In my previous entries I discussed the challenges to Evolutionary Psychology mounted by Prof. David J. Buller. While I felt that the challenges mounted were most compelling, I still believe that EP will remain a very influential school of thought for years to come. Even if continued neurological research sustains Prof. Buller's contentions, folk wisdom will support EP as a commonsense explanation of widely-repeated gender and racial stereotypes. I'm not going to claim, as others have, that EP is part of a sinister plot by scientists to impose a rigid ideological order; however, EP does tend to sustain conservative ideological assumptions, and tends to reject liberal visions of the social order as unfaithful to human nature. This most assuredly will make EP all the harder to displace, much the way Rational Expectations and RBC have survived devastating attacks on their credibility.

This remark is informed by Richard Dawkin's angry review of Not in Our Genes (1985). Dawkins writes of the book,

...Let me speak plainly. Rose et al cannot substantiate their allegation about sociobiologists believing in inevitable genetic determination, because the allegation is a simple lie. The myth of the "inevitability" of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology, and has everything to do with Rose et al’s paranoiac and demonological theology of science. Sociobiologists, such as myself... are in the business of trying to work out the conditions under which Darwinian theory might be applicable to behaviour. If we tried to do our Darwinian theorising without postulating genes affecting behaviour, we should get it wrong. That is why sociobiologists talk about genes so much, and that is all there is to it. The idea of "inevitability" never enters their heads.

Dawkins' characterization of the book seems strikingly at odds with other reviews; one wonders if he, too, is guilty of misrepresenting the opinions of his interlocutors. However, according to this article and others like it, there does seem to be a bitter contention that the sociobiologists/EP are using the scientific method to rule out the possibility of free will; by this reasoning, the universal impulse of scientists to find an explanation for what they observe that is sufficient, compelling, and irresistible, is directed not towards institutions (that can themseves be changed) but towards human genes. In other words, when Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin want scientists to help liberate humans from oppression, Dawkins, Toomby, and Cosmides seem to want to prove that oppression is itself an innate part of human nature. Dawkins himself insists that this is not so, and that a genetic predisposition for behavior is by no means the same thing as determinism. As a student of economics, I have to agree with this: classical economic thought did not really assume that humans are always selfish and indifferent to any motive but self-enrichment; it's just that, at the aggregate, specific unselfish motives are exceptional in the peculiar influence they exert on behavior; when predicting the behavior of very large groups of humans, selfless motives average out.

Economists are sometimes vilified by the political left for assuming selfishness is both inevitable and beneficial, and eliminates any grounds for progressive social transformation. Economics operates on the assumption that large groups of people will behave as if they were utterly selfish, even if individual behavior cannot be predicted. We can take this analogy a step further and speculate on the existence of a RD', a parallel Richard Dawkins who shares the real Richard Dawkin's scientific views, but has ideological views similar to those of Richard Lewontin (i.e., Marxist). Would the argument between The Class Enemy Gene auther RD' and Lewontin sound the same? I submit it would. Lewontin might argue that Comrade RD' believed in genetic determinism, and RD' would insist that he didn't, he was merely insisting that sociobiology was a technical part of revolutionary theory that Comrade Lewontin was ignoring at the peril of the International. RD' could argue, for example, that revolutionary theory was needed to understand the appropriate uses of revolutionary violence, and that the Class Enemy Gene explained how "capitalist roaders" could be anticipated and redeemed with a minimum of coercion.

For the record, there have been analogous situations in economics. In the 1920's, when the USSR still enjoyed a significant degree of political and intellectual freedom, there was a bitter dispute between the "left" (Trotsky, Zinoviev) and N. Kondratiev, the internationally reknown economist. Kondratiev opposed the liquidation of the kulak (petit bourgeouis peasants) on the grounds that there was a need to introduce collectivization organically.

In my previous posts, I declared that I believed EP was probably going to undergo significant transformation as a result of research like Buller's; advances in neurology and of course the "decoding" of the human genome have made it clear that there is a far more complex and ambiguous relationship between genes and the behavior of the brain, than was previously supposed. I strongly suspect that Toomby and Cosmides will, for instance, learn to reject analogies between the brain and existing computer technology (because the technical parallels between computers and brains are far too tenuous). A case in point is the apparent ease with which brains process images, but not bits. Computers, in constrast, process images as bits-a notoriously inefficient way to do so. The way in which brains store memories as detailed images is, from the perspective of digital computing, the least efficent possible way to do so. It seems clear, therefore, that there is a very fundamental difference between the brain and computers that is reflected in the architecture that each evolved. Had the analogy been stronger, then the strategies employed for evolution would have been more similar. Both brains and computers, after all, are obligated to organize data in ways that are consume minimal amounts of power and system resources. The ability/obligation of computers to transmit data to other computers is not so great a difference as one might suppose; there are numerous centers of processing in the human brain that are required to communicate with each other as well, and of course the brain has to communicate with other organs. Neurological objections to the brain-computer analogy will not, I think, prove the death of EP, but they are likely to drastically alter many of its root premises.