Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Sunday, 3 July 2011
Bullfighting for the unacquainted
Bullfighting in Spain has its origins during the 8 long centuries of the Spanish
War of Reconquest (711-1492 A.D.) when the knights of both the Moors and
Christians would organize hunting competitions as a respite from killing
each other and they soon realized that of all the prey the Iberian bull
offered the greatest challenge as unlike other animals it preferred to die
fighting rather than fleeing.It’s probable that a nobleman captured a few brave beasts and took them to his village in order to recreate the thrill of the hunt before his admiring subjects. Thus some remote part of Medieval Spain saw the origins of what is today the national Spanish spectacle of bullfighting.
The history of bullfighting recalls that the first real bullfight, took place in 1133 at Vera, Logroño in honour of the coronation of King Alfonso VIII. From then on they became a popular pass time at many important events. King Philip II however was disgusted by it and recruited the help of Pope Pius V to get it banned by paper decree. Other favourable delights were enjoyed by noble society while peasants continued the bullfight with enthusiasm and thus it became a symbol of something genuinely Spanish.
By 1726 they were ready to adopt their first bullfighting hero ‘Francisco Romero’ from Ronda. He was a man of humble origins who became the first professional bullfighter in Spain. The spectacle developed into an art form. He introduced the estoque, sword and muleta.
Today's bullfight is much as it was developed in the time of Romero. Six bulls and three matadors are required for an afternoon’s corrida. The three matadors dressed in their trajes de luces (suit of lights) enter the arena accompanied by their banderilleros and picadors and the strains of a traditional paso doble. The door to the toril, or bull pen, is opened and one of the bulls makes his entrance into the arena.The matador greets it with a series of passes with a large cape (Capote).These passes are usually Verónicas, the basic cape pass (named after the woman who held out a cloth to Christ on his way to the crucifixion). Bulls charge the movement not the colour of the cape (they are colour blind).The second part of the bullfight is the job of the mounted picadors who lance at the bull. Next banderilleros on foot place their pairs of spear headed sticks in the bulls shoulders to lower its head. After this the faena or final act of the performance will begin. The muleta (red cape) is used to perform sequences of passes which display the bullfighter’s artistry. The ‘natural’ pass is one in which the danger to the matador is increased as the estoque is removed from the muleta thus reducing the target size and tempting the bull to charge at the larger object, the bullfighter.
The matador tries to electrify the crowd by moving closer and closer to the horns, finally he lines the bull up for the kill.The blade has to pass through the small space between the shoulder blades for this space to be open the bulls feet have to be parallel and his head down as the bullfighter rushes over the horns to make the thrust by plunging the estoque between the withers into the region of the aorta. This requires considerable skill and discipline, not to mention a certain amount of raw courage and for this reason is known as "el momento de la verdad" or the moment of truth.
Many have a strong opinion about the bullfight be it pro or con as I myself do on the food chain. It is not my intention to be judgmental here but merely to report a few facts about the art. All opinions are to be respected.
© Author: Gisela Gina
What's your pitch on conformity?
Whether we like it or not, groups of humans act a lot like herds.
In action, opinion and even feelings, people are natural followers of the particular group they belong to. Must we be diligent followers and carry a lifelong string of duties that do not bring fulfillment and self gratification. Why must everything we do have a practical application rather than occasional personal contentment. Even in the most extreme situations, group-think tends to overcome individualism.
What do we really think of non-conformists or the so called black sheep? Opinions please.
An evolutionary view on behaviour
Boys are made to shoot and girls are made to lay eggs. And if the truth be known, boys don't very much care what they squirt into.' Crude and inelegant it may be, but neatly sums up the argument of evolutionary psychology.
The human mind is built from genes, the argument goes, the sole purpose of which is to reproduce themselves. The genes, which have been selected for through the process of evolution, programme the mind with a set of behaviours best designed to carry out their selfish aims. The reproductive strategies of men and women are different, so they have been programmed to exhibit different behaviours. The whole edifice of human society and culture is built on the need for genes to reproduce themselves, and on the different needs of men and women.
Looking at three basic premises of evolutionary psychology. First, that human beings are not born as blank slates, but are pre-programmed with specific knowledge about the world into which they are about to enter. Second, that most human behaviours, as well as social structures, have been selected for through the course of evolution, and that the ultimate (if not proximate) cause of such behaviour is the need to spread genes. And third, that many of the social problems which beset humanity arise from the mismatch between our genetic heritage (which is adapted for a Stone Age environment) and the world in which we live today. In effect we are Stone Age men living in a space age world.
For most of the past half-century, the orthodox view within psychology, anthropology and social science has been that human beings are born as blank slates. The human infant learns entirely through experience, and its behaviours, attitudes and personality are moulded by the culture into which it is born. Most scientists acknowledged that humans had a number of basic instincts and an innate propensity to learn, but felt that these did not amount to much given the almost infinitely plastic and impressionable nature of the mind. Finally, according to this orthodox view, the human brain works like a general purpose computer, using much the same method of reasoning to tackle every problem.
Over the past two decades psychologists have devised inventive experiments to tease out what innate capacities an infant might have. We now know, for instance, that infants possess knowledge about the physical world that they could not possibly have acquired through experience. They know what constitutes a physical an object, that objects do not normally pass through each other, and that they do not normally materialise or dematerialise at will. Infants seem to have an innate concept of the difference between animate and inanimate objects, and an intuitive preference for the human face.
Perhaps the most spectacular advance in the understanding of innate knowledge has been with an infant's linguistic ability. Forty years ago Noam Chomsky instigated a revolution in cognitive psychology by suggesting that children learn language by learning rules of grammar. These rules, he suggested, are somehow hardwired into the brain. Chomsky called these innate rules a 'universal grammar' and suggested that the same universal grammar underlay all human languages.
Over the past four decades Chomsky's insights have proved very fruitful. Research from a variety of disciplines has shown linguistic capacity to be both natural and universal. It is natural because it is almost impossible to stop a child learning its native tongue. When a child encounters maths, it has to memorise the multiplication table and the complexities of long division. When it learns to play the piano, it must laboriously learn the notes and the chords and then the way that these combine to form musical phrases. Yet when it learns its native language, it uses such complex grammatical constructions such as the conditional subjunctive, or the past perfect tense without knowing that it is doing so, and possibly without ever knowing in its lifetime that it has done so thousands of times over.
Language is universal because not only do all human cultures possess language, but they possess language of similar complexity. Unlike reading or mathematics or engineering, the sophistication of language is not altered by historical or social development. Language, therefore, seems to be both distinct from other cognitive skills and innate.
All these considerations have led cognitive psychologists to replace the blank slate with a 'modular' view of the mind. The mind possesses innate knowledge about the world. This knowledge is contained in a collection of distinct modules, or mini-minds, each specialised to perform a distinct task: understand physical relations, analyse visual data, process speech, and so on. Most cognitive psychologists believe that the mind is only partly modular - largely in the processing of language, perception and emotion. Cognition, many argue, results from more general brain processes.
Not so, respond evolutionary psychologists. Virtually all thought processes, they suggest, are modular and innate. Moreover, they argue, modules are not simply innate (hardwired into the brain) but evolved (designed by natural selection to perform functions important to the survival and reproduction of the organism).
The starting point of evolutionary psychology is not so much how the brain works today, as how it would have worked some 50 000 years ago. The brain, they observe, is an evolved structure and it evolved to solve the problems characteristic of our hunter-gatherer past. 'Evolutionary processes are the "architect" that assembled, detail by detail, our evolved psychological and physiological architecture'.
Because each type of problem faced by our Stone Age ancestors had a unique form, trying to solve them all with a single reasoning device would not have been very useful. The most successful early humans would have been those individuals whose brains provided specific solutions to specific problems. In other words, the smartest ancient human brains would have been composed of dozens of different instincts each designed by natural selection to aid survival and reproduction in a Stone Age environment. For evolutionary psychologists all human behaviours are adaptive - they were chosen by natural selection because they increased the ability of the individual to reproduce. Since the modern mind is not genetically that different from that of our ancestors, our mind is a nest of instincts, all adapted for a Stone Age life.
In the evolutionary psychology scheme of things, the brain contains two innate, specialist modules, one of which allows us to deal with animate objects, and the other with inanimate ones. There is some empirical evidence that this may be the case. Had our ancestors mistaken inanimate objects for animate ones, they would not have survived for very long.
Human beings possess innate knowledge about our world. The human mind, to some degree at least, is composed of specialised modules, each dedicated to solving particular tasks. But there seems to be little wisdom in viewing the mind simply as a nest of instincts. There is, on the contrary, considerable reason, both empirical and theoretical, to believe that the mind cannot be built in the way the evolutionary psychologists wish it to be. While language and basic perceptual systems such as vision or the understanding of physical systems, have been shown to be modular, very little else has.
Human behaviours and social structures are solely the products of natural selection ? This claim rests on two beliefs: first that modern behaviours are analogous to those of our ancestors; and second, that, short of evoking Divine intervention, natural selection is the only force that could have shaped the human mind and society. Like the claim for a modular mind, this argument is based on a view of how humans would have conducted themselves 50 000 years ago. But how do we know the behaviour of our ancestors? Behaviour, unlike bone, does not fossilise. Precisely because these are ancient humans, living before the development of much technology, archaeological evidence is scant. And there are certainly no ancient humans still living for us to observe.
It's a problem faced by many disciplines - archaeology, for instance, or palaeoanthropology - which have to reconstruct an ancient past from scant evidence. But it is a particular problem for evolutionary psychologists because their whole discipline rests on understanding modern behaviour in the light of ancient behaviour.
There are a number of ways evolutionary psychologists try to get round this problem. One is to assume that the lives of contemporary hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung San of southern Africa or the Ache of South America, provide a window onto the lives our ancestors. Since humans, over the vast proportion of our evolutionary history, lived as hunter-gatherers, so any evolved behaviours would be adaptations to a hunter-gatherer life. Hence studying the behaviours of contemporary hunter-gatherers should tell us which modern behaviours are adaptive and which not.
There is a long history of psychologists and anthropologists viewing 'primitive' groups as relics of an ancient past. It's a claim at the heart of nineteenth-century racial anthropology. I am not suggesting that the arguments of evolutionary psychologists are racist in any way - far from it. But many of the problems that underlay racial anthropology also underlie evolutionary psychology.
To begin with, why should we assume that the lives of 'primitive' societies today resemble those of ancient humans? Both may be hunter-gatherers, but the !Kung San, the Ache and others, are likely to have changed and developed over the past fifty or hundred thousand years. After all, no one would claim that modern agricultural societies resemble those of the earliest farmers ten thousand years ago. Why make the same assumption about hunter-gatherers, especially over a much greater time span?
There are many reasons to question the assumption that the psychological traits and behaviours of contemporary hunter-gatherers are necessarily evolved adaptations. Consider, for instance, the claim by some Darwinists that we possess an 'intuitive biology' module - an innate evolved capacity to understand and order the natural world. A number of anthropologists have pointed out the remarkable similarities between the way that 'primitive' societies classify the living world and the Linnaean system of classification at the heart of modern biology.
For evolutionary psychologists, the fact that hunter-gatherers have developed such superb taxonomic skills without the benefits of modern science reveals these skills to be innate and evolved. But if this were true, then, given their common genetic constitution, people living in modern industrial nations should be as capable as hunter-gatherers of classifying animals and plants. Quite clearly, they are not. Put the average Englishman on a desert island and you’d quickly find that his 'natural' abilities were less than intuitive.
The taxonomic skills of hunter-gatherers may well be inherited through their cultures not their genes. Evolutionary psychologists are confusing innate knowledge with folk knowledge - the knowledge developed within non-scientific cultures. Folk knowledge, such as that of hunter-gatherers, they assume, must be intuitive. But why? Non-scientific peoples are as capable of reasoning about the natural world as are scientists. The empirical reality of the biological world, together with a common propensity of human cultures to categorise at some minimal level (a propensity that may or may not be innate) is sufficient to explain similar taxonomies among different peoples. It is simply nonsense for Steven Pinker to write that because 'Most people feel, along with biologists, that the caterpillar and butterfly are the same animal, and the caterpillar and centipede are not, despite appearances to the contrary', so this demonstrates an 'intuitive' capacity to classify living forms. In fact, it simply demonstrates that we have learned that caterpillars give rise to butterflies but are unrelated to centipedes, just as we learn that whales should be classified not with fish but with mammals - and just as Australian Aborigines or the !Kung San learn the differences between birds, fish and quadrupeds.
The absurdities of using contemporary hunter-gatherers as templates for ancient humans can be seen in an example in EO Wilson's book On Human Nature. Here, Wilson examines sexual roles among the !Kung San. Wilson observes that the !Kung do not impose sex roles upon their children, little girls apparently being treated in much the same manner as little boys. As adults, women gather mongongo nuts and other plant food, usually close to the camp, while men range further to hunt game. But, writes Wilson, '!Kung social life is relaxed and egalitarian and social tasks are often shared. Men often gather mongongo nuts or build huts... and women occasionally catch small game.'
!Kung San society, then, shows some but not much sexual differentiation. Where, however, the !Kung San have settled into an agricultural form of life, the sexual roles are much more entrenched. Wilson suggests that as societies develop, so sexual roles become more demarcated: 'When societies grow still larger and more complex, women tend to be reduced in influence outside the home, and to be more constrained by custom, ritual and formal life.'
Wilson's claim that social complexity necessarily leads to greater sexual differentiation may be somewhat dubious but it is not a totally unwarranted assumption. A reasonable interpretation of this might be that sexual differentiation is a product of social development. To find the causes of the subordination of women in modern society, then, one should look at the organisation of modern society.
According to Wilson sexual differentiation is the product of a natural process - hypertrophy. Hypertrophy normally refers to an increase in the size of a tissue or organ, often in response to an increased workload. A similar process, Wilson suggests, has led to sexual differentiation in modern societies. 'Like the teeth of baby elephants that lengthen into tusks, and the cranial bones of the male elk that sprout into astonishing great antlers', he writes, 'the basic social responses of the hunter-gatherers have metamorphosed from relatively modest environmental adaptations into unexpectedly elaborate, even monstrous forms in advanced societies.'
Speculation may be the stock in trade of evolutionary psychology, but even by Darwinian standards this is spectacularly wild. To begin with, hypertrophy is a developmental, not evolutionary, process. It refers to a process that takes place within an individual's lifetime, not within a species across evolutionary time. It also refers to a process of physical, not a behavioural or social, change. As a scientific theory goes, it's about on par with the belief that aliens built the pyramids. None of this prevents Wilson from arguing that a whole host of other social phenomena, including racism and nationalism, are also 'hypertrophic modifications of the biologically meaningful institutions of hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal states.
What Wilson is really doing is taking a modern behaviour - in this case sexual discrimination - translating it back into hunter-gatherer life, and assuming that these early behaviours must be 'biologically meaningful' since the only force acting on ancient humans was natural selection. He then notices that the same behaviour appears in modern humans.
Even if we did know the behaviour patterns of early humans, this would not necessarily help us understand the roots of modern behaviour. This is because of the problems of using analogies as a scientific tool. Metaphor and analogy are very important to scientific reasoning because they allow us to view phenomena in new and distinct ways. Perhaps the most evocative and influential modern scientific metaphor is that of the 'selfish gene'. Richard Dawkins' memorable phrase illustrates the strengths of metaphor in science. It replaces the drab mathematics of population biology with a wonderfully illuminating picture of how natural selection might work. But it also illustrates the dangers of metaphoric thinking. All too often writers, including sometimes Dawkins himself, seem to forget they are dealing with a metaphor and argue as if genes actually were independent agents acting out their selfish desires.
In the case of the selfish gene its metaphoric nature is apparent to all, though some may forget it on occasion. In dealing with the relationship between modern behaviour and that of ancient humans, however, many Darwinists fail to grasp at all that they are dealing with an analogy, not a true material relationship.
Modern life is very different from Stone Age life. We partake in a myriad of activities, from going on holiday to wearing a condom, from watching TV to holding political demonstrations, that did not exist in the Pleistocene. How, then, do we translate from modern behaviour to ancient behaviour, and vice versa? By assuming that modern behaviours are in some way analogous to ancient behaviours. Cornering the futures market is like moving in for the kill in a hunt; following the party line at Westminster is akin to submitting to the authority of the alpha male; and so on. Too often, however, evolutionary psychologists fail to appreciate that these are simply imaginative analogies, of the kind that a poet or a novelist might use, and treat them instead as if there existed a real relationship between the two behaviours. 'It is poor science', Rosalind Arden pointed out in her recent debate in Prospect with Kingsley Browne, 'to pretend that stockbroking is like hunting and that staying at home with a small screamer is what women have evolved o cope with.' Indeed it is. But, unfortunately, much of evolutionary psychology rests on such assumptions.
The problem of analogical reasoning is particularly acute in making comparisons between the behaviours of humans and non-human animals. Unlike early hominids, animals are available for psychologists to observe and record their behaviour. This has made it very tempting to draw analogies between animal and human behaviour. Fighting between troops of chimps is like tribal warfare. A male orangutan's attack on a female is akin to rape. Anal intercourse among rats is homosexuality, this behaviour of overcrowded rats has been compared to that of concentration camp victims.
Evolutionary psychologists make the assumption that human and animal behaviours are more than simply analogous, but are governed by the same laws and forces. Or, to put it another way, they assume that since only natural selection can shape human behaviour, it is valid to compare human behaviours with those of animals with whom we are evolutionarily related.
Natural selection and divine intervention, however, are not the only explanations for the development of the human mind. There are material causes and motivations to human behaviour that are entirely absent from animal life. Unlike animals, humans are social and cultural beings, and human behaviour can only be understood within a social and cultural context. Of course, many animals are also social. But one of the fundamental mistakes of evolutionary psychology is to assume that the sociability of humans is of the same form as the sociability of non-human animals. This is not so. We may use the same word, but they describe two processes.
'Social' conduct in animals refers to any behaviour exhibited by a group that interacts with each other. It can range from zebras moving as a herd to minimise the effects of predators, to bees performing designated roles in a highly organised hive. One of the triumphs of modern Darwinism has been its explanation of how selfish genes give rise to social behaviour, including altruism.
Human sociability is entirely different. At its heart lies a skill that is uniquely human - language. Language allows humans to create a symbolic representation of the world, a picture of the world separate from the world itself. Without such a symbolic mode of expression, an animal may be able to react to the world, but it cannot, in any significant sense, think about it. It can have beliefs about the world, but it cannot know it has such beliefs. In other words, without language animals cannot possess self awareness. (There is a continuing debate as to whether chimpanzees are self-aware, and the extent to which they can manipulate symbols. This debate does not affect my argument here because, even should chimps possess both qualities, they do not make use of them during the normal course of their existence.)
Humans, on the other hand, because we possess language, do not simply have experiences, desires and needs, and react to them. We are also aware that we have them, that there is an 'I' which is the subject of these experiences, and which is a possessor of experiences, desires and needs. In other words humans are aware of themselves as agents, and of the world towards which their agency is directed.
Language and self-awareness transforms humanity's relationship to its evolutionary heritage. Take a basic biological response such as pain. All animals show pain. It is usually an automatic reflex and utterly recognisable - we are rarely in doubt when a horse, a dog or even a lizard is in pain. Yet the faculty of language transforms such a basic instinct within humans. One does not have to be a Baron Masoch to recognise that pain can sometimes be pleasurable, that sometimes we may seek pain, as part of sexual or other forms of gratification. In other words, as basic a physiological response as pain can be mediated through language and through social conventions, such that the human response to pain becomes different to that of other animals.
If basic emotions, such as pain and anger, can be given new meanings by being mediated through language, how much more is this true of more complex emotions such as guilt and shame? This is not to deny that emotions are evolved traits, many of which we share with our evolutionary relatives, or that they are universal to all cultures. But it is to suggest that even basic human emotions cannot understand in a purely naturalistic fashion, shaped as they are by human social development. And, if this is so, how is it possible that complex relationships such as power or love, whose very meanings are specifically human, can be understood in purely evolutionary, through analogies drawn from non-human animals, who possess neither language nor self-awareness?
Language and self-awareness transforms human life by making us conscious of ourselves as agents. Because we are conscious of ourselves as agents, we are aware of our capacity to transform the world around us. Human history is different from evolutionary history because it is Lamarckian not Darwinian in form. The nineteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck believed that changes that occur to an individual during its lifetime, in response to a 'felt need', can be inherited by its progeny. This, he claimed, was the basis of evolution. The long neck of a giraffe, for instance, evolved by the animal stretching its neck to browse on the foliage of trees, and its offspring being subsequently born with longer necks.
Darwin rejected this idea of the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics'. Instead he argued that random variation exists within a population of organisms, and that some of these variations will make the individual more successful in its struggle to survive and reproduce. If individuals are more successful in reproducing themselves, their characteristics will be passed on to the next generation.
Lamarckism describes a conscious or willed change, Darwinism an evolutionary process based on chance variation. We now know that natural evolution works in a Darwinian fashion. But development in human society is Lamarckian in form. Because humans possess the capacity for representing the world symbolically, and because we have created institutions which allow us to possess knowledge not simply as individuals but collectively as a society, so acquired habits and knowledge can be passed from generation to generation, transforming human life - and human nature - in the process. Humans are different because we are makers of our own history. In attempting to view human society in terms of natural selection, evolutionary psychologists conflate Darwinian and Lamarckian forms of evolution.
Human nature is dynamic, something that changes through history, a fact which evolutionary psychologists fail to grasp. Because they wish to understand human nature in a purely biological sense, so they have a static notion of what it means to be human. Human nature was constituted in the Stone Age and there it stopped. The most important aspect of what it means to be human - our sense of agency - is missing from Darwinian accounts.
I am not denying the influence of evolution upon human conduct. I am questioning the adequacy of evolutionary psychology as a means of understanding that influence. Humans certainly have an evolved psychology, but it cannot be understood in the same terms as the evolved psychologies of non-human animals. Nor can it be understood simply as an evolved psychology.
Take for instance, racism. It has become commonplace for evolutionary psychologists to view it as the product of an evolved trait - the innate propensity to categorise objects, and to view certain objects as 'natural kinds'. Without such a propensity, racism certainly could not occur - but nor could science and much else of human thinking. In any case, as many historians have pointed out, racism has not existed throughout history. It is a social form specific to modern society. And even within modern society, the nature and meaning of racism has developed and changed to a considerable degree. An evolutionary explanation of racism makes little more sense than an evolutionary explanation of racial difference.
Both the SSSM and evolutionary psychology have a common failing - an inadequate methodology with which to understand the relationship between our biological and social aspects. While the one denies Man's biological heritage, the other subsumes culture to biology. What both fail sufficiently to appreciate is that humans are subjects of their own history, not simply objects of either a biological or sociocultural process.
In understanding the human mind, therefore, we do not have to choose simply between natural selection and divine intervention as causative agents. Humans are also social creature, and social processes are no less material than physical ones. Implicitly, evolutionary psychologists understand this. For however much they may wish to see humans simply as Darwinian creatures they cannot deny that humans often act contrary to Darwinian principles. Thus, in his book Evolution in Mind, the psychologist Henry Plotkin opens his discussion on human culture by claiming that 'There is not much intellectual risk... in making the assumption that human culture is the product of human evolution.' A few pages later, though, he is forced to admit a problem with this view. If 'culture is the direct product of evolution', how is it possible, he asks, for culture to create forms that can 'adversely affect our biological fitness?' How, he wonders, can we understand celibacy or the risking of life and limb in distant wars? 'The only explanation', Plotkin believes, 'is that culture entails causal mechanisms that are somehow decoupled... from the causal mechanisms of our biological evolution'. Richard Dawkins similarly writes in The Selfish Gene that while 'We are built as gene machines... we have the power to turn against our creators.'
Steven Pinker has put this point most boldly of all. 'By Darwinian standards', he writes, 'I am a horrible mistake'. Why? Because he has chosen to remain childless. 'I am happy to be that way', he adds, 'and if my genes don’t like it they can go and jump in the lake'.
All this is a very stirring defence of human freedom. But how is it possible? If culture is 'the direct product of evolution', whence the capacity to 'decouple' the two? How do we possess 'the power to turn against our creators'? Presumably Pinker believes that his ability to tell his genes to go 'jump in the lake' must itself be an evolved trait. But how could such a trait survive? By definition it reduces biological fitness to zero. So how did it ever get passed on from one generation to the next? If a chimp or a horse told its genes to go take a jump, it would not survive very long in evolutionary terms. So how is it possible for humans to act like this, if we are governed simply by the same laws that hold sway over the rest of the animal kingdom?
From one perspective, Pinker's 'my genes can go jump' outburst sounds suspiciously like Sartre's 'Man is what he wills', an existential cry for freedom. From another perspective, the mysterious ability that Plotkin, Dawkins and Pinker all attribute to humans to turn against their genes smacks of Cartesian dualism. We seem, on the one hand, to be the product of our genetic heritage. But, on the other, we also seem to be animated by some mysterious non-natural force which turns us into genetic rebels.
One reason why evolutionary psychologists are so keen to stress the notion of free will is that they are wary of committing the 'naturalistic fallacy' - the belief that because something is natural it must be right. This belief underlay social Darwinism and racial science in the nineteenth century, and today's Darwinists are, understandably, keen to dissociate themselves from such a view. Pinker, therefore, proposes that ethics should be separate from the scientific study of behaviour. Science and ethics, he argues in How the Mind Works, are 'two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world'. The 'science game treats people as material objects, and its rules are the physical processes that cause behaviour through natural selection and neurophysiology.' The 'ethics game', on the other hand, 'treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behaviour through the behaviour's inherent nature or consequence'.
Ethics, presumably, are not some metaphysical entities, but an aspect of human behaviour. How then do they originate if not through 'natural selection and neurophysiology' which Pinker holds to be the basis of all other behaviours? Descartes, unable to comprehend how a mechanical science could explain the human mind, divided the human into a mechanical body and an unknowable soul. Pinker has done much the same - except that he has relabelled the soul as 'ethics'.
Only if we understand the social nature of humanity can we understand human freedom without resorting to such mysticism. It is absurd to suggest that we can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But what we can do is to transform our evolutionary heritage through social development, through our capacity for agency and hence for making our history. It is in this process of transformation that human freedom lies. The unwillingness of evolutionary psychologists to understand humans as social beings, however, means that, far from providing a materialist account of human nature, evolutionary psychology is forced to follow its logic into the murky swamps of Sartrean existentialism or Cartesian dualism.
All of which brings us to the third premise of evolutionary psychology - the belief that there exists a conflict between our Stone Age genetic heritage and the modern world in which we live. 'Our brains', Steven Pinker writes, 'are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology and other newcomers to the human experience.'
One can certainly imagine the distress that might be caused by mismatches between genetic capacity and environment. If some prankster transported a herd of elephants to the slopes of Mt Everest, or if a flock of penguins unaccountably found itself in the Sahara desert, the results might be disastrous. But we humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created that environment, through a long process of historical struggle and development. It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is 'wired up' to invent modernity but not to cope with it. If the brain is flexible enough to do the one, then why not the other?
This is, of course, is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one. The answer lies in how we choose to understand what it means to be human. In asserting a mismatch between genetic heritage and modern environment, evolutionary psychologists are adopting a particular philosophical stance about human nature and its limits. That is their prerogative. But they should not dress it up as science.
What the idea of a mismatch between genes and environment articulates is the sense of dislocation that many people feel today.
At the height of the Cold War it was a common aphorism that humanity's technical prowess outstripped its moral advancement. With its 'mismatch' theory, evolutionary psychology has repackaged this sentiment for a more nihilistic age, when anxiety and unease arise, not from fear of a nuclear holocaust, but from feeling out of synch with much of the world.
If evolutionary psychology gives vent to our sense of dislocation, it also seems to provide a ticket to salvation, by creating a new myth about what it means to be human. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualised.' Such a sacred narrative, he believes, can be either a religion or a science. 'The true evolutionary epic', he writes, 'retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic':
The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realise that Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future.
The Darwinian approach has certainly provided some valuable insights about human nature. It has demonstrated the weaknesses of many social theories of human nature, and stressed the importance of understanding human beings in our biological context. The success of evolutionary psychology lies less in its scientific insights than in its ability to fill a gap left by discredited sociological explanations of human nature and to articulate a view of humanity that seems to make more sense in a pessimistic age.
© Author:Gisela Gina
The human mind is built from genes, the argument goes, the sole purpose of which is to reproduce themselves. The genes, which have been selected for through the process of evolution, programme the mind with a set of behaviours best designed to carry out their selfish aims. The reproductive strategies of men and women are different, so they have been programmed to exhibit different behaviours. The whole edifice of human society and culture is built on the need for genes to reproduce themselves, and on the different needs of men and women.
Looking at three basic premises of evolutionary psychology. First, that human beings are not born as blank slates, but are pre-programmed with specific knowledge about the world into which they are about to enter. Second, that most human behaviours, as well as social structures, have been selected for through the course of evolution, and that the ultimate (if not proximate) cause of such behaviour is the need to spread genes. And third, that many of the social problems which beset humanity arise from the mismatch between our genetic heritage (which is adapted for a Stone Age environment) and the world in which we live today. In effect we are Stone Age men living in a space age world.
For most of the past half-century, the orthodox view within psychology, anthropology and social science has been that human beings are born as blank slates. The human infant learns entirely through experience, and its behaviours, attitudes and personality are moulded by the culture into which it is born. Most scientists acknowledged that humans had a number of basic instincts and an innate propensity to learn, but felt that these did not amount to much given the almost infinitely plastic and impressionable nature of the mind. Finally, according to this orthodox view, the human brain works like a general purpose computer, using much the same method of reasoning to tackle every problem.
Over the past two decades psychologists have devised inventive experiments to tease out what innate capacities an infant might have. We now know, for instance, that infants possess knowledge about the physical world that they could not possibly have acquired through experience. They know what constitutes a physical an object, that objects do not normally pass through each other, and that they do not normally materialise or dematerialise at will. Infants seem to have an innate concept of the difference between animate and inanimate objects, and an intuitive preference for the human face.
Perhaps the most spectacular advance in the understanding of innate knowledge has been with an infant's linguistic ability. Forty years ago Noam Chomsky instigated a revolution in cognitive psychology by suggesting that children learn language by learning rules of grammar. These rules, he suggested, are somehow hardwired into the brain. Chomsky called these innate rules a 'universal grammar' and suggested that the same universal grammar underlay all human languages.
Over the past four decades Chomsky's insights have proved very fruitful. Research from a variety of disciplines has shown linguistic capacity to be both natural and universal. It is natural because it is almost impossible to stop a child learning its native tongue. When a child encounters maths, it has to memorise the multiplication table and the complexities of long division. When it learns to play the piano, it must laboriously learn the notes and the chords and then the way that these combine to form musical phrases. Yet when it learns its native language, it uses such complex grammatical constructions such as the conditional subjunctive, or the past perfect tense without knowing that it is doing so, and possibly without ever knowing in its lifetime that it has done so thousands of times over.
Language is universal because not only do all human cultures possess language, but they possess language of similar complexity. Unlike reading or mathematics or engineering, the sophistication of language is not altered by historical or social development. Language, therefore, seems to be both distinct from other cognitive skills and innate.
All these considerations have led cognitive psychologists to replace the blank slate with a 'modular' view of the mind. The mind possesses innate knowledge about the world. This knowledge is contained in a collection of distinct modules, or mini-minds, each specialised to perform a distinct task: understand physical relations, analyse visual data, process speech, and so on. Most cognitive psychologists believe that the mind is only partly modular - largely in the processing of language, perception and emotion. Cognition, many argue, results from more general brain processes.
Not so, respond evolutionary psychologists. Virtually all thought processes, they suggest, are modular and innate. Moreover, they argue, modules are not simply innate (hardwired into the brain) but evolved (designed by natural selection to perform functions important to the survival and reproduction of the organism).
The starting point of evolutionary psychology is not so much how the brain works today, as how it would have worked some 50 000 years ago. The brain, they observe, is an evolved structure and it evolved to solve the problems characteristic of our hunter-gatherer past. 'Evolutionary processes are the "architect" that assembled, detail by detail, our evolved psychological and physiological architecture'.
Because each type of problem faced by our Stone Age ancestors had a unique form, trying to solve them all with a single reasoning device would not have been very useful. The most successful early humans would have been those individuals whose brains provided specific solutions to specific problems. In other words, the smartest ancient human brains would have been composed of dozens of different instincts each designed by natural selection to aid survival and reproduction in a Stone Age environment. For evolutionary psychologists all human behaviours are adaptive - they were chosen by natural selection because they increased the ability of the individual to reproduce. Since the modern mind is not genetically that different from that of our ancestors, our mind is a nest of instincts, all adapted for a Stone Age life.
In the evolutionary psychology scheme of things, the brain contains two innate, specialist modules, one of which allows us to deal with animate objects, and the other with inanimate ones. There is some empirical evidence that this may be the case. Had our ancestors mistaken inanimate objects for animate ones, they would not have survived for very long.
Human beings possess innate knowledge about our world. The human mind, to some degree at least, is composed of specialised modules, each dedicated to solving particular tasks. But there seems to be little wisdom in viewing the mind simply as a nest of instincts. There is, on the contrary, considerable reason, both empirical and theoretical, to believe that the mind cannot be built in the way the evolutionary psychologists wish it to be. While language and basic perceptual systems such as vision or the understanding of physical systems, have been shown to be modular, very little else has.
Human behaviours and social structures are solely the products of natural selection ? This claim rests on two beliefs: first that modern behaviours are analogous to those of our ancestors; and second, that, short of evoking Divine intervention, natural selection is the only force that could have shaped the human mind and society. Like the claim for a modular mind, this argument is based on a view of how humans would have conducted themselves 50 000 years ago. But how do we know the behaviour of our ancestors? Behaviour, unlike bone, does not fossilise. Precisely because these are ancient humans, living before the development of much technology, archaeological evidence is scant. And there are certainly no ancient humans still living for us to observe.
It's a problem faced by many disciplines - archaeology, for instance, or palaeoanthropology - which have to reconstruct an ancient past from scant evidence. But it is a particular problem for evolutionary psychologists because their whole discipline rests on understanding modern behaviour in the light of ancient behaviour.
There are a number of ways evolutionary psychologists try to get round this problem. One is to assume that the lives of contemporary hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung San of southern Africa or the Ache of South America, provide a window onto the lives our ancestors. Since humans, over the vast proportion of our evolutionary history, lived as hunter-gatherers, so any evolved behaviours would be adaptations to a hunter-gatherer life. Hence studying the behaviours of contemporary hunter-gatherers should tell us which modern behaviours are adaptive and which not.
There is a long history of psychologists and anthropologists viewing 'primitive' groups as relics of an ancient past. It's a claim at the heart of nineteenth-century racial anthropology. I am not suggesting that the arguments of evolutionary psychologists are racist in any way - far from it. But many of the problems that underlay racial anthropology also underlie evolutionary psychology.
To begin with, why should we assume that the lives of 'primitive' societies today resemble those of ancient humans? Both may be hunter-gatherers, but the !Kung San, the Ache and others, are likely to have changed and developed over the past fifty or hundred thousand years. After all, no one would claim that modern agricultural societies resemble those of the earliest farmers ten thousand years ago. Why make the same assumption about hunter-gatherers, especially over a much greater time span?
There are many reasons to question the assumption that the psychological traits and behaviours of contemporary hunter-gatherers are necessarily evolved adaptations. Consider, for instance, the claim by some Darwinists that we possess an 'intuitive biology' module - an innate evolved capacity to understand and order the natural world. A number of anthropologists have pointed out the remarkable similarities between the way that 'primitive' societies classify the living world and the Linnaean system of classification at the heart of modern biology.
For evolutionary psychologists, the fact that hunter-gatherers have developed such superb taxonomic skills without the benefits of modern science reveals these skills to be innate and evolved. But if this were true, then, given their common genetic constitution, people living in modern industrial nations should be as capable as hunter-gatherers of classifying animals and plants. Quite clearly, they are not. Put the average Englishman on a desert island and you’d quickly find that his 'natural' abilities were less than intuitive.
The taxonomic skills of hunter-gatherers may well be inherited through their cultures not their genes. Evolutionary psychologists are confusing innate knowledge with folk knowledge - the knowledge developed within non-scientific cultures. Folk knowledge, such as that of hunter-gatherers, they assume, must be intuitive. But why? Non-scientific peoples are as capable of reasoning about the natural world as are scientists. The empirical reality of the biological world, together with a common propensity of human cultures to categorise at some minimal level (a propensity that may or may not be innate) is sufficient to explain similar taxonomies among different peoples. It is simply nonsense for Steven Pinker to write that because 'Most people feel, along with biologists, that the caterpillar and butterfly are the same animal, and the caterpillar and centipede are not, despite appearances to the contrary', so this demonstrates an 'intuitive' capacity to classify living forms. In fact, it simply demonstrates that we have learned that caterpillars give rise to butterflies but are unrelated to centipedes, just as we learn that whales should be classified not with fish but with mammals - and just as Australian Aborigines or the !Kung San learn the differences between birds, fish and quadrupeds.
The absurdities of using contemporary hunter-gatherers as templates for ancient humans can be seen in an example in EO Wilson's book On Human Nature. Here, Wilson examines sexual roles among the !Kung San. Wilson observes that the !Kung do not impose sex roles upon their children, little girls apparently being treated in much the same manner as little boys. As adults, women gather mongongo nuts and other plant food, usually close to the camp, while men range further to hunt game. But, writes Wilson, '!Kung social life is relaxed and egalitarian and social tasks are often shared. Men often gather mongongo nuts or build huts... and women occasionally catch small game.'
!Kung San society, then, shows some but not much sexual differentiation. Where, however, the !Kung San have settled into an agricultural form of life, the sexual roles are much more entrenched. Wilson suggests that as societies develop, so sexual roles become more demarcated: 'When societies grow still larger and more complex, women tend to be reduced in influence outside the home, and to be more constrained by custom, ritual and formal life.'
Wilson's claim that social complexity necessarily leads to greater sexual differentiation may be somewhat dubious but it is not a totally unwarranted assumption. A reasonable interpretation of this might be that sexual differentiation is a product of social development. To find the causes of the subordination of women in modern society, then, one should look at the organisation of modern society.
According to Wilson sexual differentiation is the product of a natural process - hypertrophy. Hypertrophy normally refers to an increase in the size of a tissue or organ, often in response to an increased workload. A similar process, Wilson suggests, has led to sexual differentiation in modern societies. 'Like the teeth of baby elephants that lengthen into tusks, and the cranial bones of the male elk that sprout into astonishing great antlers', he writes, 'the basic social responses of the hunter-gatherers have metamorphosed from relatively modest environmental adaptations into unexpectedly elaborate, even monstrous forms in advanced societies.'
Speculation may be the stock in trade of evolutionary psychology, but even by Darwinian standards this is spectacularly wild. To begin with, hypertrophy is a developmental, not evolutionary, process. It refers to a process that takes place within an individual's lifetime, not within a species across evolutionary time. It also refers to a process of physical, not a behavioural or social, change. As a scientific theory goes, it's about on par with the belief that aliens built the pyramids. None of this prevents Wilson from arguing that a whole host of other social phenomena, including racism and nationalism, are also 'hypertrophic modifications of the biologically meaningful institutions of hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal states.
What Wilson is really doing is taking a modern behaviour - in this case sexual discrimination - translating it back into hunter-gatherer life, and assuming that these early behaviours must be 'biologically meaningful' since the only force acting on ancient humans was natural selection. He then notices that the same behaviour appears in modern humans.
Even if we did know the behaviour patterns of early humans, this would not necessarily help us understand the roots of modern behaviour. This is because of the problems of using analogies as a scientific tool. Metaphor and analogy are very important to scientific reasoning because they allow us to view phenomena in new and distinct ways. Perhaps the most evocative and influential modern scientific metaphor is that of the 'selfish gene'. Richard Dawkins' memorable phrase illustrates the strengths of metaphor in science. It replaces the drab mathematics of population biology with a wonderfully illuminating picture of how natural selection might work. But it also illustrates the dangers of metaphoric thinking. All too often writers, including sometimes Dawkins himself, seem to forget they are dealing with a metaphor and argue as if genes actually were independent agents acting out their selfish desires.
In the case of the selfish gene its metaphoric nature is apparent to all, though some may forget it on occasion. In dealing with the relationship between modern behaviour and that of ancient humans, however, many Darwinists fail to grasp at all that they are dealing with an analogy, not a true material relationship.
Modern life is very different from Stone Age life. We partake in a myriad of activities, from going on holiday to wearing a condom, from watching TV to holding political demonstrations, that did not exist in the Pleistocene. How, then, do we translate from modern behaviour to ancient behaviour, and vice versa? By assuming that modern behaviours are in some way analogous to ancient behaviours. Cornering the futures market is like moving in for the kill in a hunt; following the party line at Westminster is akin to submitting to the authority of the alpha male; and so on. Too often, however, evolutionary psychologists fail to appreciate that these are simply imaginative analogies, of the kind that a poet or a novelist might use, and treat them instead as if there existed a real relationship between the two behaviours. 'It is poor science', Rosalind Arden pointed out in her recent debate in Prospect with Kingsley Browne, 'to pretend that stockbroking is like hunting and that staying at home with a small screamer is what women have evolved o cope with.' Indeed it is. But, unfortunately, much of evolutionary psychology rests on such assumptions.
The problem of analogical reasoning is particularly acute in making comparisons between the behaviours of humans and non-human animals. Unlike early hominids, animals are available for psychologists to observe and record their behaviour. This has made it very tempting to draw analogies between animal and human behaviour. Fighting between troops of chimps is like tribal warfare. A male orangutan's attack on a female is akin to rape. Anal intercourse among rats is homosexuality, this behaviour of overcrowded rats has been compared to that of concentration camp victims.
Evolutionary psychologists make the assumption that human and animal behaviours are more than simply analogous, but are governed by the same laws and forces. Or, to put it another way, they assume that since only natural selection can shape human behaviour, it is valid to compare human behaviours with those of animals with whom we are evolutionarily related.
Natural selection and divine intervention, however, are not the only explanations for the development of the human mind. There are material causes and motivations to human behaviour that are entirely absent from animal life. Unlike animals, humans are social and cultural beings, and human behaviour can only be understood within a social and cultural context. Of course, many animals are also social. But one of the fundamental mistakes of evolutionary psychology is to assume that the sociability of humans is of the same form as the sociability of non-human animals. This is not so. We may use the same word, but they describe two processes.
'Social' conduct in animals refers to any behaviour exhibited by a group that interacts with each other. It can range from zebras moving as a herd to minimise the effects of predators, to bees performing designated roles in a highly organised hive. One of the triumphs of modern Darwinism has been its explanation of how selfish genes give rise to social behaviour, including altruism.
Human sociability is entirely different. At its heart lies a skill that is uniquely human - language. Language allows humans to create a symbolic representation of the world, a picture of the world separate from the world itself. Without such a symbolic mode of expression, an animal may be able to react to the world, but it cannot, in any significant sense, think about it. It can have beliefs about the world, but it cannot know it has such beliefs. In other words, without language animals cannot possess self awareness. (There is a continuing debate as to whether chimpanzees are self-aware, and the extent to which they can manipulate symbols. This debate does not affect my argument here because, even should chimps possess both qualities, they do not make use of them during the normal course of their existence.)
Humans, on the other hand, because we possess language, do not simply have experiences, desires and needs, and react to them. We are also aware that we have them, that there is an 'I' which is the subject of these experiences, and which is a possessor of experiences, desires and needs. In other words humans are aware of themselves as agents, and of the world towards which their agency is directed.
Language and self-awareness transforms humanity's relationship to its evolutionary heritage. Take a basic biological response such as pain. All animals show pain. It is usually an automatic reflex and utterly recognisable - we are rarely in doubt when a horse, a dog or even a lizard is in pain. Yet the faculty of language transforms such a basic instinct within humans. One does not have to be a Baron Masoch to recognise that pain can sometimes be pleasurable, that sometimes we may seek pain, as part of sexual or other forms of gratification. In other words, as basic a physiological response as pain can be mediated through language and through social conventions, such that the human response to pain becomes different to that of other animals.
If basic emotions, such as pain and anger, can be given new meanings by being mediated through language, how much more is this true of more complex emotions such as guilt and shame? This is not to deny that emotions are evolved traits, many of which we share with our evolutionary relatives, or that they are universal to all cultures. But it is to suggest that even basic human emotions cannot understand in a purely naturalistic fashion, shaped as they are by human social development. And, if this is so, how is it possible that complex relationships such as power or love, whose very meanings are specifically human, can be understood in purely evolutionary, through analogies drawn from non-human animals, who possess neither language nor self-awareness?
Language and self-awareness transforms human life by making us conscious of ourselves as agents. Because we are conscious of ourselves as agents, we are aware of our capacity to transform the world around us. Human history is different from evolutionary history because it is Lamarckian not Darwinian in form. The nineteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck believed that changes that occur to an individual during its lifetime, in response to a 'felt need', can be inherited by its progeny. This, he claimed, was the basis of evolution. The long neck of a giraffe, for instance, evolved by the animal stretching its neck to browse on the foliage of trees, and its offspring being subsequently born with longer necks.
Darwin rejected this idea of the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics'. Instead he argued that random variation exists within a population of organisms, and that some of these variations will make the individual more successful in its struggle to survive and reproduce. If individuals are more successful in reproducing themselves, their characteristics will be passed on to the next generation.
Lamarckism describes a conscious or willed change, Darwinism an evolutionary process based on chance variation. We now know that natural evolution works in a Darwinian fashion. But development in human society is Lamarckian in form. Because humans possess the capacity for representing the world symbolically, and because we have created institutions which allow us to possess knowledge not simply as individuals but collectively as a society, so acquired habits and knowledge can be passed from generation to generation, transforming human life - and human nature - in the process. Humans are different because we are makers of our own history. In attempting to view human society in terms of natural selection, evolutionary psychologists conflate Darwinian and Lamarckian forms of evolution.
Human nature is dynamic, something that changes through history, a fact which evolutionary psychologists fail to grasp. Because they wish to understand human nature in a purely biological sense, so they have a static notion of what it means to be human. Human nature was constituted in the Stone Age and there it stopped. The most important aspect of what it means to be human - our sense of agency - is missing from Darwinian accounts.
I am not denying the influence of evolution upon human conduct. I am questioning the adequacy of evolutionary psychology as a means of understanding that influence. Humans certainly have an evolved psychology, but it cannot be understood in the same terms as the evolved psychologies of non-human animals. Nor can it be understood simply as an evolved psychology.
Take for instance, racism. It has become commonplace for evolutionary psychologists to view it as the product of an evolved trait - the innate propensity to categorise objects, and to view certain objects as 'natural kinds'. Without such a propensity, racism certainly could not occur - but nor could science and much else of human thinking. In any case, as many historians have pointed out, racism has not existed throughout history. It is a social form specific to modern society. And even within modern society, the nature and meaning of racism has developed and changed to a considerable degree. An evolutionary explanation of racism makes little more sense than an evolutionary explanation of racial difference.
Both the SSSM and evolutionary psychology have a common failing - an inadequate methodology with which to understand the relationship between our biological and social aspects. While the one denies Man's biological heritage, the other subsumes culture to biology. What both fail sufficiently to appreciate is that humans are subjects of their own history, not simply objects of either a biological or sociocultural process.
In understanding the human mind, therefore, we do not have to choose simply between natural selection and divine intervention as causative agents. Humans are also social creature, and social processes are no less material than physical ones. Implicitly, evolutionary psychologists understand this. For however much they may wish to see humans simply as Darwinian creatures they cannot deny that humans often act contrary to Darwinian principles. Thus, in his book Evolution in Mind, the psychologist Henry Plotkin opens his discussion on human culture by claiming that 'There is not much intellectual risk... in making the assumption that human culture is the product of human evolution.' A few pages later, though, he is forced to admit a problem with this view. If 'culture is the direct product of evolution', how is it possible, he asks, for culture to create forms that can 'adversely affect our biological fitness?' How, he wonders, can we understand celibacy or the risking of life and limb in distant wars? 'The only explanation', Plotkin believes, 'is that culture entails causal mechanisms that are somehow decoupled... from the causal mechanisms of our biological evolution'. Richard Dawkins similarly writes in The Selfish Gene that while 'We are built as gene machines... we have the power to turn against our creators.'
Steven Pinker has put this point most boldly of all. 'By Darwinian standards', he writes, 'I am a horrible mistake'. Why? Because he has chosen to remain childless. 'I am happy to be that way', he adds, 'and if my genes don’t like it they can go and jump in the lake'.
All this is a very stirring defence of human freedom. But how is it possible? If culture is 'the direct product of evolution', whence the capacity to 'decouple' the two? How do we possess 'the power to turn against our creators'? Presumably Pinker believes that his ability to tell his genes to go 'jump in the lake' must itself be an evolved trait. But how could such a trait survive? By definition it reduces biological fitness to zero. So how did it ever get passed on from one generation to the next? If a chimp or a horse told its genes to go take a jump, it would not survive very long in evolutionary terms. So how is it possible for humans to act like this, if we are governed simply by the same laws that hold sway over the rest of the animal kingdom?
From one perspective, Pinker's 'my genes can go jump' outburst sounds suspiciously like Sartre's 'Man is what he wills', an existential cry for freedom. From another perspective, the mysterious ability that Plotkin, Dawkins and Pinker all attribute to humans to turn against their genes smacks of Cartesian dualism. We seem, on the one hand, to be the product of our genetic heritage. But, on the other, we also seem to be animated by some mysterious non-natural force which turns us into genetic rebels.
One reason why evolutionary psychologists are so keen to stress the notion of free will is that they are wary of committing the 'naturalistic fallacy' - the belief that because something is natural it must be right. This belief underlay social Darwinism and racial science in the nineteenth century, and today's Darwinists are, understandably, keen to dissociate themselves from such a view. Pinker, therefore, proposes that ethics should be separate from the scientific study of behaviour. Science and ethics, he argues in How the Mind Works, are 'two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world'. The 'science game treats people as material objects, and its rules are the physical processes that cause behaviour through natural selection and neurophysiology.' The 'ethics game', on the other hand, 'treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behaviour through the behaviour's inherent nature or consequence'.
Ethics, presumably, are not some metaphysical entities, but an aspect of human behaviour. How then do they originate if not through 'natural selection and neurophysiology' which Pinker holds to be the basis of all other behaviours? Descartes, unable to comprehend how a mechanical science could explain the human mind, divided the human into a mechanical body and an unknowable soul. Pinker has done much the same - except that he has relabelled the soul as 'ethics'.
Only if we understand the social nature of humanity can we understand human freedom without resorting to such mysticism. It is absurd to suggest that we can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But what we can do is to transform our evolutionary heritage through social development, through our capacity for agency and hence for making our history. It is in this process of transformation that human freedom lies. The unwillingness of evolutionary psychologists to understand humans as social beings, however, means that, far from providing a materialist account of human nature, evolutionary psychology is forced to follow its logic into the murky swamps of Sartrean existentialism or Cartesian dualism.
All of which brings us to the third premise of evolutionary psychology - the belief that there exists a conflict between our Stone Age genetic heritage and the modern world in which we live. 'Our brains', Steven Pinker writes, 'are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology and other newcomers to the human experience.'
One can certainly imagine the distress that might be caused by mismatches between genetic capacity and environment. If some prankster transported a herd of elephants to the slopes of Mt Everest, or if a flock of penguins unaccountably found itself in the Sahara desert, the results might be disastrous. But we humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created that environment, through a long process of historical struggle and development. It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is 'wired up' to invent modernity but not to cope with it. If the brain is flexible enough to do the one, then why not the other?
This is, of course, is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one. The answer lies in how we choose to understand what it means to be human. In asserting a mismatch between genetic heritage and modern environment, evolutionary psychologists are adopting a particular philosophical stance about human nature and its limits. That is their prerogative. But they should not dress it up as science.
What the idea of a mismatch between genes and environment articulates is the sense of dislocation that many people feel today.
At the height of the Cold War it was a common aphorism that humanity's technical prowess outstripped its moral advancement. With its 'mismatch' theory, evolutionary psychology has repackaged this sentiment for a more nihilistic age, when anxiety and unease arise, not from fear of a nuclear holocaust, but from feeling out of synch with much of the world.
If evolutionary psychology gives vent to our sense of dislocation, it also seems to provide a ticket to salvation, by creating a new myth about what it means to be human. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualised.' Such a sacred narrative, he believes, can be either a religion or a science. 'The true evolutionary epic', he writes, 'retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic':
The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realise that Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future.
The Darwinian approach has certainly provided some valuable insights about human nature. It has demonstrated the weaknesses of many social theories of human nature, and stressed the importance of understanding human beings in our biological context. The success of evolutionary psychology lies less in its scientific insights than in its ability to fill a gap left by discredited sociological explanations of human nature and to articulate a view of humanity that seems to make more sense in a pessimistic age.
© Author:Gisela Gina
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