Genetic determinism? Not so fast.

June 26, 2009 • 7:27 am

There are several items in the news today relevant to evolutionary psychology.  First, David Brooks, in The New York Times, has an op-ed piece on the excesses of evolutionary psychology.  Apparently “inspired” by a new book by Geoffey Miller, Brooks resists evo-psycho’s exaggerated claims:

Now Miller has published another book, “Spent,” in which he takes evolutionary psychology to the mall. The basic argument is that each of us is born with our own individual level of six big traits: intelligence, openness to new things, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and extraversion. These modules are built into humans and other animals (apparently squid can be shy).

We are all narcissists, Miller asserts. We spend much of our lives trying to broadcast our excellence in these traits in order to attract mates. Even if we’re not naturally smart or outgoing, we buy products and brands that give the impression we are.

According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence. Listening to Bjork is a sign of high intelligence, while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a sign of low intelligence. Watching Quentin Tarantino movies is a sign of high openness. He theorizes that teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.

Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.

This critique, along with Sharon Begley’s (see below), is a welcome sign that people won’t credulously accept the excessive claims of evolutionary psychology. Miller, in particular, has made a name (and some bucks) with ludicrous and insupportable claims about the genetic basis of human nature.  Now, Brook’s own critique is not perfect. He says, for example:

The second problem is one evolutionary psychology shares with economics. It’s too individualistic: individuals are born with certain traits, which they seek to maximize in the struggle for survival.

But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

This really says almost nothing, and ignores the fact that humans certainly evolved in a social milieu, and that some of our evolved traits must have been adaptive only in a social milieu.  How else can you explain an inborn facility to learn language?  Brooks would have been better off making the most trenchant critique of evolutionary psychology:  the tendency for many advocates to make speculations completely unsupported by evidence.  Do young girls really cut themselves to demonstrate a resistance to infection? Why isn’t it young men who do the cutting? After all, it’s the men who compete for women, and the “handicap” view of sexual selection posits that ornaments like the peacock’s tail are there to show females that males have the genes or constitution able to deal with (or at least produce) a debilitating but attractive feature.  When it comes to speculations about human behavior, we also have to worry that they could have unintended social consequences. Promoting the notion that self-mutilation might be adaptive may, for example, have the side effect of promoting its spread.

Apropos, Sharon Begley of Newsweek has just published a long critique of evolutionary psychology, a critique that is surprising for a mainline magazine. Begley beings with a critique of Thornhill and Palmer’s “adaptive rape,” hypothesis, which I also attacked in a New Republic article.  Begley then discusses some data that refute evo-psycho’s more popular claims, noting that these refutations get far less press than the original, sensationalistic claims.

Evolutionary psychology is not going quietly. It has had the field to itself, especially in the media, for almost two decades. In large part that was because early critics, led by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, attacked it with arguments that went over the heads of everyone but about 19 experts in evolutionary theory. It isn’t about to give up that hegemony. Thornhill is adamant that rape is an adaptation, despite Hill’s results from his Ache study. “If a particular trait or behavior is organized to do something,” as he believes rape is, “then it is an adaptation and so was selected for by evolution,” he told me. And in the new book Spent, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico reasserts the party line, arguing that “males have much more to gain from many acts of intercourse with multiple partners than do females,” and there is a “universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men.” . . .

Yet evo psych remains hugely popular in the media and on college campuses, for obvious reasons. It addresses “these very sexy topics,” says Hill. “It’s all about sex and violence,” and has what he calls “an obsession with Pleistocene just-so stories.” And few people—few scientists—know about the empirical data and theoretical arguments that undercut it. “Most scientists are too busy to read studies outside their own narrow field,” he says.

It’s about time something like this was published in a place where people can see it.   Bravo, Ms. Begley!

Speaking of research whose initial lurid claims get far more press than their later refutation, consider human “behavior genes.” Case after case in which researchers claim to have found genes for depression, novelty-seeking, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and the like have later been shown to be nonrepeatable in bigger data sets, or in data from other populations.  But the failures to replicate get far less media attention than do the original claims.  One example this week: a new “meta-analysis” study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that refutes an earlier claim that a gene involved in serotonin transport causes depression.    (See here and here for popular reports about the failure to replicate).  At least in this case, Newsweek (are they on a good science kick?) highlighted the refutation.  There are, naturally, evolutionary hypotheses about why genes for depression may be adaptive; I discuss some of these in WEIT.

All this goes to show that when it comes to assertions about the genetic/evolutionary basis of human behavior, caveat emptor.

Quote of the week

June 24, 2009 • 3:52 pm

From Peter M. J. Hess, Catholic theologian and director of the “Faith Project” of the National Center for Science Education, comes this trenchant analysis of the faith/science dichotomy.  Quote of the week in bold:

Evolution can certainly be compatible with religious faith. Because the evidence for evolution is so overwhelming, we must consider it to be a truth about the natural world — the world which we as people of faith believe was created by God, and the world made understandable by the reason and natural senses given to us by God. Denying science is a profoundly unsound theological position. Science and faith are but two ways of searching for the same truths.

Lordy, I’m so tired of hearing this statement over and over again from accommodationists (over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney praises Hess’s “great column”).  We’re both searching for the same truths?  That’s news to me.  I didn’t know faith was trying to find out where the genes are for reproductive isolating barriers between species of fruit fly. Or that the faithful are praying for some revelation about dark matter.  Likewise, I don’t know many scientists who are working on the Big Question of whether unbaptized babies go to limbo.

Really, we need to think about statements like Hess’s. They may sound good — for a nanosecond — but they’re intellectual pablum.  They are balm for believers, Panglossian tactics meant to reassure everyone that, hey folks, we’re all in the Big Search for Truth together!

As I’ve maintained repeatedly, religion is neither set up for finding truth nor very good at finding truth. Let me correct that — faith is incapable of finding truth, or at least no more capable than is astrology.   The methods of ascertaining “truth” via faith are either revelation or acceptance of dogma.   These methods have produced “truths” like a 6,000-year-old Earth and the Great Flood.  Not a very good track record.  In fact, I have yet to find a single truth about humans, Earth, or the universe that has come uniquely from faith.  If you have one, please send it to me!  If faith did hit on truths, the tenets of all the world’s religions would not be in irresolvable conflict.  But they are.

In all these debates about the compatibility of science and faith, I have yet to see an intellectually respectable answer to this ultimate dichotomy between “ways of knowing.”  Instead, people like Mooney go after us for our tone, for polarizing people, and so on.  Does Mooney sign on to Hess’s statement that the faithful and the scientists are all really engaged in the same endeavor?  If not, why does he call Hess’s column “great”? Instead of beefing about our “militancy,” why don’t accommodationists start addressing the question of whether faith can tell us anything that’s true? Let’s hear about whether you can coherently accept a Resurrection on Sunday and then go to the lab the next day and doggedly refuse to accept any claim that lacks evidence.   Now that would raise the tone of this debate.

Lion cubs in Tulsa zoo

June 24, 2009 • 9:39 am

We have some Tuesday felids because this video, taken at the Tulsa zoo, demonstrates an evolutionary lesson.  Look closely at the cubs’ coats, and you’ll see leopard-like rosettes.  Many species of cats show this pattern in the cubs, even if the pattern disappears with growth.  It almost certainly reflects (as discussed in WEIT), an atavistic trait: the persistence in a descendant of traits that were adaptive only in an ancestor.  I suspect that the ancestor of lions had spots as adults, and that’s why they show up, briefly, in lion cubs.

Sean Carroll on the compatibility of faith and science

June 23, 2009 • 1:29 pm

Over at his website, Cosmic Variance, physicist Sean Carroll weighs in on the faith/science debates.  Carroll has always been a vociferous (note: that doesn’t mean “strident” or “militant”) atheist, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that he finds faith and science incompatible.  However, he does so not for philosophical reasons, but simply from seeing the different conclusions reached by the two “magisteria”:

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.

While Carroll says that this form of incompatibility is different from the one I see, I don’t think there’s a substantive difference.  The reason that science and faith reach different conclusions is precisely because one way of knowing, science, bases its conclusions on evidence and reason, while the other way of “knowing,” religion, uses revelation and faith.  That’s the incompatibility I see, and of course it will lead to an incompatibility of conclusions. As Carroll recognizes, this trumped-up view of “faith” as belief in some nonspecific deity who doesn’t actually do anything, was the view floated by Stephen Jay Gould as part of his NOMA concept. (Gould also made the ridiculous claim that ethics and morality were the purview of religion, neglecting two millennia of secular discussion of ethics.)

But Carroll is absolutely on the money when he describes how the enlightened faithful and faithful scientists arrive at a pronouncement of “compatibility”:

The favored method of those who would claim that science and religion are compatible — really, the only method available — is to twist the definition of either “science” or “religion” well out of the form in which most people would recognize it. Often both.

Of course, it’s very difficult to agree on a single definition of “religion” (and not that much easier for “science”), so deciding when a particular definition has been twisted beyond usefulness is a tricky business. But these are human endeavors, and it makes sense to look at the actual practices and beliefs of people who define themselves as religious. And when we do, we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it. And these claims are often very important to the religions who make them; ask Galileo or Giordano Bruno if you don’t believe me.

But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead. In response, one strategy to assert the compatibility between science and religion has been to take a carving knife to the conventional understanding of “religion,” attempting to remove from its purview all of its claims about the natural world.

It continually amazes me that theologians like John Haught or scientists like Francis Collins can get away with a definition of “religion” that is completely at odds with how most real non-Ph.D-holding humans practice their faith in the real world.  To enforce a compatibility between faith and science, you have to water down “faith” until it becomes a vague deism that doesn’t permit its god to interfere in the working of the universe.  And that’s simply not the way that most people construe their faith. Note to accommodationists:  religion is NOT NECESSARILY the form of faith practiced by university theologians or academic scientists.

Carroll goes on to reject the God hypothesis, and doesn’t pull any punches.

Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding. Again, this is not an a priori result; the God hypothesis could have fit the data better than the alternatives, and indeed there are still respected religious people who argue that it does. Those people are just wrong, in precisely analogous ways to how people who cling to the Steady State theory are wrong. Fifty years ago, the Steady State model was a reasonable hypothesis; likewise, a couple of millennia ago God was a reasonable hypothesis. But our understanding (and our data) has improved greatly since then, and these are no longer viable models. The same kind of reasoning would hold for belief in miracles, various creation stories, and so on.

So, when the faithful — or the Templeton Foundation — tell you that religion allows us to answer the Bigger and Deeper Questions about Life, ask yourself, “What are the answers?.  Do we have any answers?” I have yet to find a single “truth” about our place in the universe or about the meaning of life that has been supplied by faith.  And so Templeton and its minions continue to waste millions of dollars addressing the Big Questions, but of course not getting any answers to them.  At least science gives us some answers.

Fighting back against Templeton

June 21, 2009 • 9:36 am

Standing behind much of the accommodationism in America is the John Templeton Foundation. This organization is loaded to the gunwales with cash, thanks to the investing activities of the late John Templeton, and it regularly uses its ample coffers to lure scientists into discussing “the big questions” in support of its aim to unify science and faith. (n.b.: whenever you hear the words “bigger questions” or “deeper questions” in this debate, rest assured that they really mean “unanswerable questions” or even “meaningless questions.” And you can also be sure that the answer to these big, deep questions involves religion.) Templeton likes having big-name scientists and secular academics on its panels and in its published discussions, for their presence lends an air of versimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing enterprise.

Some of us have begun fighting back, refusing to participate in Templeton’s ventures or to lend our name to their discussions. The latest refusal involves science writer Edwin Cartlidge, who emailed several neo-materialist fundamentalist militant atheists, asking their cooperation in a Templeton-funded project. So far Daniel Dennett and Anthony Grayling have responded (all of these emails are reproduced with permission of the writers):

From: Edwin Cartlidge
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 9:55 AM
To: Dennett, Daniel C.
Subject: Questions on materialism

Dear Prof Dennett, I am a science journalist currently taking part in the Templeton Cambridge journalism fellowship programme in science and religion. As part of the programme each fellow takes an indepth look at one particular topic, and mine is “materialism”. In the first place I want to understand simply what is meant by the term (as it seems to have various forms) and then to understand how a materialistic viewpoint can or cannot be reconciled with the world around us (particularly as regards human nature).. For this I will be speaking to a number of different experts, including scientists, philosophers and theologians. Since you have written extensively on the philosophy of mind and related areas I thought that you would be a good person to talk to, and wondered whether you might be free at some point in the next three weeks to speak over the phone. I imagine the conversation would last around 20 to 30 minutes.

If you would like to speak to me I would be grateful if you could tell me when would be a good time for me to call and what number I should use.

best regards,

Edwin Cartlidge.

Dennett’s response:

From: “Dennett, Daniel C.”
To: Edwin Cartlidge
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 11:53:16 PM
Subject: RE: Questions on materialism

Dear Mr Cartlidge,

I have had my say about materialism and the persistent attempt by religious spokespeople to muddy the waters by claiming, without a shred of support, that materialism (in the sense I have defended for my entire career) is any obstacle to meaning, or to an ethical life—see, e.g., BREAKING THE SPELL, pp302-307.

I see no reason to go over that ground again, and I particularly don’t want to convey the impression, by participating in an interview with you, that this is, for me, a live issue. It is not. If you had said that you were studying the views of scientists, philosophers and, say, choreographers on this topic, I would at least be curious about what expertise choreographers could bring to it. If you had said scientists, philosophers, and astrologers, I would not even have replied to your invitation. The only reason I am replying is to let you know that I disapprove of the Templeton Foundation’s attempt to tie theologians to the coat tails of scientists and philosophers who actually do have expertise on this topic.

Many years ago I made the mistake of participating, with some very good scientists, in a conference that pitted us against astrologers and other new age fakes. I learned to my dismay that even though we thoroughly dismantled the opposition, many in the audience ended up, paradoxically, with an increased esteem for astrologers! As one person explained to me “I figured that if you scientists were willing to work this hard to refute it, there must be something to it!” Isn’t it obvious to you that the Templeton Foundation is eager to create the very same response in its readers? Do you really feel comfortable being complicit with that project?

Best wishes,

Daniel Dennett

The response of philosopher Anthony Grayling, who received the same request from Cartlidge:

Dear Mr Cartlidge
Thank you for your message. I hope you will understand that this is by no means
directed at you personally, but I don't engage in Templeton-associated matters.
I cannot agree with the Templeton Foundation's project of trying to make
religion respectable by conflating it with science; this is like mixing
astrology with astronomy or voodoo with medical research, and I disapprove of
Templeton's use of its great wealth to bribe compliance with this project.
Templeton is to all intents and purposes a propaganda organisation for religious
outlooks; it should honestly say so and equally honestly devote its money to
prop up the antique superstitions it favours, and not pretend that questions of
religion are of the same kind and on the same level as those of science - by
which means it persistently seeks to muddy the waters and keep religion credible
in lay eyes. It is for this reason I don't take part in Templeton-associated
matters. My good wishes to you -
Anthony Grayling

Professor A. C. Grayling
School of Philosophy
Birkbeck, University of London

By the way, does anybody find these responses “uncivil”???

A description of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion (one of which Mr. Cartlidge received) is here. Note the description of their purpose:

The John Templeton Foundation inaugurated the fellowship in 2006 to offer a small group of print, broadcast, or online journlists annually the opportunity to examine the dynamic and creative interface of science and religion.

Creative interface only? What about those who want to write about the destructive interface?

Thanks to Richard Dawkins, who secured permission to quote these emails, and who also has a commentary about Templeton on his website. There’s a new post at Pharyngula, too.



Andrew Brown makes another dumb argument for accommodationism

June 20, 2009 • 4:19 pm

Apparently, accommodationist-in-chief Andrew Brown has his own blog, and is now using it to make arguments even dumber than those appearing in his recent Guardian piece. To wit: we athiests should be very careful about our tactics. According to Brown, if we persist in equating acceptance of evolution with atheism, then we’ll create a situation in which evolution can no longer be taught in the classroom. After all, teachng atheism in the classroom is tantamount to a denigration of religion, which is illegal in American public schools:

I don’t want here to get into a discussion about whether this [whether atheists embrace the “scientific worldview” more fully than believers can] is true. Christianity at least does seem to require the acceptance of at least one miracle as the most important thing that ever happened in the universe and it’s certainly reasonable for a scientist to reject this. In any case, it’s all part of a much bigger myth, which does far more than science can to explain the world: that of the triumph of reason, truth, and so forth over ignorance, superstition and stupidity. Such myths are not dislodged by argument.

Already, I can hear the voices saying not all in the tones of E. L. “But where’s the evidence?” “How can a scientist believe in miracles?” and so on. But it is precisely at this point, which the new atheists consider their strongest and most unanswerable, that Ruse’s argument takes effect. Suppose we concede that the new atheists are right, and no true, honest scientist could be anything other than an atheist. If that is true, the teaching of science itself becomes unconstitutional. For it is every bit as illegal to promote atheism in American public schools as it is to promote religion. Again, there are recent judgements from the heart of the culture wars to make this entirely clear. . .

But the American courts have never been asked to decide whether science is the negation of religion: in fact the defenders of evolution and of science teaching in schools have gone to great lengths to ensure that the question was not asked. The “accommodationists” whom Coyne so despises, have been brought out in all the court cases so far to say that that evolution and Christianity, science and religion, are perfectly compatible. If the courts were asked to decide whether not whether ID was a religious doctrine, but whether evolution was a necessarily atheist one, and if they decided that Jerry Coyne and PZ and Dawkins and all the rest are right, then science teaching would become unconstitutional in American public schools. They would, in short, have fucked themselves.

It’s at times like this when I think I’ve entered Cloud Cuckoo Land. Does anybody seriously think that teaching evolution is a deliberate promotion of atheism? If so, I haven’t met any of them, and that includes P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins. (Let me take that back — I’ve met two: Brown and his compadre Michael Ruse. Ruse once wrote that I should give my NIH grant back to the government because my research involves the unconstitutional promotion of atheism!)

Actually, we teach evolution because it’s a wonderful subject, explains a lot about the world, and happens to be true. And yes, it’s likely that teaching evolution probably promotes a critical examination of religious beliefs that may lead to rejecting faith. But teaching geology, physics, or astronomy does that, too. In fact, education in general leads to the rejection of faith. (Statistics show that the more education one has, the less likely one is to be religious.) Should we then worry about teaching physics, astronomy, or indeed, allowing people access to higher education, because those “promote” atheism? Should we constantly be looking over our shoulders because the courts may catch onto this? Well, American courts may be dumb, but even our benighted Supreme Court is more rational than Mr. Brown.

What Brown is really saying is that we should be worried about promoting rational values of any type, or any notion that beliefs require evidence. He doesn’t seem to realize the difference between cramming atheism down people’s throats and teaching them to think, which may have the ancillary effect of eroding faith.

Clearly, both Ruse and Brown are willing to use any rhetorical tactic to decry atheism, no matter how mush-brained it is. As I said in my last post about the Ruse/Brown twins, this smacks of desperation. Rather than engage the serious arguments of scientist-atheists, they talk about our “uncivil” tone — and now about the horrible unforseen consequences of our supposed equation of evolution with atheism. I repeat, so that Brown can get it: teaching evolution is NOT promoting atheism, it’s promoting a scientific truth. And the promotion of any scientific truth may have the ancillary effect of dispelling faith. This is almost inevitable, for the metier of science — rationality and dependence on evidence — is in absolute and irreconcilable conflict with the with the metier of faith: superstition and dependence on revelation. Too bad.

p.s. I look forward some day to Mr. Brown dropping the attacks on atheists and discussing, on their own merits, the assertions of the faithful. Does he think Jesus was the Son of God, that God answers prayers, and that there is an afterlife?

 

UPDATE:  Over on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers has posted his reaction to Andrew Brown’s piece, “In which Andrew Brown gets everything wrong.”