Psychology, evolutionary

David Hull The story that you tell from your own experience with socio-biology and later evolutionary psychology is commonplace in science. Science does not always supply a warm, supportive environmental for scientists. I wrote a very long book dealing with how the rise of cladistic analysis would kill it. 

Evolutionary Psychology A Case Study in the Poverty of Genetic Determinism... 

Returning to my original fanciful example, the first thing to note is that reductive explanations may fail to be relevant or appropriate even when they do introduce factors that are at least preconditions for the phenomenon in question. (Perhaps there is always some kind of reductive explanation that does this much.) This possibility is obvious for evolutionary psychology. To take an extreme (in the absurdity of the evolutionary explanation) and notorious example, there is no doubt that men have evolved both the capacity to commit rape, and a disposition, under some circumstances, to do so. This much is true for any behaviour that actually occurs, although the disposition to play the sousaphone or to extract cube roots is something that requires extremely special circumstances. 

Moving now from science fiction by philosophers to science fiction by scientists, we can describe circumstances under which evolutionary psychological explanations would be indisputably correct. Suppose, for instance, that rape was indeed caused by a particular module in the brain. This can be a module possessed by all males but activated only under certain circumstances (in which case, the explanation of rape will of course be incomplete), or a module peculiar to rapists. It must be a module produced by some set of genes, and those genes must have been selected in part, at least, because of their tendency to produce rape-generating brain modules. Generalising, we can identify the following three principles ... 

When evolution selects the genes that build the parts of brains (modules) that produce a particular kind of behaviour, and evolution selects them because of the fitness benefits of that kind of behaviour, we have the conditions for a perfect evolutionary psychological explanation. 

There is no reason to think that the other kind of hypothetical module, the kind exemplified by the rape module that directs different responses to different situations, will be any less susceptible to developmental variation than quasi-deterministic modules such as the homosexuality module. Plus, for that matter, there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be less initial genetic variability in cases such as the rape module. So perhaps the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics should not be seen as fundamentally disparate. 

Thornhill, R. and Thornhill, N.W. (1992), The evolutionary psychology of mens coercive sexuality , Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 363-421. 

Dorothy Nelkin Following up on your last point on social policy, from the material that I read in sociology and social policy, what I worry about most is the naturalistic fallacy the move from is to ought . Yet after the last session, I was told that this is no longer a problem, that nobody worries about this anymore. So is this just simply a problem of my philosophical naivety, or does evolutionary psychology encourage the naturalistic fallacy ... 

Alex Rosenberg Aren t you asking evolutionary psychology to run before it can walk ... 

The additional refinement to the theory, which is essential for the full flowering of evolutionary psychology, was suggested in an often recounted pub comment by Haldane in the 1950s, that he would be prepared to sacrifice his life for two brothers or eight cousins. Because he shared genes in common with his kin, the proportion varying with the closeness of... 

A further characteristic feature of the evolutionary psychology argument is to point to the relatively short period, in geological and evolutionary terms, over which Homo sapiens - and, in particular, modern society - has appeared. Forms of behaviour or social organisation which evolved adaptively over many generations in human hunter-gatherer society may or may not be adaptive in modern industrial society, but have, it is claimed, become to a degree fixed by humanity s evolutionary experience in the palaeolithic EEA. Hence, they are now relatively unmodifiable, even if dysfunctional. 

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