Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
We never see what they do when they’re in the trees, but three of them (probably a family) are snoozing on my windowsill in a big furry pile. It’s a perfect day for that, sunny and slightly cool.
I always thought that among Steve Gould’s “real” (non-essay-collection) books, The Mismeasure of Man was the best. Yes, it was tendentious, written to show that scientists could be as biased and racist as anyone else, but it rang true. And the two-page epilogue, about the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a “feeble-minded” black woman, is one of the most eloquent bits of scientific writing I’ve ever seen.
How sad, then, to find that, in a new paper in PLoS Biology (access free), a group of scholars has reanalyzed a piece of Gould’s own analysis—his attack on Samuel Morton’s 1839 study of skull volumes of ethnic groups—and found Gould’s analysis even more flawed that Morton’s. If you’ve read Gould’s book, you’ll remember that a substantial chunk involved reanalyzing Morton’s study to show that Morton had finagled his data, making Native American skulls smaller than those of Caucasians, all to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the latter.
Lewis et al. took a few years to actually re-measure Morton’s skulls and compare those with Gould’s analysis; they also looked at how Gould himself analyzed the data. Lo and behold, they showed that Gould was far sloppier than Morton. Morton had apparently not cooked his figures to put white folks on top, but Gould had done the opposite, selectively analyzing data to support his own conclusions about skull-volume equality. The authors’ conclusions?
Our analysis of Gould’s claims reveals that most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified. It is doubtful that Morton equated cranial capacity and intelligence [6],[13], calling into question his motivation for manipulating capacity averages. Morton did not consider the influence of sex or stature on cranial capacity, but it would have been impossible for him to use those parameters to bias the averages he reported (see Box 3). The grouped mean of Morton’s Native American sample is almost identical to the straight mean, rendering irrelevant Morton’s decision to use the latter. The changes in average cranial capacity from Morton’s seed-based measurements to shot-based measurements cannot be reconstructed with any certainty, incorporate erroneous seed measurements made by Morton’s assistant, yielded a broad range of changes (−10 to +12 in3) hidden by Gould’s mean, and are confounded by the shifts in sample composition (circa 50%) between the two rounds of measurement. Morton did not manipulate his samples to influence the average cranial capacities, at least not in a detectable manner. Morton did report subsample means for non-Caucasian groups (see Box 1). Of the approximately seven minor errors in Morton’s work identified by Gould [1], only two appear to be actual errors, and their overall impact confounds rather than supports Morton’s presumed a priori rankings.
There’s little doubt that Gould screwed up big-time here, and, since he’s dead we’ll never know his reasons. A report on all this appears in today’s New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, with new quotes from the authors and from anthropologists, some quite scathing about Gould:
As for the new finding’s bearing on Dr. Gould’s reputation, Dr. Kitcher said: “Steve doesn’t come out as a rogue but as someone who makes mistakes. If Steve were around he would probably defend himself with great ingenuity.”
But Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia and a co-author of the new study, was less willing to give Dr. Gould benefit of the doubt.
“I just didn’t trust Gould,” he said. “I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ came and he never even bothered to mention Michael’s study, I just felt he was a charlatan.”
Well, them’s strong words, but Gould was a man with an agenda. I knew him slightly: he was on my thesis committee at Harvard, and I crossed swords with him several times in the literature (when I was a graduate student, he once accused me of being a “hidebound gradualist”). I think his theory of punctuated equilibrium was pretty much bunk—except for his emphases on the often-jerky pattern of the fossil record. And I found him an unpleasant and arrogant man, but of course a smart and engaging one, too. He could be quite rude to those he considered his intellectual inferiors, and that was pretty much everyone.
Nevertheless, he made two great contributions to my field. He helped revive paleontology as a vibrant and essential part of modern evolutionary biology, and, with his essays and books, he excited widespread interest in evolution among the public. He and Richard Dawkins are the two great popularizers of biology in our era, and it’s always fun to discuss their relative merits. (They disliked each other intensely, of course.)
On balance I think Gould’s influence was positive, but he was a polarizing figure. And I wish he were still around.
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Lewis JE, DeGusta D, Meyer MR, Monge JM, Mann AE, et al. 2011. The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias. PLoS Biol 9(6): e1001071. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
Reader Marlene Zuk, who comments here from time to time (she’s a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside), has a nice op-ed in Sunday’s L. A. Times on animal webcams. While extolling the variety of cams available these days, giving a vast audience the ability to peer into the private lives of animals, she worries about the anthropomorphic feelings produced by this voyeurism. And she uses examples from this website:
Yet it’s that quality of animals appearing to be just like us that makes me want to drop a cautionary pebble into the live video stream. The comments on webcam sites are rife with anthropomorphism, not surprisingly, and even when this is pointed out, the contributors are often undaunted.
After the mother eagle was killed in Virginia, emotions ran high; one faithful follower declared: “Anthropomorphization [sic], hell. Eagles wouldn’t form long-term bonds and carry on like this without the exact same sorts of emotions that drive us to do that sort of thing.” When skeptics scoffed, other posters were quick to come to the first commentator’s defense: “Of course animals feel emotion, and this male eagle will be feeling just as bad in an eagly [sic] kind of way as a person would.”
Ben Goren and Marella, do you recognize your comments here? You’re famous!
I am filled with admiration for the coiner of the adjective “eagly,” and I applaud the kinship with other organisms that many viewers of animal cams feel. But there is a danger in claiming such kinship too insistently. Appearances aside, animals are not just like us, any more than they are all like each other. Rabbits have different lives than bluebirds, and we should expect neither to replicate our own. How can we know what animals feel? The fact is that we can’t. We can look at animal brains, and we can observe their behavior, but their inner lives are mysterious.
And yet one thing that constantly struck me when watching the eagles, hummingbirds, and falcons, is precisely the question Zuk asks: what is the consciousness of animals really like? I think a lot of viewers, at least on this site, are not only aware of this divide, but impelled to think about it.
Zuk also worries that the human-centered viewpoint would make us miss the importance of evolution and natural selection in creating the behaviors we see, neglect the less charismatic species that lack feathers or fur, or even try to intervene in nature when we shouldn’t be interfering.
These are all valid concerns, though I think they’re more than compensated by the interest in nature—and sympathy for its denizens—promoted by such cams. And I still think they should have left at least one eaglet in the Norfolk nest for poppa to feed!
Each day this week I’ll feature a song from one of my five favorite Broadway musicals. Today’s is my favorite song from West Side Story, “Somewhere” (music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim).
The first version is from the 1961 movie, with Natalie Wood as Maria (the song is actually sung by Marni Nixon), and Richard Beymer as Tony (song sung by Jimmy Bryant).
But I think the absolute best version is the one by Barbra Streisand, here doing it live:
I suspect that we’re all getting tired of thinking about free will. I know I am (for the moment); like D. P. Gumby, my brain hurts. Clearly my definition of yesterday, involving whether someone could do something different were the tape of life rewound, left something out. I could simply alter it by adding the words in bold: “If on the tape rewind the person, after deliberation, makes a decision different from the one before, then that person had free will.” I thought that was implicit in the words “makes a decision,” but so it goes. But I’d also be happy to accept Sampolinski’s definition of free will offered by reader Yair, which seems roughly equivalent to mine, for both my revised definition and that of Sampolinski remove free will from considerations of “randomness” (whatever those are).
To those who maintain that, by redefining the term, we gain free will, I argue that this obviates the meaning of the term as most people understand it: that we really can make choices that could have been otherwise, even if all circumstances up to the moment of choice were identical. When someone says “I have free will,” I think that’s what she means. Redefining the term to ensure that we have “free will” seems to me to completely avoid that issue. And all redefinitions still avoid the burning question of how we deal with human responsibility in a deterministic world. Redefinition also smacks, to me at least, of trying to save the ghost in the machine by burying it under sophisticated language. We really do want to feel that we can freely make decisions. And to those who claim that we really do have free will in the classical sense, I ask this: what is the mechanism whereby our thoughts can override our molecules?
Perhaps it’s best, as some have suggested, to deep-six the term “free will” altogether. I have to say, though, that I have a bunch of smart readers and I’ve learned a lot.
But enough. I want to quickly highlight one comment by Eric MacDonald after my earlier post on free will:
I’m not at all sure that I understand the problem that is being discussed here, and in [Sam Harris’s] essay. At one level there seems to be the assumption that every event has a cause, and if we could consider all the physical inputs to my brain, there would be an entirely causal account for each and every movement, every thought, every action that I perform. So, in one sense, we could just cancel out by all the words that express our humanness, words about thought, decision, hopes, fears, wishes, dreams, etc., and just speak about inputs and outputs.
On the face of it this seems implausible, not because I have any particular distaste for determinism, but because one of the advantages of big brains and the ability to reason is that it provides us with the ability to think, conceive meaning, and then act according to the thoughts and meanings that we have or understand.
Yes, but do these phenomena, which have either evolved by selection or are epiphenomena of having a big brain, say anything about whether we can override the physical inputs to our brain by just thinking about stuff? Yes, humans have more complex brains and can impute “meaning” to things in ways that many (but perhaps not all) species can’t, but I don’t see how that says anything about our choices being “freer” than those of a squirrel who decides to forage in one area rather than another.
Just basing the lack of “free will” on the idea of counterfactuals — “Instead of doing X I could easily have done Y” — as Sam seems to do — doesn’t really take us far. Of course, once something is done, you can’t not do it. That goes without saying. So, if I write the word ‘dog’, I do it because that’s the word I chose. It seems odd to say that I didn’t choose it, but that it was somehow chosen for me by a deterministic process. Meanings don’t work like that.
Unless I’m misunderstanding Eric, I don’t know what this has to do with free will. Yes, if you write “dog”, it may have meanings, especially if you have (Ceiling Cat forbid) a beloved canid. But if you’re a determinist like Sam or myself, saying that “I chose it” is just shorthand for “it was chosen for me by a deterministic process.” If you really did choose it in a way that obviates determinism, how does that happen?
Now, I know that consciousness is a very difficult thing to understand, and not only because philosophers are bloody minded and find the idea that consciousness is just a epiphenomenon that accompanies our thoughts and actions that are somehow determined, but because it would be hard to explain consciousness as simply a byproduct of evolution. If something this prominent didn’t give us selection advantage, what on earth do we have it for?
Nobody’s sure whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon of having a sufficiently complex brain, or is a neuronal module that was actually installed by natural selection. You could, of course, make up a variety of stories about how having consciousness, in the sense of feeling like the personal “command module,” would be adaptive, but in the end it’s all speculation. But I don’t understand why the evolutionary/neuronal basis of consciousness has anything to do with free will. After all, unless you’re religious or a dualist, consciousness still involves brains, neurons, and molecules.
Now, I don’t know this for sure, and perhaps there are ways to check this empirically, but it seems to me that all our actions are underdetermined by inputs. In other words, it is possible for the individual to take the the complex meaning systems in which our lives are interlaced and respond to inputs in completely unpredictable ways, precisely because we are meaning creating beings. So that for any inputs, there are a maze of different output choices that we can make. Is this contracausal free-will? I don’t know. But it seems far more likely that it is the ability to make these kinds of “creative” responses to inputs which gives human beings such an immense selection advantage, and why human beings are now at the point of decimating the world by their sheer success.
Here I think Eric is using precisely the definition of free will that I suggested yesterday—or, at least, the modified version above. Given identical inputs, deliberation could produce different outputs. Eric claims here that it can, and thus argues that we have free will in the classical sense. (This is clear from his saying that we can process inputs in “completely unpredictable ways”). But calling responses “creative” is tendentious, for it implies that we’re really doing something to those inputs that is novel and unpredictable. To me, the “unpredictability” simply reflects our lack of knowledge, not something we do to alter outputs, and, as several readers have noted, unpredictability doesn’t make our choices free.
Further, I think the assertion that our cerebral creativity gave us an immense selection advantage reverses cause and effect. Our cerebral creativity is what was favored by selection! True, once our brains became “creative,” they became subject to novel forms of selection, but that’s a different issue.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that there is originating free will in the sense that we are absolute creators. But the ability to choose — which is what Sam wants to deny — seems to me to be built into the big brain and the cultures that big brains have created. Our repertoire of possible responses to a given set of inputs — supposing it was possible to quantify those and describe them exhaustively — is much larger than Sam’s notion of choice seems to provide for. In that sense, I think, we do have free will, and I don’t know why a scientist — whose whole raison d’être is to find the correct answers to questions by means of examining the evidence — would think otherwise.
However, I’d be glad to hear some kind of response to this. I think the whole issue of “free will” and “consciousness” (which is related) is far more complex than Sam’s ultra simple analysis suggests.
What is built into our big brains is not the “ability to choose” in the truly creative sense that Eric means, but “the ability to process a huge variety of inputs in ways that most other species can’t.” There’s a difference between an array of individuals showing many different outputs to similar array of stimuli—with those diverse outputs depending on the choosers’ genes and environments—and the ability of one mind to produce different outputs given identical inputs. The former is what Dennett means by “free will”, the latter is what I mean by the term.
So, Eric, that’s my response. Cheers.
Reader Anne offers photos and a story about her multiply-named cat:
Our kitty is the most beautiful kitty in the world, at least as far as her face is concerned. These days, the rest of her is starting to resemble a football. She’s also a bit short on brains, but she makes up for it in whiskers – and her vocal opinion of every affront we subject her to.
I can’t even remember how long I’ve had her. She was a stray, but had been hanging around the edge of my yard a full year before she decided to move in. She disappeared, then came back the next summer and that was it. I have suspicions that she may have come from the nearby meth house that was busted, but have no way of verifying that. We live in a military town, and unfortunately sometimes pets get left behind when people get transferred. She might have been one of those pets.
Kitty has gone by a number of names – Squeak, Princess Peachpit, and Stinky Cat to name a few. These days it’s just Kitty or Stinks. When we moved into our house three years ago, she had a hard time adapting to the move and spent quite a bit of time hiding in strange places, including next to the toilet or behind the washing machine.
She finally settled in, and I’m happy to report we’ve just purchased the house and get to stay. She’ll be able to live out the rest of her life in relative peace – though the older male kitten that keeps coming around to play stresses her out a bit. I think it’s good for her – keeps her on her toes!
The only time I curse the cat is when I’m constructing elaborate yarn fences to keep her out of the vegetable garden. It works, for a while. She seems to be catching on that she’s not supposed to use the garden for her litter box. Maybe she does have a few brains after all!.
My husband has a funny tradition to send Kitty off to bed outside every night. He flashes the patio light off and on, and says, “Disco Cat! Disco Cat! Disco Cat!” She loves it, I’m sure. Just as much as she loves it when he cleans the floors or plays his guitar, we have visitors, or when the wind blows.
Kitty brings us joy, angst, and the occasional infected wound – I can’t imagine life without her!
Because everyone is demanding, rightly, that one define one’s concept of free will before discussing it, I will offer one here, subject, of course, to modification if it proves incoherent or useless:
A person makes a decision. Now rewind the tape leading up to the moment of that decision. Everything remains exactly the same as before: the history of the universe, the person’s entire life, experiences, and body, and so on. If on the rewind the person makes a decision different from the one before, then that person had free will.
Because I’m a physical determinist, I don’t think that making a different decision is possible, and so free will is impossible. But at least the definition has the merit of being specific. And it’s sort of intuitive: put a guy at the ice cream counter, and if he decides to order butter pecan instead of chocolate, well, that’s a free choice.
YouTube has put up Neil Patrick Harris’s hilarious opening song from last night’s Tony Awards. Have a a gander: the words are quite clever.