Jim McGinn
Thu, Jul-18-02, 01:04
"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a9fia9$pda$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > All behavioral phenomena are related in some way to
> > natural selection. This is trivial. The problem, IMO, with
> > evolutionary psychology is that it seems to make no room
> > for what might be called a "generalized learning
> > mechanism." I find this rather astounding and silly.
>
> Jim: Yes. I know what you are talking about. And I agree. I
> even go so far as to agree that it's silly. What's even more
> silly is that more often than not the scenarios that
> evolutionary psychologists propose have themselves assumed
> the existence (preexistence?) of a rather well developed GLM
> (generalized learning mechanism) in our ancestors.
>
> Glen: I'm interested in the last bit of the above. I would
> be interested if it could be shown that their position
> logically (or otherwise) entails a "GLM."
I wonder if anybody could come up with some examples of EP
hypothetical thinking that supposedly doesn't assume the
preexistence of a "GLM."
> Certainly, they acknowledge the role of "learning," but
> strongly suggest that the specifics of "what is learned" is
> rooted in the types of environments in which the species
> evolved. Here it seems that some internal inconsistency may
> be noted. That is, it makes good sense for there to be a GLM
> since organisms that "possessed" such a mechanism would be
> able to survive in environments quite different from those
> in which they evolved.
This comment here reminded me of something I'd read a few
days ago on sci.bio.paleontology. I'll cut and paste parts
of it below:
In message 1 of a thread entitled, Climate change over the
last 10mln yrs, Yousuf Khan states:
***** begin cut and paste *****
<snip>
. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip>
<snip>
. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and more
inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of man, so
we shouldn't complain too loudly about how cold it is
outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet, then we'd
just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures who would just eat
easy-to-find plants all day long -- doesn't require the
development of much intelligence.
<snip>
***** end cut and paste *****
What I gather from this statement is that the change in
environment that has been taking place over the last 10
million years has introduced two new elements in the
environment that previously had been largely nonexistent on
this planet. The first was
(is) temporal variation in climate (more temperature variation
between night and day, more variation between seasons,
more variations in terms of "sudden" shifts in climate).
The second was (is) spatial variation in habitat
(habitats that are suitable one part of the year [or day]
and unsuitable to a species at another part of the year
[or day]) and more variable distribution of habitats such
that there is a lot more distance between suitable
locations. So as our planet shifted from a climate that
was always and everywhere (even at the polar extremities)
rainy, warm, and cloudy (relatively lacking in climatic
variation over time and space) to a climate that is
drier, colder, and clearer skied (relatively variable in
climatic variation over time and space climate) the
prevaling nature of the earth's biota (biological
organisms) has also shifted (evolved as a result of the
process of natural selection) to animals that are
smaller, more mobile, and larger brained.
So, I suspect that more variable environments that required
constant movement, migration, and constant decisions with
respect to finding resources may be the evolutionary causes of
brain growth in mammals in general. But can we directly extend
this thinking to hominid/human evolution? I think we have to
be careful about this. (More on this in my CONCLUSION below.)
> Such pressure would not, of course, mean that such a
> mechanism (GLM) would have to have evolved.
I agree.
> I would add here that one of the things that seems to have
> happened to a bunch of organisms - especially mammals - is
> the emergence of a "pool of behavior" that is largely not
> "committed" to eliciting stimuli as in the reflex. This is
> part and parcel of the emergence of operant conditioning,
> the most important "mechanism of learning."
>
> Jim: If human evolution is about anything it has to be about
> finding the origins of the generalized learning mechanism
> (including culture).
>
> Glen: We're probably mostly in agreement here.
>
> Jim: But evolutionary psychologist are so lost in the
> confusion that is created by the implications of their
> poorly examined assumptions that there isn't much anybody
> can do for them. (IMO the problems with EP also run a lot
> deeper. Maybe its biggest problem is that it has swallowed
> the misthinking of neoDarwinism unexamined.)
>
> Glen: I'm not sure what you're driving at concerning
> neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism (which comprises the undisputed prevailing
paradigm of evolutionary theory) has some strangely
nonscientific aspects to it that renders its adherents blind
to its inherent shortcomings. For example, it's not unusual
for a neoDarwinists to state that they believe in multiple
units of selection (or even my more radical stipulation that
any and all units of selection are artifice and therefore
there is no one real unit of selection since selection
actually happens on all levels simultaneously) but then in the
next sentence state (or imply) that fitness is fully
measurable with respect to differential reproduction of
individual organisms over the span of a generation. They seem
unable to comprehend the contradictory nature of these two
suppositions and, as a result, they are dismissive of group
selectionist scenarios.
More to the point, neoDarwinism carries the illusion of
scientific conciseness at the expense of dismissing very
important aspects of the process of natural selection, namely
selection that happens on levels other than the individual.
> My opinion is that EP suffers from the same conceptual
> confusion that characterizes most of
> psychology and has all but crippled every field interested
> in behavior - human or otherwise. This includes behavioral
> neurobiology.
I'd be interested in more details about the source of this
conceptual confusion.
> > Anyway, despite the fact that all behavioral phenomena are
> > related in some way to natural selection, selection
> > operates on other units. Much of the behavior of
> > individuals is selected by its consequences (operant
> > behavior), and the emergence of culture ushers in other
> > relevant units. That the organisms are products of natural
> > selection does not mean that all behavior can be explained
> > by natural selection.
>
> Jim: Notwithstanding the philosophical musings of a
> philosophically ignorant but otherwise popular scientist,
> Steven J. Gould, all behavior is potentially explicable
> through natural selection. Even Gould's "spandrels" are
> explicable through natural selection. (Gould's spandrels
> argument amounts to little more than an intellectual trick.)
>
> Glen: I'm no expert on Gould, but I tend to be in agreement
> with much of what he says. I'm not familiar with
> "spandrels." Also, I'm not sure what you are driving at.
> There is an important sense in which it is false that
> "...all behavior is potentially explicable through natural
> selection..." One cannot explain the form and frequency of
> certain responses without pointing to the ontogenic
> environment, even if one can say why, from the standpoint of
> natural selection, such ontogenic environments produce such
> responses.
Okay, I know what you mean. And I agree. But I think this kind
of thinking inadvertently opens the door to the conceptual
misthinking that Gould proposes. Let me explain. AFAIC the
fact that organism's reactions to current events is largely
unpredictable (which is due not only to the fact that an
organism's ontogenenic environment is largely unpredictable to
us, but also because the complexity of lifeform's and their
evolutionary history is so great as to render them largely
unknowable to us) does not mean that their behavior is not
POTENTIALLY explicable through natural selection. What's so
silly about Gould is that when he points out that biological
phenomena is partly the result of "contingency" he really
isn't telling us anything that isn't already obvious. Nobody
proposes that the process of natural selection is not largely
the result of events that, from our perspective, are "random"
or "unpredictable." Darwin himself made this perfectly clear.
What's bad about Gould's supposition is that it provides the
illusion of scientific credibility for excusing the fact that
we currently have a hard time explaining many adaptations:
"Human intellect? Well we can't explain its selective benefits
in the earliest years of hominid evolution, so it must have
been some kind of spandrel, the result of contingency and not
natural selection." (Strangely enough, there are some who have
adopted this approach literally. In fact, recently an
anthropologists published a book in which contingency [genetic
drift] is purported to be one of the major selective causes of
human adaptations.)
All in all, when it comes to Gould's notion of "contingency"
as an explanatory tool for understanding biological origins
the best thing we can say about it is that, depending on how
we interpret it, Gould is telling us something that is already
so obvious (or should be so obvious) as to not even be worth
mentioning. The worst thing we can say is that it gives us the
false illusion that some adaptations cannot be explained by
NS. Nevertheless, in all fairness, I should also mention that
when it comes to filling out the details of evolutionary
explanations nobody does a better job than S. J. Gould. He's
one hell of a good story teller.
<snip>
CONCLUSION
As I stated above, I suspect that more variable environments
that required constant movement, migration, may be the
evolutionary causes of brain growth in mammals in general.
But, as I also indicated above, I think we have to be very
careful not to blindly extend this thinking to arrive at
conclusions about the nature of hominid/human evolution?
There would be many problems if we did. Firstly hominid brain
growth over the last 5 to 8 million years is something like
three times that of any other mammal. From this observation we
might assume that our ancestors had three times as much
enviromental variablity and three times as much migrational
behaviors in comparison to the other mammals that also evolved
in our vicinity. Obviously this makes no sense. And it really
makes no sense when we consider the fact that when it comes to
mobility bipedalism is a lousy adaptation (not the least of
the problems is the fact that in a savanna habitat an erect
posture would have made our ancestors more obvious to
predators). Also fossil evidence (tree climbing adaptations in
A'piths) of early hominids indicates that they continued to
reside in and amongst trees for upwards of a million of years
after they had adopted bipedalism.
So, not only would the relative lack of mobility of our
earliest hominid ancestors have made us really ineffective at
being the small band-size roaming hunter-gatherers that
prevailing theory currently stipulates but if they had adopted
this lifestyle then we would hardly expect the three fold
increase in brain size that characterizes hominid/human
evolution--chimps are hunter-gatherers and they haven't
experiences this increase in brain size.
Now we can bring this discussion full circle back to
Evolutionary Psychology and the importance of finding a
scenario that will indicate the evolution of a general
learning mechanism (GLM).
Evolutionary psychology does come up with a lot of
interesting scenarios for the earliest years of hominid
evolution. But their problem is that they are impusively
compelled to conform these scenarios to the above mentioned
assumptions: 1) the neoDarwinistic based assumption that
selection only happens to individuals; and 2) the
anthropology based assumption that human evolution happened
in the context of small bands of wandering hunter-gatherers.
I contend that within the context of these two simpleminded
assumptions it will prove to be impossible to find a
selective scenario that indicates the evolution of a GLM.
Therefore, in my opinion evolutionary psychology is feckless
in that they have blindly carried over assumptions from two
other disciplines that make it impossible for them to
discover the selective origins of the one thing that might
make some of their many scenarios make sense, a GLM.
I contend that human evolution, even in earliest years,
involves the emergence of a new group, the human (hominid)
community. It is the human (hominid) community that was (is)
the unit of human (hominid) selection, not individuals, not
hunter-gatherer groups. The how and why of this new group was
dictated by environmental factors that presently are not well
understood (these factors involve the introduction of a new
climatic element, seasonal dessication, a habitat that was
halfway between a rainforest and a savanna, and other ensuing
implications which I will save for a later post). Moreover, I
contend, it is only in the context of such a scenario (a
community selectionist scenario) that it is possible to
theorize the selective emergence of a GLM.
Regards,
Jim jimmcginn@yahoo.com
news:a9fia9$pda$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > All behavioral phenomena are related in some way to
> > natural selection. This is trivial. The problem, IMO, with
> > evolutionary psychology is that it seems to make no room
> > for what might be called a "generalized learning
> > mechanism." I find this rather astounding and silly.
>
> Jim: Yes. I know what you are talking about. And I agree. I
> even go so far as to agree that it's silly. What's even more
> silly is that more often than not the scenarios that
> evolutionary psychologists propose have themselves assumed
> the existence (preexistence?) of a rather well developed GLM
> (generalized learning mechanism) in our ancestors.
>
> Glen: I'm interested in the last bit of the above. I would
> be interested if it could be shown that their position
> logically (or otherwise) entails a "GLM."
I wonder if anybody could come up with some examples of EP
hypothetical thinking that supposedly doesn't assume the
preexistence of a "GLM."
> Certainly, they acknowledge the role of "learning," but
> strongly suggest that the specifics of "what is learned" is
> rooted in the types of environments in which the species
> evolved. Here it seems that some internal inconsistency may
> be noted. That is, it makes good sense for there to be a GLM
> since organisms that "possessed" such a mechanism would be
> able to survive in environments quite different from those
> in which they evolved.
This comment here reminded me of something I'd read a few
days ago on sci.bio.paleontology. I'll cut and paste parts
of it below:
In message 1 of a thread entitled, Climate change over the
last 10mln yrs, Yousuf Khan states:
***** begin cut and paste *****
<snip>
. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip>
<snip>
. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and more
inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of man, so
we shouldn't complain too loudly about how cold it is
outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet, then we'd
just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures who would just eat
easy-to-find plants all day long -- doesn't require the
development of much intelligence.
<snip>
***** end cut and paste *****
What I gather from this statement is that the change in
environment that has been taking place over the last 10
million years has introduced two new elements in the
environment that previously had been largely nonexistent on
this planet. The first was
(is) temporal variation in climate (more temperature variation
between night and day, more variation between seasons,
more variations in terms of "sudden" shifts in climate).
The second was (is) spatial variation in habitat
(habitats that are suitable one part of the year [or day]
and unsuitable to a species at another part of the year
[or day]) and more variable distribution of habitats such
that there is a lot more distance between suitable
locations. So as our planet shifted from a climate that
was always and everywhere (even at the polar extremities)
rainy, warm, and cloudy (relatively lacking in climatic
variation over time and space) to a climate that is
drier, colder, and clearer skied (relatively variable in
climatic variation over time and space climate) the
prevaling nature of the earth's biota (biological
organisms) has also shifted (evolved as a result of the
process of natural selection) to animals that are
smaller, more mobile, and larger brained.
So, I suspect that more variable environments that required
constant movement, migration, and constant decisions with
respect to finding resources may be the evolutionary causes of
brain growth in mammals in general. But can we directly extend
this thinking to hominid/human evolution? I think we have to
be careful about this. (More on this in my CONCLUSION below.)
> Such pressure would not, of course, mean that such a
> mechanism (GLM) would have to have evolved.
I agree.
> I would add here that one of the things that seems to have
> happened to a bunch of organisms - especially mammals - is
> the emergence of a "pool of behavior" that is largely not
> "committed" to eliciting stimuli as in the reflex. This is
> part and parcel of the emergence of operant conditioning,
> the most important "mechanism of learning."
>
> Jim: If human evolution is about anything it has to be about
> finding the origins of the generalized learning mechanism
> (including culture).
>
> Glen: We're probably mostly in agreement here.
>
> Jim: But evolutionary psychologist are so lost in the
> confusion that is created by the implications of their
> poorly examined assumptions that there isn't much anybody
> can do for them. (IMO the problems with EP also run a lot
> deeper. Maybe its biggest problem is that it has swallowed
> the misthinking of neoDarwinism unexamined.)
>
> Glen: I'm not sure what you're driving at concerning
> neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism (which comprises the undisputed prevailing
paradigm of evolutionary theory) has some strangely
nonscientific aspects to it that renders its adherents blind
to its inherent shortcomings. For example, it's not unusual
for a neoDarwinists to state that they believe in multiple
units of selection (or even my more radical stipulation that
any and all units of selection are artifice and therefore
there is no one real unit of selection since selection
actually happens on all levels simultaneously) but then in the
next sentence state (or imply) that fitness is fully
measurable with respect to differential reproduction of
individual organisms over the span of a generation. They seem
unable to comprehend the contradictory nature of these two
suppositions and, as a result, they are dismissive of group
selectionist scenarios.
More to the point, neoDarwinism carries the illusion of
scientific conciseness at the expense of dismissing very
important aspects of the process of natural selection, namely
selection that happens on levels other than the individual.
> My opinion is that EP suffers from the same conceptual
> confusion that characterizes most of
> psychology and has all but crippled every field interested
> in behavior - human or otherwise. This includes behavioral
> neurobiology.
I'd be interested in more details about the source of this
conceptual confusion.
> > Anyway, despite the fact that all behavioral phenomena are
> > related in some way to natural selection, selection
> > operates on other units. Much of the behavior of
> > individuals is selected by its consequences (operant
> > behavior), and the emergence of culture ushers in other
> > relevant units. That the organisms are products of natural
> > selection does not mean that all behavior can be explained
> > by natural selection.
>
> Jim: Notwithstanding the philosophical musings of a
> philosophically ignorant but otherwise popular scientist,
> Steven J. Gould, all behavior is potentially explicable
> through natural selection. Even Gould's "spandrels" are
> explicable through natural selection. (Gould's spandrels
> argument amounts to little more than an intellectual trick.)
>
> Glen: I'm no expert on Gould, but I tend to be in agreement
> with much of what he says. I'm not familiar with
> "spandrels." Also, I'm not sure what you are driving at.
> There is an important sense in which it is false that
> "...all behavior is potentially explicable through natural
> selection..." One cannot explain the form and frequency of
> certain responses without pointing to the ontogenic
> environment, even if one can say why, from the standpoint of
> natural selection, such ontogenic environments produce such
> responses.
Okay, I know what you mean. And I agree. But I think this kind
of thinking inadvertently opens the door to the conceptual
misthinking that Gould proposes. Let me explain. AFAIC the
fact that organism's reactions to current events is largely
unpredictable (which is due not only to the fact that an
organism's ontogenenic environment is largely unpredictable to
us, but also because the complexity of lifeform's and their
evolutionary history is so great as to render them largely
unknowable to us) does not mean that their behavior is not
POTENTIALLY explicable through natural selection. What's so
silly about Gould is that when he points out that biological
phenomena is partly the result of "contingency" he really
isn't telling us anything that isn't already obvious. Nobody
proposes that the process of natural selection is not largely
the result of events that, from our perspective, are "random"
or "unpredictable." Darwin himself made this perfectly clear.
What's bad about Gould's supposition is that it provides the
illusion of scientific credibility for excusing the fact that
we currently have a hard time explaining many adaptations:
"Human intellect? Well we can't explain its selective benefits
in the earliest years of hominid evolution, so it must have
been some kind of spandrel, the result of contingency and not
natural selection." (Strangely enough, there are some who have
adopted this approach literally. In fact, recently an
anthropologists published a book in which contingency [genetic
drift] is purported to be one of the major selective causes of
human adaptations.)
All in all, when it comes to Gould's notion of "contingency"
as an explanatory tool for understanding biological origins
the best thing we can say about it is that, depending on how
we interpret it, Gould is telling us something that is already
so obvious (or should be so obvious) as to not even be worth
mentioning. The worst thing we can say is that it gives us the
false illusion that some adaptations cannot be explained by
NS. Nevertheless, in all fairness, I should also mention that
when it comes to filling out the details of evolutionary
explanations nobody does a better job than S. J. Gould. He's
one hell of a good story teller.
<snip>
CONCLUSION
As I stated above, I suspect that more variable environments
that required constant movement, migration, may be the
evolutionary causes of brain growth in mammals in general.
But, as I also indicated above, I think we have to be very
careful not to blindly extend this thinking to arrive at
conclusions about the nature of hominid/human evolution?
There would be many problems if we did. Firstly hominid brain
growth over the last 5 to 8 million years is something like
three times that of any other mammal. From this observation we
might assume that our ancestors had three times as much
enviromental variablity and three times as much migrational
behaviors in comparison to the other mammals that also evolved
in our vicinity. Obviously this makes no sense. And it really
makes no sense when we consider the fact that when it comes to
mobility bipedalism is a lousy adaptation (not the least of
the problems is the fact that in a savanna habitat an erect
posture would have made our ancestors more obvious to
predators). Also fossil evidence (tree climbing adaptations in
A'piths) of early hominids indicates that they continued to
reside in and amongst trees for upwards of a million of years
after they had adopted bipedalism.
So, not only would the relative lack of mobility of our
earliest hominid ancestors have made us really ineffective at
being the small band-size roaming hunter-gatherers that
prevailing theory currently stipulates but if they had adopted
this lifestyle then we would hardly expect the three fold
increase in brain size that characterizes hominid/human
evolution--chimps are hunter-gatherers and they haven't
experiences this increase in brain size.
Now we can bring this discussion full circle back to
Evolutionary Psychology and the importance of finding a
scenario that will indicate the evolution of a general
learning mechanism (GLM).
Evolutionary psychology does come up with a lot of
interesting scenarios for the earliest years of hominid
evolution. But their problem is that they are impusively
compelled to conform these scenarios to the above mentioned
assumptions: 1) the neoDarwinistic based assumption that
selection only happens to individuals; and 2) the
anthropology based assumption that human evolution happened
in the context of small bands of wandering hunter-gatherers.
I contend that within the context of these two simpleminded
assumptions it will prove to be impossible to find a
selective scenario that indicates the evolution of a GLM.
Therefore, in my opinion evolutionary psychology is feckless
in that they have blindly carried over assumptions from two
other disciplines that make it impossible for them to
discover the selective origins of the one thing that might
make some of their many scenarios make sense, a GLM.
I contend that human evolution, even in earliest years,
involves the emergence of a new group, the human (hominid)
community. It is the human (hominid) community that was (is)
the unit of human (hominid) selection, not individuals, not
hunter-gatherer groups. The how and why of this new group was
dictated by environmental factors that presently are not well
understood (these factors involve the introduction of a new
climatic element, seasonal dessication, a habitat that was
halfway between a rainforest and a savanna, and other ensuing
implications which I will save for a later post). Moreover, I
contend, it is only in the context of such a scenario (a
community selectionist scenario) that it is possible to
theorize the selective emergence of a GLM.
Regards,
Jim jimmcginn@yahoo.com