myers
Myers is an evolutionary biologist who has gone rounds over this with Steven Pinker, an EvoPsych advocate. He summarizes the issues that Pinker keeps avoiding and never addresses in Tackling Pinker’s Defense of Evolutionary Psychology. It’s the follow up to Coyne’s last piece cited above, in which Pinker wouldn’t even answer Coyne’s question. Myers summarizes his criticisms as follows, and indeed Pinker studiously avoids ever addressing them:
Myers objects to “the habit of evolutionary psychologists of taking every property of human behavior, assuming that it is the result of selection, building scenarios for their evolution, and then testing them poorly.” That’s a pretty good summary of the problem. But to see why, consider his elaboration:
The repertoire of human behavior is so complex and rich, and relatively recently evolved, that to argue that every behavior is the product of specific selection imposes an untenable genetic load. The bulk of the genetic foundation of our psychology (and I agree that there must be one!) must be byproducts and accidents. The null hypothesis of evolutionary psychology should be that a behavior is non-adaptive, yet for some reason all I ever see is adaptive hypotheses.
First, EvoPsych imagines such a vast repertoire of evolved stimulus-response psychological mechanisms as to require a vast genetic apparatus that simply isn’t found in the human genome. Once you subtract what we share with Chimpanzees, for example, and then subtract what remains to govern human-specific non-neural organ development and mangement, very little remains. This entails that human psychology must be built out of a much smaller series of more generic substrate mechanisms than evolutionary psychology research comes anywhere near to allowing. This is one reason that its refusal to look for the genetic basis for anything is a problem: had they done that, they might have noticed the problem Myers is calling attention to. How they imagine the evolution of the brain is physically impossible. This does not mean none of the actual biology of human psychology evolved. What it means is that most of the claims about that made by EvoPsych cannot be true. Their claims are simply too numerous, too complex, to have any plausible connection to human genetics. I can’t evaluate that claim myself. But it seems pretty clearly correct. And Pinker makes no reply. Nor has any EvoPsych proponent I know.
Second, and more to my area of understanding as a historian and philosopher of science, Myers is right about method: EvoPsych needs to test the non-adaptive hypothesis for any claim first. It should not be assuming every human behavior is a product of biological adaptation. That’s pseudoscience. Too many of our behaviors are products of culture (as cross-cultural and historical studies show), too many are simply intellectual innovations that could in no way have been adaptively predicted by biological evolution. And even when biological, too many are just random accidents, byproducts of other adaptive functions, and genetic drift. EvoPsych almost never does anything to rule out these alternative explanations of its observations. And that’s really what makes it pseudoscientific. Because a real science would not make knowledge claims about the causes of an observation without ruling out other known causes of observations in the same domain (human behaviors).
Myers then criticizes EvoPsych for making other kinds of meaningless, unempirical claims, such as that there are “modules” in the brain (or genome?) governing every specific behavior it makes claims about. But it never does anything to discover that they exist. “Evolutionary psychologists don’t do neurobiology, and they don’t do genetic dissections, and they don’t do molecular genetics, so why do they insist on modularity?” They won’t do any of the tests needed to verify that such things exist. So how can they claim they exist? This is a problem of the first order. It’s one of the reasons EvoPsych remains almost always speculation, not fact. Yet EvoPsych authors treat speculations as probable, and sometimes even certain fact, all the time (the closing defense paper I discuss does so repeatedly). That’s pseudoscience. That’s just like pretending we “know” the Ekpyrotic Big Bang theory is true, simply because we can make it fit the data. Never mind the need to find evidence that the other required universe that bumped into ours exists.
Myers points out that of course the brain evolved. But we know too little about the early environment we evolved into—not nothing about it, too little about it—to sustain most of EvoPsych’s certitude about how things worked and evolved then or how people behaved then. Claiming to know the unknowable is pseudoscience. The people today, especially “Western college grads” (almost the only subjects ever studied), but even especially Westerners of any kind, and even most people on earth, do not live at all as, or interact at all with the same environment as, our evolutionary ancestors. Thus studying human behaviors in these alien cultures is all but useless. The genes we evolved to have, are interacting now with radically different environments than they original evolved to interact with. That renders most EvoPsych conclusions all but worthless. They are studying the wrong subjects, in the wrong environment. To then say they are studying what they claim to be but aren’t, is pseudoscience.
- Jonathan Marks
In “Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither” (2015), biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks adds more to the critique. For one, most other scientists of human nature observe that human beings are remarkably adaptable, not remarkably adapted. Yet EvoPsych effectively denies the observed reality (that we have adapted in fact to be highly adaptable, far more than we have adapted to any particular environment or condition), and insists on the contrary (that we have been molded to a certain bygone environment, and that this explains everything about us). Somewhere in between a sensible EvoPsych thesis can be found (there being some mixture of both facts), but you won’t find this in published EvoPsych research, which is only concerned with finding fixed human adaptations, rather than with explaining, and exploring the scope of, how we are so vastly more cognitively adaptable than any other animal.
Even more serious is the straight up pseudoscience that EvoPsych churns out, ignoring cultural realities, and resorting to hasty generalizations based on selectively biased data, a common characteristic of pseudoscience:
My personal favorite is the claim that 37 different cultures attest to the divergent features that men and women like in mates, which can now be safely ascribed to nature—until you control for gendered economic inequality, at which point the apparent divergence disappears.[Eagly & Wood 1999] It wasn’t nature at all; it was history and sloppy scientific reasoning. My second personal favorite is the presumptively evolved disposition for men to be attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.67, the same as that of the stereotypical 36-24-36 Hollywood starlet. Again, naively cross-culturally supported, until you try to control for familiarity with Hollywood. Then it breaks down quickly.[Yu & Shepard 1998] Again, history and sloppy scientific reasoning; what passes for cross-cultural generalization in evolutionary psychology tends to appall scholars actually familiar with cross-cultural analyses.[Fuentes 2012]
Amen.
Marks also observes that (emphasis mine):
Our knowledge of human evolution tells us that (1) non-adaptive or even maladaptive traits can evolve under appropriate demographic conditions (notably, small population size); (2) those were precisely the conditions under which the great bulk of human evolution occurred; and (3) origin and modern use do not map well onto one another, for either biological or cultural traits. Consequently, there is not the slightest reason to think that any specific feature has to have an adaptive explanation, much less that we have a reliable method for ascertaining it.
As I already noted. Hence with good reason Marks concludes:
[T]he methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science. For a notable example, it is apparently a revelation to evolutionary psychology that one cannot readily generalize about the human condition from a sample of humans that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Perhaps this was news in psychology—creationist, evolutionary, or otherwise—but, sad to say, everybody else who works with cultural diversity knew that a really long time ago.
He’s simply not wrong about that. Yet this fatal problem is widely ignored in EvoPsych.
- J.J. Bolhuis et al.
These points have been supported by even teams of analysts. In J.J. Bolhuis et al., “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology.” PLoS Biol 9.7 (2011), we find several conclusions well documented to the detriment of even fundamental EvoPsych premises:
(1) The evidence actually suggests human evolution may operate at a faster pace than EvoPsych requires, such that its assumption of ancient environments being wholly determinative of present biology is false. Though this only complicates the problem, since that means some of our traits evolved in that ancient period (which ones?) while others evolved in adaptation to civilization (which ones?), while the latter poses the further problem that civilization has ramped up the rapidity of its own change: the civilization environment of humans 4,000-1,000 years ago was notably different than 1,000-200 years ago which was in turn notably different than 200-50 years ago which was in turn notably different than 50-20 years ago which is in turn notably different than 20 years ago to the present (when even goat herders in Afghanistan have cellphones and use electronic currencies). How does one determine what evolved? And when? For what environment? There is hardly any real methodology for that.
(2) “Neuroscientists have been aware since the 1980s that the human brain has too much architectural complexity for it to be plausible that genes specify its wiring in detail,” essentially Myers’s point. “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,” and rightly so, because it is not at all tenable—it is in fact a pseudoscientific assumption. And “Recent trends in developmental psychology and neuroscience have instead stressed the malleability of the human brain, emphasizing how experience tunes and regulates synaptic connectivity, neural circuitry and gene expression in the brain, leading to remarkable plasticity in the brain’s structural and functional organization,” thus casting into extreme doubt most EvoPsych claims for a remarkably unchanging neural hardwiring lasting tens of thousands of years, in the face of evidence of the contrary fact of extreme adaptibility rather than adaptedness. Essentially Marks’s point.
(3) “The view that a universal genetic programme underpins human cognition is also not fully consistent with current genetic evidence.” In fact, “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,” and yet, “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 allowable thresholds for large-scale genomic diversity,” and the evidence abundantly supports that very conclusion: we have evolved into cognitive generalists, not the kaleidescopically cognitive specialists all EvoPsych research portrays us as.
(4) “Human behavioral genetics has also identified genetic variation underlying an extensive list of cognitive and behavioural characteristics,” thus challenging any claim that certain traits were adaptively selected for—when clearly, after tens of thousands of years, the variance was clearly adaptively selected for. That’s why it remains robust across all populations. Notably, for example, psychological traits are far more similar between the sexes, than basic physical characteristics like height and innate muscle development, greatly undermining a key analogy in EvoPsych reasoning—in fact, as everyone agrees, women vary far more among each other in psychological attributes than they do from men, and vice versa, which indicates humans have been evolving toward cognitive parity between the sexes, rather than adaptive differentiation, undermining another common assumption in EvoPsych research.
(5) “The thesis of massive modularity is not supported by the neuroscientific evidence,” in fact “there is no evidence for modularity in central systems such as those involved in learning and memory.” So much for Pinker’s magical modules. When your science ignores the fact that the other sciences are contradicting the foundational assumptions of your science, your science might be a pseudoscience. In fact, “comparative psychology presents an unassailable case for the existence of domain-general mechanisms.” (Remember that point. It will become relevant later.)
(6) “Evolutionary psychologists rarely examine whether their hypotheses regarding evolved psychological mechanisms are supported by what is known about how the brain works.” Once again. When your science is ignoring the findings of other sciences fundamentally relevant to your science, your science might be a pseudoscience.
(7) EvoPsych needs to start doing experiments in social learning, to see what can and can’t be unlearned by a change in culture and cognition, so as to isolate what actually is biological, and what is actually instead just picked up from one’s parents, peers, and culture, and from their own exploration of their environment (trial & error learning; social learning from observing the cause-effect experiences of others; etc.).
(8) And most fundamentally again (emphasis mine):
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 the psychological mechanisms have been upheld. For example, the numerous studies supporting the hypothesis that human beings are predisposed to detect cheaters in social situations are consistent with several evolutionary explanations. While the original researchers reasoned that cheater detection has resulted from a selective history of reciprocal altruism, alternative evolutionary explanations, for instance that a history of cultural group selection has selected for this trait, and non-evolutionary explanations, are also plausible.
In other words, by failing to rule out plausible alternative explanations for all of its results, EvoPsych has actually failed to prove anything at all. That’s pretty pseudoscientific if you ask me.
These researchers also recommend that EvoPsych get off its butt and start doing population genetics, as that’s the only way it can start ruling out alternative explanations and narrowing possibilities of biological basis. They suggest other methods be adopted from better-established sciences, like social learning experimentation, and ecology. And they point out that massive cross-cultural studies are essential to EvoPsych, just as they are in ecology (which studies the analog of diverse populations and environments to look for universal ecological laws), because only then can EvoPsych start to talk informedly about “what percentage of the variance in [human] behaviour is explained by local ecology and what percentage is better predicted by cultural history.” In other words, that’s the only way to rule out cultural causes, which in turn is the only way to rule in biological causes. It is, in other words, very nearly the only logically valid way to do EvoPsych. Yet it is almost never what EvoPsych does.
That’s enough for now. I could add the voices of psychologists Christopher Ryan and Brad Peters, psychologists Russell Gray, Megan Heaney & Scott Fairhall, neuropsychologists Jaak and Jules Panksepp, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, anthropologists J.B. Cohen & H.R. Bernard, medical scientist Ben Goldacre, philosopher of mind David Buller, and philosophers of science Robert Richardson and Jonathan Michael Kaplan … or if you want even more, Wikipedia has a whole article for you. As does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That’s a lot of experts pointing out serious and fatal flaws in what EvoPsych is doing. None of which EvoPsych experts have ever presented an adequate response to. And getting all in a huff about that is unproductive. You need to fix EvoPsych. It’s that simple. Or else these criticisms will remain unanswered, and EvoPsych will remain 90% pseudoscience.
I will at this point reiterate my warning: EvoPsych defenders will predictably ignore everything I’ve actually said, quote mine me as if I said something else, rebut what I didn’t say, and claim to have rebutted what I did say. Do please notice when they do that. Because it confirms my thesis.
Fourth, Defenses of EvoPsych Remain Inadequate
No one has adequately answered these criticisms. EvoPsych defenders typically ignore what their critics are actually saying, and rebut something they didn’t say, and then pretend to have rebutted what was originally said. Which is a big red flag for pseudoscience. The best defense they have is that “not all EvoPsych is pseudoscience,” which is just repeating what all of its critics have already said: they agree with that. That is not rebutting the criticism: that a lot of it still looks like pseudoscience (or at best really bad philosophy). Or its defenders will admit EvoPsych is speculative. But critics don’t have a problem with responsibly speculative hypothesis proposals. They are criticizing the ubiquity of irresponsible speculations (those that have inadequate grounding in the data to even warrant publication, or pose no evident means of falsification) and the repeated treating of speculations as if they were conclusions (EvoPsych proponents, and especially their fans, do this so frequently as to be wholly irresponsible, even if this mostly occurs outside the controls of peer review—though as we shall see, it occurs even there). So admitting that most EvoPsych is speculation is again not rebutting what its critics are saying.
Possibly the best (and most official) attempt to defend EvoPsych from its endless (and expert) critics is Jaime Confer et al.’s “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65.2 (February-March 2010), pp. 110-26. It notes some examples of successes in EvoPsych. For instance:
Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment.
Assuming this was indeed established cross-culturally enough to be a confirmed universal (I didn’t check), then this would indeed be evidence for evolved perception-fear circuits in the brain in response to those stimuli. The difference in intensity and frequency of fears for those stimuli vs. others that relate to things even more dangerous now supports a biological origin. And the DRS mathematics showing the benefit of such a selection process would likely be strong. Likewise, other autonomic examples like this include our innate ability to temporarily suppress hunger when faced with a fearsome stimulus.
But none of that involves complex behavior. It’s merely a simple stimulus-response cascade. None of it is cognitive. Fearing snakes, for example, is innate and near-enough universal; but beliefs about snakes vary; and no complex cognitive understanding of cultural or social relationships is required to have a fear response to a direct stimulus. This is extraordinarily different from having evolved the ability to think of, plan, and execute a rape, for example, fully conscious of what you are doing. Or knowing the difference between what a mate is and what a friend or sibling is and only feeling jealousy when the one has sex with someone else and not the other. That’s a lot of complex things to understand, before the emotion even makes sense, much less can be triggered. Likewise other complex behaviors such as mate selection, gender etiquette, or monogamy preference. Remember the distinction earlier between agency overdetection, an autonomic phenomenon, and having a religion. Pointing out successes in the autonomic realm in no way endorses success in the cognitive realm. To think that it does would be pseudoscientific. We need comparable examples of successes in the cognitive realm. This paper cites none. Not even one.
The paper then tries to answer critics under eight headings. None actually respond to what critics are saying.
- (1) Using Improper Tests
This paper says “evolutionary psychologists sometimes use methods not typically used by psychologists, such as comparative analyses across species, ethnographic records, archeological records, paleontological data, and life-history data,” but in fact it is the rarity with which these forms of evidence are actually consulted in the publication record that is the problem with EvoPsych. If consulting such evidence were mandated by peer review within the field, for any claim that cannot be established without passing falsification tests against such data (e.g. “Is the behavior you are studying present across the entire ethnographic record, or are you only studying weirdos?”), then a major channel of pseudoscience could be avoided. But that is not happening. And that is precisely the problem.
This is illustrated when Confer et al. claim the homosexual kin selection hypothesis “has been refuted” (p. 114) by studies not even logically capable of doing that (as demonstrated above, under my discussion of Coyne). They don’t even get the point: they are here ignoring the very thing critics are saying, that by ignoring the enormous environmental changes human societies have undergone, changes directly relevant to the question, and by ignoring the crucial role of culture in determining the channeling of behavior, they cannot be producing valid results with studies like these. Yet they cite invalid results as conclusive. That is pseudoscientific.
More broadly, they admit “just so” stories are not science, but they don’t respond to the criticism that most published EvoPsych consists of precisely those. Yes, we agree it’s possible to have strong, falsifiable, and even falsification-passing results in EvoPsych. We are not concerned with what’s possible. We are concerned with what is actually passing for results in Evo-Psych—and it isn’t that. Rarely are proper falsification tests engaged upon any claim in the peer reviewed EvoPsych literature (even the studies they cite on the homosexuality kin-selection question illustrate this). That’s the problem. And Confer et al. do not even acknowledge this as being the problem, much less offer any rebuttal to it. They are therefore not responding to what their critics are actually saying.
- (2) Not Accounting for Generalization of Function
The second general criticism they address is the point that most human behavior is the complex product of simpler and more generalized reasoning skills, and not actually biologically innate. The absurdity of Confer et al.’s response is that they think this is ridiculous. When in fact it should be obvious. Rejecting obvious facts in pursuit of a dogmatic need to defend one’s field is indicative of pseudoscience. Most human behavior is a product of an array of generalized reasoning skills (problem solving, symbolic reasoning, social reasoning, planning, mind-reading, etc.). This is in fact what characterizes human evolution generally: unlike other animals, we are generalists. Our teeth and our hands reflect this trend towards generalization of function. Our brains have obviously trended the same. That’s why we can play violins, conduct social life on an ‘internet’, speak dozens of languages, and land men on the moon.
Our extraordinary innovativeness and adaptability would be impossible if our behavior was not primarily driven by generalized functions of thought and problem solving. This is also why humans respond so profoundly to education, self-reflection, and psychological therapy. We have an extraordinary ability to alter and command our behaviors, beliefs, desires, and attitudes. It is not universal, some things are too inborn to wholly control (although sometimes even those we can work around with compensating behaviors, running software patches on our broken hardware: the protocols of scientific method, for example, are essentially just that). But most of our behavior is obviously the product of generalized cognitive functions (as the entirety of modern civilization itself attests). The evidence that this is the case is vast and beyond dispute. So to deny it is ridiculous.
They of course present no evidence supporting their denial. They deliver armchair arguments instead, of the sort Aquinas might have attempted to prove the earth is the center of the universe. Critics of course aren’t denying that some specific behavior modules might exist. What they are saying is that you can’t ignore the role of generalized functions either. The Confer team embarrassingly straw mans the argument as being a claim to some sort of “universal rationality,” which in fact no critic has ever claimed or would ever believe. So their refutations of it are wholly irrelevant to what their critics are actually saying. We are saying, rather, that there is obviously in our brain a collection of highly generic desires modulated by a system of highly generic problem solving tools.
The Confer team doesn’t respond to this (our actual) criticism. Nor do they recognize that the critics are not claiming they can prove that a behavior derives from some interplay of generic systems. To the contrary, these critics are saying that evolutionary psychologists cannot prove a behavior does not. Or at least, not without a far more extraordinary collection of evidence than EvoPsych ever seems able to gather. In fact we almost never have the means to tease apart the effects of generic and specific behavioral and reasoning systems in the brain. And that means we have to just accept that most of what EvoPsych wants to know, we just can’t know. Just as Lewontin pointed out.
They hang all their hopes on one single example (even though you can’t prove a generalization with one example; and not knowing how logic works is another indicator of pseudoscientific thinking): “The predictability and rapidity of men’s jealousy in response to cues of threats to paternity points to a specialized psychological circuit rather than a response caused by deliberative domain-general rational thought” (p. 115). Here they are wrong both on the facts and their inference model. The “predictability” is not there. Too many men don’t react this way at all; many men react in quite the reverse way; and how men react to jealousy is extremely varied by culture, experience, and upbringing. They have taken a claim that they didn’t test in any adequately cross-cultural way, and an effect size that is actually too small to warrant their conclusion (the outlier space is simply too large), and then claim it is a scientific fact. That is pseudoscience.
It’s particularly embarrassing because the emotion of jealousy is not even specific to sexual (much less, as they aver, “paternity”) interests. Men (and women) express jealousy over the distribution of affection (and even material resources) among siblings, parents, friends, and coworkers. So the EvoPsych model doesn’t even explain the actual activation of the emotion in practice. In fact, intensity of jealousy-response tends to correspond to previously honed and considered worldview assumptions, and thus appears to be a cognitive product of reasoning: men are taught to be jealous, depending on how much their culture tells them they need to save face with their peers, how much it tells them women are their property, how much it tells them they need to secure a woman’s sole affection and attention (and labor). This is why jealousy responses vary so much across cultures and subcultures, and so readily change with reflection and worldview shift (more on that later).
They think citing a bunch of studies that find sex differences in jealousy-response in similar modern cultures (yet never studying any cultures that are relevantly different on this dimension) proves their biological hypothesis. And they cite this as an example of EvoPsych withstanding verification. But that is pseudoscientific thinking. Publishing a thousand papers that are incapable of verifying your hypothesis cannot verify your hypothesis.
Whereas, in fact, properly conducted studies have refuted their hypothesis. For example, Christopher Carpenter, in “Meta-Analyses of Sex Differences in Responses to Sexual Versus Emotional Infidelity: Men and Women Are More Similar than Different,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 36.1 (March 2012), found that when you ask the right questions (and not questions rigged to get the results the researcher expects), “both sexes tended to be more upset by emotional than sexual infidelity when forced to choose which type of infidelity was more distressing” and “both sexes indicated that sexual infidelity was more distressing than emotional when asked to rate their level of distress separately for each using continuous measures.” So much for the claim of sex differences in jealousy reaction. When you are claiming as fact what has been scientifically refuted, you are doing pseudoscience.
Similarly, Ralph B. Hupka and Adam L. Bank, in “Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution or Social Construction?” Cross-Cultural Research 30.1 (February 1996), also tested the EvoPsych claim that “sex differences in the dislike of sexual or emotional infidelity supported the socio-biological hypothesis of men (i.e., most men) having evolved sexual jealousy, whereas women (i.e., most women) evolved emotional jealousy.” They did not find that that was the case. To the contrary, “over 50% of the men and women reported greater upset over imagined emotional infidelity.” That’s a problem. They also found that why people varied in their responses corresponded to socially constructed assumptions about gender—which cannot have biologically evolved (we have to learn that).
Similarly, Lars Penke and Jens Asendorpf, in “Evidence for Conditional Sex Differences in Emotional but Not in Sexual Jealousy at the Automatic Level of Cognitive Processing,” European Journal of Personality 22.1 (1 February 2008) found “no evidence for a sex difference in jealousy,” despite testing a sample of 284 subjects. Even what small differences some of their tests found were, like most psychological variances between men and women (a fact EvoPsych consistently ignores), not even at ten percentiles: 77% of women reported being more concerned about emotional than sexual infidelity; and 63% of men said the same. How can a behavior that exists in only a third of men (the “excess” interest in sexual fidelity among men the Confer team insists is fact) have been a biological adaptation? Wouldn’t what manifests in the majority of men be more indicative of our evolution? (If this is a result of evolution at all; EvoPsych, remember, never actually shows that it is.) Penke and Asendorpf’s study also found that even this sex difference decreased among the high-school educated: respondents who completed school were less preoccupied with sexual infidelity than drop-outs. Not only did that decrease the difference between men and women, but both men and women became less preoccupied with sexual infidelity in result of finishing high school. As that difference in achievement strongly tracks social class, and education transmits culture, this is evidence for sex differences in jealousy being a product of culture.
Even Brad Sagarin et al., in “Sex Differences in Jealousy: A Meta-Analytic Examination,” Evolution & Human Behavior 33.6 (November 2012), who surveyed the entire body of research, including 40 papers in all, though essentially useless (since so many use invalid methods, as just noted, it doesn’t matter how many of them there are), found some troubling things even in the body of work that found sex differences in jealousy:
- “Studies using nonrandom samples (typically student samples) produced significantly larger effects than studies using random samples. This is a troubling finding for the theory of evolved sex differences in jealousy, as it shows that the studies with the greatest generalizability (those with random selection) yielded smaller effects.”
- The reproducible effect across all studies was actually small (barely a ten percentile difference between male and female responses; or a confidence interval inclusive of same). It is hard to explain how such a small difference can be a product of the EvoPsych selection hypothesis.
- And this was even when you loosen the p-value to 0.09 (almost double the already problematically loose standard of 0.05). So the effect is also not very well established to high standards of certainty, even despite so many hundreds of subjects having been tested.
- Even the one group that they could find an effect at p = 0.03 was small and wildly variant: studies of responses to actual infidelity. Of those, “the largest study—and the only study with a random sample—showed a very small, nonsignificant effect” (a variance of only a few percentiles).
- The effect size varied significantly with group tested (students differed from nonstudents, young from old, educated from uneducated, people tested in the 90s from people tested now). That does not look like biology. Though Sagarin presents “just-so” biological explanations of it (illustrating the rampant trend toward just that kind of pseudoscience in this field).
- The studies overall did not actually demonstrate a sex difference in emotions of “anger; hurt; disgust; or, for that matter, distress or upset” but in fact only jealousy alone. Consequently, they conclude “the present results support the perspective that jealousy is a unique, functional emotion that is not isomorphic with other negative emotions.” What evidently does not occur to them is that jealousy minus “anger; hurt; disgust; distress; and upset” is not called jealousy. It’s called envy. They have been measuring the wrong thing.
- Moreover, the EvoPsych hypothesis is refuted by this revelation. The EvoPsych hypothesis requires jealousy to motivate men to get angry/hurt/disgusted/distressed/upset so as to initiate “paternity control” defensive actions. But if most of these studies have not even been testing that, but merely jealousy independent of precisely those emotions, then it has not been supporting the EvoPsych hypothesis at all.
I would add another point as well. Though they claim the effect still persists “cross-culturally,” they do not identify which cultures were compared. Often EvoPsych studies will compare, for example, American and Norwegian cultures, and claim this is an adequate test: two modern Western liberal high-tech societies? I doubt that. What we want to know is if the effect holds up in cultures we should expect it might not, e.g. polyandrous societies, and societies with open wife sharing. No one has ever even realized they should be asking that question. Much less answered it. And yet that’s the only cross-cultural test that can constitute a real test of the persistence claim.
When we add all that up, the Confer paper’s pride in this being a well-confirmed result in EvoPsych actually exposes the pseudoscientific nature of the field as a whole.
- (3) Ruling Out Culture (Learning & Socialization)
EvoPsych proponents usually do admit that “it offers a truly interactionist framework” and that (at least most) “evolutionary psychologists fully accept the potential importance of environmental influences” (pp. 116, 117). But no one has told this to most EvoPsych researchers who don’t take into account how this interaction can produce different outcomes as the environment changes and thus the interaction changes, as with the homosexuality kin selection argument. EvoPsych arguments almost always assume genetic determinism, and do not recognize cultural variability. They deny this (see below), but this denial is not born out in practice when one surveys their published research. And it’s what EvoPsych actually does that critics are objecting to; not what EvoPsych claims to be doing.
Nor do many evolutionary psychologists take into account the complexity of this socialization interaction. As with the analogy of agency overdetection and scripture-based monotheism: most of the latter is socialized, not genetic; the genetic underpinnings are far more generic and don’t actually have anything directly to do with religion, much less any specific set of religious ideas. This at least I think most EvoPsych literature agrees with. But not all examples follow this correct distinction. So saying they all do is not answering the critics, who are saying EvoPsych is not adequately taking this into account. This article claims they do, but provides no examples of it. And the examples one could randomly pick do not usually corroborate it, either. So this is not answering the critics. If EvoPsych studies mostly don’t even check for cultural causation as the alternative hypothesis or contributing cause, they aren’t doing science. Unless they admit that when they fail to do this, they have not produced any verifiable conclusions, until that alternative is finally properly tested and teased out. But EvoPsych publications tend to be overly triumphal, and less like cosmology papers, which are explicit in declaring that they have not proven anything (other than what to look for in future).
Nor is the fact that genes and environment interact helpful to the point. Critics agree that that must be the case. Everyone is an interactionist. What they disagree with is that we have the means to separate genes and environment in any way that can produce reliable knowledge in all but the fewest of cases, yet EvoPsych papers keep being published that claim to have done the impossible, yet failed to do so by any logically valid means. So on this point again, no answer is being given to the actual criticism. Even this paper only speaks of what’s theoretically possible. They never address the actual EvoPsych literature and whether it accomplishes any of the things thus claimed.
Worse, this paper, in attempting to defend EvoPsych, actually cites the pseudoscientific “gendered toys” papers as if these were an example of good science, when in fact they are precisely the kind of pseudoscience critics are attacking as inane.
In Gerianne Alexander & Melissa Hines, “Sex Differences in Response to Children’s Toys in Nonhuman Primates,” Evolution & Human Behavior 23.6 (1 November 2002) and Janice Hassett et al., “Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy Preferences Parallel Those of Children,” Hormones & Behavior 54.3 (August 2008), they claimed even monkeys showed the same sex difference in toy choice as 21st century American children: girls play with Dolls, Cooking Pots, and Teddy Bears, boys play with Trucks, Police Cars, and Balls. In the first study, more specifically: a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog (in the second study, wheeled toys and plush toys)—not one of which would be meaningful to a monkey, of any gender. Never mind that monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do, that trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in, that human boys play with dolls as often as girls (I never went anywhere without my G.I. Joe, whom I also dressed; today, kids play with Action Figures, as did I), and that the Teddy Bear was originally a boy’s toy. Culture is seriously confounding here, and the thesis illogical. It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience. (And why are we studying monkeys, our most distant primate ancestors, when we actually have sex-difference studies of tool use and play in our much closer cousins the Chimpanzees? Oh, right, because those results don’t support the sexist assumptions of these researches…though, of course, humans still aren’t Chimpanzees, either.)
Professor Letitia Meynell has surveyed many of the outlandish things in the first study (a draft of her detailed critique can be found here):
- “Because ‘object preference’ is defined [in the study] in terms of contact, if a monkey had violently attacked a toy it would count as an expression of preference.”
- “The observation time, just a few hours in all, is insufficient for the careful development and application of ethograms of the kind used by ethologists in the field.”
- “While [human] girls may express female behavior patterns associated with cooking utensils, a pot is not, in Alexander and Hines’s terms, ‘an opportunity for nurturance’ for a vervet monkey. Nor, indeed, do pots typically appear in the vervet’s natural environment and they could not have been a part of a behavioral pattern for a shared ancestor 25 million years ago” (nor in fact even 6,000 years ago).
- “The very idea of a gendered toy suggests a stimulus, the toy, that tends to prompt specific play behavior because the toy has recognizable features that are salient to the animal and the behavior in question. Pots cannot have such salience to a non-cooking animal.” In fact, “it is unlikely that books, cars, balls, dolls and soft toys do either” (even the dolls and soft toys used did not resemble infant monkeys in any fashion cognizable to a monkey).
- “There is little reason to think that the toys are salient to the vervets in any way that relevantly resembles the ways in which they are salient to human children, which is required if the study is to justify Alexander and Hines’s conclusion about human evolution.”
- The study found, perversely for its thesis, “females and males spent more time in contact with pots than dolls.”
- The study thus hedged that toys were female-preferred because they were pinkish in color, citing the equally pseudoscientific EvoPsych study falsely claiming evolved gendered color preferences that is even more embarrassingly bad science (that ignored cultural variation yet again).
- “It seems fairly clear that by their own lights, Alexander and Hines’s experiment lacks crucial controls for color preferences, which presumably renders their positive results irrelevant.” In any other science, that mistake would not pass peer review.
- “The assumption at the base of this account, that reddish-pink things are opportunities for nurturance because primate infant faces are pink, is problematic as not all primate infant faces are reddish-pink. Within our own species there are a wide variety of different facial colors and, by Alexander and Hines’s logic, one might expect a dominant female preference in the human population for various shades of brown,” a subtle dig at the inherent racism in their methodological assumptions (“Oh, right, we forgot humans used to all be black!”).
- The study admits that “because the males had greater contact time with the toys overall they may have had the same amount of contact time with feminine toys as the females did.” Oh really.
- “Even with this approach to data analysis, Alexander and Hines report that the males ‘had similar percent contact with “masculine” and “feminine” toys’, implying that they equally prefer masculine and feminine objects; only the female vervets showed preferences similar to their human cousins.”
- “We can see that some subjects revealed no object preferences (only 33 of 44 males and 30 of 44 females came in contact with the toys).” Seriously.
- “We cannot see if all the females revealed similar tendencies with, say, each female contacting the feminine objects, or if there was a wide variance in behaviors among females.” (This ignoring of the “variance with and the overlap between sexes of sex-typed traits” belies a common pseudoscientific assumption in EvoPsych.)
Her overall conclusion is correct:
The more closely one looks at the study and tries to understand the actual behaviors, stimuli, developmental pathways, and evolutionary mechanisms, the more difficult it becomes to make a coherent evolutionary story from Alexander and Hines’s data. Without a more detailed account of the actual behavior and the causation of that behavior it is difficult to see how a plausible evolutionary account can be found.
The researchers even use single anecdotes to make sweeping claims about sex differences (the behavior of a single subject, is assumed to indicate the tendencies of all members of that sex), which is quintessential pseudoscience. The second study, bizarrely, these researchers heralded as confirming their results, when in fact they contradicted them, finding that “male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences.” Notice that Hines & Alexander found the opposite: total variability in male monkey preferences and only selectiveness in female monkey preferences!
And the same issues abound in that study, too. Why would monkeys know what wheels are? Or care? If you look at the Chimpanzee studies, a possible hypothesis forms: male-female primate differences appear to reflect violence-based dominance play in small groups, a behavioral mechanism no longer typical in human populations; young male primates thus practice motions typical of inflicting harm; they actually don’t know or care what the motion is with. The Hassett team did absolutely nothing to control for this hypothesis. Their results thus failed to establish any conclusion. (If their methods can even be trusted at all. See a critique here.)
This is, overall, just terrible, terrible science. This is the phrenology Jerry Coyne was talking about. And yet this is what Confer et al. are citing as their best example of good EvoPsych.
I hardly need say more. This is not how you answer your critics. This is how you shoot your foot.
Confer et al. also, notably, cite a very old study, by B.S. Low, “Cross-Cultural Patterns in the Training of Children: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 103 (1989), as confirming the EvoPsych hypothesis that parents evolved to police their daughter’s sexuality. It does no such thing. This is another example of pseudoscientifically claiming something that was never proved, is an established scientific fact, and a “good” example (!) of EvoPsych. In this case, they cherry picked it I’m sure because it is one of the very rare instances of an EvoPsych study actually employing some attempt at a highly diverse cross-cultural comparative study.
Of this the Confer team says, “In a massive cross-cultural study, Low found support for the evolution-based daughter guarding hypothesis in a study of 93 cultures—girls across cultures are taught to be more sexually restrained than boys” (p. 118). That is false. The study cited does not say that. Low’s research found this disparity only in 78 of the 93 cultures studied, and almost all of them were polygynous and thus intrinsically male-dominant sexist societies in which women were culturally coded as the property of men (notably, polyandrous societies—the very ones that should have been examined for comparison—were included in the data examined but never discussed in respect to this variable). The report also only says that girls were “more intensely” reinforced on that variable than boys in those 78 cultures, not how much more (in other words, the actual effect size was not discussed).
Moreover, Low explicitly found that sex differences in child rearing varied significantly with the structural differences in the cultural system they had to navigate as adults. This actually disconfirms EvoPsych explanations, and rather verifies that people adapt to the cultural system they find themselves in, and develop the strategy that works within that system. This is not biology at play. Biology can at most underlie the more basic needs operating in decision making, such as the need to succeed within the system one finds oneself in. But those systems vary too much for humans to have evolved a specific strategy for doing so. To the contrary, even Low’s data (which actually ignored cultures not conforming to the thesis paradigm) shows that humans evolved a generic skill of adapting to and succeeding within novel social systems.
One of Low’s most relevant findings was that “the larger the size of the social group…the more [both sons and daughters] are taught to be obedient, sexually restrained, and submissive” (p. 316), and yet the ancient cultures in which our evolution occurred would have been on the bottom of the size scale. That means that as our environment changed to be more unlike the environment we evolved to thrive in, sexual restraint training increased, which does not suggest inculcating sexual restraint was an evolved trait. To the contrary, it looks like a culturally adaptive trait, resulting from an observed need to cope with a new environment that people weren’t evolved for.
Low’s own hypothesis (notably not the one the Confer team claimed, or even mentioned, even though it supersedes their hypothesis) is that all the traits examined were being modulated according to a single evolved motive, which is: the reduction of friction within the social group (p. 316). Accordingly, she hypothesized that which practices do that will vary according to the cultural system in place. Sexual restraint was just one dimension in friction management, and thus cannot be verified to be a biological urge in parents to control their daughter’s fertility. In fact, Low says, certain “societies ought to show stronger inculcation of daughters in sexual restraint and obedience than in other societies, because these increase a woman’s apparent value to prospective high-status husbands” (p. 312). In other words, only where women were coded as marketable property has controlling their sexuality become a concern; it therefore cannot have been a biologically evolved concern, as property is a late human invention. Moreover, Low’s observation means the difference causing the effect is cognitively observed, and effective at the level of conscious decisions (the decisions of mating men, and families anticipating those decisions in order to gain social advantage from it). Which means no biological background is needed for the phenomenon to develop. Culture can fully explain it. Thus its existence in no way supports a biological over a cultural cause. In fact, that sexual restraint reinforcement varies by cultural structure argues for a cultural and not a biological cause.
Low does go on to tell a bunch of just-so stories, which are asserted to be probable without evidence (pp. 317-18), exemplifying the irresponsible nature of EvoPsych research generally. But apart from that, Low’s study does not confirm what Confer’s team claimed, even when it was responsibly drawing inferences from responsibly collected data.
So in the attempt to answer critics, the Confer team’s use of Low just confirms everything critics are saying: extraordinarily flawed methods, wholly incapable of verifying the conclusions published, are being cited as well-confirmed scientific facts demonstrating the merits of EvoPsych. This is appalling. Far from answering our criticism, Confer et al. is simply validating it. And demonstrating that they aren’t even aware of the fact that they are promulgating or defending pseudoscience.
- (4) Ruling Out Culture (Cultural Evolution)
Culture is the number one competing hypothesis EvoPsych needs to rule out in any study before it can claim an observed behavior is biological. Number two would be the gamut of accident-byproduct explanations. But culture should be the first alternative tested. And culture-as-cause operates two ways: through human innovation and transmission (learning & socialization, which Confer’s team attempted to address above), and through cultural evolution itself. For example, families that adopt a behavior that benefits them will not only be better positioned to transmit what they learned directly (thus evolving their culture), they will also be emulated by social observers (thus spreading that evolved culture further). As this process continues over time, behaviors will evolve exactly in line with EvoPsych assumptions, yet without any underlying biological evolution occurring: the adaptations are not happening genetically, but previous (and for being multiply adaptive, essentially fixed) genetic inheritances (e.g. problem solving; social emulation) are generically operating to develop a culture (like an operating system running on top of the hardware) that produces the behavioral complexity EvoPsych proponents want to study.
It should be obvious that this happens. It therefore should be obvious that you have to rule this out before you can claim a biological adaptation is occurring instead of a cultural one. Yet EvoPsych almost never does this. And since they are not ruling out such a highly likely alternative hypothesis, none of their studies that fail to do that can logically claim to have established any EvoPsych hypothesis. This is one reason why most EvoPsych is pseudoscience (when, for example, studies that are logically incapable of verifying their conclusions, are claimed to have verified their conclusions).
How does Confer et al. respond?
By ignoring the criticism completely. They respond instead to wholly unrelated concerns. Such as, “Whether humans have evolved psychological adaptations over the past 10,000 years for other culturally transmitted inventions, such as cash economies, remains an open question” (pp. 118-19), although that is at least a good concession. But then they argue:
- “(a) cultural phenomena are real and require explanation,” which is what we are saying, yet EvoPsych papers frequently ignore this assumption. And Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
- “(b) labeling something as ‘culture’ is simply a description, not a causal explanation,” but that is false, because culture can be invented and vary on a scale of years, but biology cannot, and a cultural adaptation can cause a behavior without any underlying change in biology, and this very definitely is as much a causal explanation as the converse is.
- “(c) it is useful to distinguish between different forms of cultural phenomena, such as evoked culture and transmitted culture,” which is true, but not relevant to their critics’ concerns.
- “(d) explaining evoked cultural phenomena [the result of different circumstances interacting with common biology] requires an understanding of the evolved psychological mechanisms and the relevant environmental input involved in their elicitation,” which is simply a tautology. That it is true does not mean we have been able to identify which cultural mechanisms are evoked this way or by what biological mechanism. And critics are saying EvoPsych isn’t doing this in any sound way. Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
- “(e) explaining transmitted culture requires the invocation of evolved psychological mechanisms in both transmitters and receivers,” is obviously true, but again is not a response to EvoPsych’s critics. It is vacuous to say transmitted culture requires evolved biological mechanisms (like social intelligence, vocal chords, and eyes). Critics are instead saying transmitted culture can cause the very observations that EvoPsych researchers are unwarrantedly claiming are caused by biology. And EvoPsych almost never controls for that fact. Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
- “(f) transmitted culture, if recurrent over generations, can influence the evolution of novel adaptations, which in turn can affect transmitted culture, theoretically producing adaptation—culture coevolutionary processes,” which is true and not in dispute. But that it is possible does not mean we have been able or can know when this has been the case. And critics are asking how EvoPsych can claim to know that, when it rarely ever submits such knowledge to adequate falsification tests, or even tests of any kind.
That is all the Confer paper says in response to critics on the culture question. Note how they did not respond to any of our actual criticisms. And actually made patently false claims (such as that culture is not a causal explanation of behavior). This is what a pseudoscience looks like.
- (5) Accounting for Radical Changes in Modern Environment
This is one other form of “you can’t keep ignoring culture like you do” argument. And they admit, “Extremely novel recent environments, of course, have not had enough time to influence the evolution of psychological adaptations” (p. 119) and “mismatches between modern and ancestral environments may negate the adaptive utility of some evolved psychological mechanisms” and “novel environmental stimuli, such as media images or pornography, may trigger, hijack, or exploit our evolved psychological mechanisms.” Among other things. But “possibly, therefore probably” is a fallacy. How do we prove this is what is happening? No credible answer is given.
Obsessed again with “male sexual jealousy” as the example, the Confer paper now makes ridiculous just-so claims that contradict plain observation—sounding very much like Medieval academics in their unscientific attempt to explain nature. The Confer team says, “Male sexual jealousy almost certainly evolved, in part, to serve a paternity certainty function.” But that is challenged by contrary evidence. It ignores the wide enough frequency of polyandry and wife sharing in a variety of cultures closer to ancient social structures than post-civilization structures are, including cultures that explicitly eschew paternity entirely (like the “open marriage” system of the Mosuo). If animals varied that much, we would no longer claim that jealousy was biologically determined, but that it was a cultural adaptation to a certain varying cultural system, such that when you change the system, the behavior disappears or transforms. It also ignores the known psychological reality that sexual jealousy often stems from very different concerns about social status maintenance rather than paternity (in societies where a cuckold’s masculinity is threatened among peers when he allows his mate to stray), possessiveness (which is based in ownership of women and their physical and emotional labor, and role as status symbols, not simply access to their womb), and fears of abandonment (in actual fact, I’d argue, the most common cause of jealousy in men who have unlearned possessiveness), which has little to do with paternity.
Paternity need not be the sole driving factor, if ever it was. Bonobos, for example, exhibit no such concern, and in fact their fluidity of relationship formation is actually closer to human patterns than any other ape known, so it is not automatically to be assumed we would have evolved to be any more concerned about paternity than male Bobobos did. Paternity concern could well be a cognitive cultural innovation: caused by coming to understand what paternity is and its situational value. The effects would be identical. So EvoPsych cannot simply assume that wasn’t the cause of human paternity policing. Especially when so many men so easily don’t at all care about policing paternity, a phenomenon that would be bizarre if observed in most other mammals (and EvoPsych should be especially interested in explaining what is bizarre about us). Indeed, we even observe a number of cultures that have wife sharing. That should be impossible if men’s “womb control” instincts were biologically innate.
The Confer paper not only ignores all of this, and has nothing to say about it (in fact, it seems utterly blind to even the existence of these points), it goes on to say really stupid things like:
“If the relevant adaptation is a powerful emotion triggered by modern instances of ancestral cues, such as witnessing one’s mate kissing a rival,” then male jealousy is explained. This ignores the fact that telling the difference between chaste and sexual kissing, and kissing sexual rivals vs. kissing family members, requires highly complex learned cognitive understanding. Which cannot be evolved. Yet we do not instinctively flare up with jealousy the moment our wife kisses her sister or father or brother or son. The fact that we easily and completely discriminate between these things, proves we did not evolve a stimulus-response reaction to seeing our woman kiss someone. We had to learn it. We had to learn what kissing was. We had to learn what kissing meant. We had to learn it meant different things in different contexts. That’s culture. Not biology. EvoPsych has a whole lot of work to do before it can convincingly (read: empirically) prove otherwise.
Even the knowledge of who is your mate and who isn’t—e.g. before engagement or after breakup—requires advanced learned cognition that cannot be innate. We do not imprint, on parents or sex partners, like some other animals do. We are far more adaptable than that. Which is why human mating patterns are so varied culturally: from monogamy to polygyny to polyandry. And it might be worth noting that too many men enjoy watching their women kiss other men (indeed sexually) for a kiss-jealousy response to possibly be biologically innate the way it could be imagined to be in other animals. EvoPsych simply ignores the bizarrely frequent variation and adaptability of human behavior, a feature of humans that is extraordinarily strange compared to any other mammal, and thus very much in need of attention and explanation. And yet when your science ignores obvious data like this, it’s starting to look like a pseudoscience.
An even stupider thing they say is that “there would have been no selection pressure to design a mechanism capable of distinguishing between a situation in which a nude woman was seen and a sexual opportunity existed, and a similar situation lacking such sexual opportunity (e.g., a photograph of a nude woman).” And in one sentence, like a Medieval academic, they completely forget about male fantasies. Men have surely always, as they do now, daydreamed sexual encounters with women. That was the original porn. (Never mind also that the more primitive of human societies routinely interact with each other in the nude—the idea of not doing so is a late invention.) The fact that Confer’s team can’t even get basic facts right about fundamental human behavior, and then feel free to make completely bogus claims about it because of that, does not bode well for EvoPsych. It rather illustrates why we are calling it mostly pseudoscience.
Once again, at no point in this section is any actual criticism addressed: that the environment has changed so radically that studying modern populations is a highly unreliable way to determine what behaviors our genes evoked in us in ancient environments, and not controlling in any effective way for that fact, renders results in EvoPsych useless. To ignore this and insist the results reliably pertain to evolved traits in ancient environments is pseudoscience. And even if they want to claim something evolved after the paleolithic (the example they cite is lactose tolerance; though that is not a psychological trait), they still have to present evidence that in fact it did, without which they cannot claim to know, and if they cannot claim to know, they cannot claim to know a behavior has a biological cause at all. They do not even seem equipped to think rationally about behavior in the first place—such as we see with this Medieval armchair nonsense about male sexual fantasies not being a thing, or nudity never having been the norm, or there being a visual kiss-jealousy stimulus-response module.
[It’s all the more embarrassing that, once again, EvoPsych fails to do any real science, and thus didn’t know kissing is in fact a cultural phenomenon: most cultures don’t even have romantic kissing, or even regard it as disgusting. And even when Chimpanzees kiss, it has no sexual connotation.]
- (6) Getting the Genetic Confirmation
That brings us to genetics. I used to think this was a more severe criticism of EvoPsych than it really is. But EvoPsych could theoretically make advances without isolating and studying genes. It’s just a lot harder to do that, since genetic evidence is so useful to a variety of tasks EvoPsych needs to complete in order for its results to be scientific. And many critics have pointed this out.
Likewise, I am not sure the charges of genetic determinism that critics also level at EvoPsych are really of what typifies actual research so much as how that research is used and reported. Maybe a little of the former. And there is certainly enough of the latter to warrant censure. Once again, the Confer team insists they disavow genetic determinism, by saying EvoPsych allows outcomes to be an interaction of genes and environment. But at no point do they address the actual criticism, which is that humans are known to be extremely adaptable with cognitive effort, e.g. cultural variability, both historical and geographical, psychotherapy and self-reflection, and education and training, can all cause enormous changes in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes, which EvoPsych does not adequately account for in its attempt to insist all behavior is the inevitable outcome of a biological mechanism when in contact with a particular environment. We have demonstrated far more cognitive control over ourselves than that. Which among mammals, again, makes us really bizarre.
Which fact alone requires evolutionary explanation: How did we acquire that power and why was it selected for? What in fact is it that was selected for, that makes it possible? But more importantly, that it was selected for (as cannot be denied), undermines most claims of EvoPsych. Unless they can show that some behavior can’t be unlearned or modified with cognitive change, biology does not adequately explain the behavior itself, for if it is that easily unlearned, then it was probably learned in the first place—it almost certainly cannot be biologically innate; you can’t “unlearn” your genes out of you. But since EvoPsych almost never submits any of its claims to this test (not even indirectly, by broad cross-cultural comparative studies), almost none of its claims can be known to be true. Refusing to admit this is another thing that tends to make it a pseudoscience.
Though it is technically true that “molecular genetic analysis is not necessary for carrying out the research program of evolutionary psychology,” that is only if you can pass some other falsification test that rules out culture as the cause. Critics don’t say you need to find the genes. They say you need to rule out culture, and if you never confirm genetic correlations, then that eliminates one major way of doing that, necessitating you employ some other way of doing it. But EvoPsych typically does neither. And even if an alternative is used, e.g. demonstrating cultural universality, its claims still remain insecure. Because a cultural universal can still be a product of convergent cultural evolution (as people converge in their innovations on common optimal solutions to common problems), and the only way to rule that out, is to show a strong genetic correlation between those who exhibit the behavior and those who don’t (among other like tests). Otherwise, if genes don’t correlate with a behavior at all, or only weakly, then the behavior is either wholly learned and not innate, or it is so much a mixture of both as to render any claims as to which part is which impossible—without some form of advanced future science. And if you don’t have the tools yet to do this science, the science needs to be shelved until you do. Otherwise you aren’t doing science. (Unless, again, you are doing it in the explicitly non-truth-asserting manner of cosmologists.)
- (7) Finding Practical Applications
This is the most disturbing section in the Confer defense. They seem to be responding to an imagined criticism that EvoPsych needs to have applications to be worthwhile, which is not really a good critique of any science. Though maybe some have said that, I think most critics have the opposite concern: that because over 90% of EvoPsych must be false, it is dangerous to start basing applications on such unreliable conclusions. The Confer team seem wholly oblivious to this serious concern, and to the contrary, validate it, by actually making bold and terrifying claims about how EvoPsych should be applied.
This just illustrates how dangerous EvoPsych is: they here make all sorts of confident assertions about how EvoPsych conclusions, which we just saw are at least 90% false and almost never validly tested and thus almost never actually known, can transform, for example, mental health care and the law. This is scary as fuck. It reminds me to mention What’s the Harm. We must not allow anything so close to a pseudoscience as EvoPsych do this. It is decades if not centuries too soon for it to be anywhere near responsibly able to make recommendations in such domains (or any area of human life, really).
We must instead be testing actual outcome measures (e.g. if a therapy recommended by EvoPsych conclusions actually works better than present best practices, then indeed advocate it; but don’t advocate it in the absence of any such confirming test). Rather than assuming EvoPsych is reliably informing us. And we shouldn’t be advocating any changes in law or jurisprudence until we are damn well certain our science is indisputable. And EvoPsych just isn’t.
Fortunately, the authors handwave at this point, failing to find any recommendation at all from EvoPsych for the law. They suggest maybe it can contribute to sexual harassment jury decisions somehow (it is never said how), because “evolution-guided research…has shown that women consistently judge a variety of acts to be more sexually harassing than do men, and women experience greater levels of fear than do men in response to specific acts of being stalked.” But this is more pseudoscience. None of the cited studies showed these sex differences were evolved or biologically innate, rather than produced by different experiential databases that result from men and women being treated differently in their culture.
This is where the pseudoscience of EvoPsych gets impaled once again on our most fundamental criticism of it: it fails to distinguish culture from biology, and in consequence irresponsibly leads us to ignore cultural solutions to problems like this. In actual fact there is abundant data available that when men experience the world as women do (or even just start to see enough of the evidence that women do), their attitudes toward harassment and stalking shift toward women’s perspective. That indicates that this sex difference is learned behavior, and not biologically evolved at all. The real lesson would thus be, we need to educate men. Biology has nothing to do with it.
EvoPsych is thus pernicious if ever proposed as a source of practical advice. And the Confer paper never addresses this concern. At all. Even though critics have articulated the point in countless forms by now.
- (8) Admitting Limitations
In their closing sections all they talk about are strange human behaviors that are contrary to DRS that EvoPsych “has yet to explain.” Which is amusing to me, because as I have shown, it’s unlikely EvoPsych has explained much of any human behavior at all. Remember, we are lucky if even 10% of its results are true! Beyond that, they admit we can’t observe ancient conditions or cultures—but don’t address what critics mention this for: the inability to observe that is very damning to EvoPsych’s entire enterprise. This paper offers no rebuttal. At most they talk about what few things we can know about that ancient environment, which no one disputes. But that’s simply not enough for the requirements of the kind of elaborate claims made by EvoPsych, which need psychological data gleaned from the inhabitants of those ancient environments, which simply can’t be accessed at all. Even supposedly “primitive” cultures today like African Bushmen are actually not wholly typical of our ancestors, since they have been pushed into the most desperate resource areas by encroaching civilization, and have also been significantly influenced by knowledge of, and trade and interaction with, modern cultures.
Hence to illustrate the problem: EvoPsych needs to know how did homosexuals fit into paleolithic filial and social systems? We don’t know. We can speculate. We can test that speculation with mathematical models. We can verify that homosexuality is strongly a function of genetics and fetal environment (which in turn means, a function of the mother’s genetics), and therefore not a free floating cultural variable. We can look for and examine as many cultures as come closest to what we think our paleolithic cultures were like. And things like that. But that’s not enough to know for sure. And these data are all a lot more than we have for most EvoPsych claims. And yet even here we can produce no certainty. That’s a serious problem. And Confer et al. never address it.
Instead the Confer paper ends with such impertinences as that EvoPsych has been (has it now?) “far more successful in predicting and explaining species-typical and sex-differentiated psychological adaptations than explaining variation within species or within the sexes,” which is a telling admission, since the strangely high variation within the sexes (in psychological traits women vary more among each other than they do from men, and vice versa) nullifies most claims to evolved sex differences (since the variability within the sexes, and the overlap between the sexes, is too great to have the kind of strong effects as sex differentiation does in other animals).
Conclusion
And as if to prove my entire thesis, the last evidence cited in the Confer paper in defense of EvoPsych is the assertion that “evolutionary psychologists have discovered a female superiority in spatial location memory.” Which in fact is simply false. The study the Confer team cites, failed to be replicated in the field.
… As shown by Elizabeth Cashdan et al., “Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition among Hadza Foragers,” Evolution & Human Behavior 33.4 (July 2012).
Yep. That’s how bogus EvoPsych is.
-:-
It was generous of you to use so many words to address this topic. Evolutionary psychology can never be more than speculation, because unlike actual evolution there never will be a fossil record nor a record in DNA to support the claims about our ancient ancestors’ thoughts. Evolutionary psychology is like “social Darwinism” in that it’s not-science trying to ride the coattails of science to gain credibility, and possibly damaging the credibility of actual science in the process. And like social Darwinism, EvoPsych seems to be geared toward justifying social inequalities by means of pseudoscience, though social Darwinism focused on social class and race, while EvoPsych often conflates biological sex with gender.
I am somewhat more optimistic than you on both fronts. But I recognize there is merit in both points as well. The abuse of EvoPsych to cause harm, intentional and even unintentional, is real (some of my links take readers to works showing this). And in terms of establishing credible conclusions, it does need to be vastly more humble, and work a great deal harder, than it heretofore has.
What I find strange is that, as far as I have read, EP’s rarely look at inheritance patterns.
It should be obvious that the attributes they are studying are present in different degrees between subjects.
If it was an inherited attribute, shouldn’t one expect that if I have a strong showing of the attribute, then my ancestors should too? In other words, children of a parent with a strong expression of an attribute should show it strongly to. And in determining that, this should hold true even when the child was not reared by its biological parents.
There is some truth in there, though remember sexual reproduction is recombinative, so there can be dominant and recessive genes, thus if a gene or gene sequence evolved, the associated trait should, yes, be statistically present in a long enough trace of ancestors, but won’t necessarily be present in both a parent and their child, as it may be recessive in the parent while dominant in the child. If you look at several generations, though, you should see the trait (and thus its genes) being transmitted in some stable fashion over the long haul. Otherwise it can’t have been evolutionarily selected 100,000 years ago (if, for example, you are claiming the gene is present in a current test subject, and that that gene was selected into the human genome 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years ago).
EvoPsych of course predicts that the genes for a behavior-response “module” are present widely across the entire species, if not literally in every member of the species. So they aren’t talking about traits peculiar to one or another family. They might say that outliers (subjects who don’t exhibit the trait selected for ages ago) are just in possession of a recessive instance of the associated gene(s). And that their children in turn will inherit the trait and may express it if it is then dominant, or carry it recessively, passing it on still to their children.
And so on for hundreds of thousand of years.
Yes, they should be able to find these genes. Some of them by now. All of them eventually. But they aren’t working very hard to make that happen. And so far as I know, it has never happened to date (i.e. no genes for a specific behavior or “behavior module” have ever been conclusively isolated). If I’m wrong, I’d be delighted to know some examples.
Dr. Carrier,
Exciting and thought-provoking post in many ways and I am glad to see this issue being discussed in such detail.
Although I am not aware of any “genes for a specific behavior” being detected in humans with sufficient direct experimental rigor, there are lab experiments done on prairie voles that seem to indicate that overexpression of a single gene called vasopressin V1a receptor (V1aR) promotes “partner preference formation” in an otherwise solitary and polygamous species. There also seems to be a wider phylogenetic relationship between expression levels and levels of monogramy in different prairie vole species, which led to this experimental testing being carried out. It is likely not the only factor in monogamous pair bonding in voles, but the evidence seems to indicate that a specific behavior has a strong influence from V1aR, at least in this species.
It will almost surely be several orders of magnitude more complicated in humans with probably hundreds of different factors influencing any specific behavior. It is also a pretty safe bet that researchers will not inject human brains with viral vectors to test it either, so these kind of experiments cannot be done on humans.
Lim, M. M., Wang, Z., Olazabal, D. E., Ren, X., Terwilliger, E. F., & Young, L. J. (2004). Enhanced partner preference in a promiscuous species by manipulating the expression of a single gene. Nature, 429(6993), 754-757.
There also seems to be pretty good evidence that mate choice in rodents, fish, birds, non-human primates (most likely all vertebrates) is influenced by MHC dissimilarity by smell (MHC has volatile breakdown products), and the evolutionary explanation is that MHC-heterozygosity protects against pathogens, since the host immune system is more diverse in these individuals. Some genetic and behavioral studies have been done in humans with mixed results, both because of the problem with human genetic experimentation and due to the obvious fact that other factors also play a major role in mate selection, to say the least.
Milinski, M. (2006). The Major Histocompatibility Complex, Sexual Selection, and Mate Choice. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 37(1), 159-186.
Bonneaud, C., Chastel, O., Federici, P., Westerdahl, H., & Sorci, G. (2006). Complex Mhc-based mate choice in a wild passerine. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 273(1590), 1111-1116.
Schwensow, N., Eberle, M., & Sommer, S. (2008). Compatibility counts: MHC-associated mate choice in a wild promiscuous primate. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 275(1634), 555-564.
It should be noted that none of this research is being carried out by evolutionary psychologists (which I am not sure even does any relevant research at this point) and a lot of proponents of evolutionary psychology has never heard of this kind of behavioral biology / behavioral ecology research.
There is a great course on human behavioral biology taught at Stanford by Robert Sapolsky. All 25 lectures can be found on Youtube by searching for “Lecture Collection | Human Behavioral Biology”. There are also a few good textbooks on the subject, such as “An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology” by Krebs and Davis (2012, 4th edition).
Most of these behavioral biologists perform relevant research into evolution of behavior but at the same time are very, very critical to evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, they do not get that much mass media attention, presumably because it is hard to be sensationalist about voles and because they do not claim that “women evolved to shop” or some such nonsense. So most attention is given to evolutionary psychologists, who are frequently in the business of making stuff up as they go along.
That’s all a really good example of exactly the kind of genetics research EvoPsych isn’t doing, and yet of the very kind of research that models good science: good use of controls to test a variable; very limited claims as to effect; recognition that the behavior observed (outside the controlled conditions) is actually far more variable. And of course, these species are far less complex cognitively than humans, and very far removed from us psycho-genetically, as you note.
I have read about this too, but I think that Karlsson exaggarates the results of these studies.
First of all, rodents using MHC in mate choice has been mostly disproven: [1][2].
A meta-analysis on humans suggest that MHC dissimilarity does not affect mate choice.
And there is multiple studies which argue for MHC not being a volatile odor: [1][2].
And even if MHC could be smelled and would affect mate choice, how does it play out in situations, where even identical twins can have very different scents: [1][2].
Dawkins interviews Stephen Rose.
For the benefit of all the readers here, please summarize why that video is relevant and what it answers.
From wiki
“With Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, Rose championed the “radical science movement”. The three criticized sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and adaptationism, most prominently in the book Not in Our Genes (1984), laying out their opposition to Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson, 1975), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and other works promoting an evolutionary explanation for human social behaviour.”
The video is an hour long wide-ranging tactful discussion of evo-psych with some focus on the ‘selfish gene’ thesis of Dawkins opposed by Rose’s POV that the ‘whole organism’ and the society must be taken into account.
My take is that Rose makes several points that Dawkins is perhaps forced to agree with, but then I’ve gone off Dawkins a bit and I like Rose’ overall approach, plus the fact that my nephew is a PhD evo biologist who admires Rose but Dawkins far less so.
Its an interesting conversation.
Thanks.
I have to admit I stopped reading when Steven Pinker was mentioned. That bloke has never met a pseudoscientific theory he doesn’t like.
(I have no idea if that’s a correct assessment.)
RE: “Graphic from a pseudoscientific website using EvoPsych to argue nonsense about the thermodynamics of human marriage bonding, showing a pretty girl in a short skirt in flirtatious pose, with ratio lines showing the perfect ratios of her body parts, with the words Perfect Body, Perfect Genes.”
Richard, as a former psychology student in college many decades ago and as one of your elderly patrons at patreon.com who is now mostly blind, I always appreciate your attention to detail even to the extent of describing graphics contained in your blog posts for those of us who rely on text-to-speech to access content on the Internet these days. Now I must admit I think my own response after listening to this excellent article and relistening to your graphic descriptor necessitate reaching for that little blue pill since my mental images probably far exceed and improve upon the actual photo you have described. lol!
And most people don’t even know those comments are in there. 🙂
So, ironically, in a way, I have made sighted people blind.
Bravo, sir! Yet another intellectual tour-de-force from the world’s greatest living intellect. You have slain the intellectual sham that is Evolutionary Psychology, then burned and buried its rotten carcass. You have proven once again that the so-called expert intellects in the sciences are no match for a well trained historian.
This is yet another gleaming jewel in your crown of intellectual greatness. You have conclusively proven that Jesus was a myrh, reconciled General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, presented the one correct moral theory of philosophy while disproving all others, conclusively proven the superiority of polyamory and the folly of monogamy, and now refuted Evolutionary Psychology. The only question that remains is, where do you go from here? My guess is that in the coming months we will find even more of the greatest unsolved problens such as proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, and a cure for Cancer resolved on the pages of this very blog.
You have accomplished so much more than supposed atheist “leaders” like Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, and Shermer, and the comparison of your continued success to their utter career failure just highlights their intellectual bankruptcy. You have also helped expose the expensive fraud that is modern academia. What is the need for places like MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and their multi-billion dollar endowments when the greatest mind in the world can teach you via YouTube and Skype straight from Stockton, California?
Is there any way I could commission you to have this blog post printed out on fine gilded paper, bound in imitation leather, and autographed? I will pay whatever it takes to have a piece of pivotal scholarship like this. I am also interested in acquiring an autographed version of your superb, groundbreaking, card game.
Keep up the outstanding work, Dr. Carrier. You are cementing your place as the greatest intellect in history.
Pure ad hominem. Used as an excuse to address not a single actual argument or item of evidence I presented.
Just as I predicted.
Thank you for this, Richard – it will be very useful.
A couple of quibbles? Coyne should not be regarded as a critic of EP, except when it would be too embarrassing to openly defend it. Coyne is fond of announcing that Islam is an inherently violent religion because of the Koran while ignoring all those centuries when the Koran somehow did not lead Muslims into being terrorists. He’s a smart man, so I sure he knows what he says is not true. If he can tell whoppers like that, I think we should suspect him of promoting EP whenever he thinks he can get away with it. And Coyne seems to be fond of suggesting that critics of EP reject evolution.
Coyne is also vociferous opponent of all group selection theories, which leads to the second quibble, which is that apparently the large majority of evolutionary scientists reject all group selection explanations at this point in time. So I don’t think it is a good reflection of the state of the field to cite group selection explanations and criticisms without noting this.
But it seems more than quibbling to note that EP is largely committed to rejecting what they call the Standard Social Science Model. Steven Pinker may not be a neuroscientist nor an evolutionary biologist. True, his article on “The False Allure of Group Selection” (.http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection…to anticipate, there is no true allure for him either,) is hailed by the likes of Coyne and Dawkins. Nonetheless, his book The Blank Slate is devoted to demonstrating that yes, Virginia, there is an inborn human nature, and the SSSM denies Nature. You may add “God-given” in parentheses if you wish. For my part, I believe the SSSM, insofar as there is such a thing, is the gold standard of science. Mario Bunge in an article for Skeptical Inquirer some years ago included ignoring or repudiating the work of other fields was a mark of pseudoscience. Perhaps you should add that to the list? Two of the most respected names in the field, Tooby and Cosmides in the primer on EP make this repudiation explicit. They also decree that EP is entirely separate from behavioral genetics too, for good measure. (http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html)
Discussing Pinker leads to another issue I think, which is the role of genetic determinism or the new scientific racism or what you would have it, in EP. Disclaimer: I’m hostile so you may wish to investigate for yourself. Coyne, Pinker, Dawkins are all believers in the scientific utility of the race concept, although naturally they disavow racism. A neat trick if you ask me. But there is an EP style argument on the “natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence” which Pinker seems to endorse whole heartedly! (A useful commentary here I think is http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/How%20Jews%20Became%20Smart%20(2008).pdf.) Perhaps it may seem irrelevant that Pinker is cited. He is just one person. Yet, he is one of the most praised and widely read popularizers of EP type explanations. In addition to The Blank Slate, his Better Angels of Our Nature is I think becoming an authority to cite further popular literature. One takeaway from this book is that the so-called Western world is superior to the rest of humanity, and maybe it would be better if they ran things. It’s more subtle than that in some ways, though even cruder in others. Again, you may prefer to investigate for yourself. I’m not sure that one can effectively critique EP only as science.
But aside from the deep connections of EP to genetic determinism, racism and reactionary politics, there is I think a larger issue about pseudoscience in general. As Bunge suggested, perhaps pseudoscience can be identified by its reliance on some time honored religious tenet, that it perpetually rediscovers? In the case of EP, of course, it is the very notion of Human Nature, whether directly given by the God of your preference, or by the perfect craftsman of Evolution. The nearly divine powers of natural selection substitute nicely for God.
Lastly, perhaps formally an emphasis on falisification a la Popper includes the necessity to consider alternative hypotheses. Argument to the best explanation could be construed as a kind of falsificationism I suppose. But I can only say that in practice this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Further, I’m pretty sure that practically all scientific work published in EP formally meets the criteria for falsification. I’m not sure that falsification in the Popperian stance is really the hallmark of science. It seems to me there are many scientific experiments done with controls and studies done with statistical controls that set up a hypothesis to be falsified. For instance, one could do a study on over-active agency detection. But given that “religion” sometimes is to medicine as alchemy is to chemistry or astrology is to astronomy; that sometimes “religion” is meat redistribution by animal sacrifice; that sometime “religion” is a marker of tribal identity: that sometimes “religion” is openly a part of royal/imperial government…well, it is unclear to me how a statistically controlled study (or controlled lab experiment) can be very useful scientifically. It seems to me that Popper was politically motivated to find the most narrow definition of science he could so that he could rule out in toto the possibility of social science, which he disliked as being too Marxist I think. Be that as it may, perhaps caution would dictate care to emphasize the importance of looking at all the evidence? Even if that is harder to do than to say?
Note that I am not here judging Coyne in general, just pointing out what he has said on this subject (which is within his field of expertise) and that it is backed up by other experts. Obviously I have my own quibbles with Coyne on other stupid things he has said. But it would be ad hominem for me to say that this was relevant here. I’ll evaluate his arguments on their own terms (hence, though, I did indeed find his arguments contradictory—and suddenly weakest when defending EP).
Oh dear. I hope that is not the case. If so, it’s another criticism: a science driven by dogmas rather than evidence is indeed pseudoscience.
Note that I have not confirmed this assessment myself. If group selection theories are indeed anathema in the EvoPsych journals now, someone would need to demonstrate that that has happened. That would be useful to do; but I haven’t the time or inclination myself.
And that wouldn’t be enough to show this is because of pseudoscientific dogmatism. We are not saying all group selection hypotheses have merit. Just that obviously some group selective processes could easily have occurred. Mathematically, some such events would be almost impossible to avoid. So being dogmatically against them is folly. But just not being interested, or able, to test them is not the same thing as that. So they could be scarce for reasons of epistemic access.
Although, granted, though that would be charitable, I do suspect that’s unlikely, since EvoPsych seems wholly unconcerned with lack of epistemic access. 90% of it is psychically declaring conclusions about matters we actually have no epistemic access to.
Your remarks are noted. But this would be too great a chore for me to demonstrate myself. Though whether EvoPsychers have replies to your points, I’d be delighted to hear them.
I agree (and do mention in my article) that there is some creeping political and ideological agenda, often not even conscious, entangled with the EP field and its output. But it’s hard work to untangle just whether and where that’s operating.
Inherently I don’t regard that as a criticism. It doesn’t matter where hypotheses come from, only whether they are adequately tested empirically. And many a science dusts off an old idea and re-tests it, even finding it turns out to be correct.
And in this case the thing in question is too nebulous and undefined to be useful as a scientific concept (as Lewontin noticed about “aggression” being listed as Human Nature). This is something we see done outside peer review, when EvoPsych proponents wax philosophical about the implications of peer reviewed EP research that turns out to be in fact almost entirely false.
And I’m more concerned with what’s passing peer review. Not that I’m unconcerned with the way it is also being abused outside of that arena (I mention in this article that that is indeed a concern). But my article is about the former and not the latter.
Granted, as I also said in my article, the fallacy of goal post moving rears here: EvoPsych proponents will happily agree that their peer reviewed lit says nothing about this thing called Human Nature; then turn around and make all sorts of claims about how that lit proves this thing called Human Nature. We see you doing that, EvoPsychers. We aren’t fooled.
You are right, though, also, to point out their use of the black-and-white fallacy (argument by false dichotomy): that the only options are Human Nature or Blank Slate. No one on earth in any science today has ever advocated a Blank Slate hypothesis. And straw man argumentation against your critics, is a sign of a pseudoscience.
Obviously the reality is, we do have an evolved nature, our computational hardware…on top of which most of what we have become is software we invented to run on it (culture). Their dichotomy, is false.
It is, though, when conducted correctly (i.e. without fallacy). I show how in my reduction of the ABE to Bayes’ Theorem in Proving History (index).
And I endeavored even in the article here to show that falsification tests mean testing down alternative explanations.
This confuses proving an effect, with proving its cause. The very point I quoted the Reproducibility Project explaining.
That EvoPsych often generates falsification-tested verifications of effects is just Psych, not EvoPsych. It’s when they add the Evo in that they sneak in Medieval armchair nonsense that either isn’t even falsifiable in principle, or that they have never subjected to any sound falsification test at all, much less sufficiently to establish the conclusion is probable.
I’m not sure of your point, but maybe these thoughts reflect it:
(1) One of my overall points in this article is that most of what EvoPsych wants to know, it just can’t. It doesn’t mean the causes don’t exist. It just means we have no instruments capable of discovering them. Failure to admit this is a major driving cause of its pseudoscientific output.
(2) For this very reason, “looking at all the evidence” is not sufficient to verify a hypothesis. It may simply be (and often is the case) that we don’t have access to the evidence we need to actually verify a hypothesis. Consequently, “looking at all the evidence” there is, is not in fact science. If it can’t get what you want, it just can’t. It doesn’t matter that we looked at all the evidence that exists. That simply isn’t necessarily going to be the evidence we need.
(3) Falsification is mathematically necessary to verify a hypothesis. I am not interested in Popper’s demonstrations of this (or his motives). I can demonstrate it with Bayes’ Theorem. In any calculus of probability, the only way to show that P(h) is high, is to show that P(e|~h) is low. There is literally no other way to do it (even an argument from prior probability amounts to that, since all priors are the outputs of previous runs of the equation, hypothetically or actually). It’s logically impossible to know that P(h) is high without knowing that P(e|~h) is low. But “showing that P(e|~h) is low” is precisely what we mean by a falsification test.
To my chagrin, I see I omitted the essential part about how good the essay is (perhaps especially without my notion of improvements?). Excellent work, for what my opinion is worth.
Oh, right! Thanks for saying.
I wonder if you aren’t giving too much credit to the homosexuality-as-genetic arguments as well. This is one of the very few cases in which we have begun to approach having an adequate amount of large-scale data about actual inheritance patterns, using twin studies and so forth. Full confession: my knowledge of this field consists mainly of reading summaries, I Am Not A Developmental Psychologist. (But I am a psychologist, and I have done some work on developmental matters.)
At any rate, a number of twin studies have now shown that a substantial proportion of the variability in sexual orientation can be attributed to straightforward inheritance. But “substantial proportion” varies from about 0.1 to 0.4, with results for men being stronger than those for women. Which means that 0.6 to 0.9 of the variability in sexual orientation CANNOT be explained by inheritance. This is still vastly, vastly, stronger direct evidence for genetic influence on a complex human behaviour than exists for anything else in evo-psych, so far as I am aware. But it’s very bad evidence for a simple genetic explanation of this behaviour, indeed the 0.6-0.9 point would seem to rule out such an explanation completely. Despite what popular accounts would have us believe, we aren’t “born this way”, or at least most of us aren’t.
Here is a just-so-story: what if one of the genetic factors associated with sexual orientation is actually responsible for a general increase in curiosity or adventurousness (which are the types of things we have strong evidence that there ARE genes that directly influence – indeed we know some of the genes involved and know that they are responsible for similar variations in behaviour from humans all the way down to fruit flies and nematode worms)? So, nothing about what you do with your genitals, nothing about sexual behaviour at all. But someone with a high-adventurousness gene could be more likely to engage in unconventional sexual behaviour, and so would their siblings (and the inverse is true for someone with a low adventurousness gene). If this is done during the years when sexual identity develops, such experimentation (or the lack thereof) might lead to the development of homosexuality (or heterosexuality). (And, to follow the standard method of evo-psych in throwing in unrelated stuff, this high curiousity might also account for the higher proportion of homosexuality among artistic types.)
Now, there are a million problems with this explanation. I’m not seriously suggesting it as a hypothesis (indeed, I’m pretty sure if it was true it would already have been discovered by means of simple DNA analysis, which I’m sure has been done many times in studies of sexual orientation). I bring it up merely to illustrate that a great deal of the heritability of sexual orientation might have little or nothing, directly, to do with sex. You could probably think up half a dozen other non-sexual explanations of sexual orientation. Which means that the mathematical models could well be barking up the wrong tree.
As I said, this is one of the only cases that I’m aware of where there is ANY direct evidence that a complex and highly specific human behaviour is accounted for by simple genetic factors. So, yeah, your general argument against evo-psych would appear to be pretty rock-solid – if this is the best it can do, the field is in trouble. But I find it very troubling that the “born this way” viewpoint is taken so seriously, when the evidence would appear to point so strongly against it.
Tangentially, I’m assuming that your mention of fetal environment is referring to the birth order effect? That is, every older brother that a human male has makes that male 30% more likely to grow up to be a gay man. This is commonly interpreted as supporting the idea that the intrauterine environment (which is modified by previous children) affects one’s likelihood of being gay. But while this is *consistent* with the birth order effect, it certainly isn’t *supported* by it. And I’m not aware of any direct tests of this hypothesis.
So, TLDR: Evolutionary psych bad, even standard example of evolutionary psych (homosexuality as a highly genetically-specified trait) is also bad.
Your reasoning on uterine effects doesn’t make sense. The effect is confirmed. It is not hypothetical. And that effect cannot be explained any other way: we know homosexuality is produced by the mother’s genes, during fetal development. Thus, that twins don’t match homosexuality perfectly with genes is already expected. It’s still genetically determined: by the mother’s genome.
What happens is that something in a mother’s genetic code prompts her to sometimes send chemical signals to a fetus to redirect its neural development towards homosexuality (confirmed by neuroanatomy; likewise transgenderism, BTW, although that appears to be more of a random signal slip). Those signals are analog, not digital, so they don’t always work (hence they can be more effective on one twin than another even in the same womb). But they increase with male births (i.e. the more sons a woman has, the more likely her next son will be gay, indicating epigenetic processes operating on the mother’s genome—and again indicating it is a mother’s genes, not the twins’ own genes, that is the primary cause of homosexuality).
So your arguments against genetic determinism here don’t work.
However, I also agree with your arguments from experiential development. And this is a good example of how human psychology is too complicated for EvoPsychers to understand it the way they want to.
Because not all sexuality is driven by strong attraction urges. Some bisexual men, for instance, can enjoy play with men without being specifically as attracted to them as strongly homosexual men or strongly heterosexual women are. In fact, we know intensity of attraction varies on a bell curve—it is not a switch that one turns on and off. It’s a dial that gets shifted somewhere on a continuum. Again, we are analog computers, not digital. Thus, intrauterine chemical signaling can move that dial more than without that signal, but how far it moves it can remain as varied as always. From an Evo perspective, that doesn’t matter. The statistical effect is all that has to result. It doesn’t have to be neat and tidy.
Thus, when you combine the genetic effects (where the sexuality and intensity dials get set in the womb) with personality (e.g. one’s degree of openness to experience) and environment (e.g. permissive vs. homophobic societies) the output will be more complex than EvoPsych would want. You will get some people whose dial is somewhere closer to the middle, but because they are also adventurous and permitted (as you hypothesize), learn to enjoy some homoeroticism. This is why bisexuality in women is recorded as being so much more common than in men: it is more socially permitted (thus blocking a cultural control on genetic expression), thus allowing expression of personality effects to increase homoeroticism above the uterine dial setting alone.
An obvious proof of this is that masturbation is universal. Yet is by definition homosexual (a man having sex with himself is having sex with a man; ditto a woman). Thus, we can obviously learn to be comfortable and even enjoy sex without an opposite sex partner. This is further confirmed by the frequency of gender reversing in sexual fantasies (people often imagine themselves as the opposite sex having sex with someone of their own sex). The frequency with which women actually enjoy pegging (warning: sex discussed in that link), when allowed, illustrates this at the observational stage of fantasy fulfillment.
So, indeed, it is both born this way (your attraction levels—and aversions, or lack thereof—are set in the womb) and human freedom (people can learn to explore and enjoy a more expansive sexual experience than their uterine set-points dictate).
Politically, I agree that we shouldn’t make sexuality all about genetic determinism simply because Christians fallaciously respect naturalistic fallacies (and their being in our way, we are content to use their own fallacies against them to make them stop being bigots). Human sexual choice is as deserving of respect.
“Your reasoning on uterine effects doesn’t make sense. The effect is confirmed. It is not hypothetical. And that effect cannot be explained any other way: we know homosexuality is produced by the mother’s genes, during fetal development.”
What effect is confirmed? The 1/3 increase in the likelihood of an adult man being gay for each older brother he has? Yes, that’s one of the cleanest findings in the literature, so far as I know.
As for it not being explainable any other way… you sure about that? I haven’t heard any serious discussion of the likely environmental differences that result from having older brothers. For instance, the fact that you’re likely to spend a lot of time during early childhood, when we know many sexual preferences are set, naked in the presence of people of the same sex that you care about (and the more older brothers you have, the more this is likely to occur). This is actually an explanation I would seriously propose, and one I’m surprised I haven’t seen in the literature – although there are political reasons why it might be anathema to many. At any rate, “no other explanation is typically given” seems more accurate than “no other explanation is possible”.
“What happens is that something in a mother’s genetic code prompts her to sometimes send chemical signals to a fetus to redirect its neural development towards homosexuality (confirmed by neuroanatomy; likewise transgenderism, BTW, although that appears to be more of a random signal slip).”
I’m pretty sure you’re grossly overstating the certainty of this. When you say “confirmed by neuroanatomy” – how is it possible that neuroanatomy could confirm anything about the intrauterine environment? The only neuroanatomical studies I’m aware of that might be relevant here (and I’d be very glad to hear of others) are those that find mean differences between the brains of adult homosexuals and heterosexuals. But the fact that there are such differences says nothing about their source, be it uterine, genetic, or experiential. E.g. there are plenty of differences between the brains of blind and sighted adults (I believe far larger ones than those between gay and straight adults), but clearly there is no genetic or uterine cause of these differences. (And similar logic applies to many of the putative differences between male and female brains.)
You’re right, one can ask for more research to shore these questions up.
I think the evidence is already strong enough. But it can’t hurt to have more.
Incidentally, apologies for the length and hyper-specificity of the above, it’s kind of an obsession of mine (to the point where I’m considering making career moves in this direction). I realize that was hardly the main topic of your post.
To the contrary, I thought yours was a very interesting and productive comment. In fact: Thank you for it.
Thanks!
“Too many”?
How many individuals within a population have to enjoy an unusual fetish before that is “too many” individuals for that sub-group to represent an exception to the rule?
Some people have a scat fetish. They enjoy being defecated upon. Does that mean that the widely observed human disgust response to excrement cannot “possibly be biologically innate”? If a certain percentage of the population (currently defined as “too many”) experiences enjoyment of a stimulus that produces aversion in all others, that invalidates the hypothesis that the aversion is biologically innate? Science should not go forward assuming that a reflexive disgust response to the sight and smell of excrement (a response of course mediated by culture and individual psychology, and manifesting in a wide range of expression) is “biologically innate the way it could be imagined to be in other animals”? This assumption of a universal disgust response based on repeated observation and testing should be thrown out just because a subset of the population either fails to have this response or converts that response into a fetish?
I think you need to define “too many” as you mean it in the sentence I quoted above, or you’ll have to throw out a huge amount of documented human responses to stimuli that previously were best explained by innate biology: The disgust response to filth and dead bodies (nearly universal, but exceptions exist); the protective and affectionate response to a big head, large eyes and small chin (nearly universal, but exceptions exist); heterosexuality itself (nearly universal, but exceptions exist). The list of nearly universal human responses to stimuli that do nonetheless include some undeniable exceptions is fairly long.
Are you able to define “too many” as you mean it in the above quoted sentence? Does “too many” exceptions to the rule really just mean “this group includes Richard Carrier”? If so, you’re kind of doing what you accuse EvoPsychs of doing.
It’s a valid question: is the number of men who compersively enjoy sharing their mates the same small percentage as are into scat fetishes?
I am quite certain even you do not believe that it is.
I have never encountered a scat fetishist. I have encountered hundreds of compersive men. They literally fill entire conferences. Whole cultures exist that wife-share. Not a single culture exists that plays with shit.
But indeed, we do need to know: how many random accidents contrary to DRS can a population tolerate and still evolve a trait? For instance, Down syndrome was not selected for, yet remains in a steady percentage of the population. Thus, there can be outliers that don’t affect selection. So the question legitimately is, when does the number start to defy that calculus? EvoPsych generally never answers this question. Indeed, they don’t even examine the outliers, and rarely even mention them, or their frequency, or ask when that becomes a problem for their thesis. For example, if all studies show more than 50% of men care more about emotional infidelity than sexual (and that is what the meta-analysis shows the data aggregate to), it’s extremely hard to see how EvoPsych can insist a minority of men reflect the selection pressure of the last two million years.
If compersive feelings were contrary to DRS, as the EvoPsych argument requires (since otherwise being jealous would not produce any DRS against the non-jealous and thus could not be selected for), then their existence refutes the EvoPsych hypothesis. Compersive men should have been bred out of us hundreds of thousands of years ago. Unless they are as rare as Down syndrome victims. But if you don’t go finding out, how will you know? Not checking, is bad science.
Thus, EvoPsych needs to do a lot of work here to show (a) that compersive men have some sort of compensating advantage that negates the advantage of being jealous (so as to explain why they exist in such numbers), reflecting the presence of different survival strategies being acted out within the human species (similar to short people having advantages as well as tall people, which each cancel out DRS, by each pursuing different strategies for success) or (b) that compersive men are an accidental byproduct of a genetic system that usually produces jealous men (and thus the continued existence of compersives is an inevitable free rider).
It is not enough to say (a) or (b) could be the case. You have to actually empirically ascertain that they are. Only then are you doing science.
And until you do that, you simply can’t make the claims EvoPsych does about male jealousy (even apart from all the other problems with it I illustrated, which you notably ignored: you thus just illustrated a documented cognitive bias, of ignoring all the strong arguments for a conclusion, cherry picking and rebutting the single lone weakest argument for that conclusion, and then concluding you have also rebutted the stronger arguments).
Thus, again, the issue here is not that we can now prove the contrary. The issue is that EvoPsych needs to disprove the contrary. And hasn’t. And it’s not doing so is what makes it pseudoscience.
I will also add, by explaining the behavior inherited by less than 50% of men, EvoPsych is doing bad science already when it then claims that result applies to all men. Even if their hypothesis is correct, and the 30-40% or so of “sexually overjealous” men are that way because of genes and not culture (and I gave a lot more evidence against that being a reliable thing to claim even now), that does not warrant saying “all men are sexually overjealous.” That would be pseudoscience. Yet it’s what EvoPsych says (even the Confer paper!). That’s just shit science, top to bottom.
So even in that scenario, EvoPsych needs to also explain—and recognize the existence of—the 60-70% of men that are not sexually overjealous. It’s failure to do so, and thus failing to recognize the actual diversity of human nature, is also what makes it a pseudoscience.
I’m very interested in the concept of cultural evolution, and I read your comparison of it to eve-psych with great interest. I agree that cultural evolution should probably be the default assumption for any widespread belief or behavior — as you say “It therefore should be obvious that you have to rule this out before you can claim a biological adaptation is occurring instead of a cultural one.”
However, I’m worried that some of the problems with evolutionary psych might apply to cultural evo as well. Not all of them, obviously — cultural evo avoids many of the pitfalls that you attribute to evolutionary psychology. It relies on a method of transmission that is obvious and observable (observation, imitation, and communication) rather than the dubious pathway of genes. Also, cultural theories will be far less prescriptive (in the sense you describe in your point 7) compared to evolutionary ones. Since, as you say, cultures “can be invented and vary on a scale of years, but biology cannot,” it makes sense that cultural habits that might have been beneficial as recently as the 1930s might be wholly useless in the digital age. (For example, due to innovations like the U.N., most people around the world no longer need to live in fear that some neighboring state will conquer and enslave them — which was the condition when the vast majority of our inherited cultural traits were selected for.)
It occurs to me, though, that at least some of the criticism aimed at evo-psych might legitimately be leveled at cultural evolution studies as well, in terms of the problems of replication and the lack of ways to separate rigorous studies from speculation. If we were to advance a hypothesis based on cultural evolution — say, “Monotheistic religions tended to support the growth of imperialistic societies because they created shared culture that transcended ethnic boundaries, and reinforced other imperialistic attributes like respect for a distant, centralized authority” — how exactly could we make that hypothesis falsifiable? What are your thoughts?
Absolutely.
Notice the critics aren’t saying they know cultural evolution and not psychological evolution is the cause of every behavior. They are saying we usually don’t know which is the cause. And EvoPysch is rarely doing anything actually capable of finding out. And in most cases, it never could—we just can’t know, for lack of epistemic access to the needed evidence.
Really, in fact, EvoPsych should not even exist as a field. There should only be Behavioral Science, and it’s sole job should be asking “Is this behavior cultural or genetic? Or both? And if both, what role is played by each?” It would then explain behavior with all hypotheses, not insist only one set of hypotheses can be true or should be tested, as EvoPsych essentially does.
Though again, that would result in being forced to admit the first point all over again: in most cases, we simply cannot know the answer to these questions.
From a quick googling it would seem that romantic kissing (especially lips on lips) isn’t even universal and is in fact considered gross by some communities.
http://hraf.yale.edu/romantic-or-disgusting-passionate-kissing-is-not-a-human-universal/
I haven’t checked that, but that’s a notable point if correct.
(Though note that kissing, notably not sexual, is also a Chimpanzee behavior.)
Addendum to the discussion of genes above.
The other thing Evolutionary psychologists have to do is , once they’ve found genes that drive behaviour, they both need to show that the locus has been under selection (there are well defined molecular tests for this) , and under direct selection at that. Genetic hitchhiking has been well demonstrated, wherein genes behave like they are under selection because a neighbouring gene is. Only after those criteria are satisfied can people even begin to do any serious evolutionary biological research. While lots of traits are polygenic and multiple genes can be associated with traits, the number of genes that determine a trait varies directly with how difficult it is to test for adaptation.
Right. That’s another example of the accident/byproduct domain of alternative explanations EvoPsych almost never rules out.
Throwaway/deletable nit comment:
There seems to be a broken link for the text “here”.
Good catch! Thank you.
Fixed.
#10:
The proponents of that relic may never have realized it was scientifically untenable to argue “born this way”–however, it was a device intended to steer the conversation from “homosexuality is a choice” by framing sexual orientation to be something as inevitable as, say, the starting point of melanin in your skin.
Back before Trump started running for the Republican candidacy, most right-wingers knew it was unfashionable to be racist, even if they did sweet fuck all about actually addressing their own racism. “Born this Way” was only ever intended to bridge the gap, the massive canyon that was missing from gay rights. It was still fashionable to be a shithead to gay people. If it’s wrong to discriminate against black people because they’re born black, it’s equally wrong to discriminate against gay people because they’re born gay. So the oversimplified argument goes, at least.
At the time, despite knowing the argument was wrong, I still supported its intent. Though even if we accept homosexuality as choice, there’s still no reasonable argument as to why that is an immoral choice.
Of course Trump is re-legitimizing xenophobia and racism, so it’s all kinda moot now. Apparently, moral codes that can be reduced to “don’t be an asshole” are beyond the pale for the far-right. Don’t need to worry about being unfashionable when a potential presidential candidate is spouting off all the same nonsense you do without masking it in “politically correct” language.
#17 – Agree with most of what you say. And just to clarify, I certainly wouldn’t argue that sexual orientation is a choice (at least not for most people), any more than one’s native language is. But I would argue that it’s a lot more like native language than it is like skin colour – i.e. most of the interesting determinants happen in early childhood, and the role of genetics is going to be VERY convoluted and not even remotely direct. I might be wrong, but I think the weight of the evidence is certainly consistent with that, and I think most of the scientists pushing the strongly deterministic line have implicitly fallen for the naturalistic fallacy, honestly. (And there are several scientists who openly advocate a much larger role for experience than is typically acknowledged, although they tend to be rather circumspect about it.)
As for the intent of “born this way”, I’ve always said that the correct response to “pray away the gay” and similar types of people is “fuck off”. It’s definitely not “but nature/God made me this way and nature/God is good!”. If what we do with our genitals is not a moral issue (provided it’s with consenting adults and other standard caveats) then it’s not a moral issue, and we shouldn’t have to make any compromises on that front.
But, as you say, the intent was always a good one. And I do think it’s had largely good political consequences – I suspect it’s a big part of the about-face that a lot of younger Republican types have had over gay rights in the past couple of decades, for example. It’s just… I’m a scientist, and at some points I value truth over consequences. And this is one of them.
Again, thanks for an excellent review. And personally thanks for the response to my comment. By the way, I was a little shocked at how long that turned out. In my defense, it’s a big subject. Still, my apologies.
But I will keep this part shorter. To me it seems very likely that when concepts or principles in some research field replicate religious notions, either as founding principles or as things to prove (or, efficiently, both,) there are issues of personal and social biases raised that shouldn’t be ignored. This sort of thing I think raises red flags about group thinking. On the other hand, I think that an analysis informed by what used to be called a materialist perspective before it was rejected by most philosophers is not favored by such prejudices.
I’ve not read Proving History, nor am I very familiar with Bayesian/subjective probability (Bayes’ theorem itself seems to me to permit a frequentist interpretation but it seems most Bayesians are subjectivist,) or how you calculate probabilities or distributions for historical events, so I will not speak to that criticism directly. I can only say that if the only scientific approach is falsification, then the problem of induction arises. And that problem appears to be fatal not just to any notion of science, but to any notion of objective reality as well.
If religious notions are not a problem for a scientific approach, then it is reasonable to assume a hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead, no? And if the absence of evidence means we cannot speak scientifically, how can we claim that it is nonsense to say that he did? We can’t even prove there are no miracles now, much less then.
No, the problem of induction is as avoided in Bayesian reasoning as any other. The conclusion of Bayes’ Theorem from its premises is a deductive one, not inductive. And each premise in Bayesian reasoning is the observation that given data set x, the frequency of y in x is p. That is also a deductive conclusion, not an inductive one. The question then is how likely is it that x (all that you observe) is representative of all like sets (anything new you may observe). One can deductively show what the probability is that x is a sample biased too far for or against y for p to be generalized beyond x, because for either to be the case, you can calculate how unlikely the coincidence is that all you observe is x (the most generalized result is Laplace’s Rule of Succession; but for a complete unpacking of how this has that effect see William Faris’s book review of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes, in Notices of the American Mathematical Society 53.1 [January 2006]: 33–42). That calculation will usually end you up with a very small probability, conjoined with an error margin (the principle of confidence level and confidence interval; Bayes then runs with the end of the interval that argues a fortiori against any conclusion you want to test: all this is explained in Proving History).
Note that the remaining limitation (that there is a nonzero probability x is too biased for you to assert p) has nothing to do with the falsification requirement. It is true of all models of verification. Thus, the so-called “problem of induction” always exists, no matter what. All we can do is get the epistemic probability of being wrong to be low. We can never get it to be zero. But that we can get it to be low (when we restrict our assertions of probability to the epistemic domain) is the solution to the problem of induction.
So, no, the fact that only passing falsification tests can verify a hypothesis, does not increase or create the problem of induction.
And I’ll reiterate, what I am saying, is logically necessarily the case: the only way to verify a hypothesis is to have it pass an adequate falsification test (or tests). Because if you have not shown that P(e|~h.b) is low, you cannot say P(h|e.b) is high. And that is a deductive fact of logic. Thus, the only way to verify h, is to confirm that no evidence falsifies h. Otherwise, for example, if you find some evidence e that is what is expected on h, if e is also expected on ~h, it cannot increase the probability of h. It is therefore not in fact evidence of h. Even if h totally predicted that evidence and even if that evidence is totally consistent with h. Thus, the only evidence that can increase the probability of h is evidence we can show is not expected on ~h.
Now, direct falsification of course happens if we find evidence that is unlikely on h, i.e. evidence that makes P(e|h.b) low. But evidence that is unlikely on ~h falsifies competing explanations of h. Thus, those are falsification tests as well. The best falsification tests are those we can think of that would show P(e|h.b) is low; and then we find the evidence that would do that isn’t where it is expected to be—but expected on what? on ~h. Thus, all falsification tests are actually looking for a low P(e|~h.b). And just hoping not to find a low P(e|h.b) instead.
I explain in Proving History that historical claims (like empirical conclusions in philosophy) are just science claims with less data. They are known to high probabilities, but not as high as warrants the label of science in expected parlance (one reason why the failure rate in psychology is a scandal). Since it’s all about probabilities, you can certainly reach conclusions with high probability on matters like whether Jesus (or any of the other dozen savior gods back then) actually rose from the dead. In fact, such claims as those start with very low priors because of science (all scientific background data on how corpses behave make actual resurrection, which has never been observed by science, extremely improbable before you even consider the evidence in a specific case, which means you need extraordinary evidence to overcome that problem: see my lecture on Miracles & Historical Method for a complete explanation). So this is a question science has already addressed (do people tend to rise from the dead with any observable frequency? no). This would be different if resurrections were a recurring phenomenon, or anything of a relevant class of power was (e.g. if hospitals had miracle wings staffed by righteous priests who could perform wonders on command; or we got to walk into Klatu’s spaceship).
I think the “kissing” example is a very good one for showing how exactly Evo Psych often fails at looking over the borders of even the university the researchers work in. It’s not universal and even in very similar societies there can be vast differences.
Germans may hug but very seldomly kiss friends, yet a mere 30 km from my place in France that’s the social norm and I’m pretty sure that I’m more likely to share genes with the folks across the border than those living somewhere at the North Sea. Go to Latin America and the level at which people kiss is set way, way lower again while also jealousy and public display of macho behaviour is much more acceptable.
My last probability and statistics course was in 1973 (or maybe 1972?) so there is some lengthy reading ahead, even though I already have long reading list. At this point I do not understand how the data sets are not inductive, rather than deductive. I do not understand how to prove P(e|~h) is low (or high,) can be scientifically demonstrated if only looking at all the evidence there is, rather than all the evidence we need, isn’t scientific. I rather thought we generally had only a sampling of evidence, usually a biased one at that. I don’t under stand how to reduce the alternative explanations in ABE to ~h, instead of a sum of the probabilities for each alternative explanation, plus the probabilities for the unimagined ones.. I don’t understand how a falsificationist test for science permits a falsificationist test for the acceptance of empirical reality. I don’t think anybody has devised an experiment to prove empricism, which is why I thought, as its creator Popper acknowledged, the problem of induction is a problem for falsificationism that it isn’t in other perspectives. And I don’t understand why this problem doesn’t apply to the experimental natural sciences. You can’t just assume correct deductions in history because you’ve uncritically accepted conclusions from other fields. I don’t understand how falsificationism works in historical natural sciences. Popper allowed himself to be persuaded evolutionary science was scientific when somebody or other cobbled up some Rube Goldberg example but so far as I know the normal practice of evolutionary science is not really guided by a falsificationist scheme, even if the rhetoric is added.
Of course it would be rude for me to imply it’s your responsibility to amend my vast ignorance. I just hope this partial list explains why there are reservations on my part, and others, that aren’t just obstinate refusal to think. You write in you conclusion “They are known to high probabilities, but not as high as warrants the label of science in expected parlance…”
This is a common view of what constitutes sciences, but the notion that there is no scientific history, nor indeed any social science, nor any historical natural science…well, this is plainly an enormous claim. It has been popular for some time to repudiate the vicious totalitarian Enlightenment ideology. But I do hope that you can understand that reluctance to accept deductive truth is not motivated solely by moral corruption.
Thank you for your time.
I’m a bit of a fan of Evo-Psych, but only a bit. My tendency is to look for simple mechanisms that could have interacted to cause a complex behaviour. For example, we often hear that men are constantly thinking about sex. Nicholas Epley (2015) in his book Mind-Wise pointed out that men don’t think about sex as much as claimed, but do think about sex more than women, but that this is in the context of thinking about all of their bodily needs more. I would expect that one could plausibly extend that finding to suggest that the ubiquitous man-flu is a by-product of a brain that is more inclined to self-test for current status, i.e. a male one.
I’m curious, Richard, as to what you have to say about Deirdre Barrett’s book, Supernormal Stimuli (2010). It is an extension of Nico Tinbergen’s work on that topic, indeed the first chapter or two detail his life and work. The reason I ask is because she, somewhat contrary to a few lines in Sense and Goodness, defines what in fact “cute” is, and that it is (at least somewhat) objective, and it is distinctly Evo~Psych in flavour.
Many thanks, and keep up the good work. I feel like your blog is forcing me to do better in my own theorising.
I’d still worry that the finding you mention in the first paragraph was not actually controlled adequately for culture.
The second paragraph actually echoes and reinforces the very point I make myself (in Part VI, “Natural Beauty”: Sense and Goodness, pp. 351-66). Although I believe (?) she was referring to neonatality (kittens) not felinity (cats).
Richard,
You wrote:
No, that rather clearly was not the question.
The question was: How many is “too many” as you meant it in this sentence:
Even if scat is a less popular fetish than cuckolding, as you claim it is and I’ll accept that for the sake of argument, that doesn’t answer the question. Unless you mean to say that “more people than are into scat” equals “too many.” And I don’t see why it would.
You also mention emotional versus sexual infidelity. But even if a majority of men are more concerned about emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity, that doesn’t answer the question, or necessarily even relate to the question in a significant way. Emotional infidelity can clearly be a reliable proxy for or early warning sign of sexual infidelity — they aren’t completely different things, especially if we’re talking about jealousy.
I tried to be careful about the question I was asking, and to ask it more than once, but you seemed to miss the question: How many is “too many”? Specifically as you meant “too many” in this sentence:
You seem to acknowledge that the observed human response to excrement may indicate an innate, biological, at least meaningfully universal disgust reflex in our species. However, you seem to still want to carve out an exception for jealousy — unlike disgust, jealousy is not innate, biological and meaningfully universal.
The proposal appears to be that disgust is innate and jealousy is not.
I don’t see that you have made a case for your proposal through much more than assertion. Specifically the assertion that the quantity of men with either a no-jealousy response or a convert-jealousy-to-something-pleasurable response to mate infidelity is so great that it rules out the innate hypothesis for jealousy. To even begin to test this assertion, we would need to answer these questions:
–Roughly what percentage of men display the atypical responses (assuming you grant that a cuckolding fetish is atypical)?
–How do we know that this percentage crosses a threshold relating to innateness?
–Do the majority of cuckolding fetishists truly experience no negative jealousy response at all, or do most convert or transform that negative emotion into arousal the way that scat fetishists convert disgust into arousal?
–Do those who experience jealousy as a negative emotion but convert it into arousal count as evidence against the innate hypothesis? If so, do scat fetishists who convert disgust into pleasure count in the same way against the hypothesis that disgust is innate?
–More generally, does the fact that human beings can be sexually aroused by a wide range of usually negative biologically innate impulses — fear, anger, suffering — also mean that those impulses are now in question as biologically innate? Does the presence of arousal in some ever mean “not innate”? If so, when and why?
The fact that humans can devise complex reactions to our basic impulses (and that culture often adds an additional layer of complexity) in no way argues against the existence of those basic impulses. Those impulses can be biologically innate without uniformity of expression. I don’t see that you have even begun to justify a categorical exception for jealousy as a biologically innate response by reference to communities of cuckold fetishists/compersives. Even granting that this community is larger than that of scat fetishists, that could still just mean, speculating here, that the biologically innate jealousy response is more malleable than the biologically innate disgust response, possibly because disgust relates more to individual survival (the pathogens in shit can kill you) and jealousy more to reproduction and social behavior (losing a mate probably isn’t going to kill you, but the wrong behavioral response to the biologically innate feeling of jealousy could).
This sentence of yours is a fairly straightforward pronouncement that contradicts an enormous about of scientific work on the subject of jealousy:
You exclude even the possibility of jealousy as a biologically innate response. Without good evidence and argument to back it up, I don’t see how you are not doing what you accuse EvoPsychs of doing: Deciding first how you want human nature to be, and then grabbing whatever is nearby to support it as “just so.”
I already answered these points: EvoPsych can’t make pronouncements without having answered these very questions. And it has not. Therefore, any assumptions it asserts to be true about them are pseudoscience.
As for the problems with the whole sex difference in jealousy issue (remember, that’s the argument: not that jealousy isn’t evolved, but that sexual jealousy was evolved largely only in men by a mechanism only of reproductive interest to men; plus, that it evolved to be activated by the visual stimulus of observed kissing), the evidence I listed against EvoPsych’s conclusion was vastly greater than the one minor thing you are obsessing over. You might want to ask why you are ignoring that.
I don’t understand why atheists would oppose evolutionary psychology. Is it because you are leftists? I heard that Gould and Lewontin used to oppose gene-centered view of Dawkins and sociobiology of E.O. Wilson because they were marxists of sorts. What they didn’t like was the possiblity of there being a human nature that is too rigid to change radically as communists envisioned. I also see the name of Rebecca Watson mentioned in this article or the one above this one that is calling Dawkins and Coyne “duderolls-something”, mocking them. I know that R. Watson is some feminist blogger that once campaigned against Dawkins declaring him to be a misogynist or something.
Such radical leftist people will sacrifice science itself for their political goals. If they want people to believe that patriarchy can be subdued easier if people do not believe that there is a biological history and foundation to it. So they might be motivated to trash evolutionary psychology if it says anything like that.
Same goes for communist minded people. If they figure that “evo-psych” is undermining the socialist cause by telling people human nature cannot really change much, unlike marxism claimed when they said culture, behavior, worldview, science, art and values are based entirely on the economic infrastructure and changing the “relations of production” one can create any kind of culture or human being they want, perhaps then evo-psych becomes a legitimate target.
I highly doubt that Steven Pinker or E.O. Wilson or David Buss or any other sociobiologist is any less a liberal than any of you. I think it is really sad that a promising new science is trashed this way only because of political concerns.
If evo-psych has mistakes in method or conception, they will have to be corrected within its own paradigm. I don’t think there is any other alternative for a truly scientific psychology. All sciences have to be ultimately reducible to physics to be sciences at all, and biology is the only route for psychology.
Dear Mr. Fake Email Address:
Atheists believe in the scientific method. They therefore oppose pseudosciences.
QED.
P.S. Cultural history demonstrates empirically that human behavior is extraordinarily malleable and changeable. And atheists are all about believing what the evidence extensively shows.
You misunderstand me. I am an atheist myself. I just dont see why you should trash jerry coyne and dawkins. And trash evopsych. Evopsych is all about taking darwin seriously. What is wrong with you? It is not even your field, why are so sure that it is rubbish? You should read books by david buss and pinker.
Dawkins? I never mention Dawkins in this article. And Coyne, almost everything I say about him in this article is positive, and the only negative things I say are not “trashing” but just actual documented observations of him not applying his own stated principles.
So you clearly did not read this article and you clearly have no actual objection to anything I actually said in this article.
If you want to know why I am so sure EvoPsych is over 90% rubbish, maybe you should read the article?
You would then notice I am relying on the observations of a dozen experts who are in relevant fields agreeing with me that it is rubbish. So why do you think they think it’s rubbish? Well, if you read my article, you’ll find out.
You will also, when you do that, notice I actually discuss Pinker (and some of the content also pertains to Buss; though I don’t name him myself, some of the expert critics I cite, do).
Finally, EvoPsych is not “all about taking darwin seriously.” And you would know what it really was all about, and how it goes wildly beyond anything Darwin ever scientifically proposed or defended. EvoPsych is no more “all about taking darwin seriously” than Social Darwinism was.
“In the statistical aggregate, it costs more to under-detect agency than over-detect it. So there is a very plausible selective pathway for our brains to have evolved into limited over-detectors.”
Except there’s no need for such a thing to be genetically determined if the evolutionary cost/benefit is reflected in individual experience of punishment and reward (e.g. pain and pleasure) when interacting with the environment; the vertebrate brain seems evolved to function as sort of a coincidence detector, this means that -under the influence of such a cost differential- the statistical aggregate of encountered information during normal development could well lead to over-detection of agency.
Yes, agency over-detection could be an evolved specialization of a more generic coincidence overdetector. But it still has to be a specialized evolution, because unlike other coincidence detecting, this one causes us to attribute conscious intelligence as the cause (and then model and speculate about it), whereas other coincidences we attribute to blind natural forces (e.g. landscape mapping; metallurgy; astrology).
But no, evolved mechanisms do not have to tie into pain/pleasure responses. There is no pain or pleasure response in most cognitive biases like agency overdetection: we simply, literally, just “perceive” the agency. The bias operates subconsciously and pre-cognitively. It therefore does not require secondary activation of the generic pain/pleasure motivation system.
And the evolutionary cost/benefit is not in the pain/pleasure outcome. It’s literally in the DRS: if 1% more people are killed by underdetecting agency than overdetecting it, overdetection will become uniform in the species within a few thousand years. No pain or pleasure ever need be activated.
Update: There just came out a really good survey of what’s wrong with EvoPsych (evincing its crypto-sexist bias) on gender differences (from exposing the false claim that critics of EvoPsych deny any innate differences exist, to exposing the fact that EvoPsych has demonstrated innate gender differences when it hasn’t). See On Setting The “Universal Sex Difference” Bar Way Too Low.
Update: New article about the problem with standard significance testing that discusses why this method is degrading the reliability of psychology (and pharmacology as well): The Problem with p-Values (by David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology). And now a more extensive article about the peer review crisis across all science: Why We Can’t Trust Academic Journals to Tell the Scientific Truth (by Julian Kirchherr). Related to this is a burgeoning problem of fake journals in the sciences, a fact even self-described skeptics are blithely ignorant of: An Embarrassing Moment for the Skeptical Movement (by Massimo Pigliucci).
Update: The Social Sciences Reproducibility Project has now started getting results as well. And it doesn’t look good. Likewise in Economics; equally alarming. Both show a failure rate of about 1 in 3. See also related work expanding on studying the reliability of research in Psychology.
Thank you, Dr. Carrier, for this extensive analysis of evolutionary psychology. I am somewhat immunized from the worst of the populist nonsense filtered through the profit-driven media, but, as a layman, was still susceptible to the sounder-looking “findings” from the discipline itself, and this is a welcome warning (which I only just realised is several years old).
It is good to note the definition of pseudo-science that you give here, particularly the requirement of over-confidence or assertion of a position, and it is personally a relief to me, because I enjoy, and believe there is value in, conjecturing on matters beyond empirical access or, as you also make clear, beyond current empirical access. The physical evolution of the human lineage, its cultural evolution, and the relationship between these, are fascinating and important subjects tantalizingly outside, or on the borders of, our harder sciences. At one end, EvoPsych (at its best, if it has a best) analyses current human psychology, trying to project backwards; at the other, even the hardest data from archaeology requires interpreting, which can involve testable hypotheses or wander into the unfalsifiable desert of archaeo-guesswork.
I would offer one tentative criticism, however. Where you discuss the “gendered-toys” subject, I think it is something of a misunderstanding (I would not accuse you of deliberate straw-manning) to dismiss the hypothesis on the grounds you gave, in particular, that there is no possible behavioural trigger for a male monkey in the wild to play with a wheeled toy, since it doesn’t know what a car is. I imagine the causal process hypothesized is that male primate evolution stressed an interest in a range of environmental examples of functional, mechanical, spatio-kinetic phenomena, predisposing the male human to prefer observed or historically attested functions that involve similarly mechanical processes (ploughing, making and throwing weapons, collecting sports cars…). Similarly, it might be a reasonably hypothesis that females might cuddle, and practise nurturing behaviours with, soft toys even with the most rudimentary and unrepresentative facial features (and skin colours) and, since in most primates including humans the female cares for and feeds offspring, there is even (plausibly) a continuous positive selective pressure through time upon female nurturance behaviours.
Harlow, after all, established baby monkeys’ preference for clinging to a soft surrogate “mother” (when not too hungry), rather than the feeding one, and we don’t complain that neither has a real-looking face and doesn’t move, and monkeys can’t possibly have evolved to cling to fake fur or suckle from a bottle. Similarly, supernormal stimulus can be demonstrated with Tinbergen’s model bird beaks, which baby birds prefer to real ones.
I think your usually rigorous analysis also dropped significantly in arguing that lots of boys play with dolls, like GI Joes, and that you played with dolls, when the first at least needs a little more evaluation (do more girls play with dolls than boys, and is it significant that boys tend to play with war figures while girls tend to feed and change baby dolls?), and the latter – I hardly need point out – is pure anecdote.
Neither criticism is meant with malice, of course, and no doubt pale into insignificance next to the cognitive blunders I run into all the time. But we should all avoid grist to the opposition’s mill where we catch ourselves, or others catch us.
I think you give a range of valid general principles that throw the hypothesis under consideration into serious doubt, at the very least, and the studies you mention appear to be badly designed and involve a very curious choice of objects, which don’t even fit the (at least plausible) causal rationale I have suggested (a cooking pot, for instance, has hardly any of either basic features: it certainly isn’t cuddly or baby-like, but it has almost no interest for the mechanically-manipulative mind either; perhaps it was chosen for that reason, stupidly, as some kind of control).
I would like to find out more about this area of study (hoping – I admit – that it falls apart even more), partly because it is one of the range of assertions used by the likes of Jordan Peterson – currently far too popular – to justify patriarchies, undermining social justice and feminism. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor resources (financial or educational) to make a full assessment myself. I’m not sure how it would affect my politics were such fundamental sex differences established, but the argument against “equality of outcomes” (as opposed to equality of opportunity) might hold more water, and that for “positive discrimination” might be weakened.
Thank you again for this, and all your other brilliant work.
You just defended bad science with more “just so” stories that were totally made up and don’t have any scientific study confirming them, ignored the examples given here for that very same study that don’t match (and thus refute) your made up theory, and then dismissed vast data (a massive GI Joe doll industry) as a mere isolated anecdote.
You might want to see to what’s going on here. You are thinking very badly. Why?
Thanks for replying. I am disappointed. You appear not to have given proper consideration to my points.
I was at great pains not to defend bad science, and supported your general criticism of it, and I wonder which bad science you imagine I defended and how. What I did was challenge you to think more carefully on a couple of points you used in your criticism of bad science, mainly because – as I think I explained – having bad criticisms can backfire. You failed to respond to those, instead insulting me with your patronizing nonsense.
You criticised the gendered toys experiments partly on their assumption that male monkeys would be drawn to wheeled toys only if they knew what a vehicle does, etc. This is a mistaken basis for criticism of the hypothesis. As I said, it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that some features of particular objects illicit responses that translate in the human to gender preferences for cars or babies.
Although there may be lots of GI Joes and other “dolls” that boys typically tend to play with, the fact that these are very different from those girls typically play with undermines the simple statement that lots of boys play with dolls too. Boys’ “dolls”, as you want to characterize them, are little different from the tin soldiers earlier generations played with, just more modern and able to be put in better action poses, and the games played are also the same – warfare. They are in fact objects to aspire to for boys (unfortunately), images of aggressive, violent grown men. Girls, meanwhile, spend hours changing nappies and feeding their pretend infants, playing the role of grown, nurturing, loving women. Those differences aren’t easily swept aside.
I was, perhaps, wrong to imply that your GI Joe comment was anecdotal, because it was in parentheses as a private, only incidentally-supporting fact to the main argument (which I contest above). But then, better really not to mention it for the reason I gave, not to give grist to the pseudo-scientist’s mill.
Fingers crossed you get my points this time before you ignore them and insult me further.
I said a lot more than that. You ignored it.
Why?
You also made up stories about possible reasons monkeys would like wheeled objects. Based on no scientific evidence.
Why?
You ignored the fact that a massive toy industry is evidence of widespread, not idiosyncratic interest, and tried to pass it off as a rare idiosyncratic interest.
Why?
And now you do both: you ignore the fact I cited in the article that “the Teddy Bear was originally a boy’s toy.”
Why?
And instead completely make up a reason, based on no scientific evidence, that GI Joe dolls were only “liked” because they are associated with violence.
Why are you defending a pseudoscience, by pseudoscientifically making up stories based on no evidence? That’s called shooting yourself in the foot. Or striking an own goal.
It’s just the worse that your made-up theory is refuted by the evidence you inexplicably ignored: the previous popularity of teddy bears among boys.
We could have added a great deal more. Read this article (and this and this). Boys have been playing with plush, nonviolent dolls quite popularly for ages now.
Why do you ignore evidence, make shit up instead, and then claim you’ve defended a science against the justified accusation of doing the very same thing you just did?
What’s wrong with you?
I didn’t ignore it. I complimented you on it and supported it in general (glowing) statements. In order to point out one or two possible mistakes (doing so politely and in the midst of complimentary and supportive communication) why must I respond to everything you’ve said? That’s ridiculous.
It seems eminently clear to me now that you’re doing that as a distraction from the contended points, such as that it’s unhelpful to criticise those gendered-toy experiments on the grounds that the monkeys don’t know what a car is. I have clarified the point sufficiently, and you’re still distracting us from the issue by criticising me for things I do not say or even imply, and actually explicitly criticise myself. To reiterate – I think almost all of your dealing with the issue is on point, and I merely wanted to remind you that imagining spurious rationales behind scientific hypotheses that those proposing them do not intend opens you to unnecessary criticism. If you disagree, fine. You don’t have to twist it round into vitriol against the one raising the concerns.
I did not make up “stories about possible reasons monkeys would like wheeled objects. Based on no scientific evidence,” I made the reasonable assumption that the scientists who did such experiments weren’t quite so imbecilic as to hold the views you appeared to assume they must have laboured under. Do they say in the studies that male monkeys obviously want to learn to drive? If not, your points were missing the point, and you open yourself to that kind of come-back by doing so.
No, I did not. You’re clearly deliberately misinterpreting my statements and arguments and motives.
Because I am not here to undermine your overall thesis, which is why I supported it in several of my original statements, even ending with thanks for this and all your “other excellent work”. It’s a long piece. Am I supposed to go through it all, statement by statement, telling you how right you are on all of them, as well as disagreeing with some of them? Isn’t it normal just to say it was all “excellent work” and then cite a caveat or two for you to consider?
Even now, you seem convinced I am trying to support the study in question. I am not. I am differentiating good reasons to critique it and bad ones based on misinterpretation of intention. But you seem to be prone to that, since you’re now doing it to me!
You’re even exaggerating my position on that, so desperate are you to win what you see as some kind of intellectual dispute. I did not say GI Joe dolls were only liked because they are associated with violence. I brought your attention to the different general modes of play of girls and boys with their dolls. This was, of course, in response to your implying that there is very little difference between girls’ doll use and boys’.
And that was already at one remove from my intention. I was not originally arguing even that point. I was suggesting that “boys play with dolls too – I had a GI Joe” is the sort of argument that your real opponents will find unconvincing, even ridiculous, because of the different types of doll and the modes of play that almost everyone knows about and witnesses.
I trust you will be able to figure out what’s wrong with both of those contentions from what I’ve said, but if not, we’ve reached the limits of my communication skills.
I’m sorry, you seriously imagine that whatever this popularity amounts to, its existence undermines the general trend of different modes of play with differently gendered toys, which is vastly in the direction of boys playing with active ones related to construction industries, farming, space exploration and warfare, and girls with baby dolls they pretend to nurse, later moving on to fashion dolls they dress up? Seriously? No, seriously though? You think you’ve found the exception that ruins that contention.
You provide some links that seem, at least in part, to back up what I’m saying (what I’ve now been brow-beaten into dealing with, at one remove from my intention), and do not provide much support for your position. Perhaps you skipped over these points:
“In ancient Greece [dolls] have been documented as being a plaything for girls as far back as 200 BC.” (So they even started as girls’ toys.)
“From the start, the Teddy Bear was considered to be suitable for either boys or girls, and marketed simply as a toy ‘for children’.” (So, they weren’t in fact, as you say, “a boy’s toy”. And were they more popular with boys, or just “popular”? And does it matter when what you’re pointing to is a complete outlier, an exception to the rule?)
The other two articles describe the struggle manufacturers have (and parents, and children themselves) to change the very feature you seem to be trying to deny exists, that there are (generally, on the whole) “girls’ toys” and “boys’ toys”, with some clearly different functions. I support you in the general contention that these are likely to be at least largely socially constructed differences (although, apparently unlike you, I’m not wedded to my beliefs quite so firmly that I have to defend them all the time with irrelevant tangents and ad homs).
My main point was that positing even slightly unreasonable criticisms of your target “pseudo-science” can backfire – people won’t trust that you’re able to see the real issues if you do that. Raising this with you has had the ironic effect on me that I don’t trust you, because you seem unable to deal with a criticism honestly. This throws into doubt all the work I thought I could trust of yours on Christianity or morality or anything else, which I had recently begun to rely on as mostly trustworthy. If a supposed expert in critical thinking can’t think critically about their own statements (or can’t actually understand what is being said, which I suppose is a possibility), I’ll find trustworthy expertise elsewhere.
Assumptions aren’t evidence, even when they come from scientists. That’s not how science works. You don’t just “assume x” and then because it’s a scientist assuming x, therefore x is now a scientific fact. That’s pseudoscience. That you don’t know even this leaves no reason to take anything you say seriously. You are wasting everyone’s time here.
The more so as you keep ignoring every other argument I presented, every other example and evidence, and instead keep obsessing on your made-up story about monkeys and wheels. And then keep acting like a vast quantity of historical evidence regarding boys and dolls as “ridiculous.”
So even when we have vast evidence, it’s “ridiculous,” and when we have no evidence at all it’s “science.” WTF? Like a flat earther, you make up even more stories about the evidence to explain it all away; made up stories about boys supposedly not actually playing with the dolls made for them en masse, made up stories for which you have no evidence, and which all evidence contradicts (need we start pulling out photographs of boys with their rag dolls and teddy bears, of which historical archives abound?).
You are off the rails here. You are defending pseudoscientific methods and conclusions, and humorously, attempting to avoid the charge, you continue defending the very methods of pseudoscience and act like a pseudoscientist, making stuff up, presenting no evidence for it, and making up excuses to ignore vast amounts of the evidence that actually does exist. Exactly like a pseudoscientist. That’s an own goal. You’ve simply proved my point.
Richard, as I said earlier, if you have been unable to comprehend my very clear, repeated clarification of what it is I am here to say, which is what I did say, I have reached the end of my communication skills.
It would be interesting at this point to invite you to take part in the well-trusted part of good discussion protocols to reflect, to paraphrase what the other person is (trying to) say, before ranting that it’s pseudo-scientific and supporting pseudo-science. A reading-comprehension test for the professor. But what’s the use. You’re clearly determined to imagine what I’m communicating and repeatedly insult me with it. An own goal. Shooting yourself in the foot. Why? Because anyone else of half your intelligence can see that’s what you’re doing.
As for the error of making assumptions, does that not apply to you? Could you provide, if asked, evidence that those you accuse of believing that monkeys respond to wheeled vehicles only because they know what they’re for, actually propose that explanatory scheme? Or was that something you assumed they believed?
Again, if you cannot understand the difference between the claim that boys and girls play differently, on the whole, with different toys, and being unable to find a picture of a boy playing with a doll, you’re an even bigger idiot than you already appear.
Omitting to check the “Notify me of new comments via email” box,
Ciao.
You continue to act like a pseudoscientist, pretending if we can’t disprove a theory, therefore your theory is proved. Wrong. That’s not how science works. I don’t have to prove a negative. You have no evidence for your theory of monkeys. Therefore it isn’t science. Therefore it isn’t applicable here. That you think it is is what makes you a pseudoscientist.
And that made-up theory only addresses one of half a dozen items of evidence confirming my conclusion. Ignoring all the evidence you can’t explain away, cherry picking one item of evidence as if none other exists, and making up a theory to explain it away, all on a basis of no science or evidence, is stock pseudoscience.
And making up more stuff about how boys and girls play with dolls in different cultures, or what kinds of dolls they play with, again based on zero evidence but just shit you made up in your head loosely based on an isolated observation of one culture in one unique historical period, is not science. It’s pseudoscience.
And thinking how kids play in a post-space-age WEIRD culture is at all informative of how monkeys would play in the wild is gold star pseudoscience.
Making shit up doesn’t rescue you from that fact. Making shit up is just making shit up. And that’s precisely not what real science does.
“You have no evidence for your theory of monkeys. Therefore it isn’t science.”
And your theory of monkeys? Don’t you need some evidence of that? ‘Which theory of monkeys?’ I hear you ask. The one I’ve been trying to get you to notice all through this, that they could only respond differently according to gender to objects used as stimulus if they recognise the human meaning of them. You claimed that. That is what you claimed. That’s yours.
Now, contrary to your positive statement of that, I wasn’t proposing a “theory of monkeys”. I was demonstrating that there is an alternative hypothesis regarding the causal process by which monkeys might respond to objects, and I suggested that this – being actually physically possible – is a (much more) reasonable one to assume the experimenters had in mind (I have no idea whether they did or not, and I don’t claim it is true, so your accusation that I’m making shit up and it’s pseudo-science is unfounded). You made the positive claim, as stated above, without evidence either that it would be necessary to support any findings, or that the scientists had this in mind as the mechanism (which obviously they’d be bonkers to – I don’t know why you imagined such a thing).
It is not even necessary for that to be their hypothesis regarding the mechanism, or to have one at all. They might do an experiment to discover whether or not they can detect differences, which would be an observation inviting the proposal of hypotheses about the mechanism. This is quite normal in science, observations preceding the development of explanations. But you, er, “made shit up” about the necessary causal mechanism if their observations were even to have been possible. Which is why I started this, not expecting it to be quite such a long and tedious haul to get you to grasp it.
“And making up more stuff about how boys and girls play with dolls in different cultures, or what kinds of dolls they play with, again based on zero evidence but just shit you made up in your head loosely based on an isolated observation of one culture in one unique historical period, is not science. It’s pseudoscience.”
Again, my point was that YOU failed to consider the question of whether these involved different forms of play, used to different degrees by boys and girls, and were different types of object, despite your choice of the word “doll”, suggesting there are none of these differences.
To criticise me for an “isolated observation of one culture”, when you cited your own individual doll, isn’t that a little odd? But sure, I should not have made the opposite counter-claim without evidence…
However, it seemed you provided a fair bit of that in the articles you linked to, somehow imagining they supported your view. The articles, as I already noted, and as you already ignored entirely, describe the struggle manufacturers had and are still having to encourage the sexes to play with similar toys. Were your contention true, this would be easy – indeed, nobody would be talking about gendered toys in the first place. We’d all have been playing with them exactly the same since 200 BC or whenever it was one of your citations said dolls were first played with – by girls.
You now start criticising me for not consulting a wide enough set of cultures in forming my pseudo-scientific hypothesis, or from a long enough period. I’m doing the WEIRD error now. Funnily enough, you didn’t say anything about how boys and girls played with dolls in other cultures at different times, just that Teddybears were first produced for boys, which was wrong anyway according to your own sources. That was in the USA, a weird culture 😉 , and you mention no other. The only other culture or time period mentioned besides modern Western ones is ancient Greece, and I mentioned that. It involved a gender difference in children’s toys.
I’m sorry, did I miss your extensive cross-cultural study of gender differences in toy use over the millennia, showing there weren’t any?
“And thinking [that] how kids play in a post-space-age WEIRD culture is at all informative of how monkeys would play in the wild is gold star pseudoscience.”
I’ve not said any such thing, I don’t know why you asked, and you seem to have the inference backwards. We were discussing inferring things about humans from monkeys (although we might, I suppose do the opposite).
You just keep repeating the same errors: ignoring all the other evidence I listed, obsessing over your made up theory about monkeys, ignoring the ethnographic record and historical evidence refuting your made up theory, and falsely claiming we need our own theory of monkeys to reject yours when in fact all we need to do that is the fact that it is based on exactly zero evidence. In short, in every single instance, you use, side with and defend the methods of pseudoscience, not that of actual science. Thus all you keep doing is proving my point. There isn’t even anything left to argue.
Sigh.
“falsely claiming we need our own theory of monkeys to reject yours”
You must know that is a downright lie, or you’re having trouble thinking.
I did not claim you need a theory of monkeys (to reject mine or not); I criticised your claim, as I explained perfectly comprehensively last time.
You claimed a theory of monkeys. I criticised it. You don’t have any evidence for it. It is a silly theory. Nobody shares it.
Look, here it is. I’ve dug it out for you to read.
You claimed, “the thesis [is] illogical. It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience.”
and
“…not one of which would be meaningful to a monkey, of any gender. Never mind that monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do, that trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in”… etc.
So, obviously I didn’t claim you need your own theory of monkeys to reject mine, because I knew you had one already.
So, to the explanation of why your theory of monkeys is bananas.
Of course it’s impossible that monkeys evolved a preference for cooking pots or police cars recognised as such, but that does not make the thesis illogical, because you’ve supplied the silly thesis. It is perfectly possible for them to evolve a preference for those things incidentally, not because they know what those things are or do, but because they have features that stimulate particular behaviours, and (if there were sex differences in their and in humans’ responses, these might be related to the same general features).
Gwen Dewar considers the same studies, and doesn’t fall into the same trap you did:
“What is intrinsically male about a toy truck–something that wasn’t even invented until the 20th century?
“We’re a long way from answering that rather imponderable question. But there are some hints.
“For instance, there is some evidence that males tend to prefer looking at mechanical motion rather than biological motion. In one experiment, researchers presented 12-month old babies with videos of cars and faces. Male babies looked longer at images of moving cars. Girl babies looked longer at videos of moving faces (Lutchmaya and Baron-Cohen 2002).
“And, as noted by Christina Williams and Kristen Pleil–who conducted their own toy experiments–toy trucks have interesting apertures to investigate, and may lend themselves to certain kinds of mechanical exploration that simply don’t apply to most soft toys or dolls (Williams and Pleil 2009). ”
She also hypothesizes that mechanical toys can make more of a ruckus, and might be favoured by males for their use in dominance displays.
https://www.parentingscience.com/girl-toys-and-parenting.html
“You just keep repeating the same errors”
I keep explaining your error to you in more and more precise ways. Your replies are becoming almost identical. They have barely communicated a new thought in weeks, beyond the odd new lie.
“There isn’t even anything left to argue.”
Well, there’s the original point I made, now neatly dissected out of the rotting corpse of this conversation. You seem to have some aversion to it.
And you just repeat everything again. I advanced no theory of monkeys. I stated a fact about monkeys. You made no evidence-based claim about monkeys. You are ignoring all the other evidence. And continuing to make shit up based on no science.
This is pointless.
Hi Richard,
I gave it a while before replying again to give us both time to think, and because my repetition (as you see it) appears to be irritating and pointless to you.
However, I hope you’ll forgive me having just one more attempt at understanding where I’m going wrong. I really hate misunderstanding things, and I was drawn to your work because you seemed to be as rigorous as I am in your approach to discussion.
Instead of “repeating”, therefore, this time I thought I’d just ask a few questions, which I imagine ought to have yes/no answers, but which you might feel deserve unpacking or “it’s complicated” or something. This will hopefully make it quicker to respond, just using the numbers and Y/N or whatever.
Do you still stand by your statements that I quoted last time? The gist again: “It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience. […] monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do […] trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in”
Am I right in understanding that you hold the view that in order to display sexually dimorphic responses to a particular object, an animal must have evolved with that object in its ancient environment?
Do you mean that the illogicality of this “impossibile” presumption entirely refutes (rather than merely undermines) scientific studies into sexual dimorphism in response to modern objects?
Do you think other mechanisms suggested last time (that males might enjoy exploring the shapes or mechanics of objects more than females; that some mechanical or hard objects might indicate their usefulness in threat displays, etc.) have any explanatory value?
What kind of explanation can there be for such phenomena as birds collecting highly reflective objects like bottle tops, silver foil, jewellery, etc., for their nest decoration, if these did not exist in their evolutionary past?
Would not the sexual dimorphism of response of such birds (males do this, not females, AFAIK) be an example refuting your objection to the monkeys’ (alleged) differential response to objects?
Many thanks
John
“It’s possible monkeys would display some sort of sexually dimorphic responses to objects they play with, therefore they did, and not only did, but developed the specific responses I claim they did” is a non sequitur. It is exactly the opposite of how science works.
Moreover, you continue to ignore all the other converging lines of evidence I cited, and keep obsessing over this one single thing you made up. There wasn’t just one line of evidence demonstrating the study pseudoscience, but half a dozen or more. And you can’t rebut half a dozen points by ignoring five, and responding to one by inventing shit never demonstrated anywhere in the entire history of science.
That you think you can is what makes you a pseudoscientist pushing pseudoscience.
I notice you declined to answer any of my questions. You know why I switched from statements to questions, don’t you? It was because you were refusing to engage honestly with my criticisms. For about 20 exchanges.
Yes. It is. But that is not what I am saying, as you know. You just straw-manned me, making up that quote! You’re getting worse. I didn’t think you could, but you are actually now putting ridiculous words in my mouth. What a disgusting way to go on!
However, getting back to the matter at hand, YOU seem to be saying, “It is impossible that monkeys would display sexually dimorphic responses to objects they play with unless those objects are part of their evolutionary history.”
Since you refused to engage in reasonable discussion of this point, I even wrote it as a question for you to acknowledge or deny, in case I had misunderstood. You have declined to answer.
So, since you don’t deny it, I’ll take it that is indeed your position (as just presented).
Mine is this: “I do not know that it is impossible for monkeys to display sexual dimorphism in their responses to objects without those objects being in their evolutionary environment.”
You see? You see how that is expressing agnosticism on the point. And actually, since it is YOUR text I am critiquing, it literally does not matter what my position on the issue is, only what your position is and whether you can defend it.
I am not arguing even for the reality of those general types of response, let alone demanding that particular responses were observed. I am contesting your positive statement that you know that is impossible…as I have explained tirelessly now for months, and which you still seem unable to comprehend. Odd that, for a philosophy professor.
As you will have recognised weeks ago, but still refuse to acknowledge, I didn’t make “this one single thing up”, you made up its negation, the impossibility of it. I am asking you to explain how you know what you said you know. That’s all. Other “converging lines of evidence” are irrelevant. As you very well know, but dare not admit.
As you very well know, I did not rebut any line of evidence, because I am not trying to make an argument. I am requiring YOU to do what you go on and on and on and on about endlessly, which is to have reasons behind the statements YOU make. The statement in question should stand on its own. Each point you make, such as the one I am “obsessing over”, ought to be empirically defensible or rationally defensible, on its own.
Since you’re still struggling to understand this, I’ll give you another example. You could not, for instance, say, “Monkeys never drink water,” and then, when I ask you what the hell you’re on about, say, “I said a lot more than that”, and “You’re obsessing over that one issue”, and “You think you’ve proved monkeys drink water but your evidence sucks, so you’re a pseudo-scientist”!
Does that little vignette remind you of anything, Dr Carrier?
It was so easy – all you had to do was use critical thinking for a second, you know, from that course you teach, recognise that your statement was not one of those you could put alongside the others, however sound they were, because it was false, and then say, “Oops, yeah, my bad. I’ll edit that.” You know, like people do who are open to learning and changing their minds, which is what thinking is for. And this would have been over and done with in two comments, and you wouldn’t look like a complete dick, in public, on your own blog.
That you think you can just keep batting this away by insulting the person making sense in the exchange and trying to teach you something is what makes you a complete dick.
“I do not know that it is impossible…” is not how science works. We cannot draw conclusions about what is likely from what we merely deem possible. That’s why we need evidence to affirm anything probable. And if we cannot affirm it probable, we cannot affirm it.
You still don’t seem to even understand what we are talking about, why the science you are trying to defend is bad, or what good science would even look like.
You again keep obsessing over one thing, ignoring all the other converging evidence to the same conclusion, and give no evidence for this one thing you wish to affirm being at all likely and thus at all relevant.
And you keep doing this over and over again with giant repetitive wordwalls. Learning nothing. Repeating already-refuted assertions. And wasting everyone’s time here.
That isn’t science, it’s a philosophical proposition. As I correctly said last time, it is a statement of agnosticism. As such, it requires no evidence. It is the exact opposite of, “I know that it is impossible,” which is the claim you made, and which you are sadly neither willing to defend or abandon.
It’s a pity. You were becoming something of a hero for me, but you’ve turned out to be one of the worst kinds of hypocrite. You require others to provide support for their statements, but don’t hold yourself to the same standard, preferring to insult and lie.
You say something is impossible, and I am requiring you to say how you know that statement is true, i.e. provide evidence or reason.
This is why your second sentence does not apply (to me).
I gave POSSIBILITIES, hypothetical explanations that MIGHT BE true. I did not say any of them is true or even likely. These were given merely to illustrate that your impossibility claim was worth exercising scepticism about. If Watson said, “There is no way into this walled garden for a murderer to have got in, with the door bricked up and poisonous snakes installed along the top!”, and Holmes pointed out that there was a trap-door, or that the maid had said something about the master of the house enjoying hot-air ballooning, I’d be Holmes, and it really is elementary, dear Carrier. Holmes does not have to be right that the murderer fell in from the sky or tunneled in, or that one of those is likely, or even that any murder took place. Watson’s statement would not be true until it is supported in its own right. Contrary evidence, however, puts it in doubt. Unfortunately for Watson, with a statement of impossibility, all contrary possibilities have to be eliminated somehow.
We need evidence (or perhaps more correctly reason) to affirm anything impossible. In fact, to establish your view as PROBABLY impossible is a weaker position than its absolute affirmation, so your objection again applies to your logic. But you refuse to give reasons why you know what you claim.
You even avoided answering a yes/no question to affirm or deny that you stand by it! You prefer to lie repeatedly about what I’m saying, despite repeated correction.
Since your positive claim should be reasonable on its own grounds, all the evidence I need here is that you made the positive claim.
Now, since you’re sick of my text walls and repetition, I’ll stop writing here when you adequately explain your reasoning for the claim (or admit that it was a mistake). You might also just abandon the subject and refrain from moderating my reply, but you may come to regret that even more. Tricky, innit?
It should be possible, surely, to explain why you said what you said, and why other suggested causes are impossible. Logic dictates, of course, that if one of them is possible, your claim is mistaken, so eliminating each in turn seems futile, but perhaps some general principle makes your claim true and all of them impossible at one stroke. I’m not pre-judging. We’ve yet to hear a single word from you in defence of your theory of monkeys.
Do stop blithering on about how I’m not dealing with all the other “converging evidence” against the thing I’m trying to affirm, or how I’m trying to affirm something, or that the thing I’m trying to affirm is the study. I don’t care a hoot about the study, nor trying to affirm anything other than that you said what you said (which is there in black and white), and that you have yet to support it (which you can easily disprove by quoting where you supported it).
Anyone with the first idea what’s going on here knows what you’re up to. You can’t bring yourself to say those three little words (or even four), “(Maybe) I was wrong.”
And that’s why I’m not wasting everyone’s time. I’m attempting to demonstrate publicly, with logical argument, just how deep you’ll dig yourself into this particular hole of denial, because (a) it might be useful for people to see how painful it is to make the choice you continue to make, and (b) because you’ve got me really pissed with your obnoxious lies and insults, and (c) because you’ll probably do better work in future if you join the group you require to have reasons for their statements instead of imagining you can stand above it just pontificating. Of course you’ll characterize that as wasting everyone’s time, but I’m not trolling. You’re actually trolling your own blog!
I had some small hope you might wake up and change your behaviour, but that’s looking unlikely. I can’t say it’s impossible, obviously.
And I’m talking about science.
To which you have yet to say a single relevant thing.
You once again write a repetitive wordwall that never addresses the evidence I presented and offers no rational defense of the science exposed thereby as bogus. And that is why you are wasting everyone’s time. We’re here to talk about the science. Not your weird obsessive speculations.
Okay then. Science, if you like.
Is your contention, “it is impossible for monkeys to develop gender-typical responses to things they’ve not seen before,” a scientific one? Is it a hypothesis?
Actually, I don’t give a proverbial monkeys.
Answer the question. HOW DO YOU KNOW IT IS IMPOSSIBLE?
Less wordwally. Just for you. 😀
Oh, but I must just share this I found on the web (abridged)…
The Principles of Critical Thought:
Questioning information rather than merely receiving it (trust but verify).Constant skill applied to all knowledge and belief (not to be compartmentalized).
Must be applied to yourself as well as others (self-question, self-test, self-critique).
Step 1: Check the facts (check multiple sources and evaluate their reliability).
Step 2: Check for biases and fallacies (your own and those of others).
Step 3: Consider alternative explanations of the evidence and test them.
Update your beliefs when evidence goes against them.
Restate all your beliefs as probabilities; then justify those probabilities
(or change them if you can't).
https://www.richardcarrier.info/CriticalThinking.html
Time to rewrite this:
1. Ignore all criticism, even in the context of general support. Insult, twist, obfuscate, lie and cheat to avoid having to rethink or even mention the contested point.
You have written a dozen verbose and repetitive comments now, after being told a dozen times to address all the evidence converging on my conclusion, not just this single issue of evolved monkey play salience, and to only address the latter with science, not shit you make up.
You still don’t do either. A dozen strikes at bat, not a single hit.
I’m done. And so are you.
As Lettersquash noted this “It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience.” is an stupid assertion, Lettersquash asked you about it, you evaded the question and you refused to admit your mistake.
LOL. I did not evade anything. I correctly pointed out that all he did was make a bunch of stuff up with no evidence. And that is what you find convincing. That’s now the story of you.
The rest of us act rationally and expect science to be empirical. We don’t cater to making shit up to force facts to fit a pet theory. Especially when that ignores the actual data.
@Pepe Lopez, thanks for that support.
I was surprised to see a notification in my email, as this all had a nice neat line drawn under it nearly two years ago. We were, apparently, “done”.
It was, in the final analysis, a very minor issue. I expected it to be dealt with by a response something like, “OK, maybe I overstated that,” or “Yes, I didn’t think that through completely.”
The contested (negative) claim ought to be quite obviously flawed, but Richard either cannot see it or pretends he cannot (I suspect the latter). Repeating that I do not address “all the evidence” is irrelevant, and dismissing discussion of the “impossible” proposition as pseudoscience is both evasive, ignorant and insulting. I can think of several scientific hypotheses now given high confidence that would never have been discovered if scientists hadn’t got beyond the critics’ claim, “it’s impossible!”
If I reduced the point to a simple question – “Richard, is it possible that monkeys might evolve gendered responses to cooking pots or police cars in their absence?” – I doubt any clear answer would be forthcoming (when a yes or no are the only options).
I’m not sure how he’d respond to, “Richard, is it reasonable to claim a negative as certain, and thus dismiss its positive hypothesis as ‘pseudoscience’?”
He might point out that he used the phrase, “…to assume so…”, which would be technically correct, but this would also require that the theorist who proposed the possibility is “assuming” it to be true rather than merely discussing hypothetical propositions, as scientists generally do.
An opportunity was missed, because it’s a fascinating idea. It seems likely (to my mind) that virtually no evolutionary response could evolve unless novel objects were first recognised as like something else, to which a response has already been established. Most natural objects are heterogeneous anyway, requiring classification according to certain characteristics, so this mental process must already be functioning.
Perhaps there is good research on this already. In the modern era, it would be trivial to place animals in situations they could never have experienced, with completely novel objects, and test whether they respond in this way, ‘classifying’ an experience according to similarities to those they habitually encounter.
But no, judgement has been passed. This is “impossible” and to suggest it is “pseudoscience”.
What a trivial – almost merely editorial – error for a ‘critical-thinker’ to be blatantly obviously irrationally dogmatic over!
Funny how people alter reality. My response was that I have already presented the reasons why this is impossible (as in: too improbable to believe), and that your attempts to invent a just-so story has no evidence in its support and contradicts the evidence that exists, and therefore is pseudoscience. I have yet to see any reply. Playing with equivocation fallacies over what the word “impossible” means does not a reply make. Scientific impossibilities are not logical impossibilities. And you ought to know that. So ought any competent person.
Wow, now you meant “impossible”, as in “too improbable to believe”. It’s not a philosophy thing, but sciency-impossible. It’s naughty of you not to say that about 20 comments earlier.
That’s fine then. All my queries are answered: you find it too improbable to believe, which you express as “impossible”.
And that’s not at all too improbable to believe.
Um. This isn’t new. I never mean impossible as logically impossible, anywhere in my writings or lectures or conversations about anything, unless I specifically say so—as with almost all other speakers of English.
When humans mean specifically the narrow subset of logically impossible, they say so. Anyone competent in English ought to know this. You can confirm the fact by Googling “impossible” and checking the first one hundred entries and seeing if any of them that don’t say specifically that they mean a logical impossibility, likely actually mean anything other than “too improbable to credit.”
If you go around assuming otherwise, you will be incapable of comprehending most human speech. Which is a folly much to be pitied.
I tend to assume someone who fails to grasp basic universal English idioms is not actually incompetent but is only being a disingenuous troll. But if incompetence is the mantle you’d rather claim, I’ll grant it.
Oh do stop digging this hole. Impossible, even in the “universal English idiom”, means the opposite of “possible”.
Two minutes googling:
Merriam-Webster
incapable of being or of occurring
The Free Dictionary
Incapable of having existence or of occurring.
Cambridge
If an action or event is impossible, it cannot happen or be achieved
Collins
Something that is impossible cannot be done or cannot happen.
Dictionary.com
not possible; unable to be, exist, happen, etc.
There are, of course, other uses, including “insufferable”. 🙁
LOL. You are assuming your premise in your conclusion. And then ignoring all the data. Just to get the result you want to save face.
What does “incapable” mean? physically or logically? too improbable to credit or probability formally of zero? — you cannot assume to know except by reference to usage, so quoting a dictionary proves nothing as to you point, since none of those entries answer the question.
And then (conveniently) you ignore nearly a hundred contrary examples in the dataset, the very evidence of usage you have to reference to interpret the dictionary entries, yet those scores of examples show even your circularly presumed premise is false: people routinely use “incapable” and all like words to mean too improbable to credit and not to refer to logical impossibilities, and countless examples in the dataset make this clear. Again, without your circular presumption that nearly everything everyone says using these words is false, which would indicate your failure to comprehend usage. Which at this point has to be deliberate.
You clearly are therefore a disingenuous troll. No honest intellect would attempt such a lame argument as this.