Motivation

I’m going to put a variety of thoughts in here, as Jeff did, since I had a variety of reactions. A common thread running through these ideas is the danger of identifying the adaptive with the good.

Just-So Stories. I share Jeff’s concern about Jeff’s just-so stories. At times, I thought the stories in the reading were both suspect and methodologically dangerous. To give an example, in the Levitin excerpt, I found the argument that the continued presence of music in culture as strong evidence of adaptive value a little empty (pp. 255-56), for a variety of reasons. First, I think it’s nonresponsive to the position Levitin is arguing against, namely that a capacity for music-making is correlated with other adaptive traits but is not of any adaptive value in itself. It seems that the “mere correlation” argument is equally compatible with the continued presence of music within society. Second, and more generally, I share Jeff’s concern from last week with providing evolutionary explanations for all traits, which makes me even more skeptical of arguments of the “continued presence” form.

But this only explains why the arguments are suspect—I also think they’re dangerous. Arguments that employ similarly flimsy methods are dangerous in the context of evolution because they can diminish our ability to see the capacity for change and improvement. If given traits are thought to be adaptive, then we may be lulled into thinking they are (1) intrinsically good and (2) in any case immutable. So, for example, how does one respond to the project of “explain[ing] the evolution of the killing of other human beings”? (p. 310) If the tendency or desire is adaptive, where “adaptive” in evolutionary terms is a good, is the desire itself good? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but I’d much rather ask that kind of question only after rigorous methodology was applied and adaptativeness were less open to question. Last night, I was watching CNN, and I saw heard just the kind of argument that bothers me. A commentator explained that Elliot Spitzer engaged in illicit activities because the “human need for emotion” has been suppressed by our culture and replaced (adaptively) by translating all needs into sex. The commentator suggested that this was a “natural” part of our evolution. Can we deal with such apologists when the results are ugly and the methods are flimsy?

Homosexuality. I agree with the authors that it’s hard to see how homosexuality could be adaptive. Maybe this is an argument in favor of nurture-based accounts, or maybe it’s an argument that homosexuality is evolutionary noise—I’ll note with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, however, that the “continued presence” of homosexuality may suggest adaptativeness. In any case, I’m dissatisfied with my responses here. If we are to conclude that homosexuality is nurture-based, then that might lend support to those who advocate programs for “correction” of homosexuality, which is nauseating. I recognize, of course, that nurture does not imply the ability to change; I just think that it opens the door wider for such arguments. If we are to conclude that homosexuality is evolutionary noise, then our tendency in this context to associate “adaptive” with “good” cuts the other way—homosexuals are somehow (naturally, evolutionarily) bad, or at least “mistaken.” Can we talk about homosexuality and evolution on less offensive terms?

On Feeling Boxed In. I just wanted to say that there is reason to feel less boxed in here than in the context of other readings. Here, we can tell ourselves a story about “humanity generally” without feeling compelled to identify each of our individual traits with some evolutionary function, whereas in other contexts (perhaps ideology, certainly many determinist and structural accounts) we cannot escape the mechanism described even on an individual level.

I will say, however, that the natural tendency to identify the “adaptive” with the “good” is unsettling.

Here are a few thoughts:

I. It is worth noting that human preferences might not be as universal, and thus not tell as clear a story, as Buss suggests. For example, some studies suggest that the preference for a .7 waist-to-hip ratio is not universal, and that it is fact correlated with contact to Western media, which is present in most of the cross-cultural studies cited by Buss. See, e.g., Yu, D. W. and G. H. Shepard, 1998, “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?”, Nature, 396: 321–322, studying isolated tribal populations in S. America. Moreover, a few minutes on Google Scholar pulls up articles suggesting that the .7 ratio is not necessarily correlated with evolutionary fitness. I do not claim to offer counter-proof to Buss’s claims, but merely to note that they are more contested than might appear from his book, and thus suggest that the facts do not yet speak for themselves.

II. I worry that the methodology of evolutionary psychology runs a strong risk of providing us with just-so stories—starting with facts about human behavior today, and reconstructing the mind’s design from an analysis of the problems the mind might have evolved to solve. Not only does this lead to the potential for the over-use of adaptation as an explanation for biological traits, but also to the problem that many stories will often fit the facts equally well. This is a problem for evolutionary accounts in general, but seems to be compounded in evolutionary psychology. For example: how could we determine which of the following (discussed by Diamond in “Why Is Sex Fun?”) is the best explanation for why women evolved concealed ovulation (mentioned by Buss on 137).
1. Anti-contraception theory: Women became aware of dangers of childbirth and thus avoided having sex when in estrus. These women failed to reproduce, thus placing selective pressure in favor of genes that hid ovulation
2. Recreational sex theory: Women evolved to hide ovulation to provide men with recreational sex so that they would not leave the family to copulate with other women
3. Jealousy theory: Concealed evolution promotes monogamy, by forcing the man to stay home in order to bolster certainty of his paternity. With two parents at home, the children have better chance of survival.
4. Anti-infanticide theory: Concealed ovulation gives the woman access to many sex partners, and leaves men uncertain as to whether they sired her children. This prevents infanticide.
Depending on which is the case, we could posit very different accounts of adaptive psychology.

III. As a historian, I am worried whenever my research confirms the story that I would have told before I started it. I had a similar worry when reading this book.

Erin, you are absolutely correct that this week’s reading might help give us an empirical explanation of sexual violence against women. But this still leaves me uneasy with MacKinnon’s suggestion in various parts of her statement that sexual norms were created by men, for men. This is a very hard realization for me, making me feel complicit in creating sexual norms, many of which are clearly problematic and harmful towards women. Reflecting on Buss’ book, however, there is no suggestion that the genetic pool has been determined any more by men than by women. Evolutionary change, as Buss puts it, is determined by a combination of natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, and the founder effect. These driving forces can feed into each other, and to the extent that sexual discrimination can be explained not only based on sexual selection and the enforcement of non-genetically based sexual norms (as suggested) but also on the basis of natural selection, genetic drift, and the founder effect, MacKinnon’s thesis becomes weakened.

How far do we want to go in designing systems to make up for an evolutionary lag time that leaves us adapted to a world several thousand years in the past? For example, adaptive mating preferences lie behind much of modern gender inequality. Men have evolved to favor younger women; this preference perpetuates power imbalances between the sexes and also leaves many women alone in their older age after their mates have died. Perhaps early educational efforts reinforced by later incentives and sanctions can curb this male behavior. Should system designers contemplate that correcting these kinds of behaviors is a “good” of any order?

This week’s readings on evolutionary psychology put me very much in mind of the MacKinnon reading from two weeks ago. Whether or not you believe that human instincts are many or few, whether all of our thoughts and behaviors can be categorized by a few basic heuristics or are highly situationally dependent, the common thread through Buss’ work was that sex is a/the primary motivator. Maybe this was understood last week as part of the discussion of individual versus group fitness, but it felt much more salient this week. I use sex here as the drive to reproduce (the seeming lack of which leaves Buss stumped as to both the motivations of gays – since “Any orientation that lowered the likelihood of successful reproduction would be ruthlessly selected against.” – and lesbians – for which he at least can try to assert the traditional masculine feminine paradigms by pointing out that “Butch lesbians tend to be more masculine, dominant, and assertive, whereas femme lesbians tend to be more sensitive, cheerful, and feminine.”).

At the risk of being too touchy-feely for the class, I am truly curious as to how other members of the class react to the portrayal of gender roles in Buss. They make me feel very boxed in, while at the same time feeling mischaracterized. I may consider myself “femme” and yet also consider myself much more “masculine, dominant, and assertive” than the average woman. However, I don’t have the original study data and thus do not know the design and who was being compared (i.e. maybe lesbians/bisexual women are generally more “masculine” than straight women according to whatever factor measures masculinity).

To return to the original point, the reading does culminate in what could be considered the empirical evidence David felt was lacking for MacKinnon’s philosophical observations about sexual violence against women. Why do men attack other men? Sexual competition. Why do men attack women? Because they feel like the women might have other/better options and they want to keep their women. Why do women (verbally) attack other women? To make those women appear less sexually attractive to men.

Is this story better or truer because it’s based on an evolutionary rather than a philosophical analysis of society? It certainly has a greater air of inevitability about it. My concern is that the evolutionary perspective might lead people to feel like violence is somehow “natural” and evolutionarily justified, particularly violence against women. After all, in cross-cultural studies, “Male sexual jealousy…turned out to be a human universal and the leading cause of spousal homicide in the many cultures that have been surveyed so far.”

Can and should these evolutionary stories be broken down or given precedence? Our society places a great deal of weight on science, or at least the portion of society that believes in things like evolution. It might strike some as wrong to work against human nature in dealing with issues like domestic violence, or other types of interpersonal violence. In a way, the social acceptance of violence can be seen in our sentencing for non-violent drug crimes as compared to crimes like assault. For example, under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, merely possessing heroin or cocaine has a base level of 8; while an assault with physical contact, or the threatened use and possession of a dangerous weapon, has a base level of 7 (2007 Federal Sentencing Guidelines). Granted, you could say that this is sign not that violence is minimized, but that drug possession is particularly frowned upon.

Is sex-driven violence inevitable? As Yochai observed, no matter how hard you try, you can’t stop little boys from fighting. Maybe it is a waste of resources to fight “reasonable” amounts of violence, though where the threshold of reasonableness falls is unclear.

The introduction of ‘signalling theory’ really grabbed my attention in this week’s readings:

The assumption behind this theory is that individuals with better traits have lower marginal signalling costs, that is, lower costs of altruistic acts. Thus, those with better traits are more likely to signal, which allows the inference that those who signal have better traits.

This struck me as a sort of evolutionary Calvinism. One of the main tenets of Calvinism, from my limited understanding, is that salvation was completely determined by God. No human action could affect the likelihood of one being saved, but rather it was God’s grace that determined all action. People ascribing to this doctrine never the less behaved in a properly worshipful manner — that is, they acted as though they were saved. One speculates that this has a fair bit to do with community standing and also a little to do with wishful thinking.

Similarly here, even if one’s altruistic actions cannot directly maximize one’s individual utility, people may never the less behave altruistically in order to send a message that they are ‘more fit’ (so to speak) than they actually are. This basic idea bears out fairly well in the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption, but the loose link in the chain is the assumption that altruism and fitness are conceptually associated so that demonstrating one signals the other.

Thoughts on this?

Richerson and Boyd make a interesting point of relating group selection theory and group-beneficial beliefs to religion. To those authors, the adoption of religion can be modeled as a propensity to imitate successful neighbors. Christianity, according to the authors, experienced great success in attracting Roman converts because Romans “were attracted to what they saw as a better quality of life.”

I have two main concerns about applying group selection theory to religion, and how religion may play a role in regulating group behavior and sociality:

1. Richerson and Boyd seem to underestimate the transaction costs involved in attracting individuals to a religion, new or old. True, evangelizing religions such as Christianity and Islam go to pains to ease the conversion process. There are other religions, however, that require months or year-long conversions, and still others that do not reveal the religion’s utmost secrets but to only a select few. To most, the transaction cost of converting to a new religion may outweigh the benefits of the “better quality of life”.

2. The authors’ arguments on the spread of norms in the context of religion is largely circular. The authors mention that “the better norm will spread because people imitate their more-successful neighbors.” However, the majority, if not all, of the world’s religions can be viewed as perceiving success itself in various ways. Is the maximization of individual and/or group success defined by maximizing the ability to reproduce (see Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, where use of contraception is prohibited), or is population control and reproductive choice through the use of contraception (see certain Protestant denominations, Reform Judaism) more reflective of Darwinian “success”?

Take this combined with the fact that throughout history religious adoption has often occurred through coercion rather than assimilation, and it seems to me that religion is not a good example of the spread of group-beneficial cultural variants.

Coming back to our class discussion of two weeks ago, I’m intrigued by the notion of punishment (reward/punishment or moralistic punishment depending on the author) as a means of reinforcing pro-social behaviors at the group level. We’ll undoubtedly talk more about this in class, but I liked the Sober & Sloan Wilson approach of framing the punishment as a form of group-level altruism.

I didn’t see the readings as promoting the individual gene approach, or showing it as the most tenable level of focus. If there is variations in phenotpyic behaviors, then surely that is something that a social level approach can harness, and for the evolutionary biologists, punishment is the way to do that.

But when we choose what traits we want to reward or punish, we need to keep in mind what I will call the “Chicken Coop Example.” If we select for traits that seem to have the most input along dimension X at the individual level, will we ultimately be hindering X in the overall population? Will be be creating nasty hens that stress each other out and diminish productivity?

It seems to me that our studies thus far have indicated that we cannot understand motivation solely in terms of personal agency—that reference to the individual alone cannot account for the way in which we make decisions. The question thus arises: at what level should we look to understand ourselves? Beyond the body? Within? The readings this week are compelling in that they provide us with a naturalistic alternative to taking individuals (i.e. individual bodies) as the fundamental units of our analysis—an alternative that seems to be defined not by our method of analysis, but rather by natural selection.

However, there is much disagreement about what the units of selection actually are. As Alexander puts it, the key question is, “Survival of the fittest what?” Does natural selection act on genes, individuals, kinship groups, behavioral groups, populations, or species? According to Alexander, the “general consensus” is that genes are the usual unit, because “adaptiveness is not appropriately assumed at any higher level of organization than necessary to explain the trait in question.” I am particular interested in how “higher” and “necessary to explain” are conceived.

If you are interested in reading the thoughts of some early geneticists about the nature of the gene and genetic explanation (which will make this post much longer than the 1 paragraph you are obligated to read), here are two that you might find interesting:

In 1909, T. H Morgan—one of the most influential geneticists of the 20th c, and “father” of the chromosome theory of heredity—wrote an article about genes [i.e., “factors”] titled, “What are ‘Factors’ in Mendelian Explanations?” Here, he discussed his concern with the new conceptual tools of geneticists, and the nature of genetic explanation: “Facts are being transformed into factors [i.e., genes] at a rapid rate…We work backwards from the facts to the factors, and then, presto! explain the facts by the very factors that we invented to account for them.” While Morgan was not “unappreciative of the distinct advantages” of this method “in handling the facts,” he was concerned that it would lead to a misconception of the nature of the factors. He thought that “the superior jugglery” used in this line of reasoning could lead some to forget that “the results are often so excellently ‘explained’ because the explanation was invented to explain them.” In these ways, Morgan suggested that the genes did not speak for themselves—that they were turned into facts through the method by which they were approached.

In the 1930s, Richard Goldschmidt (one of the most influential developmental geneticists of the 20th c.) suggested that geneticists should abandon the concept of the gene as a unit of function and explanation: “The conclusion…is that… no genes are existing, but only points, loci, in the chromosome which have to be arranged in a proper order or pattern to control normal development.” These ideas were radical at first, but eventually became accepted. After Ninth International Congress on Genetics in 1953, an article in Science reported: “it can be said that the most significant trend at the Bellagio Congress was the virtual abandonment of the gene in the classical sense as the object of study. Both the statistical and physiological approaches, to follow the distinction laid down by President Goldschmidt, have instead turned their attention to the properties and functions of more complex systems.”

As we see in our readings, however, “consensus” rarely exists in science: the gene lives on as a unit of explanation. One reason that I find the history of science interesting is it reveals something about the assumptions in—or alternatives too—what counts as normal science today.

Holy cow. Thinking about the mighty life cycle of the Dicrocoelium dendriticum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicrocoelium_dendriticum) has made me a little less sanguine that we will ever really come to a rich understanding of the causes and effects of human motivation. If this fluke’s microscopic brain is susceptible to such a complex, evolution-mandated, multi-generational progression from cow to snail to ant to cow, it’s a little scary to contemplate what our human brains have evolved to do over the years. (Certainly, free will is out the window.)

Another motivational complication goes to the human-specific ability to work with technology, language, and moral norms. If genes and culture are embedded in a double-helix evolutionary bind, and our evolution is as dependent upon social context as Unto Others and Not by Genes Alone (and perhaps Aristotle and Joseph Butler, but not Nietzsche/Hobbes/Dawkins) suggest, then I think we may have to give up on a species-wide account of motivation and focus on very local gene/culture interactions instead. Describing intra-species evolutionary variations (e.g., why does religion A take hold with people X whereas a different set of social norms prevail with people Y, and what happens when these people interact?) begins to look a lot more important than speaking in neuroscientific or ev-bio generalities, and our inquiry begins to look more like anthropology/sociology than biology. Though of course biology is still relevant for grounding the inquiry in an account of internal human structures (e.g., how do universal brain structures encode particular linguistic and moral structures and efficiently pass them on to future generations?).

In a way, this is a response to Jason’s post re the rational actor model; once you try to account for social embeddedness in system design, you introduce so many additional context-dependent variables that the model risks degenerating into uselessness. It’s easier to model a person who is interested solely in “taking care of her own life and health and private good.” But if the various accounts of group selection are accurate, then this person’s individual actions aren’t really comprehensible unless you juxtapose them with an account of how she was “made for society and to promote the happiness of it,” (Sober & Wilson p. 132, quoting Joseph Butler). Which involves a deep analysis not just of punishment mechanisms but also of human tools such as language, morality, empathy, sacrifice, scapegoating, etc.