Have we caveman brains?

May 18, 2007 12:09 PM

What are the best sources for a layman to learn more about evolutionary psychology?

I'm in the middle of reading The Murderer Next Door, which puts forward a theory of murder as a natural adaptation for human beings. I find it fascinating, and there's certainly a ring of truth of it to me, at least in the broad strokes.

My initial Googling has turned up some things to read on evolutionary psychology, but I thought I'd get some opinions on where to start. What's the best reads for both pro- and con- takes on EP? I'm particularly interested in practical applications, as I can't imagine what they would be.

posted by Bookhouse to science & nature (33 comments total)

Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works is excellent, and accessible. It's up there with Dawkins' books on genetics for the whole "aha! Now I get it"-type feeling.

Note - I am not an evolutionary psychologist.
posted by liquidindian at 12:32 PM on May 18, 2007

Addendum - his chapters on anger are probably of specific interest. His main argument is that as we are well-developed lie detectors, and violence is useful to continue your genes, we must have an in-built capacity for violence that isn't faked. I'm probably simplifying horribly, but it was to me one of the most striking arguments in the book.
posted by liquidindian at 12:36 PM on May 18, 2007

Survival of the Prettiest is fascinating and fun, though I can't attest to how rigorous the science is.
posted by alms at 12:36 PM on May 18, 2007

Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind. Also Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind. Things are happening pretty quickly in evolutionary psych now, so there may be some new things. The lit is large.
posted by MarshallPoe at 12:49 PM on May 18, 2007

Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape or The Human Zoo. Old, but useful examples of the methodology.
posted by adipocere at 12:53 PM on May 18, 2007

My favorite book in this vein is Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence.

Don't let the title trick you into thinking it's some kind of MEN ARE AWFUL treatise: it's two (male) scientists writing about the origin and effect of violence among the great apes. It's extremely, extremely illuminating. After you read it, things like human warfare and rape begin to make a bizarrely clear kind of sense.

(If anyone says that I just condoned rape or whatever, I'll smack them.)
posted by thehmsbeagle at 12:58 PM on May 18, 2007

There is a lot of serious malarkey getting peddled under the name "evolutionary psychology". It's a lot of:
1. select cynical theory about human nature (eg people are naturally selfish, men are driven to rape, etc)
2. make up a plausible-sounding evolutionary backstory the suggests that trait would have been advantageous evolutionarily
3. say that this trait is hard-wired! unchangeable! etc.
4. publish.

Notice that nowhere in there was there any actual science. Or, only the flimsiest of science. Pinker is ridiculed by read scientists.

I will look around and post a few debunking pieces, but really - take all of this stuff with healthy skepticism. A lot of it is total bull.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:03 PM on May 18, 2007 [3 favorites has favorites]

Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind.

Be careful with some of the suggestions, particularly Mithen... there tends to be a lot of expounding with little data to back it up. Not the say that the ideas aren't valuable, but many are pure speculation.
posted by The Michael The at 2:08 PM on May 18, 2007

a bit of a thread theft, but the mention of rape reminded me of a college pop lit class i took, where the professor mentioned how the majority of romance novels (by women, for women) feature an overly aggressive male who forces himself on the protagonist, at which point she realizes she wanted him all along. he also mentioned gone with the wind and other stories that feature such situations.

this got me thinking about the possibility that women could have some kind of evolutionary programming that would cause them to accept or even tolerate rape after the fact, to somehow encourage mothering under any circumstances.

then i wondered how this might be related to things i have heard about rape victims feeling guilty and confused about the fact that they (at least physically) found some degree of pleasure in being raped. and how all of these could relate to the psychology of S&M and power games between willing couples.

if anyone knows of any readings on those subjects , please share them

note : i have no psychology education to speak of, so excuse my ignorance as far as usage of proper terminology goes
posted by white light at 2:11 PM on May 18, 2007

Ok. Just to be clear: in saying that a lot of evolutionary psychology is BS, I'm not -- AT ALL -- saying that we should ignore evolution when thinking about human behavior. I just mean there's a certain popular strand of work that tries to make claims about human nature etc based on scientifically sloppy reasoning patterns like the one I illustrated above -- and people lap it up because it seems to verify cynical or salacious etc claims about humans, or the differences between men and women, etc. Again, I'm not saying there are no differences between men and women - but the ones claimed by some evolutionary psychologists are just the ass-dumbest junior high school joke differences, like "women naturally love display and make-up" or some crap, where the evidence given is something like "we surveyed thirty undergraduates at Princeton, and 10 of the women reported being concerned with their appearance. Here's a story about why this is due to evolution." It's just embarrassingly unscientific. So I'm saying: keep your critical thinking hat on when you're reading this stuff. Don't give it a free pass because it has the patina of science about it.

Here's what seems to be an annotated bibliography on Ev Psych from a guy who has written a book critiquing certain parts of Ev Psych. I haven't read his book; don't know anything about him.

Here's a very detailed review of his book by a cognitive scientist; it gives a nice description of the field (and some of the classic papers of the 1970s and 1980s), and some links to related material. Here is another review of the book he wrote, which references another book -- Vaulting Ambition by Philip Kitcher, which was a critique of the view that came before ev psych, "sociobiology". Kitcher is a respected philosopher of science. That first review, and these two books might be good places to start looking at critiques.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:31 PM on May 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Lobster Mitten --

Are these criticisms specific of particular theories, or is the entire idea that our behaviors are innate that is considered wrong?
posted by Bookhouse at 2:32 PM on May 18, 2007

Shit, should have previewed. Thanks, LM.
posted by Bookhouse at 2:32 PM on May 18, 2007

Here's an exchange between Pinker and Steven Jay Gould, coming after a critique Gould wrote of Pinker's work. Pinker says Gould gets it wrong, and then Gould explains why Pinker gets it wrong.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:46 PM on May 18, 2007

Yeah, Mithen's a great read, but also speculative.

Pinker's HTMW pretty much sticks to what's accepted (in evo pych, if not outside it); he goes a bit futher with Blank Slate.

Pinker's former student Gary Marcus also has a pretty good read, The Birth of the Mind. Pinker's influence shows in Marcus's writing style; if you like how Pinker writes, you'll like Marcus's book too.

Miller's book on sexual selection in humans, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature is thought-provoking and well-written.

To get a bit deeper into evo pysch, you want to read stuff by the originators of the field, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides; they edited a book of papers on evo pysch, The Adapted Mind, which is pretty much accessible to laymen.

Once you've read these, Dennett's probably next on your list for philosophy of consciousness in Consciousness Explained, and Dawkins's The Selfish Gene.

Semi-related is Zahavi & Zahavi's on his handicap principle, and it's a naturalist's book in the tradition of Tinbergen, so a cool interesting read. Also, evo pysch has roots in Tinbergen, so read him too.

Of course, the progentor of evo pysch is EO Wilson and his Sociobiology.

About evo pysch and the controversy over it, Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate is dense, fair, and at times almost as fun as a gossip column. Read it to learn why commie jerks Gould, Lewontin, and Rose smeared and hounded EO Wilson.

(Interestingly, Tinbergen and the clash with the American behaviorists in some ways parallelels Wilson & Dawkins, et al. vs. Gould & Lewontin.)
posted by orthogonality at 3:03 PM on May 18, 2007 [3 favorites has favorites]

Oh, and non-scientist journalists Matt Ridley (not Mark, he is a scientist) and Robert Wright wrote several good books that are even more lay-person accessible.

Wm. Calvin is a scientist, but not strictly an evo pysch. His books are great fun to read, if very speculative (throwing Madonna, ec.) and often available free on his website. VS Ramachandran's books also touch on evo pysch, but more cog. science and neurology. The late Harold Klawan's Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of Evolutionary Neurology is written from the clinician's point of view, reminiscent of Oliver Sacks.

More underpinnings in Trivers and WD Hamilton.

Um. I wish I had my book collection with me, I could just read the titles off. But yeah, you can read this stuff forever.

Basically: evo pysch, animal behavior, evo devo, evolution, genetics, cog. sci., neurology, philosophy of mind, some computational stuff, all connect up. You can just keep looping through. Currently I'm into more of the computational stuff, but it's all part of the picture really.
posted by orthogonality at 3:18 PM on May 18, 2007

Here's an exchange between Pinker and Steven Jay Gould, coming after a critique Gould wrote of Pinker's work. Pinker says Gould gets it wrong, and then Gould explains why Pinker gets it wrong.

I admire both Pinker and Gould a great deal, and I enjoyed reading this article, but they don't seem to be quite listening to one another here. It seems that the argument here is less about whether certain features are "innate" or not, but how we explain the origins of these "innate" behaviors. They obviously disagree not only on the level at which you can explain a feature away by hypothesizing for what reason it was naturally selected, but also on the degree to which either party does so!

The big problem of evolutionary psychology is that it's one thing to notice a feature in a group - another to say that it is "natural" - and another to explain why it is so "natural." Step with care, and be mindful that anyone who claims there is one standard consensus on this stuff is a liar.

I'll crib two bits of advice from both Gould and Pinker's other works. From Pinker's side, keep extremely critical of those who claim that the brain is this blank slate onto which this sort of hovering, amorphous entity called "culture" writes arbitrary rules. This extreme position is taken by almost no one you will ever need to take seriously, but aspects of that viewpoint are everywhere - watch noses crinkle when you suggest certain personalities or aspects of intelligence have a significant heritable factor.

And as for Gould's side, bear in mind that scientists are not objective robots who can craft explanations ex nihilo, without expressing their own biases, assumptions, and limited thinking. Don't mistake this for your garden variety pseudo-pomo condemnation off all viewpoints - just, always be critical, and don't be swayed because some scientist somewhere says something which makes sense. Common sense is quite frequently wrong, and belies cultural assumptions which we don't even know we are assuming.

To take the rape example from above: it is easy (and profound) that rape fantasies are extremely common in both men and women. To immediately assume that this is something "culture" whipped up is foolish, as it is also foolish to immediately whip up some pat explanation drawing from how we imagine something might get naturally selected. To get at the origin of such fantasies, we'd have to deal with the obvious fact that there are innate, powerful subconscious urges surrounding sex, power, and violence, and then we'd have to see how (and to what degree) society knitted those urges into the production of those romance novels with what are essentially romantic rape fantasies.

It's all insanely complicated, which is why it's worth studying. Personally, I'd suggest reading The Blank Slate, as it's a pretty broad and readable blast against the idea notions of the blank slate or the noble savage. Once you've accepted that certain features appear to be innate on some level, then you can get into the dirty business of having to explain why or if these things or so.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:24 PM on May 18, 2007

if these things or so.

ARE so, even.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:27 PM on May 18, 2007

Bookhouse - the critiques are based on a handful of classic papers in this literature that got very famous, but were methodlogically sloppy. So, the main criticisms are of very specific reasoning patterns. Again, the criticisms I'm talking about are ones made by real scientists who absolutely believe in evolution, and who believe that humans evolved through natural selection, and so that the human mind and human behaviors are a product of evolution in that sense. Everyone in the (genuine scholarly) debate agrees on that.

The question is, what kinds of conclusions can we draw from that about present-day human behaviors and thinking patterns, and what kinds of conclusions can we draw about "human nature", innate and unchangeable ways humans are?

Different kinds of traits will be advantageous in different environments -- so we need to know about the environment of evolutionary adaptation, to know what would be advantageous. So we study that environment (the EEA), and maybe as a result we can say that certain behaviors would be advantageous there.

Consider a case that was an early EP favorite: the idea that stepparents are more likely to abuse their stepkids than bio parents are to abuse their bio kids. Some evolutionary psychologists say "this is because it was evolutionarily advantageous for early humans to care for their own genetic offspring and neglect children who weren't genetically theirs, so modern human psychology has an innate tendency to favor one's bio kids". Well, this is too simple. Suppose we study the EEA, and find that paying more attention to your genetic offspring, and the genetic offspring of your near kin (eg your neices and nephews, who will share some percentage of the same genes as you), really was an advantageous behavior in the EEA (that is, it resulted in more of your genes surviving into the next generation). [It might not be advantageous! It could be more advantageous to get a reputation as an equal caretaker, because then everyone in the group will take care of each others' kids and if one parent is killed their kids will still get taken care of, for example. These are empirical questions about complex natural processes, so we can't just make simple guesses about what's going to be advantageous - it takes scientific investigation. But suppose for the sake of argument that caring more for genetically related kids was an advantageous behavior.]

Even then, we still don't know what psychology produced those behaviors in the EEA. All selection cares about is the behavior; a single behavior can be produced by various different internal processes, and selection doesn't discriminate among these processes except by selecting against ones that are so resource-costly that they cancel the benefit of the behavior.

For example: Maybe in the EEA, humans were always in groups with only their kin, so any kids in the group would be genetically related to them. If that were the case, the psychology of "take care of all kids in your social group" would produce a taking-care-of-genetically-related-kids behavior. So even if we're right that taking care of one's own kin was advantageous behavior, that doesn't mean that early humans ever had a thought about which children were theirs and which weren't; nor does it mean that there was any selection pressure for psychology that favored one's own kids.

(Ok, there's lots more here, but I have to stop now. But you get the sense of what's going on here. There is a lot more nuance than a simplistic just-so story.)



The lamest cartoon version of EP follows this fallacious reasoning pattern (again, not all EP does, just some, but this is a pattern to watch out for):

1. Any behavior that helps promote one's own genes is "selfish" in a certain sense.
CRUCIAL NOTE: This is a metaphoric sense of selfishness - it just means "good for the passing on of these genes", it doesn't mean "in the personal interest of the individual, and against the personal interest of other individuals". In this metaphorical sense, if altruistic behavior helped to get your genes passed on, it would count as "selfish". But it's obviously not literally selfish. Altruistic behavior might even result in your death; a mother who dies to save her child's life is not being selfish, she is being self-sacrificing, even if it means her genes get passed on.

2. So evolution favors "selfish" behavior.
Because behaviors that get genes passed on, are themselves likely to get passed on, if they're a reliable product of those genes.

3. So selfishness is innate in human psychology.
This is meant in the literal sense of selfishness, doing things for your own benefit even when they hurt others.

This argument is invalid, because it equivocates - moves back and forth between meanings of "selfish".
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:42 PM on May 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Pinker is disingenuous if he suggests that anybody seriously holds the "human minds are a blank slate" theory. That's a strawman, to make him sound reasonable. But there's a huge range of positions one can hold on the continuum from "all our behaviors and thoughts are innate" to "all our behaviors and thoughts are entirely made by culture". Just be aware of the "normative" force that comes from calling something "natural"; there's often the suggestion that if something is "natural" we can't change it. But of course there are plenty of examples where we have changed things that are "natural" -- for example, we don't pee just anywhere we please; we manage to live according to lots of complex social rules, etc.

Also, as you will note from reading orthogonality's comment (about "those commies"), the debate about this stuff has been wrapped up in politics. The oversimple version is this: Some EPs offered conclusions about human nature that were meant to suggest that humans are always selfish, so captialism -- which relies on selfishness -- is the natural way an economy should be. Then others critiqued these conclusions, in some cases because they favored non-capitalist economic systems (sometimes because they had a different basic view of human nature).

You can probably guess what kinds of political agendas are served by claiming that men innately want to rape vs. claiming that they don't, or that women innately want to deceive and cheat men, etc. Ugh.

So anyway, read with a bucket of salt next to your chair and apply as needed.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:02 PM on May 18, 2007

Pinker is disingenuous if he suggests that anybody seriously holds the "human minds are a blank slate" theory. That's a strawman, to make him sound reasonable. But there's a huge range of positions one can hold on the continuum from "all our behaviors and thoughts are innate" to "all our behaviors and thoughts are entirely made by culture". Just be aware of the "normative" force that comes from calling something "natural"; there's often the suggestion that if something is "natural" we can't change it. But of course there are plenty of examples where we have changed things that are "natural" -- for example, we don't pee just anywhere we please; we manage to live according to lots of complex social rules, etc.

Have you read the book? He does NOT say that anyone seriously holds that straw man idea, and to say that he does so is just another straw man!

But there's a huge range of positions one can hold on the continuum

You agree with his stated positions more than you may realize.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:09 PM on May 18, 2007

So anyway, read with a bucket of salt next to your chair and apply as needed.

Oh, and good advice for both of us and all of us.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:09 PM on May 18, 2007

No - I haven't read it - that's why I said "if". Didn't mean to imply that I had read it. I must have been misinterpreting what you said:

From Pinker's side, keep extremely critical of those who claim that the brain is this blank slate onto which this sort of hovering, amorphous entity called "culture" writes arbitrary rules. This extreme position is taken by almost no one you will ever need to take seriously

I took that to mean that Pinker offers the strawman view as something to watch out for, and that you were editorializing (correctly) that nobody really holds that view.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:12 PM on May 18, 2007

As I mentioned way upthread, I have a general skepticism about Pinker, since I've heard all his books criticised by experts in whatever field he's writing on. I've heard lots of linguists complain about The Language Instinct, I've heard cognitive scientists complain about HTMW, I've heard cognitive scientists and philosophers complain about TBS. I've only read the LI, and enjoyed it a lot as a quickie tour - I understand it's inaccurate in a lot of ways, though, and takes contentious positions while representing them as settled fact. The Blank Slate came in for a lot of criticism from philosophers when it came out, and I sort of recall the criticism centering on it including strawmen and a lot of sloppiness, but don't really have the energy to hunt down reviews etc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:19 PM on May 18, 2007

I took that to mean that Pinker offers the strawman view as something to watch out for, and that you were editorializing (correctly) that nobody really holds that view.

You give me far too much credit. :)

Either way, I think TBS is worth reading, even for its contentious reception. This is all extremely thorny territory, and part of the excitement is the fact that just about every self-proclaimed expert on the topic is going to be dead wrong about many things. I feel that a lot of the negative reviews came from people as reading the book more didactically than I did - I did not see a treatise against "nurture," but rather a book about how in many small-to-large ways we may make those assumptions. I did not see a book expressing any one single viewpoint on humanity, barring that we MUST allow that SOME things are innate, even if we have no idea what those things may be, and even if we may be completely mistaken as to their significance.

Others read it and saw something else entirely. It's a touchy subject prone to misinterpretation and violent denunciations. I'm currently pawing through what I think is an extremely sloppy, straw man-filled negative review, but I'm sure there are more sophisticated critiques.

Either way, I think we can all agree that human society is a complex mixture of biologically innate notions, culturally held notions, individual quirks, and general madness. Read every book claiming to have an answer with, as you say, a bucket of salt.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:36 PM on May 18, 2007

Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography does a good job of exploring alternate explanations for behaviors that a lot of (lazy) ev psych theorists claim must be due to evolution. In the process she also elegantly exposes the process that LobsterMitten mentions, of how scientists' own unrecognized biases can influence their conclusions. And she talks a great deal about how women, and relationships, may have worked in the past. It's a great book.
posted by occhiblu at 8:38 PM on May 18, 2007

Evolutionary psychology is bullshit. It's the new social darwinism.
posted by Afroblanco at 12:54 AM on May 19, 2007

I recommend The Moral Animal by Robert Wright- he touches on game theory and deals with humanity's capacity for altruism as well as selfishness, illustrating each point with anecdotes from the life of Charles Darwin.
posted by Coaticass at 2:32 AM on May 19, 2007

Afroblanco, enquiring into the source of the world's troubles shouldn't dictate our response to them. People who think "survival of the fittest" is a moral precept are maybe not thinking all that hard? One of the things Wright talks about is what he calls the "naturalistic fallacy", meaning that people who believe that because something is "natural" it is also right, are in error.
posted by Coaticass at 2:46 AM on May 19, 2007

There's a lot of great responses in this thread!

I haven't seen anyone recommend Passions Within Reason, by Robert Frank. He's an economist, so his perspective is somewhat different, in that he's trying to explain how emotions may have evolved to help us solve problems of trust, commitment, and honesty that are inherent to life in groups. Really interesting and written for a lay audience.

Also, I'll second LM: ev. psych in particular seems to inspire a level of speculation and overreaching that's pretty remarkable. Don't uncritically accept anything you read about this stuff.
posted by myeviltwin at 8:38 AM on May 19, 2007

If you are willing to plow through some more academic reading, I highly recommend Susan Sperling's "Baboons with Briefcases vs. Langurs in Lipstick: Feminism and Functionalism in Primate Studies." Published in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (pg 204)

The key to what she's saying is that there are different models in evolutionary biology, one of which is functionalism, and functionalism is really problematic. However, debates over functionalism don't get taken up outside of academic EB meetings, and so the debate as understood outside of academic EB (as shown in the responses here) gets framed as bio-reductionist vs. cultural-reductionist. She shows that both sociobiologists and feminist critiques thereof draw on functionalist models, which creates similar problems in each.

The article is really interesting because it is a critique based on science and empiricism that takes into account the political objections to sociobiology (precursor to EP) but turns the same lens on those who object. It's kind of jargon heavy, but again, I think really worth the read.


If your general interest is the biological foundations of behaviour and you are willing to read outside of evolutionary psychology, I highly recommend anything by Anne Fausto-Sterling, her latest being Sexing the Body. She's a biologist who's got a good grasp of social theory. She's good at explaining how sociality and biology come together to produce things. That is, she elaborates the increasingly popular position among social scientist and biologists that there is no nature verses nurture, but rather nature plus nurture.
posted by carmen at 9:11 AM on May 19, 2007

I'd like to second The Moral Animal. It's the book that got me interested in the topic and it does a good job of explaining why evolutionary psychology isn't just justification of amoral behavior, and why it doesn't go hand-in-hand with racism or eugenics.

I also really enjoy the anecdotes about Charles Darwin's life and the world he lived in. Good science writing puts things in historical context.
posted by hutta at 12:12 AM on May 20, 2007

Well, getting back to the subject of the original post, you might like this book: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Grossman, David. I've read it; it's fascinating. It doesn't deal specifically will evo devo but you'll learn a hell of a lot about what it means for a human to kill. Here's his website:

http://www.killology.com
posted by PoopyDoop at 11:38 AM on September 26, 2007

Nth-ing Pinker's How the Mind Works and Wright's The Moral Animal. Both are very good reads, and good introductions to the field, if a tad dated.

Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue is excellent and a quick read. And his Nature Via Nurture is as a good an introduction to evo-psych as Pinker's and Wright's, and it came out more recently.

LobsterMitten seems to bring his salt buckets to the party every time evolutionary psychology is brought up, and (s)he is right that you should read the books suggested above with a critical eye as well as for enjoyment. But really, this applies no less to any other field than to evolutionary psychology.

That said, LM's portrayal of evo-psych in this and other threads suggets either a lack of familiarity with the material or a complete misunderstanding of it. I'm assuming LM is not puprposefully misrepresenting it.

For example, the argument that LM invalidates here has never actually been proposed by any evolutionary psychologist that I have read. Pinker has dedicates a chapter to altruism, Ridley an entire book to it. Both of which would not exist if evol-psychologists believed what LM thinks they believe.

Anyway, if you enjoyed HTMW, Origins of Virute and the other books, I want to recommend Homicide by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. It is probably the most fascinating emprical work I have read in this field.
posted by AceRock at 8:59 AM on October 15, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]