Two Pieces on Pinker

As regular readers will know, I'm a huge fan of Steven Pinker's - he's the one who got me into evolutionary psychology in the first place. (I was imprinted by How the Mind Works in high school). There are two interesting Pinker related pieces out in the last while: the first is a new Guardian profile by John Crace, the second a New Scientist video interview (embedded below, or click here) about his book The Stuff of Thought.



(Via Marginal Revolution for the Guardian article).

Video: Why a scared expression brings a survival advantage

A new paper in Nature Neuroscience (which I haven't read, because I can't access it) argues facial expressions have an adaptive value. Specifically, the study found that the fear expression enhances sight and air-intake, while the expression of disgust reduces air intake. Check out the great New Scientist video (embedded below or click here) that admirably explains the study's results.



(See also: New Scientists' article and ScienceNOW's take).

Astonishing intellectual dishonesty

I have been reading an excellent collection of Stephen Jay Gould's writings off-and-on for while now and have been thoroughly enjoying it. The book is called The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould and is edited by Steven Rose and Paul McGarr. While Gould is not popular among evolutionary psychologists (and understandably so), I don't want to focus on that right now, because the editors are guilty of truly astonishing intellectual dishonesty. In their introduction to the section of the book about "Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology", Rose and McGarr write:

Steve [Gould] was one of those centrally involved in the counterattack on the Wilsonian theses, notably the assumption that central features of United States society - its class, race, and gender structure, its inequalities of status and wealth - were adaptive, evolved feature of the human condition, deducible from Darwinian principles.

They are referring, of course, to E. O. Wilson's seminal 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The risible thing is, Wilson never said anything even remotely like this. You will look in vain for any statement in the last chapter of Sociobiology or the whole of On Human Nature for an argument (or "assumption") that racism, sexism and inequality are somehow "adaptive". Indeed, given that racism and sexism have certainly waned in the US since 1975, surely the editors are now committed to the position that Wilson thinks current US society is maladapted because of these changes? If so, Wilson is not letting on.

Rose and McGarr again demonstrate there is a strong negative correlation between honesty and Marxism, and a strong positive correlation between Marxism and dumb beliefs.

Xenophobia and dormitive virtues

As most of you will know, South Africa was wracked by despicable and disturbing nation-wide incidents of xenophobic violence over the last couple of months. This has led, correctly, to much public debate about the causes of xenophobia, the conditions under which it results in violence, and what we can do to prevent it. This week’s edition of the Sunday Independent (South Africa’s best weekly), however, contains a near-perfect example of how not to go about explaining this phenomenon. In “Money and narrow nationalism won’t buy us a rainbow” (full article behind paywall), Colleen Lowe Morna asserts:

Xenophobia… has its roots in the failure to accept “otherness” mixed with misguided notions about the superiority of self. That fragile self is constantly threatened by the potential power of the other whether numerical, social, political or economic.

Well, erm, no. A ‘failure to accept otherness’ is not an explanation of xenophobia, it’s simply a redescription of it. Xenophobia, of course, is the hatred or fear of foreigners; the prefix xeno- derives from the Greek xenos meaning stranger or foreigner and the suffix -phobia derives from phobos, or fear. Obviously, strangers are “other”, hatred and prejudice entails one’s own superiority and a non-acceptance of the “other”. Lowe Morna’s purported explanation is, therefore, literally no better than saying opium causes sleep because it has "dormitive virtues".

Arthur Mutambara’s piece in the same newspaper, “Digging up the roots of xenophobia” (paywall again), illustrates another (far less egregious) failure in the debate so far. While Mutambara’s analysis is crudely simplistic, naïve in places and repeatedly factually inaccurate, at least he offers a set of causes that count as a genuine possible explanation. He argues:

At the root of the attacks are the grievances of increased poverty, growing inequality and unemployment, coupled with a deplorable social infrastructure in which health, housing and education are woefully inadequate.

I don’t buy this explanation – it’s clearly causally insufficient and probably doesn’t hold up comparatively – but, as I’ve said, at least it’s a candidate explanation. It is an explanation, however, that focuses exclusively on proximate causes, never mentioning ultimate causes. Why is it that increased poverty, inequality and unemployment where social services are inadequate lead to xenophobic violence? Why doesn't it lead to, oh I don’t know, an irresistible mass urge to recite poetry? Or a sudoku craze? Or anti-albino feeling? We need an account, in other words, of why the social ills Mutambara mentions (or the true proximate causes, whatever they are) lead to xenophobia rather than the infinite number of other possibilities.

In one sense, I admit, the focus on proximate causes is appropriate. There was a time the very same South Africans didn’t commit xenophobic violence (on such a scale, at least), and it’s important to understand what has changed to cause the difference so that we can do something to prevent the violence. But it is possible – perhaps likely – that designing optimum policies to prevent xenophobic violence depends on a full account of the phenomenon, including both proximate and ultimate causes. And evolutionary psychology, of course, has much to say about the ultimate causes of violence and xenophobia.

The Paleolitihic diet

One of the things I love about Wikipedia is the large number of good articles on strange or obscure topics. Today's featured article (i.e. a very high quality article placed on Wikipedia's main page) is a perfect example: Paleolithic-style diet. So we all know the standard evolutionary psychology view that human beings are adapted to the Pleistocene, not to modernity. As a result, our taste for sugary, fatty and salty foods is maladaptive when supermarkets and fast food restaurants abound. The Paleolithic diet (aka paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet or hunter-gatherer diet) starts from a very similar view and advocates a diet consisting of:

wild plants and animals that humans and their close relatives habitually consumed during the Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age), a period of about 2 million years duration that ended about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapiens developed agriculture... Building upon the principles of evolutionary medicine, this nutritional concept is based on the premise that modern humans are genetically adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors and that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, and therefore that an ideal diet for human health and well-being is one that resembles this ancestral diet. Proponents of Paleolithic-style diets differ in their dietary prescriptions, but all agree that people today should eat mainly meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots and nuts, and avoid grains, legumes, dairy products, salt and refined sugar.

The New Darwinism in the Humanities

Something a bit more positive about the humanities...

A couple of years ago Harold Fromm, an English studies professor at the University of Arizona, published the best short study of the application of evolutionary psychology to the humanities I have ever come across. The article, published in the Hudson Review, was "The New Darwinism in the Humanities" and came in two parts: "Part I: From Plato to Pinker" (pdf) and "Part II: Back to Nature, Again" (pdf). As I have mentioned before, while I have don't know the literature well enough to sides in internal debates, a scientific approach (with suitable Darwinian infusions) is exactly what I think the humanities needs. A flourishing, successful, scientifically orientated research program may finally loosen the grip of fashionable nonsense such as postmodernism and start bringing the "two cultures" closer together. Done right, such an approach may fetter theorizing in the humanities to the real world, preventing it from drifting randomly.

In any case, Fromm's article is an excellent guide to an emerging field. Give it a try.

Crazy Kanazawa

I mentioned a while ago that LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa recently launched a blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist. I was quite excited about this - there are a dearth of evolutionary psychology blogs, so I thought it was great an up and coming researcher was taking on the blogosphere. Kanazawa, however, is worrying me a bit...

In his very first post, "If the truth offends, it’s our job to offend", he defended the laudable notion that scientists should follow the evidence wherever it may lead. He took it a bit far for my liking though, by arguing scientists should never think about the consequences of their research. Said Kanazawa, "Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create." Really? If a physicist's experiment might, say, create a black hole and destroy the earth, should she ignore this possibility? Were the Manhattan Project scientists wrong to worry about igniting the atmosphere (pdf)? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for PC-bashing, academic freedom and following the evidence where it leads, but the notion that scientists should never consider the consequences of their research is absurd. Bacon was right: knowledge is power. But it's not necessarily or always a power for good. In some cases - the extreme ones - scientists should most certainly consider this.

The above, however, is pretty minor compared to Kanazawa's latest post, "Why we are losing this war". Why is it, he asks, that WWI and WWII lasted only four years but the "war on terror" has lasted seven years, with no end in sight? (Ignore for the moment the fact that, by any reasonable definition, WWII lasted six years, not four). Why is it that the West did not quickly defeat enemies who are much poorer, less well-equipped, and comparatively technologically backward? Kanazawa answers:

It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire... We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.

This is an interesting theory, and it could be right, but it's not clear to me why Kanazawa highlights this single factor. Firstly, he doesn't seem to have enough evidence to argue this is the only or even most important variable. Where are his citations to rigorous academic research demonstrating his 'hate theory' is anything more than only vaguely inspired by evolutionary considerations, anything but feral speculation? Secondly, the war on terror is asymmetric and regular armies have always had trouble with enemies who employ terrorist and guerrilla tactics, no matter how much they hated them. Thirdly, it's unclear whether the war on terror really qualifies as a "war" in the traditional sense and can thus be settled by military means. Lastly, there is a much better argument for why powerful countries lose wars against less capable enemies: Andrew Mack (1975)'s application of the life-dinner principle to international politics. Mack argued that when powerful countries, like the United States, are defeated by weak ones, like Vietnam, it is not because of the 'insurgents' military victory on the ground', but because of "the progressive attrition of their opponents' political capability to wage war" (1975: 177). That is, relatively weak enemies win exactly because they are weak, because the conflict is asymmetric: weak enemies do not pose an existential risk to their opponents, but powerful ones do. Consequently, the war is necessarily "total" for the weak and "limited" for the powerful. (That's where the life-dinner principle comes in: why does the hare run faster than the hound? Because the hare is running for its life, but the hound merely for its dinner). There are, I admit, a number of wrinkles here (most importantly, terrorists may pose an existential risk if they acquire weapons of mass destruction and it could be that people only hate powerful enemies) but I'll skip over these and ask the concerned reader to look at Mack's paper (who addresses a number of potential concerns that might arise).

The real reason I'm worried about Kanazawa, however, only emerges in the second to last paragraph, when he writes:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

The above, to be sure, is somewhat ambiguous. It could be that what he's saying is that, were Coulter president, she would have hated her new-found enemies appropriately, nuked the Middle East and thus "won" the war on terror in a day. But it could be that Kanazawa doesn't think that would have been a good idea, it could be that he's simply arguing hypothetically without endorsing that course of action. And yet... it really doesn't read that way. The tone, the context, and the register all suggest to me that Kanazawa would have approved of a nuclear response to 9/11. And this, I submit, is a little extreme. Forget for the moment that killing millions of innocent people is a Bad Thing, forget that the Middle East contains a good proportion of the world's oil, forget that America's democratic ally Israel is in the Middle East, forget that the fall-out would do extensive damage to other parts of the world, forget that there are tens of thousands of Americans (and far more other foreigners) living in the area, forget that the environmental damage would be enormous, forget that the Middle East contains innumerable priceless cultural artifacts, forget that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims living outside the Middle East (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.), and forget that 9/11 was planned from Afghanistan, outside the Middle East. Have you forgotten all of these factors (and any others you came up with for yourself)? Good. Now it's a good idea to nuke the entire Middle East. Now only does it make any sense whatsoever to call the hypothetical nuclear destruction of the entire Middle East a "victory" for America.

Kanazawa ends his article with, "Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running." I agree this too is somewhat ambiguous, but, wow, he really seems to be saying Ann Coulter would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. Coulter, for those of you who don't know, is a batshit crazy, deeply uninformed Creationist, extreme right-wing, fundamentalist Christian. (Have a look at her website or her page on Wikiquote). I find it hard to think of someone who would be a worse president.

Unless I have been uncharitable, unless I have misrepresented his position, and unless he was joking, Kanazawa is crazy. Frankly, he gives evolutionary psychology a bad name by associating it with this kind of extremism. Evolutionary psychologists are not the heartless right-wingers they're sometimes characterized as being (Tybur, Miller & Gangestad, 2007), but Kanazawa is hardly helping to combat that erroneous perception with posts like these.

Reference

Mack, A. (1975) "Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict," World Politics, 27(2): 175-200.

Tybur, J. M., Miller, G. F., & Gangestad, S. W. (2007) "Testing the controversy: An empirical examination of adaptationists' attitudes towards politics and science," Human Nature, 18(4): 313-328.

Audio: The co-evolution of altruism and war

The latest edition of Scientific American's weekly podcast, Science Talk, features Santa-Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowls who recently made a splash when he and a colleague argued, in a paper published in Science, that altruism and war had to have co-evolved. The interview with Bowls starts at roughly 15:00, in the first part of the show there is an interview with "spider woman" Greta Binford (also worth a listen).

Video: Steven Pinker interviewed by Robert Wright

In the video embedded below (or click here to go to Google Video), journalist and science popularizer Robert Wright interviews Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. The video runs for about an hour and all of it is very much worth watching. Check it out!

Shermer on the evolutionary psychology of corporate behavior

As I have mentioned before, Michael Shermer has recently become enamored with evolutionary psychology and it’s really showing in his Scientific American columns. He may, however, have become a tad too enthusiastic for his own good. In a recent piece, “Do all companies have to be evil?”, Shermer applies evolutionary psychology to the corporate world. His conclusion, gratifyingly, is that the “greed is good” mindset (Objectivism, for example) not only does not breed success but actually leads to failure. Argues Shermer,

When we apply these evolutionary findings to economic life, we learn that Enron and the Gordon Gekko “Greed Is Good” ethic are the exception and that Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is the rule. Two conditions must be present to accentuate the latter: first, internal trust reinforced by personal relationships, and, second, external rules supported by social institutions.

Shermer then goes on to compare the corporate cultures of Enron and Google in some detail, thereby illustrating his contention about trust and social institutions. This is all very interesting (and certainly worth a read) but I have a few misgivings. What follows are a couple of unconnected observations.

Firstly, Shermer seems to fail to appreciate that to evaluate a hypothesis rigorously it needs to be tested against data not used to come up with it in the first place. That is, if we hypothesize x based on observations y, to test x we need to compare its predictions to a different set of observations z - we can’t use y again because that would be circular. So it makes me worry when Shermer says

By studying how modern companies work, we can gain insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of our morality, including concepts such as reciprocity, altruism and fairness. When we apply these evolutionary findings to economic life…

Is he using human behavior in corporate settings as data for evolutionary psychology or is he using evolutionary psychology to explain human corporate behavior? Perhaps I am being a bit unfair, Shermer has limited space and the above is somewhat tangential, but it remains an important methodological point.

Secondly, it is important to note that in most of the article, Shermer is speculating, not doing science or reporting on established science. For example, he explains Google’s success at creating a productive corporate culture by invoking egalitarianism:

A horizontal corporate structure [like Google’s] generates an atmosphere of equalitarianism and nonelitism that taps into the environment of our Paleolithic ancestors, who evolved in what are believed to have been largely egalitarian bands and tribes.

This seems plausible enough and, sure, we infer from the egalitarian cultures of current hunter-gatherers that our Pleistocene ancestors had similarly egalitarian ways, but we don’t really know what the significance of this is. Numerous successful organizations – the American military comes to mind – have decidedly vertical structures. And soldiers too have ancestors who we infer lived in egalitarian cultures. So what does this “tap into” business really amount to? Some actual science would have been nice – plausibility is not a sufficiently high bar, support from serious academic studies is what Shermer’s hypotheses need. (When n=2 [Google + Enron] we can’t be really sure of anything). More importantly, Shermer should have explicitly warned his readers he was speculating. To be clear: I have nothing against speculation; it’s a valuable and important exercise. But it is vital to distinguish carefully between speculation and fact, between speculative extensions of theory and well-established theory.

A small matter also annoyed me a bit in the article: Shermer uses the term “evolution” in several distinct senses without clear distinction. There is vague metaphysical evolution, cultural evolution, biological evolution, and many others. Shermer invites misunderstanding by not being clear about which sense he’s referring to.

Lastly, Shermer’s contention that Google is a paragon of goodness (and thus an illustration of his evolutionary speculations) is vulnerable to the observation that the company doesn’t always behave as advertised. Google, let’s not forget, conveniently disregarded its principles for access to the Chinese market (among many other lapses, as Shermer himself documents). But his response to this problem is as lame as it comes, “Controversies of this nature are inevitable for any company that grows as rapidly as Google has, and no matter how lofty a company philosophy may be, perfection will always be an unattainable goal.” Human aren’t perfect. Great. But we knew that already. What happened to Shermer’s hypothesis that there is an evolutionary reason that “don’t be evil” breeds business success? Scientists don’t get to rationalize away inconvenient facts. (To be fair, this problem doesn’t implicate the contention that aspects of the “don’t be evil” philosophy cultivate an internal corporate structure conducive to business success. Shermer, however, unwisely defends a broader hypothesis at the end of the article).

A new evolutionary psychology blog

Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psychologist at the LSE and author most recently of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, has just launched a blog: The Scientific Fundamentalist. Kanazawa's blog is part of Psychology Today magazine's new blog collective, which also features behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Psychology Today's editor in chief Kaja Perina (Darwin's Arrow) and psychiatrist Peter Kramer (In Practice). There isn't much content yet, but all the blogs look quite promising.

Alas, the RSS feed doesn't seem to be set up properly yet: there seems to be no way of getting posts from only, say, Kanazawa instead of all the blogs. Hopefully they'll sort that out soon.

Literary Darwinism: Bridging the Cultures

In his famous 1959 Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures," C. P. Snow argued that there existed a worrying divergence and growing incompatibility between two sorts of intellectual: scientists and literary intellectuals. Alas, almost 50 years later, many of the problems Snow identified remain and have probably even grown: witness the dominance of post-modernism, post-structuralism and other woo in the humanities. (This despite pointed and seemingly decisive criticisms).

So it's certainly a good thing that there is a group of researchers, Literary Darwinists, who are helping, in a modest way, to bridge the chasm from both ends. Jennifer Schuessler, writing on the NYT blog Paper Cuts, reviews a recent addition to this literature: Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altrusitic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction by William Flesch. (Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the book, only about it). Flesch, professor of English Literature at Brandeis, seems to have solid humanities credentials, which means it's harder to portray Literary Darwinists as consisting solely of cold-hearted and naive scientists trying to colonize the humanities. Imagine that, scientists and English professors working on a single research program...

While I haven't read Flesch's book, I have ventured into other parts of the Literary Darwinist literature, mainly Joseph Carroll's work, and, speaking generally, I think it's exactly the sort of thing that should be happening. I don't know the field nearly well enough to have strong opinions, or to take sides in particular debates, but it's clear evolutionary psychology needs some account of literature and art generally. If we are aiming to provide a naturalistic (and pomo/nonsense-free) understanding of human behavior, it's clear we can't shy away from tackling distinctively human activities such as the creation and enjoyment of literature. Moreover, I would be extremely surprised if knowledge of our evolved mental architecture did not contribute to literary studies - so it's hardly only a matter of literature constituting a 'problem' for scientists to solve, a Darwinian perspective on literature might end up enriching the humanities.

(See also: D. T. Max's "The Literary Darwinists" in the NYT Magazine and Harold Fromm's fantastic "The New Darwinism in the Humanities": Part 1 [pdf] and Part 2 [pdf]).

The Moral Instinct

Channeling the younger self who wrote The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has written an article for the NYT entitled "The Moral Instinct", a fantastic survey of the moral sense and its various quirks. Although some of the material appeared in The Blank Slate, it's certainly still worth the read.

(Hat tip to Mind Hacks).

Using science to find The One

The Economist reports on a fascinating development in the dating world: using science to find a partner through "personal chemistry matching". In 1995 Claus Wedekink established in a landmark paper that straight women overwhelmingly prefer the smell of men who have dissimilar major histocompatibility complexes (MHC). (The study was later replicated and seems to hold for men's preferences as well). Since (1) MHC is a gene region partly responsible for the immune system, (2) disease is an important selective pressure and (3) individuals with a wider range of MHC genes are better protected against disease, the theory goes that people evolved preferences for mates with dissimilar MHCs (which is in turn detected through smell).

Now Scientificmatch.com will analyze your DNA for only $1,995 and match you with people with the most dissimilar MHCs! Scientific Match claims that their service has a whole range of benefits (including a higher frequency of orgasm for women) and liberally cites the scientific literature to support their case.

It's amazing what people come up with. I have long suspected that it won't be long before evolutionary psychological self-help books start appearing (if they haven't already...).