[Marxism] Evolutionary psychology dismantled

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

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."

On that point, the evidence instead suggests that both sexes prefer 
mates around their own age, adjusted for the fact that men mature later 
than women. If the male mind were adapted to prefer the most fertile 
women, then AARP-eligible men should marry 23-year-olds, which—Anna 
Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall notwithstanding—they do not, instead 
preferring women well past their peak fertility. And, interestingly, 
when Miller focuses on the science rather than tries to sell books, he 
allows that "human mate choice is much more than men just liking youth 
and beauty, and women liking status and wealth," as he told me by e-mail.

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.

Far from ceding anything, evolutionary psychologists have moved the 
battle from science, where they are on shaky ground, to ideology, where 
bluster and name-calling can be quite successful. UNM's Miller, for 
instance, complains that critics "have convinced a substantial portion 
of the educated public that evolutionary psychology is a pernicious 
right-wing conspiracy," and complains that believing in evolutionary 
psychology is seen "as an indicator of conservatism, disagreeableness 
and selfishness." That, sadly, is how much too much of the debate has 
gone. "Critics have been told that they're just Marxists motivated by a 
hatred of evolutionary psychology," says Buller. "That's one reason I'm 
not following the field anymore: the way science is being conducted is 
more like a political campaign."

Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of 
human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, 
the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to 
mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As 
Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the 
system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, 
emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. 
It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men 
and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out 
not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have 
discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone 
imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone 
assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 
50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some 
may be even younger.

That has caught the attention of even the most ardent proponents of evo 
psych, because when the environment is changing rapidly—as when 
agriculture was invented or city-states arose—is also when natural 
selection produces the most dramatic changes in a gene pool. Yet most of 
the field's leaders, admits UNM's Miller, "have not kept up with the 
last decade's astounding progress in human evolutionary genetics." The 
discovery of genes as young as agriculture and city-states, rather than 
as old as cavemen, means "we have to rethink to foundational 
assumptions" of evo psych, says Miller, starting with the claim that 
there are human universals and that they are the result of a Stone Age 
brain. Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in 
malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can 
take stock of the world and adapt to it.

full: http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu