Evo Psycho Bingo
Irradiated by LabRat
From Boing Boing, a rather hilarious graphic that I’m pretty sure I can rack up a full Bingo in within six comments of exchange with its target:
Click for big.
To be clear, in case anyone is confused, I have absolutely no problem with the basic concept of evolutionary psychology. I fully agree that the bit where we’re rational beings is a hell of a lot more recent than the bit where are social primates, and I absolutely think that that evolutionary background shaped how we think and feel, up to and including biologically based differences in sex, gender, and sexuality. What I have a massive problem with is how revoltingly often that the end “evolutionary psychology” is put to is in constructing ad-hoc just-so stories that justify their creators’ preconceptions and preferences, usually with extremely little true understanding of how the mechanics of evolution actually work, and even less attempt to address cultural forces and check their hypotheses against and across human history and different cultures. The distinct odor of bullshit wafting from such things usually comes with some common telltales:
- Definition of fitness as the degree to which something is sexually satisfying to males. Fitness is defined as number of matings, not number of children reaching reproductive age. The influence of the sexual preferences of females will be often be assumed to be insignificant, if they don’t actually suffer fitness loss from mating.
- The social structure of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers is assumed to have been functionally identical to the social structure of the author or authors’ own society immediately prior to the perceived advent of “political correctness”. Extra bonus: an assumption of a nuclear family with a single breadwinner, which is extremely modern by the standards of known history and still not the worldwide norm.
- Assumption of “mate quality” along a linear scale of best to worst, with minimal acknowledgment that wild gene pools are full of stable genetic diversity for the very reason that the definition of “best” is highly contextual, an effect only compounded by the scale of time.
- Assumptions about Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with minimal to nonexistent supporting examination of modern hunter-gatherers.
- Assumption that widespread cultural variations reflect ways in which human behavior has become “unnatural” rather than representing a warning sign to check the assumption that the behaviors in question are particularly hardwired.
It is true that science is not politically correct. It does not follow that science therefore supports “un-PC” conclusions instead. Science more often offers minimal real conclusions for our cultural wars and bugaboos, or a completely nonintuitive conclusion, as science exists in the first place to counter the heavy sway narrative logic and confirmation bias have on human thought.
April 8th, 2010 at 4:41 am
I particularly like I-3.
Does anyone ever really say that all behavior is hardwired? That strikes me as so patently absurd that I have trouble believing that anyone would actually say such a thing with a straight face.
April 8th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Don’t you know? They are behaviorally-hard-wired to say that all behavior is hard-wired.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:45 am
Wait, wait. People think women can’t mentally “rotate 3D objects”? Is this a real thing?
It is true that science is not politically correct. It does not follow that science therefore supports “un-PC” conclusions instead.
When you put it that way, it seems like a variation of god-in-the-gaps. Thinking along those lines, hack evo-psych actually has quite a bit in common with creationism.
My favorite bit on the card is this gem:
Rape is an adaptation.
Maybe so; natural selection doesn’t always select for traits that make us happy. But fortunately, tool use is also an adaptation.
April 8th, 2010 at 6:22 am
<3
I swear, some of these guys get their assumptions about Paleolithic society from the fucking Geico commercials.
The word "unnatural" always drives me up the wall, because I'm pretty sure I can’t do something that it’s not natural for a female human to do. If you think about it.
April 8th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Great post.
The definition of fitness one is interesting.
The reasoning (guessing here) must be that the female reproductive cycle, from conception to offspring, is nine months; the male cycle is a ten-minute fire-and-forget, so whatever males favour in a given era will/may have greater influence, thanks to the male ability to complete his reproductive cycle two hundred or so times over the same period.
Assuming, of course, a society of whatever sort of human where all the males have the libido and commitment levels of fourteen-year-old boys.
As for number five, it’s so much more appealing to certain, um, types to suggest that the “other” is engaging in some sort of unnatural act, rather than (metaphorically) a sort of semi-transitory non-physiological speciation. Adopting behaviours that work in a given society/geographical setting/whatever, depending on whether the era’s big shaping factor is “do I/we eat/not drown/live through today,” or “do I/we succeed in society today,” however the latter is defined.
April 8th, 2010 at 10:35 am
David: The trouble with that weighting of male and female “influence” is that males and females aren’t mating with a generic third sex, they’re mating with each other. For every male “fire and forget”, there has to be a female with that nine-month cycle that actually gets pregnant, and a child raised to adulthood, for it to count toward his fitness. Otherwise he’s just having fun. A woman’s chance of a pregnancy- only the start to potential fitness gain- are about 1/20; his chances are much, much lower given concealed ovulation, and that’s even before we take into consideration the massive investment in time, energy, and resources human children take to rear to reproductive age.
Here’s another modern thing we think of as a human norm: a cultural horror of infanticide. Hunter-gatherer groups that truly live independent of civilization almost universally have some culturally acceptable mechanism to allow for more infants than the tribe can absorb to die early. A ghetto lothario may be able to “spread his seed” far and wide and get a significant fitness payoff, but his savannah equivalent would have had an extremely difficult time doing the same thing.
April 8th, 2010 at 10:51 am
I’m laughing so hard I’m in frickin’ tears.
That bingo card is made of pure, distilled, compressed WIN.
April 8th, 2010 at 11:29 am
LabRat: Certainly wasn’t agreeing with the idea; just seemed interesting to explore the potential thought behind it, as it seemed to be one that might have some underlying, however flawed, logic, beyond being a banner to wave for (insert ideology here), like the “savannah = nuclear family of the ’50s” option.
April 8th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Ah, sorry for jumping on you a bit there. Part of the problem- and root source of my frustration- is that it’s only relatively recently that serious evolutionary biology research has started to question the assumption that matings equate to fitness tightly enough to use that as a proxy measure. Even when studying species with extreme parental investment…
April 8th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Is this – on the serious science side – an artifact of heavy (as a field) studies in species where mating=test of (at least) male fitness, and parental investment is either minimal or entirely lacking, leaving an undue focus on mating?
April 8th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Oh, it’s just late 19th-early 20th century armchair eugenics applied to psychology, that’s all. Nothing new here, same as it ever was, etc. Take some half-baked preconceived notions, a bit of misogynistic jingoism, a dash of nostalgia, a splash of smug self-satisfaction, and a pamphlet-sized understanding of evolution, mix it all together, then serve. The only differences between turn-of-the-century eugenics and turn-of-this-century Armchair EvoPsych is that they managed to throw psychology in there to spice things up and nobody worth listening to actually takes this stuff seriously.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
David: Actually, it’s Darwin’s fault. His theory of sexual selection was founded on the supposed universality of the “passionate male” and the “coy female”. Extended examples were provided- and often, later shown to be not what they seemed. In this arena people would actually have a point regarding modern biologists’ supposed slavish devotion to Darwin…
April 9th, 2010 at 10:36 am
http://www.quotes.net/quote/390