Good golly, I wish I had time to read this book:
Adapting Minds:Posted by Chris at May 16, 2005 11:37 PM
Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
David J. BullerWas human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was -- that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology -- the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire -- and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided.
Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. Evolutionary psychologists claim many discoveries based on this approach, including the evolutionary rationale for human mate preferences (that males prefer nubile females and females prefer high-status males) and "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries." Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence.
Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." - Thomas Huxley, on first reading Darwin.
Nevertheless, I suspect that in ten years time the consensus will end up somewhere in the middle. You can't expel human nature altogether, because to do so involves also expelling our animal nature as apes evolved from other apes.
Posted by: chris at May 17, 2005 07:08 AMAh, but no one in his or her right mind wants to expel human nature altogether. We're evolved; any theory of human nature has to fit with that. What some people - all evolutionists - do want to do is point out that extrapolative evolutionary psychology is filled with all kinds of methodological pitfalls. We may be evolved, but it ain't easy to see what else exactly follows from that. Certainly, armchair theorizing won't get us very far. Neither will the academic versions of armchair theorizing.
Indeed, one of the things that makes me completely nutty is the claim that we're trying to expel human nature or deny evolution or something like that when we point out that the just-so stories told as part of a particular evolutionary story about humans are problematic.
Posted by: Chris at May 17, 2005 08:46 AMChris, I quite agree with everything you say. However, the piece you quoted ends: "When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself." If this is really what Buller claims, then my guess is he's overstating his case, that's all.
Back to you when I've read the book.
Pop psychology gives us this "lizard brain" pap, academics talking about this or that area of the brain that lights up the cat scans,all designed in my Marxist, paranoid opinion,to further the project of capitalism as the logical extension of mans inate (competitive) nature. The whole social Darwinian spiel. Once you have a fixed nature as justification, capitalism becomes "a poor system, but better than any alternatives" to paraphrase somebody famous and oft quoted. (Churchill?) History just stops developing.
Posted by: Troutsky at May 17, 2005 11:45 AMChris,
Oh. Yeah. That quote actually is pretty relevant, isn't it? I suppose I should read the book too to figure out whether that's his official position or whether he's got something more nuanced up his sleeve.
