Re: [Marxism] Evolutionary psychology dismantled

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:44:01 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 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. 


Even assuming that a behavior like rape
is an adaptation, his conclusion that
it was necessarily selected by
evolution would still be a 
a non sequitur for reasons
described by the behavioral
psychologist B.F. Skinner,
nearly thirty years ago.

Skinner argued that selection as a
causal mode operates at three different levels:
(1) the genetic level in terms of what he called
selection by contingencies of survival, that is
natural selection,  (2) the
level (in terms of the behavioral repertoires of
individual organisms) of operant conditioning,
and (3) the level of the evolution of cultures.  

Skinner, who was otherwise pretty friendly
with E.O. Wilson,  found him guilty of taking 
certain features common to natural selection,
operant conditioning, and the evolution of
cultures and attributing them all to genes.
As Skinner it:

"Genes no doubt explain behavior resulting from
natural selection, and they are also responsible
for operant conditioning as a process, but once
that process has evolved, a different kind of
selection accounts for the behavior of the
individual and the evolution of cultural practices."
(B.F. Skinner, "Can the Experimental Analysis
of Behavior Rescue Psychology" from his book
*Upon Further Reflection*, 1987).

In my judgement, the same sort of criticism
that Skinner made of Wilson, is also applicable
to contemporary evolutionary psychologists
like Thornhill or Steven Pinker.  And as should be 
apparent from a reading of Skinner, there is nothing
anti-Darwinian about such criticism as
people like Wilson or Pinker would have
us believe.

And of course, as Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Lewontin pointed out many years ago,
made the point that not all traits in living organisms
are to be regarded as adaptations.  See for
example their famous paper, "The spandrels
of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm:
a critique of the adaptationist programme,"
in Proceedings of the Royal Society (1979),
pp. 591-598.
(www.life.illinois.edu/ib/443/Gould%20&%20Lewontin.pdf)

> 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."
> 


> 
>
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