The Mismeasure of Gould:

Marxist ideology vs. biological reality

After reading two very critical reviews of Stephen J. Gould et al.'s determination to subvert an empirical approach to scientific reviews of race, evolution and eugenics, I decided to combine an earlier post of rebuttals to Gouldian pseudoscience with two very recent critiques by Kevin MacDonald and Richard Dawkins, along with some older essays and comments by other experts. However, only MacDonald has formulated a hypothesis as to why Gouldian misinformation is so predominant in the popular press. This critique of Gould et al. is from The Culture of Critique, but his two prior works must also be read to fully understand the formulations that MacDonald uses to explain Gould's ability at duplicity, self-deception and propaganda: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1995) and Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998).

Simply put, Gould et al. has been promoting the Jewish reaction against the Holocaust and/or a Jewish evolutionary strategy by subverting any concepts or scientific knowledge that would make it more difficult for Judaism to function as a secular religion based on ingroup racial purity, while appearing to be universally concerned with a classless society. That is, Gould is carrying on the tradition of a Marxist approach to promoting Judaism through removing the salience of ethnic identity for one based on class struggle. To do this he has set out to attack elements of evolutionary theory, primarily adaptationism along with trying to deny any connection between race, genetics, and so-called genetic determinism (which no evolutionist has embraced contrary to Gouldian dogma). A review of MacDonald's three books is available at my home page.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Gould by Nils K. Oeijord, author of Why Gould was Wrong.

Sadly, Stephen Jay Gould died only two months after his 1433 pages book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (henceforth, TSET) was published. Surprisingly, TSET is NOT about the structure of evolutionary theory, and it is NOT a portrayal of the current state of evolutionary theory. Instead it is about The Structure of Gould's Evolutionary Theory. So even the title of this book is confused.

(Below I will show that the content of the book is extremely confused.) Gould claims TSET to be part of a Hegelian dialectic, in which Darwinism has become the thesis, with "Gouldism" (my word) as antithesis, and, of course, a synthesis waiting to be born in the future. Obviously, Gould believes that he is Darwin II. Like Marx's Das Kapital, the TSET does not end. And, like Marx, Gould uses "outpouring, masquerading as a single sentence." One searches in vain for a clearly expressed sentence. Several "Gouldisms" are impossible to understand. An example: "autapomorphy". And, like Marx, he does rely too heavily upon rhetoric.

In TSET Gould picks his history: "Sociobiology" doesn't appear in the index. The revolutionary theory of "Evolutionary psychology" emerges briefly. Robert Trivers is ignored although reciprocal altruism is mentioned (unattributed). William D. Hamilton is largely ignored. E. 0. Wilson is ignored. No Haeckel. No Spencer. No Mayr. No Dobzhansky.

No Simpson. No ... Selective argumentation characterizes most of TSET. An example: Richard Dawkins devastatingly critical analogy for the gradualist-punctuationalist debate is unmentioned.

Unbelievable but true: Gould claims that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about the effect of a single gene. But, undoubtedly, Mendel did speak meaningfully about the effect of a single gene. Moreover: No matter how complex the interactions, the substitution of one allele for another must have a mean arithmetic effect on fitness. In turn fitness will convey differential evolutionary advantage upon different alleles. Again, Gould is absolutely wrong.

Punctuated equilibrium isn't the revolutionary approach that Gould claims. Obviously, there have been periods of relative "stasis" (stasis = no evolutionary change) punctuated by relatively rapid changes, because environments change irregularly and unevenly. However, even rapid evolutionary change involved tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years and when they occurred, ordinary natural selection was responsible! Gradualism does not deny that catastrophes sometimes happen. But after catastrophes, ordinary natural selection takes up where it left off. Clearly, the "theory of punctuated equilibria" is not a scientific revolution. "Gould has been pushing against an open door," says David P. Barash.

Gould falsely claims that the "subject of stasis had never been subjected to quantitative empirical study ..." In fact, there had been numerous quantitative studies of evolutionary stasis in many taxa.

Gould claims that selection does not at all occur at the gene level! He even speaks of gene selection in the past tense, as though it has peen disproved! How can genes NOT be a unit of selection? In fact, genes are THE unit of selection. Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, William D. Hamilton, and George C. Williams emphasize selection at the gene level, because genes, unlike individuals, groups, and species, are persistent "replicators", which selection can maintain, promote, or extinguish over time. But, of course, even arch-­reductionists acknowledge that selection operates at many different levels simultaneously. Again, it is much ado about nothing.

We all know that natural selection is not the only mechanism of Genetic change, but undoubtedly it's by far the most important mechanism. But Gould makes it appear as though natural selection has peen dethroned! And the path-breaking works of John Endler and numerous other scientists about natural selection are totally ignored!

Gould argues that evolution has almost nothing to do with human behavior. Gould is so eager to beat his own drums that objectivity is lost altogether, says David P. Barash. (By the way, Barash is a leftist.) Another possible explanation is that Gould simply had an unidentified mental syndrome. No wonder that John Maynard Smith concluded that Gould's views are "so confused as to be not worth bothering with."

Gould describes a conspiracy: a "hardening" of adaptationism. This is seductive rhetoric. Instead of "hardening" he should say "consolidation" or "consensus" or "shared recognition of explanations that work." The Structure of Evolutionary Theory will additionally damage Gould's reputation. Einstein had his Einstein syndrome (a language syndrome), I think S. J. Gould had his Gould syndrome (a thinking/learning syndrome). Why not?
 

Page 111—As the notoriety of Sociobiology grew in the ensuing years, Hamilton and Trivers, who had thought up many of the ideas, also became targets of picketers, as did the anthropologists Irven DeVore and Lionel Tiger when they tried to teach the ideas. The insinuation that Trivers was a tool of racism and right-wing oppression was particularly galling because Trivers was himself a political radical, a supporter of the Black Panthers, and a scholarly collaborator of Huey Newton's. Trivers had argued that sociobiology is, if anything, a force for political progress. It is rooted in the insight that organisms did not evolve to benefit their family, group, or species, because the individuals making up those groups have genetic conflicts of interest with one another and would be selected to defend those interests. This immediately subverts the comfortable belief that those in power rule for the good of all, and it throws a spotlight on hidden actors in the social world, such as females and the younger generation. Also, by finding an evolutionary basis for altruism, sociobiology shows that a sense of justice has a deep foundation in people's minds and need not run against our organic nature. And by showing that self-deception is likely to evolve (because the best liar is the one who believes his own lies), sociobiology encourages self-scrutiny and helps undermine hypocrisy and corruption. (I will return to the political beliefs of Trivers and other "Darwinian leftists" in the chapter on politics.)

Trivers later wrote of the attacks on sociobiology, "Although some of the attackers were prominent biologists, the attack seemed intellectually feeble and lazy. Gross errors in logic were permitted as long as they appeared to give some tactical advantage in the political struggle.... Because we were hirelings of the dominant interests, said these fellow hirelings of the same interests, we were their mouthpieces, employed to deepen the [deceptions] with which the ruling elite retained their unjust advantage. Although it follows from evolutionary reasoning that individuals will tend to argue in ways that are ultimately (sometimes unconsciously) self-serving, it seemed a priori unlikely that evil should reside so completely in one set of hirelings and virtue in the other."

The "prominent biologists" that Trivers had in mind were Gould and Lewontin, and together with the British neuroscientist Steven Rose they became the intellectual vanguard of the radical science movement. For twenty-five years they have indefatigably fought a rearguard battle against behavioral genetics, sociobiology (and later evolutionary psychology), and the neuroscience of politically sensitive topics such as sex differences and mental illness. Other than Wilson, the major target of their attacks has been Richard Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins covered many of the same ideas as Wilson but concentrated on the logic of the new evolutionary theories rather than the zoological details. He said almost nothing about humans.

The radical scientists' case against Wilson and Dawkins can be summed up in two words: "determinism" and "reductionism." Their writings are peppered with these words, used not in any technical sense but as vague terms of abuse. For example, here are two representative passages in a book by Lewontin, Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin with the defiantly Blank Slate title Not in Our Genes: "Sociobiology is a reductionist, biological determinist explanation of human existence. Its adherents claim ... that the details of present and past social arrangements are the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes. [Reductionists] argue that the properties of a human society are ... no more than the sums of the individual behaviors and tendencies of the individual humans of which that society is composed. Societies are 'aggressive' because the individuals who compose them are 'aggressive,' for instance."

The quotations from Wilson we saw earlier in the chapter show that he never expressed anything close to these ridiculous beliefs, and neither, of course, did Dawkins. For example, after discussing the tendency in mammals for males to seek a greater number of sexual partners than females do, Dawkins devoted a paragraph to human societies in which he wrote: "What this astonishing variety suggests is that man's way of life is largely determined by culture rather than by genes. However, it is still possible that human males in general have a tendency towards promiscuity, and females a tendency to monogamy, as we would predict on evolutionary grounds. Which of these tendencies wins in particular societies depends on details of cultural circumstance, just as in different animal species it depends on ecological details."

What exactly do "determinism" and "reductionism" mean? In the precise sense in which mathematicians use the word, a "deterministic" system is one whose states are caused by prior states with absolute certainty, rather than probabilistically. Neither Dawkins nor any other sane biologist would ever dream of proposing that human behavior is deterministic, as if people must commit acts of promiscuity, aggression, or selfishness at every opportunity. Among the radical scientists and the many intellectuals they have influenced, "determinism" has taken on a meaning that is diametrically opposed to its true meaning. The word is now used to refer to any claim that people have a tendency to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. It is a sign of the tenacity of the Blank Slate that a probability greater than zero is equated with a probability of 100 percent. Zero innateness is the only acceptable belief, and all departures from it are treated as equivalent.

Page 114—All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damning quotation on Dawkins: "They [the genes] control us, body and mind." That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, "They created us, body and mind," which is very different. Lewontin has used the doctored quotation in five different places.

Page 122—Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and the other signatories of the "Against 'Sociobiology"' manifesto wrote: "We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange."

Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping." The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.

This debating tactic—first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man—can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes: "Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological 'environmentalism'; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits."

The idea of "biological determinism"—that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty—and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. "Predisposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance—abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child—then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates. But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution." Their support for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, "The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating." Their own view is that "the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is `in' that nature to construct its own history." The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species—about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on—is not "sensible."

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology—not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. "Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it," they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.

Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: "The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has." Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not "important").

In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that "our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit." Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts," which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes "have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action."

So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics—that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change—reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding."

Page 127—Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment—Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment." That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous"—not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.

Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"—presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.

Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which ... shall we choose? ... Let us take this stand.... We can do otherwise." And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will: "Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as 'free Will.'"

Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness." Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.

The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet.) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution—limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority—then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans.

Page 132—An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of "Against 'Sociobiology'" wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an important basis for. .. the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany." In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced ... to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals." The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda. Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.

The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying: "Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault they are genetically programmed."

Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek: "The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i.e., unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it!)"

On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question: "Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes?"

And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point: "The 'scientific belief' would ... appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal responsibility, or universal morality."

For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a "we" that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a "soul" that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this irreducible locus of free choice.

WHERE DOES THIS leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.

The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin. Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice. A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do no wrong," but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a "stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts.

In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person?" This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.

I have in press an edition of Darwin's Origin of Species.  Along with the full text of the Origin, the edition contains a couple hundred pages of other writing by Darwin and by his sources and contemporaries.  The publisher is Broadview Press.  There is a long introduction talking about Darwin's historical position and the development of his Ideas.  In order to situate Darwin in relation to contemporary evolutionary theory, I devote a whole section, about twenty pages, to "The Pseudo-Revolutions of Stephen Jay Gould."  Like a number of other Darwinians, I regard Gould as theoretically disingenuous.  His death has elicited an enormous outpouring of celebratory sentiment.  If Ian will permit me, I would like to inject a contrary note into the obituary notices.  I've excerpted below the opening and closing paragraphs from the section on Gould in my introduction to the edition of the Origin.

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Modern Darwinism and the Pseudo-Revolutions of Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould is the most widely read contemporary popular commentator on evolution, and he is also the chief critic of contemporary Darwinism. He has done field work on land snails in the West Indies, has written a long series of popular essays and scholarly studies on natural history and the history of biology, and occupies something like the unofficial chair of evolutionary biology in the pages of the New York Review of Books. His chief claim to scientific eminence is to have proposed putative corrections and alternatives to mainstream Darwinism, especially to the idea that adaptation through natural selection is the main engine of evolutionary change. In reality, Gould has offered no truly original and genuinely significant contributions to evolutionary theory. Instead, he has created a vast rhetorical tissue of sophistical equivocations. If Gould has formulated no significant revisions of Darwinian theory, why is it necessary to take account of his views? Maynard Smith poses this question and provides an answer: "Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory." ("Genes, Memes, and Minds," 46).

Gould's claims for revolutionary revision depend on combining a few basic techniques of sophistical argument. In its simplest version, Gould's technique involves two steps. The first is to create a straw man by giving a falsely simplified description of the received view. The second is to propose what is actually the received view and to present this standard view as if it were a revolutionary correction. In his falsely simplified representation, the Modern Synthesis and its current acolytes consist of "ultra-Darwinians" and "panadaptationists" who are oblivious to all adaptively neutral phenomena and who fervently believe that all of evolution consists in the production of maximally efficient adaptations unconstrained by inheritance or contingent historical circumstance. In order to rescue evolutionary theory from these strangely narrow and obsessive "Darwinian fundamentalists," Gould propounds an array of concepts to which, he intimates, they are strangers. These broader concepts include the observations that adaptations are not ideally perfect but only relatively, competitively perfect, that inherited structures constrain adaptive change, that previously existing structures can be modified for some new adaptive purpose, that some structures are not themselves adaptive but are nonetheless sustained by natural selection because they happen to be connected, in inheritance, with structures that are adaptive, and that evolutionary change proceeds at a varying pace, depending both on the appearance of favorable variations and on alterations in the total set of ecological conditions. In reality, none of these concepts is outside the range of the standard Darwinism that constitutes the Modern Synthesis.

 [THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS ARE FROM THE CONCLUSION]
Several eminent evolutionists have reflected on the quality of sophistry that pervades Gould's theoretical writing. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Simon Conway Morris, and E. O. Wilson have all described the way in which Gould exaggerates the revolutionary significance of his ideas. In a chapter of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett gives a penetrating and comprehensive critique of Gould's theoretical career and describes it, correctly, as a series of factitious revolutions. One of the chapter sections is tellingly titled "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Summarizing his chapter, Dennett concludes, "Gould's self-styled revolutions, against adaptationism, gradualism, and extrapolationism, and for 'radical contingency,' all evaporate, their good points already firmly incorporated into the modern synthesis, and their mistaken points dismissed. Darwin's dangerous idea emerges strengthened, its dominion over every corner of biology more secure than ever" (312). Rather more bluntly, Dawkins complains that "Gould seems to be saying things that are more radical than they really are. He pretends" ("A Survival Machine," 84). Dawkins is openly hostile toward Gould, and he gives his reasons. "I'm extremely hostile towards any sort of obscurantism, pretension. If I think somebody's a fake, if somebody isn't genuinely concerned about what actually is true but is instead doing something for some other motive, if somebody is trying to appear like an intellectual, or trying to appear more profound than he is, or more mysterious than he is, I'm very hostile to that" (85). As we have seen, Conway Morris provides a sober specialist critique of Gould's conclusions about the fossils of the Burgess shale, but he also formulates an evocative and humorous image of Gould's whole career as an ostensible post-adaptationist founder of new evolutionary theories:  "Again and again Gould has been seen to charge into battle, sometimes hardly visible in the struggling mass. Strangely immune to seemingly lethal lunges he finally re-emerges. Eventually the dust and confusion die down. Gould announces to the awestruck onlookers that our present understanding of evolutionary processes is dangerously deficient and the theory is perhaps in its death throes. We look beyond the exponent of doom, and there standing in the sunlight is the edifice of evolutionary theory, little changed." (10) In a similar vein, commenting specifically on the debate over punctuated equilibrium, Wilson suggests that Gould's claims for revolutionary novelty were more a matter of rhetorical posturing than of substantive conceptual proposals. "Neo-Darwinian theory was not challenged in substance, only semantically—a renaming, so to speak, as opposed to a reinventing of the wheel" (Diversity of Life, 89). The term "punctuated equilibrium" has survived, but it "is now used mostly as a descriptive term for a pattern of alternating rapid and slow evolution, especially when the rapid phase is accompanied by species formation. Its fate illustrates the principle that in science failed ideas live on as ghosts in the glossaries of the survivors."

 Early in his career as the boy who cried wolf, Gould responded to the complaint that he is generating confusion by creating pseudo-issues. Backing off from the strong, saltational version of punctuated equilibrium, he acknowledged that punctuated equilibrium "may not be directed at the heart of natural selection," but he still claimed that "it remains an important critique of the Darwinian tradition." His supporting inference for the importance of his idea is this: "The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest and debate, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake" ("Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory," 106). Evolutionary biologists do not tend to be fools, but they do tend to be ingenuously straightforward, and they are often poorly equipped to deal with provocative challenges wrapped in obfuscatory equivocation. Gould's pluralism, his punctuationism, and his spandrels can be likened to the eggs of a cuckoo in the nest of evolutionary biology. The eggs look enough like legitimate eggs to cause consternation in the minds of the parent birds, but targeted birds eventually evolve defenses against the cuckoo's parasitism. They count eggs or assess size, and oust the illegitimate intruders. The affair costs them some little effort, but it hardly seems fair for the cuckoo then to proclaim that the effort taken to oust his illegitimate offspring constitutes evidence of his own legitimacy.

 Among Darwin's contemporaries, the one figure who most resembles Gould in his use of sophistical equivocation is the paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-92), who wished, on the one hand, to affirm that animal forms are determined by "archetypes" that are not related to one another by lineage and, on the other, to represent himself as having originated proto-Darwinian evolutionary ideas. In responding to Owen's equivocations in the historical sketch appended to the third edition of the Origin, Darwin comes closer to a snort of satirical contempt than he ever comes in responding to any other writer, even to Lamarck. "It is consolatory to me that others find Professor Owen's controversial writings as difficult to understand and to reconcile with each other, as I do." Darwin himself operates in good faith, and his overriding assumption is that others do also, even when he fundamentally disagrees with them. In his Autobiography, he remarks, "I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice." Coming from a man who had received so many violently hostile reviews, this remark reflects a presumption of good faith so ingenuous in its benignity as to fall little short of the sublime. But Owen is so flagrantly and unmistakably not operating in good faith that even Darwin's simplicity of good will is finally roused to an awareness of Owen's deviousness and duplicity. One can only speculate how Darwin would have responded to Gould. He might well have wondered whether Gould is, as Maynard Smith characterizes him, merely confused, or, as Dawkins characterizes him, downright dishonest. To my own eye, it seems evident that Gould is not himself confused, though it is his purpose that his readers should be.

 Joseph Carroll, English Department, University of Missouri--St. Louis, St. Louis, MO  63121

Human Nature Review  2002 Volume 2: 99-109 ( 14 March )
URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/apd.html

Essay Review

Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology:
Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned

By Robert Kurzban*

Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology
edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose.
Jonathan Cape, London, 2000.

In "Alas Poor Darwin" (hereafter APD), Steven and Hilary Rose and the other contributors to this edited volume accuse evolutionary psychologists of sins both scientific and political, in prose filled with self-righteous rage, smug dismissals, and unremitting invective. Evolutionary psychologists, they say, are wedded to genetic determinism, a view simplistic in conception, fatalistic in outlook, and flatly mistaken. Further, they argue that evolutionary psychologists indulge in post-hoc, "Just-so" story-telling, the seediest kind of scientific promiscuity. If evolutionary psychology were guilty of the sins of which it was accused, the Roses and their contributors could be considered to have produced an important work, helping to prevent the spread of flimsy science and distasteful politics.

It is therefore important to determine if evolutionary psychology bears any resemblance to the beast the Roses have conjured. Unfortunately, like the witches in Salem or Communists under McCarthy, evolutionary psychologists stand exposed to nearly any character assassination inflicted upon them, their tormentors knowing well that to defend the field is to expose oneself to similar treatment.

Let us nonetheless for the sake of decency interrogate these supposed failings both intellectual and spiritual, against the chance, small it may be, that evolutionary psychology has been falsely maligned, and might after all be worthy of residing among its more reputable brethren disciplines. In the process, let us see if we can ensure that its critics are righteous scholars in pursuit of truth, rather than scoundrels who would through innuendo, mischaracterization, and yes, even outright dishonesty, shame and dishonor a foe they little understand, and therefore fear. Let us review the charges, and hear the defense.

First Charge: Genetic Determinism

"Evolutionary principles imply genetic destiny," Nelkin (p. 27) baldly declares^1. Evolutionary psychologists "dismiss" cultural, historical and individual variables, Herrnstein Smith (p. 167) assures us. In short, evolutionary psychologists believe that biology is destiny (H. Rose, p. 149), with genes alone determining a "hard wired" brain, exerting total control, with no room whatsoever for influences from the environment. (For additional explicit examples of these claims, see Fausto-Sterling, p. 221; Jencks, p. 34; Shakespeare and Erikson, p. 231.)

Is this the message we see running through evolutionary psychologists' writings? Are they telling us that there is no chance to escape from Nature, that Nurture is powerless in the face of our genetic tethers? Does evolutionary psychology hold that the organism will be what it will be, regardless of the physical and social environment?

In point of fact, it is clear that the accusers in this particular case have, to be generous, exaggerated to some small degree. Evolutionary psychologists not only reject genetic determinism, but have emphasized that they believe that it is actually nonsensical to try to talk about genes without discussing the environment in which the genes exist. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) put this as straightforwardly and transparently, in academic style, as one could ask: "…every feature of every phenotype is fully and equally codetermined by the interaction of the organism's genes … and its ontogenetic environments…" (p. 83). They have expressed similar sentiments elsewhere, as have other evolutionary psychologists. (For examples from those the APD authors cite, see Dennett, 1995, p. 338; Pinker, 1997, p. 33; Symons, 1992, p. 140; Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 20; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 87, p. 122).

Why the vast gap between the actual arguments made by evolutionary psychologists and the claims attributed to them? The answer lies in a deep confusion about biology shared by many of the authors of APD, a preconception that seems to prevent them from understanding what evolutionary psychologists actually say. The Roses and others, expecting to read about genetic determinism, instead read in genetic determinism. To see this, we'll come at it slightly obliquely. Hilary Rose will be our guide.

Unsatisfied with a conjecture advanced by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson about why the incidence of child abuse is higher among stepchildren than biological children, Hilary Rose proclaims triumphantly that evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker "…entirely shredded any credibility the Wilson-Daly thesis had" with his suggestion that perhaps when a mother hadn't sufficient resources to nurture a child, maternal love could switch off, replaced by murderous intentions.^2,3 Rose concludes: "Both killing and protecting are explained by evolutionary selection…selection explains everything and therefore nothing" (p. 147).

Consider carefully why Rose draws this conclusion. Her suggestion is that an evolutionary explanation is useless if it predicts that an organism will do one thing under certain conditions (i.e., normal ones), and the opposite under different conditions (i.e., extreme scarcity). This is because she believes that evolution must lead to a prediction of only one sort of behavior across all contexts, and therefore that it cannot yield a prediction that the organism will behave contingently on contextual factors.

In Rose's view, therefore, an evolutionary approach cannot explain why bats feed at night but sleep during the day, why rabbits nestle against other rabbits but flee from a fox, or why humans eat when hungry but not when sated. For her, if evolution explains each of these behaviors, then it explains none of them.

She is forced into this position because she equates evolution with genetic determinism and inflexibility of behavior. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists, biologists and, as far as I know, nearly everyone else, believes that organisms behave contingently on the environment and their own current state. In fact, and each two-year-old discovers this idea anew when she sees that Fido comes when offered a doggie biscuit, but leaves when pelted with rocks.

The intricacies of behavioral flexibility (rather than behavioral fixity) is, in fact, a fundamental message of evolutionary psychologists: evolution sculpts organisms to behave contingently on their environment. This makes an important task of scientists to discover the dimensions of the (internal and external) environment on which organisms condition their behavior (see, to take a random example, Pinker's hypothesis above).

Indeed, Rose herself endorses this approach when she suggests that child abuse might be explained by contextual factors such as "psychological strain" and "financial pressures" associated with building a second family (p. 146). Both abuse and non-abuse are explained by the presence or absence of these factors and, therefore, her critique of Pinker's hypothesis ought to apply. Instead, her hypothesis is "obvious" while Daly and Wilson's is "absurd" (see S. Rose, p. 314, for enthusiastic agreement on both counts). Apparently then, her view is that positing conditional behavior is acceptable as long as evolution (which everyone seems to agree must be part of the story somewhere) is left implicit rather than made explicit. Thus, for Hilary Rose, it's acceptable to suggest that dogs eat because their bellies are empty as long as evolution plays no role in the hypothesis.

It seems so simple. The evolutionary view, for humans and non-humans, suggests that organisms are designed to develop, learn, and behave in ways that are conditional on environmental influences. There is no room for genetic determinism. Further, and ironically, the argument is that adding adaptations allows greater flexibility, because each adaptation generates more conditional possibilities. To deny adaptations in humans, therefore, is to suggest less flexibility.

The logic is no different from a lesson Bill Gates has learned far too well: Microsoft adds new algorithms to their word processor in every generation. Word 2000, for example, can learn a variety of things it couldn't in previous incarnations. My instance of MS Word learns new words (today it learned "panglossian"), my preferences for menus, and the fact that the passive voice is not to be considered a grammatical error. Add domain-specific functions, add flexibility.⁴

Evolutionary psychologists, at minimum the ones named in the Roses' volume, are innocent of the charge of genetic determinism. They have made their position clear, both in their explicit statements of their views, and as embodied in their research programs.

On the charge of genetic determinism, I find the defendant not guilty.

And I find that the prosecution should go back and carefully review the evidence.

Second Charge: Panadaptationism

Evolutionary psychologists believe that the belly-button is an adaptation for storing small berries on the long trek back to camp. They believe that ear lobes are adaptations designed to accommodate diamond-stud earrings. And they believe that people are good at calculus because mathematicians were considered sexy two million years ago and the "calculus gene" was a genetic winner.

Actually, they don't believe any of these things. But if one were to read about evolutionary psychologists, one might well come away with the impression that they do.

Stephen J. Gould, for example, is so convinced that evolutionary psychologists believe that all features of organisms are adaptations that there seems to be no amount of evidence that will persuade him to the contrary. Gould (2000) says "Evolutionary universals may not be adaptive now, they [evolutionary psychologists] say, but such behaviors must have arisen as adaptations…" (p. 119, emphasis original) and later that the "internal error of adaptationism arises from a failure to recognize that even the strictest operation of pure natural selection builds organisms full of nonadaptive parts and behaviors" (p. 123). Dover (p. 58) and S. Rose (pp. 303-303, 313) make similar claims.

The idea that evolutionary psychology is "panadaptationist" is not just false, it is infuriatingly false.⁵ To reject panadaptationism is to accept what Gould terms the "pluralistic" (Gould, 1997) view that there are features of organisms that are not adaptations, and that natural selection is not the only source of genetic change. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) put it this way: "In addition to adaptations, the evolutionary process commonly produces two other outcomes visible in the designs of organisms: (1) concomitants or by-products of adaptations (recently nicknamed "spandrels"; Gould & Lewontin, 1979); and (2) random effects" (p. 62). These sentiments have been echoed by numerous evolutionary psychologists. (For other particularly clear examples, see Buss et al., 1998, p. 537; Daly and Wilson, 1988, p. 12; Dennett, 1995, p. 247; Pinker, 1997, p. 174; Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 9). Further, evolutionary psychologists explicitly test by-product hypotheses in their research (for a blisteringly clear example, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). And they explicitly acknowledge that adaptationist claims must be backed by evidence (see e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, p. 180).

In fact, evolutionary psychologists are so aware of the existence of by-products, in the same volume that Gould claims evolutionary psychologists don't believe in any by-products, Fausto-Sterling claims evolutionary psychologists believe in too many. Fausto-Sterling is offended by evolutionary psychologist Don Symons' (1979) speculation that the female orgasm might be a by-product, rather than an adaptation (p. 211). Interestingly, Symons (1979) went on to suggest that male nipples were similarly byproducts, just like the human ability to read and write (pp. 93-94), the very same examples Gould used to educate evolutionary psychologists about byproducts (Gould, p. 113-114, 122).

Evolutionary psychologists acknowledge by-products. They believe in them, they develop hypotheses about them, and they test for them.

But none of them think the belly-button evolved as a berry-storage system.

Third Charge: Unfalsifiable hypotheses

Evolutionary psychologists are routinely accused of generating hypotheses that are both post-hoc and unfalsifiable. Many of these accusations revolve around the idea that we cannot prove anything about the past, so evolutionary claims cannot be verified.

Gould (2000), for example, asks: "…how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about the EEA⁶…We do not even know the original environment of our ancestors…" (p. 120). Similarly, Fausto-Sterling (2000) suggests that because we know so little about the ancestral past, "evaluating competing hypotheses becomes very difficult" (p. 214).⁷ (See H. Rose, p. 141 and Benton, p. 262, for additional examples).

Gould concludes that "…the key strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable and therefore unscientific." (Gould, p. 120). This is a strong (but remarkably common) claim. I suspect that if I approached critics of evolutionary approaches and told them a psychic cat had planted a hypothesis in my brain, they would urge me to test it. However, if I approached them and said that I had developed this same idea from an evolutionary standpoint, I would earn their scorn as a "Just-so" storyteller. It is a serious indictment of a scientist when he or she does not understand that the origin of a hypothesis does not necessarily tell you how easy or hard it is to test, and I urge Dr. Gould to exercise care in his accusations along these lines.

Evolutionary psychologists use our limited knowledge about the past to generate hypotheses. However, as others have pointed out, evolutionary psychologists' hypotheses about human psychology can be tested in the very same way that other hypotheses about human psychology can be evaluated. David Buss, on the basis of evolutionary ideas, hypothesized that there would be cross-cultural sex differences in a number of variables related to sex and mating. He collected data from 37 cultures to test these hypotheses (Buss, 1989), and many of his hypotheses were supported. If the data had turned out differently, his hypotheses would have been undermined. It didn't stop being science because his hypotheses derived from an evolutionary analysis. (Holcomb, 1998, provides a very nice discussion of this, as do Ketelaar and Ellis, 1998).

As others have pointed out, from his own statements, it is clear that Gould himself does not really endorse the criticism that the lack of information about the past is crippling. He admits that eyes are adaptations for seeing (p. 105) but that humans don't have adaptations for reading (p. 124). Why? He denies reading is an adaptation because he believes that we do, in fact, have "key information" about the past. In particular, he knows that because the historical record suggests writing is a recent human activity, natural selection has not had sufficient time to craft adaptations for reading. In contrast, he affirms the eye is an adaptation because he believes the archeological evidence indicates people have been seeing for a very long time, and because the eye has features that make it improbably functional for solving this adaptive problem. Gould here reasons precisely like an evolutionary psychologist, inferring an evolutionary history from what is known about the past combined with an appreciation for evidence of intricate design, as one observes in the human eye.

To claim that a hypothesis is unfalsifiable is to claim that there is no evidence that one could gather to support or refute the hypothesis. To claim that an evolutionary hypothesis is unfalsifiable, however, is just plain fashionable.

Fourth Charge: Proximate Explanations

One of the oddest charges in APD is S. Rose's criticism that evolutionary psychologists "…insist on distal (in their slightly archaic language, "ultimate") explanations when proximate ones are so much more explanatory…" (p. 3), a charge peppered throughout the book (see, e.g., H. Rose, 146 and S. Rose, 305).

The distinction between ultimate and proximate explanations focuses on how one answers the question "why?" One answer to the question "Why does the heart work like a pump?" is that it was designed to pump blood. Another answer is that electrical impulses cause the cardiac muscle to contract at regular intervals, decreasing the volume of the heart, causing the fluids inside to squirt out. Both answer the question, one by explaining why the heart has the design features that it has, the other by explaining the physical operation of the device. It is easy to see that answering the first question could go a long way toward answering the second. Indeed it did: research on the heart was stalled until William Harvey recognized its function as a pump, after which research progressed apace.

S. Rose gives the impression that evolutionary psychologists "insist on distal explanations" to the exclusion of proximate explanations. This is easily shown to be false, as H. Rose's discussion of infanticide illustrates. Daly and Wilson were interested in particular variables that played a causal role in child abuse and homicide--a proximate explanation. H. Rose discussed this hypothesis, although both she and S. Rose are clearly skeptical of the explanation itself.

There is, however, a perverse sense in which the first part of Rose's claim is correct. It is true that evolutionary psychologists "insist on distal explanations" in the same way that it is true that the legal system "insists on motive" when proving someone's guilt. One could make a case without a motive, but it is likely to be unconvincing. (Consider the prosecution's case with and without a will leaving a vast inheritance to the suspected murderer.) Motives, like ultimate explanations, can guide the search for evidence and provide a more thorough and persuasive explanation for the view one is advocating.

In a sense then, this accusation is correct. Evolutionary psychologists prefer a more thorough explanation of behavior, preferring to have accounts at both the proximate and ultimate level. S. Rose's criticism can easily be put the other way: non-evolutionary psychologists are guilty of failing to insist on ultimate explanations, even though evolution by natural selection is the only mechanism known that generates complex functional design. Hence, failing to provide an evolutionary account is an omission, rather than a virtue.

Providing a proximal explanation neither invalidates an ultimate explanation nor replaces it. A biomechanical explanation of how the heart works doesn't make it any less a blood-pump. And knowing that it's a pump can guide the search for other features of the heart. One can go about doing physiology and psychology without care for ultimate explanations. Indeed, scientists who reject the evolutionary approach are free to derive hypotheses from whatever other sources they wish, including intuition, observation, or psychic cats. But if "insisting" on a more thorough explanation for psychological phenomena is a crime, then evolutionary psychologists are guilty as charged.

Fifth Charge: Evolutionary Claims are Political, not Scientific

Possibly because biological approaches to human behavior have been appropriated for political purposes in the past, many evolutionary psychologists have been very careful to emphasize the distinction between science, which can help us to understand what is, and morality, which concerns questions about what ought to be (e.g., Pinker, 1997, p. 50; Thornhill & Palmer, pp. 5-6). Evolutionary psychologists deny that anything they could discover about what is would tell us what ought to be.

In contrast, Nelkin proclaims that "Evolutionary psychology is not only a new science, it is a vision of morality and social order, a guide to moral behavior and policy agendas" (p. 24). She further argues that "natural" explanations, ominously, "convey a message about social policies" (p. 24). Rose and Rose (2000) go further, making the claim that in places, "…the political agenda of EP is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state" (p. 9).

Where do these ideas come from? None of these three claims bear citations (except to another chapter in the volume), and, evolutionary psychologists generally bend over backward to make it clear that their findings can