The Olé Defense

(Another warning - this is a LONG account of a terrible class I had the other day in the psychology department. Read at your peril).

I had one of the worst academic experiences of my short existence on Wednesday and have hesitated to write about it because I was so exceedingly angry. The basic background is this: we were reading a "classic text" by Tooby/Cosmides that essentially outlines the principles of Evolutionary Psychology. EP, briefly, is an attempt at understanding modern psychology in the light of evolutionary theory, notably presuming that the vast majority of our evolution took place while we were hunter gatherers and that a lot of our seemingly maladaptive behaviors are due to the residual effect sof this change in environs. The week before I had commented to the professor, "I am really interested to read this text, because most of what I have read has been critical of EP." Which is true; strict biologists are generally not fans of EP on methodological philosophical grounds; jason in particular has repeatedly written begging EPists to do more than pay lip service to developmental biology. The prof responded thusly:

"What do you mean? What criticisms could there be?"

I should have known that I was in trouble there, but I pressed on, "Well, it's not a categorical criticism; it's more of a concern that starting with ideas about psychological functionalism without knowledge of the underlying evolutionary / developmental biology can lead you to posit hypotheses that contradict known biological mechanisms." In other words, if you follow the MO of EP - that extant psychological mechanisms evolved under selective pressure in the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million years BO to 10,000 years BP) - you may propose evolutionary tracts or facts that just couldn't be true given what we already know about the underlying biology. So it's not so much an accusation of "your discipline is ludicrous;" it's a criticism that "your discipline, while probably generally correct in theory, would be well-served by paying close attention to the biological mechanisms we already know about." And that's it.

Of course, the prof took this as an attack and an accusation that "EP is wrong." And the week before, he already rather aggressively asked me to "bring in examples where what we've said is wrong." I tried to reiterate that this was not the point, but I went unheard.

So here's the thing - there are examples. EPists, which is a broad group of people who try to incorporate evolutionary theory into the development of human psychology / culture, have said some wildly stupid things. My favorite is the "upsuck hypothesis," that female orgasms evolved as a way for women to control which sperm enter their cervix to fertilize their eggs (Um, the idea that female orgasms, whose neural and anatomical causes bear a STRIKING resemblance to males', evolved independent of the male anatomy is highly unlikely). Or they comment on animal behavior - another great example is that female hyenas have come to develop male-looking external genitalia because it helps them to win conflicts with the males. Or that men are better than women at spatial reasoning because when we were hunter-gatherers this was a sexually-selected trait (which would, natch, require some rathe rimpressive "spatial reasoning genes" on the Y chromosome). Or that being gay is a sort of "alternative reproductive strategy;" that by being gay and more effeminate, gay men could help rear their relatives offspring and perpetuate their behavior via kin selection. Or, even better, that rape can be theoretically conceived of as an alternative reproductive strategy. All of these hopefully sound dubious on the surface, but trust that there are serious biological reasons - location of genes on chromosomes, developmental similarities between women and men, actual survival costs of certain anatomical features, etc. - why you would not even bother to entertain these claims as explanatory mechanisms.

But again, that wasn't my point. Here are some major ASSUMPTIONS, not FINDINGS, of EP that biologists tend to criticize:

1. EP is concerned with "ultimate," not "proximate" causes. You can understand human evolution at the top level without regard to underlying mechanisms.

2. All important human evolution took place during the aforementioned Pleistocene Epoch, and understanding the current human condition involves conceiving of us as animals with hunter-gatherer instincts in a non hunter-gatherer world.

3. No relevant evolution has taken place in the past 10,000 years.

4. Our modern psychological features are ADAPTATIONS that were functionally evolved to solve ADAPTIVE PROBLEMS.

5. Oh, yeah, FUNCTIONALISM, the AI idea that top level function is important and could be equivalent regardless of instantiated architecture, is absolutely true.

6. We can generally assume that complex traits had to have been formed by selective pressure, so most complex behaviors we see currently are the result of evolutionary design.

7. Oh, wait, spandrels, aka evolutionary "side effects." Yes, those exist, but they will be relatively few compared to the complex adaptations.

8. Oh, and these functional problem solutions are mental modules. Specific modules have been designed to solve specific problems. There are thousands of them, because it is inherently better for a function to solve a particular problem instead of having a general solution mechanism.

9. These modules, being evolved entities, are encoded for by genes.

10. These genes are polyphenotypic (that may not be the exact term), meaning that a single gene can respond to the environment in the appropriate adaptive way.

11. While we clearly can't figure out exactly what happened in the Pleistocene Epoch, we can get at it by looking at 1, the modules that have evolved, 2, looking at modern hunter gather societies, or 3, looking at other primate species.

Okay, so that's a huge list, and the interest of not letting this post wax on forever, please trust that these are legitimate, fundamental theoretical differences that biologists and EPists have, and that there are just some plain philosophical differences of method here that don't jive. Among other things, biologists tend to get miffed when people posit things like "mental modules" but are the unable to point in the direction of the underlying neural architecture. It's as though EPists want it both ways - they want to utilize a plainly physicalist mechanism (natural selection on genes) for authority, but they don't want to point out the actual physical thing that is emerging from the physical process of evolution. Whether I agree with them or not, I feel you would have to acknowledge that they are making certain theoretical assumptions - that mutation of genes can occur and result in neural modulation that for some reason we have not been able to detect - that obviously conflict with biological standards of knowledge.

Anyhoo, to cut to the chase of the story, when i got to class on Wednesday, the prof had invited another EPist to sit in on class. No one other than the two profs and I had read the Tooby / Cosmides paper, and so we were the only three speaking for the first two hours of class. And the professor asked me to present some of the biological critiques. And after each one he blurted, "But that's wrong," and then gave a canned response as to why a particular critique was "wrong." This quickly degraded into the professor just shouting "Well, give me an example where an EP theory was actually biologically wrong!" Shouting is not an exaggeration. It had quickly devolved into a "let's get defensive about EP" quasi-debate, and I was going out of my way NOT to attack EP but just to list the theoretical differences that EP and developmental biological theories of evolution have.

Enter the Olé defense: Every example I gave, the visiting professor qualified as "that's not us." Apparently one of the above examples of biologically implausible EP theories is just "not really EP." And so the professors were collectively answering, 'That's not us; what's a criticism that the REAL EPists need to respond to?"

And so, I started pointing out the evo devo biologist problems with the Tooby Cosmides paper. Guess what the responses were?

"We don't say that."

This eventually got the absurdity of my having to turn my laptop monitor around to show them the exact line of the Tooby/Cosmides paper did indeed "say that." After which we got the line of the century:

"Well, they may have written that, but they don't really think that."

Oh, okay. So after this repeated dodging, and repeatedly, I don't know, yelling and trying to make me feel stupid for even daring to question them on the basis of what had been written in their foundational paper (they did eventually admit that the bit about all relevant evolution taking place in the Pleistocene Epoch being unfounded), the discussion turned to the ideas of evidence and mental modules. Again, they asked me for criticisms, and I tried to explain that generally speaking, biologists don't like reference to physical mechanisms that cannot be located. That furthermore, it certainly seems with what is known about neural plasticity and other organization aspects of the brain, that the postulated mental modules don't really jive with what we already know.

"Well," they slyly replied, "what about visual mechanisms? They're not organized in an encapsulated fashion - we can point to criss-crossing neurons from the optic nerve back to the occipital lobes, and they don't stay encapsulated. They're a functional mechanism that is not encapsulated in the brain."

"Right," i slyly replied, "but we have found them. We can see them. There's a visual mechanism, and we can point to the neurons. It's there in a way that a "spousal jealousy module" plainly is not."

After which we get line number two of the century:

"Absense of evidence is not evidence against."

Well, guess what smart guys? Absence of evidence is also not evidence for. And this was all I was trying to point out in the beginning, that there are fundamental methodological approaches that differ between these two areas of study. Admittedly, I have more sympathy for the biological model, but I had no interest in a who's-right-who's-wrong game. Apparently, they did, and in front of the silent crowd of ten worthless students who neither did the reading nor stepped in with any evidence of higher cortical function during this entire "class discussion," I got tag teamed by two pathetic PhDs who were so defensive about their discipline as to feel the need to try to bitch out a visiting grad student in their seminar class. Real welcoming attitude, fellas.

It degenerated from there - the class prof threw forward, "Well, Einstein didn't have evidence for light bent by gravity when he posited its existence." Leaving aside this quasi-appeal to authority, let's just think about the silliness of trying to justify an evidenceless theory by stating that another theory posited before evidence had turned out to be right: GUESS WHAT? LOTS OF THEM WERE WRONG. I pointed this out, but they just said "we do have empirical evidence that agrees with out findings." Finally fed up and tired of being grilled to give examples of times "they" had been wrong when the "they" turned out to be ever-shifting people who don't even write what they think, I asked, "Okay, what's an example of a useful EP theory with empirical evidence?"

"Male aggression," they replied.

That's just great. We need EP to tell us that males are more aggressive than females. I was unaware of that. I asked them what specific adaptive problem this solved, and beyond offering nothing, they said "It fits in well with cross species functional analysis." Meaning, I suppose, that since male birds are the offspring's caretakers, you would expect them to be less aggressive. Fine, great; call me bodhissatva because I am enlightened.

I can't even begin to explain how terrible this all made me feel - I had tried to just put forth a set of critiques in order to start a discussion about methodological assumptions, and these jerks turned it into an adversarial, hostile debate. I felt terrible - the whole time I was consciously trying to rein it in, because yes, I know I can get argumentative, but I was specifically trying not to. They were out to try to make me feel stupid, and Oléd every comment I made. WORSE, it just seems so powerfully indicative that even in a relatively benign environment, a stupid grad seminar, professors are incapable of listening to a critique - from a freaking grad student, no less - without lapsing into an immature defensive posture. What is the point of even trying to undertake philosophy of science type endeavors if the "scientists" are going to behave as though you're burning their church every time you question a methodological assumption?

So, I left that class just feeling utterly pointless about everything - aggravated because I had been berated, because I felt that I couldn't have been articulating my points well if they were so deaf to them, and because of that nice crystalline feeling that people are just too effing worthless, defensive and self-concerned to permit honest philosophical discussion. It was a terrible feeling; I really couldn't sleep that night (some eight hours later) because my blood was still pumping hard, my mind spinning on edge trying to figure out how they couldn't have understood what i had been saying.

It's difficult, because I came to realize I had a sort of dichotomy of choices - either I had just failed and hadn't stated anything clearly, or they were just dumb and refusing to listen. I thoroughly recognize that the latter is a really easy way to justify yourself in just about any dispute, so I was trying and trying to give them every benefit of the doubt and think of how I could have made it clearer that I wasn't interested in arguing. But I couldn't - I had plainly stated exactly what I was looking to do at the beginning of class, and they just chose to take it as an attack. I can't let myself feel bad about this any more.

There's a coda, though. The prof is interested in doing a study about religious dietary laws and how to explain them as an effect of ecological evolutionary pressures. His method - he's going to prime subjects with images of disease, and then get their thoughts as to the rationality of dietary laws. SO yes, we're going to learn something profoundly significant about the formulation of 5000 year old dietary laws by gathering data about attitudes in the present... okay, fine. But how do you even pretend to justify this idea, that acute diease-diet associations in the present have anything to do with the formulation of chronically applied dietary laws in the distant past?

I would find it difficult to justify that, but that's not even the point. They don't even try; they just carry it as an underlying assumption sans reflection. So the end of this is not that the EP angle, at least as espoused by these two professors, is just dumb, it's that it's unreflective - and if you're so concerned about entrenching yourself in a set of disciplinary assumptions that you're unwilling to even reflect on their justification, well, then you are not worth my concern. That may mean that my discipline all the while is pointless, seeing as we're preaching to an unreflective deaf crowd who will just spit back canned nothingness at us. But at least we reflect on what we do.