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Evolutionary Psychology-4
May 16, 2005
[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ]
One of the more memorable lines of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (W.E.B. Du Bois) is this one: As I read again this work of mine written over sixty years ago, I am on the one hand gratified to realize how hard and honestly I worked on my subject as a young man of twenty-four...There is, however, [an] area of criticism ...I have not seen voiced but which disturbs me. That is my ignorance in the waning nineteenth century of the significance of the work of Freud and Marx... At this time psychological measurements were beginning at Harvard with Münsterberg; but the work of Freud and his ...epoch-making contribution to science were not generally known when I was writing this book, and consequently I did not realize the psychological reasons behind the trends of human action which the African slave-trade involved... My book's last admonition was "to do things at the very moment when they ought to have been done." Some knowledge of Freud would have made my conclusion less pat and simple. Needless to say, Du Bois is writing an introduction to a reprinting of his doctoral thesis (originally written in 1894). What, I wondered, might Freud have had to do with his analysis of the African Slave Trade and its persistance after abolition (1807)?Naturally, in my study of the slave-trade, I noted economic facts and influences...I still saw slavery and the trade as the result of moral lassitude-"the policy of laissez-faire, laissez-passer." I wanted the young nation to call forth "the whole moral energy of the people into action" instead of accepting a "bargain" on "one of the most threatening of the dsocial and political ills" which faced the nation. The role of Marx is plain enough; but Sigmund Freud's philosophy has intensely personal implications. How could a doctrine purporting to explain such a personal matter as latent anal fixations explain the machinations of the US Congress?
This paper helps explain what Du Bois might have meant ("Lenin v Freud on War and Aggression," Bryan Register, 1997) appeals to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents: ...Freud's theory of aggression is ...derived from two themes: the relations between the id, ego, and superego, and the conflict between the life instinct - Eros - and the death instinct - Thanatos.
Individuals are born with - as - an 'id', raw desire for satisfaction and pleasure. But not all desires can be satisfied, especially for an infant. And desires must be satisfied by following some process; fulfillment is not automatic. So the id develops, for its satisfaction in light of reality, an 'ego'...The ego remains, in a sense, part of the id, but it has concerns other than wish-fulfillment; it seeks to gratify the id in the context of what is possible in reality.
The development of the 'superego' is more complicated; the superego is generated through the Oedipus complex: At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his mother, which originally related to the mother's breast... the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him.... until the boy's sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them... His identification with his father... changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother.
The child is ambivalent about his father: he wants both to be him, and to kill him. To resolve this crisis, the child uses the strength derived from identification with the father to forbid himself to seek that which is his father's domain - that is, the mother. This self-forbidding creates the superego, which always exists in regard to the ego as a father to a child: dominant and prohibitory. Since the restrictions exercised on the child by the father are almost invariably the moral injunctions of the society, other moral authorities inform the superego in its attempt to police the ego. These become one's morals, which are then passed to one's children.
But the id, ego, and superego are only the channelers of forces. The forces themselves, the life and death instincts, are the second part of the story: ...we put forward the death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we suppose that [the life instinct], by bringing about a more a more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, of preserving it.
The life instincts push the individual toward prior states of living matter; the death instinct pushes an individual toward a state prior to living matter. The life instinct provides the source of an individual's libido and drive for happiness... The death instinct counters by providing the source of one's aggressive and violent tendencies: 'a portion of the [death] instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness.' ...Aggression is the death instinct controlled by Eros. While the death instinct seeks the destruction of the organism, the ego can redirect its force at an external object.
Having addressed the relationship between Freudian psychology and imperialism, we turn now to our original theme, the research of Prof. David J Buller. "DeFreuding Evolutionary Psychology: Adaptation and Human Motivation" addresses conflicts between the Freudian perception of unconscious motives and that of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). However, Buller mentions a few ways in which Freudian theories of the unconscious motivations of human action anticipate EP: Elsewhere he writes that "an evolutionary view of life can shed light on psyche, which eludes us because it is us" ...This goes well beyond the idea that understanding the evolution of the mind will enable us to infer its internal dynamics. It also conveys the Freudian legacy that our "manifest" image of human motivation is largely a veneer of illusion concealing the truth about the "latent" motives that actually cause us to behave as we do. Buller explains a priori that, their occasional denials nothwithstanding, EP practitioners do attempt to identify those latent motives as well as their ultimate ends.
Let us present these conflicts in outline: - [Martin] Daly and [Margo] Wilson say Freud's theory of the dynamic unconscious got its dynamics wrong. A young boy's conflicts with his father are due not to unconscious sexual jealousy over his parents' sexual relationship as per Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, they argue, but to a desire to postpone as long as possible the addition to the family of a sibling competing for parental resources.
- Freudian psychology treats the motives of behavior separately from the function of the behavior. The unconscious motivation consists of a set of desires for gratification, with a complex relationship to the reason such a preference might have evolved. For example, in Freudian psychology, "anal retention" is a form of gratification that involves the development of bowel control; subconscious motives of control stem from that. In contrast, EP typically identifies motives and functions, e.g., jealousy may occur as a subconscious motive precisely because, on average, humans that have evolved jealousy as a reproductive strategy are more likely to succeed in mate retention, which is therefore on average, optimal for propagating one's genes.
Buller is less interested in arbitrating between Freud and EP than in pointing out the problems of EP putting out its shingle to compete with Freud. Either EP attempts to use evolutionary analysis to explain the origins of human motivation, or else it uses evolutionary analysis to establish what those motivations are. If EP attempts to do both at once, it is performing a logical fallacy (because it conflates motivations with the functions of those motivations, as an evolved reproductive strategy); I would also add, that if EP tries to do both then it would put itself utterly beyond the realm of falsification. The reason is, if EP attempts to do both, then it would produce a narrative that claims humans evolved subliminal jealous impulses as a motivation (which, in actual fact, might not be present in the behavior of an individual; that individual might be acting under other unconscious motives); then, at the same time, use the same system of evolutionary theorizing to explain the function served by such a motivation (when, if fact, the motivation isn't relevant to the psychological function in play).
When I was in high school, I had a religious conservative's objection to Freudian psychotherapy. Like most people, I was delighted to find books that reinforced my biases, and initially, everything I "knew" about Freudian psychotherapy came from a book whose title I have completely forgotten. It was a book criticizing the concept from the vantage point that psychotherapy put itself beyond the reach of falsification by insisting that, if the patient rejected the therapist's analysis, the patient was "resisting" therapy-presumably to protect the self-perception. This was, in fact, the purported reason why motives were subconscious. IIRC, the book neglected to point out that this would have been a problem with any psychological therapy; I recall reading much the same thing in a conversation between Thomas Merton and Mark Van Doren. Van Doren warned Merton that his exercise of reason in the space of moral judgement was really an excuse to avoid moral rigor (again, this is a distant memory; I read Merton in a common laundry room of the apartment complex where I lived). Freud, however, did recognize the potential for this sort of circular reasoning to constitute a form of intellectual tyranny, and this article explains how he (at least) sought to redress the matter.
Buller's essay has attracted critical rejoinders (e.g., by Ed Hagen here). Ed Hagen argues that EP... "claims that our explanations in fact accord with commonsense understandings; it is the Freudian, postmodern, structural, social constructionist, and other largely bankrupt theories of human motivation and behavior that evolutionary psychologists wish to replace.
[...]
The focus of EP is to identify those psychological phenomena that are adaptations. It is in this sense that Darwinian imaginations will shed light on human motivation (in particular) and the human mind (in general)-which psychological phenomena are adaptations? If Symons claims a privileged role for EP in comprehending human motivation, then it is only with respect to other formal theories of such (e.g., Freud, Marx, Durkheim, Skinner, etc.), and not to either the subjective sense that individuals have, or the explanations they provide (a distinction that Buller fails to make). That is, EP is more likely to provide a correct account of motivation than is Freudianism, Marxism, etc. Conscious and unconscious are concepts (useful or not, with empirical support or not) that enter EP as potential phenomena to be explained, not as fundamental assumptions of the theory.
[...]
Buller also continues to imply that a theory of motivation entails the unconscious. It does not. It is he who sees the unconscious everywhere, not EP. A mechanism to detect and prefer mates with features that approach the population average does not imply or require the unconscious or unconscious motivations. In fact, it is not about motivation per se. Some individuals may be motivated to pursue mates with faces that approach a population mean, others may be motivated to avoid such mates (e.g., because they feel unable to successfully compete). Interestingly enough, it is Prof. Hagen, not Buller, who explains why the sociobiological fallacy is a fallacy:Buller does not properly explain why the sociobiological fallacy is in fact a fallacy. It is not merely because it conflates a theory of the origins of a mechanism with a theory of the nature of a mechanism. It is a fallacy because, absent time travel, it is impossible to compute current fitness at all. It is therefore impossible to maximize it. The fitness of an organism (more properly, a gene) will be known only to the future, and thus cannot be maximized in the present. This may be the main difference between EP and sociobiology.
(Part 5)
Comments
on this Post:
I've been waiting to see where you're going with this. But I
was going to comment on how "socio-biology"/Ev. Psych. involves a
version of the "genetic fallacy," confusing origin with current
function, which you seem now to have stated. Because a *capacity*
"necessarily" has a material, biological substrate, it does not
necessarily follow that that capacity is causally determined by its
biological basis. And the case is weakened all the more when care is
not taken to delineate the identity of the phenomena to be explained, a
complex welter in this sort of case, but rather picked at
opportunistically on an ad hoc basis. (There are no clear boundaries
between the mental, the physiological, and the behavioral, contrary to
the dualist tradition which frequently gets invertedly enacted by
reductionist-materialist styles of explanation, but rather the three
constantly interact, and much of what we might be wont to think of as
"mind" is actually compounded out of such interactions.) I think it's
perfectly legitimate to inquire into biological constraints and
tendencies in so-called "human nature", but it's fairly obviously
fallacious to regard such an inquiry as largely, if not entirely,
constitutive of the domain to which it is addressed. And actual
discoveries along those lines are far more likely to occur piecemeal,
as a byproduct of convergences in ongoing research in neuro-biology,
ethology, genetics, embryology, linguistics, psychology, etc., than by
means of the jerry-built program of a "new" science, especially one
riddled with such logical/empirical howlers as reliance on imaginary
scenarios about life on the African savannahs, rather than considering
several million years of divergent evolution and the sketchy, but
complicated record of paleoanthropological evolution.
The case of language deserves some special consideration, since it
is the development of language that marks the emergence from natural
biological evolution into the human socio-cultural form of life, as a
new level of emergent reality, with phenomena, complications, problems,
ciruits and feedback loops, of its own, which have a quasi-causal
significance requiring a different level of explanation, such as, e.g.,
the binding of "identities" to social recognitions between members of
the group and the purging of anxieties and conflicts that disrupt the
interactions of the group, or the coordination of differentiated
activities and actions, dependent on the transmission of inherited
cultural lore, through the establishment of social exchanges, (in
short, matters than involve "religion", in the etymological sense of
"binding ties".) Perhaps the key point is that it is only with language
that the phenomenon of intentional agency can be said to fully and
properly emerge, by which a contrast with causally determined processes
can be made. Human agency, "freedom", is an effect of language. Whereas
animal organisms, as a separately (self)-delimited causal organization,
respond to environmental events or cycles of events and intervene
causally, on behalf of their own causal organization, in the separate
causal chains or nexuses of their environment, only with symbolic
language is it possible to interpret environmental states-of-affairs in
terms of counterfactual possibilities and future aims and select
thematically from them to effect and monitor a causal intervention in
the environment. It should be further remarked that, just as the rules
of language are constitutive, such that one can say a good many things
by following those rules, but one is constrained by the
operations of those rules, on pain of loss of intelligibility, so too
is agency a constitutively constrained phenomenon, partly because its
possibilities overlap with those of language, but partly because it is
differentiated from language, with its causal consequences and
feedbacks requiring the development and structuring of a different set
of skills and tacit rules/understandings than the
communicative/interactive consequences of language, though the two
levels must in some degree interpenetrate and be coordinated. Such, at
any rate, would be an account of agency as a real phenomenon, at the
most rudimentary level. Now, the remark/criticism that I want to make
is that, in much of linguistics, there is a marked cognitivist bias,
emphasizing the function of language as a "neutral" exchange of
information between pre-constituted, intra-cranial "minds", which
neglects the point that any such cognitive exchange of information must
already be "in-formed" by language. It's true that there is a
complicated "chicken-and-egg" problem here, since language requires the
capacity for symbolic thought to recognize the intelligibility of signs
and their functionning as communicative signals, while the functionning
of signs as intelligible communicative signals depends on the existence
of a "system" of symbolic communication and their place in it. But if
one takes the "naturalistic" notion that language emerged out of
biological evolution seriously, one nonetheless can't read it back into
biological evolution, as if it were a pre-existent function of
cognitive-instrumental adaption operating in terms of isolated
"minds"/brains. Human beings did not suddenly develop language and thus
become sociable, but rather language could only have emerged on the
basis of a long evolutionary history of the development of animal
sociality, (and primates, as a class, are characterized by a marked
intensification of such sociality.) Now, animal communication is
entirely analog, which is to say, it operates entirely through and as a
system of relations, as a specification, in terms of acceptance or
rejection, of relational stances, without being able to "say" anything
*about* anything, (which requires syntax). Hence, it is a fair
conjecture that language emerged from and overlayed a prior analog
system of social communication, which, becoming digitalized, developed
the digitally encoded features that linguistics foucuses on in terms of
cognitive effects. But the "primary" function of language would be the
relational one of establishing and maintaining relationships, with the
immense amplicative cognitive-instrumental effects of language being an
"accidental" byproduct of evolution, (though there is no need to oppose
the relational and the cognitive-instrumental axes, as they can feed
into and "drive" one another). Though there are notable evolutionary
prerequisites for language, such as, the descended larynx and the
coordination of 400+ facial muscles with the tongue, and there is some
substantial evidence for modular functionning in some aspects of its
brain processing, there is little reason for speaking of a language
"instinct", as if language were a function rather than a result of
biological (pre)-adaption, since not only are the actual contents of
language generated through communicative interaction across the world,
rather than deriving simply from the brain processes of isolated
organisms, but it's very existence would seem to imply a long
evolutionary history of neural development, whereby instinctually-fixed
behavioral programs were broken up and internested with rule-governed
learning capacities that coevolved and increasingly took over from them.
But the basic remark I would want to emphasize about
socio-biology/Ev. Psych. isn't with respect to its
scientistic-reductionist tendencies, nor its ideological affinities or
functions, but rather regards the metaphysical impulse it ironically
embodies. Just as metaphysics construes intellibility/rational
justification in terms of a "grounding" in the "necessity" of a
pregiven order of the world, on the basis of a "prior" logic and its
"first principles", so socio-biology attempts to stuff the emergent
phenomena of the human social world back into the pregiven "logic" of
biological adaption, (which, among other things, ignores the question
of "adaption to what?"). There is an obvious affinity to the
"imperatives" of economistic thinking, rooted as it is in the
reproduction of material production, without regard to the social ends
of accumulated wealth or technical capacities. But there is also an
ironical affinity for its opponents among religious fundamentalists,
who similarly seek a dogmatic self-enclosure, that allieviates/explains
human responsibility. Further, adherents of such supposed evolutionary
thinking like to derive inverted justification from post-modernist
palaverings, with which opposition to their views is routinely
stigmatized, contrasting the alleged scientific basis and intent of
their program with the post-modernist production/proliferation of
synthetic ideologies, without any recognition that they, just as much
as their fundamentalist opponents, are engaged in something of the same.
Finally, I'd note my amusement with Lewontin et alia, since L. has a
particularly high professional reputation as a geneticist, arguing that
Dawkins postulates the "alienation" of the organism. First off, that's
an absurd misapplication of Marxist jargon, since organisms per se can
not be "alienated". Presumably, the point that they wanted to make
against Dawkins gene-selectionism, which does have the effect of
focusing on the "internal" structure of the isolated organism, was the
classic Darwinian point that natural selection occurs on phenotypes,
rather than genes, which are the outcome of such selections, and that
organisms hence can not be separated from their interactions with their
environments, which include other species, which coevolve with them,
which is a principle driver of the development of eco-systemic niches
and thus the emergence behavioral or mental properties that they might
display. Of course, it is not unreasonable to question the ideological
uses to which science can be put, an old Frankfurt School theme, nor is
it mistaken to see in sociobiology an ideological threat to projects of
social freedom or emancipation. But why adopt an ideological language
to make a basically biological point? And why focus on criticism of
ideological effects, when criticism of epistemic crudity would seem to
be the prior consideration?
Posted by: john c. halasz at May 22, 2005 01:05 AM
Thanks, John, it's really good to have you back. As always, I'm
really pleased by the way you've pulled everything together and gone
onto the next level of analysis.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to inquire into biological
constraints and tendencies in so-called "human nature", but it's fairly
obviously fallacious to regard such an inquiry as largely, if not
entirely, constitutive of the domain to which it is addressed
This fallacy is the one I call "fundamentalism": positing a single
explanation for everything one cares about. Part of the problem is, of
course, that it's reductionist; another is that it causes the Master
Theory to subordinate all ethical constraints to itself, which is how I
came to belief that fundamentalism was a failure as a moral guide.
Another is that the Master Theory typically is massaged to conform to
all possible narratives the believer encounters, which naturally chips
away at its meaning.
Hence, we intuitively understand the parallel between "Christian
fundamentalism," "Islamic fundamentalism," and "market fundamentalism,"
although the underlying systems of belief are quite
different, and although any expert on these respective
ideologies will inveigh against their comparison with the others. In a
commonsensical way, they speak to a connotative truth about the danger
of an explanatory narrative supplanting all other sources of guidance.
Finally, I'd note my amusement with Lewontin et al [...] arguing
that Dawkins postulates the "alienation" of the organism. First off,
that's an absurd misapplication of Marxist jargon, since organisms per
se can not be "alienated". Presumably, the point that they wanted to
make against Dawkins gene-selectionism, which does have the effect of
focusing on the "internal" structure of the isolated organism, was the
classic Darwinian point that natural selection occurs on phenotypes,
rather than genes, which are the outcome of such selections, and that
organisms hence can not be separated from their interactions with their
environments, which include other species [that] coevolve with them, which is a principle driver of the development of eco-systemic niches and thus the emergence [of?] behavioral or mental properties that they might display. [...] Why adopt an ideological language to make a basically biological point?
And why focus on criticism of ideological effects, when criticism of
epistemic crudity would seem to be the prior consideration?
[Emphasis added]
I think the practical significance of Lewontin, Jones, & Kamin's
critique was try to draw an analogy between primitive capital
accumulation (as the Marxian "original sin") and "ethology": both are
the foundations of branchings off of an explanatory narrative to
furnish a rationale for "the way things are." In the case of primitive
capital accumulation, this is used to proceed from enlightenment
rationalization of economic behavior to a polemical justification for
the alienation of capital from labor. In the case of ethology,
the sociobiologist was alleged to have begun with well-established
scientific explanations, and extrapolated those into explanations of
both "true" hidden motives, and the true functions of those hidden motives. The alienation here is of behavior from motive--specifically, declaring that behavior
is an evolved phenotype rather than an expression of individual will.
Posted by: James R MacLean at May 22, 2005 05:34 AM
I had to go to work so I wrapped up my already lengthy sceed. But
there was a machinery breakdown, so I took two hours off to go home.
Briefly, there were two things I didn't get to. One was to note that
the popular analogy between brains and computers is badly flawed.
Brains are basically analog pattern-recognition devices rather than
digital computational devices. The reason for such a flat-out dogmatic
assertion is itself evolutionary. With analog systems,- (it matters
little to me whether one uses the term "computation" in a stetched-out
sense or not)- the physical structure of the system, its processing
mode, and the output of the processing are effectively one and the same
thing, the simple example being a mercury thermometer, if one ignores
the digital stripes that convert its measurement into a numerical
scale. Hence, it is readily conceivable how such a system, which
evolved originally for physical and physiological reasons under
likewise physical selection pressures, might begin to develop mental
properties and capacities as an emergent feature of its functionning in
a gradual step-wise fashion, involving specific selection pressures and
ecological advantages, as well as, costs. By contrast, a digital
computational device involves a separate physical processing substrate
and a distinct informational code, both of which effectively require a
designer to construct/program. It is hard to see how such a system
could suddenly appear in natural evolution, built over but somehow
integrated with a physical system. Also a digital system involves
strictly bounded categories about which yes/no decisions must be made,
whereas analog processing occurs in a continuum of more or less similar
or different, such that it is readily conceivable how a categorial
network underlying emergent mental functionnings could evolve in the
latter case, whereas in the former case, the categorial boundaries
would have to be provided for from somewhere and would nonetheless be
stymied when confronted by borderline cases from the environment,
whereas in the former case which way a borderline case would be
categorized in an evolving remixing would make very little difference
overall. The upshot then is that, were an organism to have suddenly
acquired a digital intelligence overlaying its physiological
functionning it would likely be readily outcompeted, by dumber, less
mentally evolved, but more flexible organisms anyway. (However, the
distinction between analog and digital is not completely pat, since, in
systems theory, an establishment of a boundary, whether between
organism and environment, or between different physiological subsystems
within an organism, or between subsystems in the brain, involves a
digitalization.)
The other comment concerns so-called "human nature". I take my cue
in considering such matters, in part, from the reactionary German
philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, who argued that the human
species had so evolved that the plasticity of its "instincts" left it
instinctually underdefined, biologically deficient. As a consequence,
human beings require socio-cultural structuration to compensate for
their lack of biological behavioral definition qua adaptive fitness; in
other words, culture for human beings is itself in a sense
"biological", taking over and substituting for predetermined biological
functionning. Hence the standard opposition between nature and nurture
is defective, since there is a third middle level in which culture and
biology interpenetrate, culture taking over and structuring biological
tendencies and potentials, while underlying biological pressures and
tendencies, in part "steering" the formation of cultural structures.
(That would presumably be the level that psychoanalysis, however
murkily, dogmatically, and misguidedly, hits upon.) Hence, so-called
"human nature" is neither infinitely malleable, changeable like
yesterday's clothes, nor fixedly immutable and ahistorical, but rather
is a "second nature" which evolves, for better or for worse,
socio-culturally. What is sad about the "new-found" biologism is that
it entirely misses the resonance of that old Teutonic cultural
pessimism, replacing it with a dogmatic reification of "positive"
science, which blandly reaffirms the supposedly given as it selectively
mirrors the status quo, and has no idea what it loses or lacks. (The
wonderful Kafka story "A Report to an Academy" could serve as a
refutation of such an attitude avant la lettre.)
Posted by: john c. halasz at May 22, 2005 08:31 AM
One was to note that the popular analogy between brains and computers is badly flawed.
Absolutely. Everytime I read an article by an EP proponent, with few
exceptions I've been obligated to wonder why anyone respects this. I
think it's unfortunate that it's glommed onto evolution; so, for
example, we have Richard Dawkins defending evolution from creationists,
and sociobiology from Lewontin, Jones, & Kamin. So the result is,
people are inclined to lump opponents of EP with creationists, or (if
we're "lucky"), pop-radical leftists.
I'm hoping that, if nothing else, David Buller's articulate and measured critique will cause creative destruction in the field.
...It is readily conceivable how such a system, which evolved
originally for physical and physiological reasons under likewise
physical selection pressures, might begin to develop mental properties
and capacities as an emergent feature of its functioning in a gradual
step-wise fashion[...]By contrast, a digital computational device involves a separate physical processing substrate and a distinct informational code [software],
both of which effectively require a designer to construct/program. It
is hard to see how such a system could suddenly appear in natural
evolution, built over but somehow integrated with a physical system.
Word.
(Pun intended)
I think, indeed, this is about where the analogy breaks down. As you
say, machines (and other human artifacts) evolve under institutional or
market forces; one a refinement emerged, it could propagate across
platforms in a single generation (e.g., introduction of 64-bit CPUs
over 32-bit; replacing C with C++ compilers). In contrast, resistance
to crowd diseases allowed my Soviet-style of information processing to
survive the English conquest of Scotland and the American Civil War.
As a consequence, human beings require socio-cultural
structuration to compensate for their lack of biological behavioral
definition qua adaptive fitness; in other words, culture for human
beings is itself in a sense "biological", taking over and substituting
for predetermined biological functionning. Hence the standard
opposition between nature and nurture is defective, since there is a
third middle level in which culture and biology interpenetrate, culture
taking over and structuring biological tendencies and potentials, while
underlying biological pressures and tendencies, in part "steering" the
formation of cultural structures.
That's the gist of the Buller essays. It looks like recent discoveries in the genome and neurology are with you on this.
Posted by: James R MacLean at May 23, 2005 08:59 AM
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I've been waiting to see where you're going with this. But I was going to comment on how "socio-biology"/Ev. Psych. involves a version of the "genetic fallacy," confusing origin with current function, which you seem now to have stated. Because a *capacity* "necessarily" has a material, biological substrate, it does not necessarily follow that that capacity is causally determined by its biological basis. And the case is weakened all the more when care is not taken to delineate the identity of the phenomena to be explained, a complex welter in this sort of case, but rather picked at opportunistically on an ad hoc basis. (There are no clear boundaries between the mental, the physiological, and the behavioral, contrary to the dualist tradition which frequently gets invertedly enacted by reductionist-materialist styles of explanation, but rather the three constantly interact, and much of what we might be wont to think of as "mind" is actually compounded out of such interactions.) I think it's perfectly legitimate to inquire into biological constraints and tendencies in so-called "human nature", but it's fairly obviously fallacious to regard such an inquiry as largely, if not entirely, constitutive of the domain to which it is addressed. And actual discoveries along those lines are far more likely to occur piecemeal, as a byproduct of convergences in ongoing research in neuro-biology, ethology, genetics, embryology, linguistics, psychology, etc., than by means of the jerry-built program of a "new" science, especially one riddled with such logical/empirical howlers as reliance on imaginary scenarios about life on the African savannahs, rather than considering several million years of divergent evolution and the sketchy, but complicated record of paleoanthropological evolution.
The case of language deserves some special consideration, since it is the development of language that marks the emergence from natural biological evolution into the human socio-cultural form of life, as a new level of emergent reality, with phenomena, complications, problems, ciruits and feedback loops, of its own, which have a quasi-causal significance requiring a different level of explanation, such as, e.g., the binding of "identities" to social recognitions between members of the group and the purging of anxieties and conflicts that disrupt the interactions of the group, or the coordination of differentiated activities and actions, dependent on the transmission of inherited cultural lore, through the establishment of social exchanges, (in short, matters than involve "religion", in the etymological sense of "binding ties".) Perhaps the key point is that it is only with language that the phenomenon of intentional agency can be said to fully and properly emerge, by which a contrast with causally determined processes can be made. Human agency, "freedom", is an effect of language. Whereas animal organisms, as a separately (self)-delimited causal organization, respond to environmental events or cycles of events and intervene causally, on behalf of their own causal organization, in the separate causal chains or nexuses of their environment, only with symbolic language is it possible to interpret environmental states-of-affairs in terms of counterfactual possibilities and future aims and select thematically from them to effect and monitor a causal intervention in the environment. It should be further remarked that, just as the rules of language are constitutive, such that one can say a good many things by following those rules, but one is constrained by the operations of those rules, on pain of loss of intelligibility, so too is agency a constitutively constrained phenomenon, partly because its possibilities overlap with those of language, but partly because it is differentiated from language, with its causal consequences and feedbacks requiring the development and structuring of a different set of skills and tacit rules/understandings than the communicative/interactive consequences of language, though the two levels must in some degree interpenetrate and be coordinated. Such, at any rate, would be an account of agency as a real phenomenon, at the most rudimentary level. Now, the remark/criticism that I want to make is that, in much of linguistics, there is a marked cognitivist bias, emphasizing the function of language as a "neutral" exchange of information between pre-constituted, intra-cranial "minds", which neglects the point that any such cognitive exchange of information must already be "in-formed" by language. It's true that there is a complicated "chicken-and-egg" problem here, since language requires the capacity for symbolic thought to recognize the intelligibility of signs and their functionning as communicative signals, while the functionning of signs as intelligible communicative signals depends on the existence of a "system" of symbolic communication and their place in it. But if one takes the "naturalistic" notion that language emerged out of biological evolution seriously, one nonetheless can't read it back into biological evolution, as if it were a pre-existent function of cognitive-instrumental adaption operating in terms of isolated "minds"/brains. Human beings did not suddenly develop language and thus become sociable, but rather language could only have emerged on the basis of a long evolutionary history of the development of animal sociality, (and primates, as a class, are characterized by a marked intensification of such sociality.) Now, animal communication is entirely analog, which is to say, it operates entirely through and as a system of relations, as a specification, in terms of acceptance or rejection, of relational stances, without being able to "say" anything *about* anything, (which requires syntax). Hence, it is a fair conjecture that language emerged from and overlayed a prior analog system of social communication, which, becoming digitalized, developed the digitally encoded features that linguistics foucuses on in terms of cognitive effects. But the "primary" function of language would be the relational one of establishing and maintaining relationships, with the immense amplicative cognitive-instrumental effects of language being an "accidental" byproduct of evolution, (though there is no need to oppose the relational and the cognitive-instrumental axes, as they can feed into and "drive" one another). Though there are notable evolutionary prerequisites for language, such as, the descended larynx and the coordination of 400+ facial muscles with the tongue, and there is some substantial evidence for modular functionning in some aspects of its brain processing, there is little reason for speaking of a language "instinct", as if language were a function rather than a result of biological (pre)-adaption, since not only are the actual contents of language generated through communicative interaction across the world, rather than deriving simply from the brain processes of isolated organisms, but it's very existence would seem to imply a long evolutionary history of neural development, whereby instinctually-fixed behavioral programs were broken up and internested with rule-governed learning capacities that coevolved and increasingly took over from them.
But the basic remark I would want to emphasize about socio-biology/Ev. Psych. isn't with respect to its scientistic-reductionist tendencies, nor its ideological affinities or functions, but rather regards the metaphysical impulse it ironically embodies. Just as metaphysics construes intellibility/rational justification in terms of a "grounding" in the "necessity" of a pregiven order of the world, on the basis of a "prior" logic and its "first principles", so socio-biology attempts to stuff the emergent phenomena of the human social world back into the pregiven "logic" of biological adaption, (which, among other things, ignores the question of "adaption to what?"). There is an obvious affinity to the "imperatives" of economistic thinking, rooted as it is in the reproduction of material production, without regard to the social ends of accumulated wealth or technical capacities. But there is also an ironical affinity for its opponents among religious fundamentalists, who similarly seek a dogmatic self-enclosure, that allieviates/explains human responsibility. Further, adherents of such supposed evolutionary thinking like to derive inverted justification from post-modernist palaverings, with which opposition to their views is routinely stigmatized, contrasting the alleged scientific basis and intent of their program with the post-modernist production/proliferation of synthetic ideologies, without any recognition that they, just as much as their fundamentalist opponents, are engaged in something of the same.
Finally, I'd note my amusement with Lewontin et alia, since L. has a particularly high professional reputation as a geneticist, arguing that Dawkins postulates the "alienation" of the organism. First off, that's an absurd misapplication of Marxist jargon, since organisms per se can not be "alienated". Presumably, the point that they wanted to make against Dawkins gene-selectionism, which does have the effect of focusing on the "internal" structure of the isolated organism, was the classic Darwinian point that natural selection occurs on phenotypes, rather than genes, which are the outcome of such selections, and that organisms hence can not be separated from their interactions with their environments, which include other species, which coevolve with them, which is a principle driver of the development of eco-systemic niches and thus the emergence behavioral or mental properties that they might display. Of course, it is not unreasonable to question the ideological uses to which science can be put, an old Frankfurt School theme, nor is it mistaken to see in sociobiology an ideological threat to projects of social freedom or emancipation. But why adopt an ideological language to make a basically biological point? And why focus on criticism of ideological effects, when criticism of epistemic crudity would seem to be the prior consideration?
Posted by: john c. halasz at May 22, 2005 01:05 AM
Thanks, John, it's really good to have you back. As always, I'm really pleased by the way you've pulled everything together and gone onto the next level of analysis.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to inquire into biological constraints and tendencies in so-called "human nature", but it's fairly obviously fallacious to regard such an inquiry as largely, if not entirely, constitutive of the domain to which it is addressed
This fallacy is the one I call "fundamentalism": positing a single explanation for everything one cares about. Part of the problem is, of course, that it's reductionist; another is that it causes the Master Theory to subordinate all ethical constraints to itself, which is how I came to belief that fundamentalism was a failure as a moral guide. Another is that the Master Theory typically is massaged to conform to all possible narratives the believer encounters, which naturally chips away at its meaning.
Hence, we intuitively understand the parallel between "Christian fundamentalism," "Islamic fundamentalism," and "market fundamentalism," although the underlying systems of belief are quite different, and although any expert on these respective ideologies will inveigh against their comparison with the others. In a commonsensical way, they speak to a connotative truth about the danger of an explanatory narrative supplanting all other sources of guidance.
Finally, I'd note my amusement with Lewontin et al [...] arguing that Dawkins postulates the "alienation" of the organism. First off, that's an absurd misapplication of Marxist jargon, since organisms per se can not be "alienated". Presumably, the point that they wanted to make against Dawkins gene-selectionism, which does have the effect of focusing on the "internal" structure of the isolated organism, was the classic Darwinian point that natural selection occurs on phenotypes, rather than genes, which are the outcome of such selections, and that organisms hence can not be separated from their interactions with their environments, which include other species [that] coevolve with them, which is a principle driver of the development of eco-systemic niches and thus the emergence [of?] behavioral or mental properties that they might display. [...] Why adopt an ideological language to make a basically biological point? And why focus on criticism of ideological effects, when criticism of epistemic crudity would seem to be the prior consideration?
[Emphasis added]
I think the practical significance of Lewontin, Jones, & Kamin's critique was try to draw an analogy between primitive capital accumulation (as the Marxian "original sin") and "ethology": both are the foundations of branchings off of an explanatory narrative to furnish a rationale for "the way things are." In the case of primitive capital accumulation, this is used to proceed from enlightenment rationalization of economic behavior to a polemical justification for the alienation of capital from labor. In the case of ethology, the sociobiologist was alleged to have begun with well-established scientific explanations, and extrapolated those into explanations of both "true" hidden motives, and the true functions of those hidden motives. The alienation here is of behavior from motive--specifically, declaring that behavior is an evolved phenotype rather than an expression of individual will.
Posted by: James R MacLean at May 22, 2005 05:34 AM
I had to go to work so I wrapped up my already lengthy sceed. But there was a machinery breakdown, so I took two hours off to go home. Briefly, there were two things I didn't get to. One was to note that the popular analogy between brains and computers is badly flawed. Brains are basically analog pattern-recognition devices rather than digital computational devices. The reason for such a flat-out dogmatic assertion is itself evolutionary. With analog systems,- (it matters little to me whether one uses the term "computation" in a stetched-out sense or not)- the physical structure of the system, its processing mode, and the output of the processing are effectively one and the same thing, the simple example being a mercury thermometer, if one ignores the digital stripes that convert its measurement into a numerical scale. Hence, it is readily conceivable how such a system, which evolved originally for physical and physiological reasons under likewise physical selection pressures, might begin to develop mental properties and capacities as an emergent feature of its functionning in a gradual step-wise fashion, involving specific selection pressures and ecological advantages, as well as, costs. By contrast, a digital computational device involves a separate physical processing substrate and a distinct informational code, both of which effectively require a designer to construct/program. It is hard to see how such a system could suddenly appear in natural evolution, built over but somehow integrated with a physical system. Also a digital system involves strictly bounded categories about which yes/no decisions must be made, whereas analog processing occurs in a continuum of more or less similar or different, such that it is readily conceivable how a categorial network underlying emergent mental functionnings could evolve in the latter case, whereas in the former case, the categorial boundaries would have to be provided for from somewhere and would nonetheless be stymied when confronted by borderline cases from the environment, whereas in the former case which way a borderline case would be categorized in an evolving remixing would make very little difference overall. The upshot then is that, were an organism to have suddenly acquired a digital intelligence overlaying its physiological functionning it would likely be readily outcompeted, by dumber, less mentally evolved, but more flexible organisms anyway. (However, the distinction between analog and digital is not completely pat, since, in systems theory, an establishment of a boundary, whether between organism and environment, or between different physiological subsystems within an organism, or between subsystems in the brain, involves a digitalization.)
The other comment concerns so-called "human nature". I take my cue in considering such matters, in part, from the reactionary German philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, who argued that the human species had so evolved that the plasticity of its "instincts" left it instinctually underdefined, biologically deficient. As a consequence, human beings require socio-cultural structuration to compensate for their lack of biological behavioral definition qua adaptive fitness; in other words, culture for human beings is itself in a sense "biological", taking over and substituting for predetermined biological functionning. Hence the standard opposition between nature and nurture is defective, since there is a third middle level in which culture and biology interpenetrate, culture taking over and structuring biological tendencies and potentials, while underlying biological pressures and tendencies, in part "steering" the formation of cultural structures. (That would presumably be the level that psychoanalysis, however murkily, dogmatically, and misguidedly, hits upon.) Hence, so-called "human nature" is neither infinitely malleable, changeable like yesterday's clothes, nor fixedly immutable and ahistorical, but rather is a "second nature" which evolves, for better or for worse, socio-culturally. What is sad about the "new-found" biologism is that it entirely misses the resonance of that old Teutonic cultural pessimism, replacing it with a dogmatic reification of "positive" science, which blandly reaffirms the supposedly given as it selectively mirrors the status quo, and has no idea what it loses or lacks. (The wonderful Kafka story "A Report to an Academy" could serve as a refutation of such an attitude avant la lettre.)
Posted by: john c. halasz at May 22, 2005 08:31 AM
One was to note that the popular analogy between brains and computers is badly flawed.
Absolutely. Everytime I read an article by an EP proponent, with few exceptions I've been obligated to wonder why anyone respects this. I think it's unfortunate that it's glommed onto evolution; so, for example, we have Richard Dawkins defending evolution from creationists, and sociobiology from Lewontin, Jones, & Kamin. So the result is, people are inclined to lump opponents of EP with creationists, or (if we're "lucky"), pop-radical leftists.
I'm hoping that, if nothing else, David Buller's articulate and measured critique will cause creative destruction in the field.
...It is readily conceivable how such a system, which evolved originally for physical and physiological reasons under likewise physical selection pressures, might begin to develop mental properties and capacities as an emergent feature of its functioning in a gradual step-wise fashion[...]By contrast, a digital computational device involves a separate physical processing substrate and a distinct informational code [software], both of which effectively require a designer to construct/program. It is hard to see how such a system could suddenly appear in natural evolution, built over but somehow integrated with a physical system.
Word.
(Pun intended)
I think, indeed, this is about where the analogy breaks down. As you say, machines (and other human artifacts) evolve under institutional or market forces; one a refinement emerged, it could propagate across platforms in a single generation (e.g., introduction of 64-bit CPUs over 32-bit; replacing C with C++ compilers). In contrast, resistance to crowd diseases allowed my Soviet-style of information processing to survive the English conquest of Scotland and the American Civil War.
As a consequence, human beings require socio-cultural structuration to compensate for their lack of biological behavioral definition qua adaptive fitness; in other words, culture for human beings is itself in a sense "biological", taking over and substituting for predetermined biological functionning. Hence the standard opposition between nature and nurture is defective, since there is a third middle level in which culture and biology interpenetrate, culture taking over and structuring biological tendencies and potentials, while underlying biological pressures and tendencies, in part "steering" the formation of cultural structures.
That's the gist of the Buller essays. It looks like recent discoveries in the genome and neurology are with you on this.
Posted by: James R MacLean at May 23, 2005 08:59 AM