|
|
| date | 2001-03-15:20:17 |
| SelfConciousness | There's been stuff I've been meaning to get around to writing for a few days now, but when I sit down with time to write, it seems to fly out of my mind. |
| Humans |
This is under Humans rather than Biology because it's about human behavior, not biology. "Evolutionary psychology" keeps coming up. I've encountered it a couple of times recently in independent contexts. The simplest thing to say about it is that it was racist, sexist nonsense when it was called sociobiology, too. I've more to say, but only time now for a couple of notes. The first is that yes, it is true that the very fact we have psychological motivations is due to our evolutionary history. If that was all "evolutionary psychology" was saying it would be simply banal, as opposed to vicious and stupid. Here's an example of something an evolutionary psychologist might try to explain: I married a woman who was born just about as far away from where I was born as it's possible to get and still be on the same planet. The explanation would be something like: humans are tuned up to practice exogamy, to make sure our genes are well-mixed with our neighbors. This prevents inbreeding and was an important social force in early hominid evolution. Now, there's some empirical evidence for those claims: relative to our nearest primate cousins it is true that humans appear to favor exogamy. But. As it turns out, my wife's family has many fairly close connections with my family, mostly in the form of friends in common--a close friend of my mother-in-law is currently dating my mother's college basketball coach, for example. I'd be willing to bet that Jan and I would only have to go four or five generations back to find ancestors in common, as my father's family came from the north of England and hers from the south of Scotland. Nor are such close associations at all uncommon--the average distance between places of birth for married people in North America is something like 25 miles. What would an evolutionary psychologist say to this? Well, that to keep our genes strong we have been tuned up to breed with people who are "like us" in important respects... And so on. Whenever I hear an "explanation" given by an evolutionary psychologist, I ask myself, "What would this bozo say if the facts were the opposite of what they are?" It is in all cases remarkably easy to think of equally plausible "explanations" for the opposing situation. If we marry far apart, it's exogamy; if we marry close together, it's gene conservation. If we are attracted to thin, athletic people it's because we are attracted to efficient foragers and hunters. If we are attracted to fat people it's because we're attracted to evidence of surplus food or power. Evolutionary psychology has a positively Freudian power to "explain" everything in terms that, when the surface is scratched a little, appear to me to be nothing more than the most unreflective stereotypes imaginable. And because we carry a rich endowment of stereotypes around with us, we are never at a loss to come up with one. That's why it's important to always consider the "other story"--the story the evolutionary psychologist would tell if the facts were different. When we're trapped in stereotypical thinking, it can be hard to escape. If we forget the current scenario and replace it with it's opposite, drawing out the opposing stereotype (and there always is one--men are violent/men are reasonable; women are flighty/women are practical...) is a little easier. |
| Names |
I came across an interesting observation at http://www.logicallearning.com in an essay whose author's name I don't recall. In an essay examining claims of language ability in chimps, the author pointed out that naming things is a distinctly human activity. Our real trick is not that we treat objects as instances of classes, but that we make an intentional association between instances of a class of symbols and other classes. Thus, we use instances of "dog" to refer to the class of canine creatures. The essay was by no means a complete exposition, but the author at least had the sense to acknowledge that non-human creatures are capable of treating objects as instances of classes. Given the trivial observational evidence for this proposition it would be hard for anyone without a great big ideological axe to grind to deny it. For example, my cat Nut discovered at a young age that he could hook his paws onto the handle of a drawer, wrastle it open and pull the contents out, making a nice nest for himself inside. He clearly is aware of some generalization that corresponds to handles, because he's capable of trying this out on any instance of a handle he encounters--he spent quite a while one evening pulling my briefcase across the floor by its handle in small spurts, as he tried to "open" it by treating its handle as he treats drawer handles. So Nut is capable of generalizing about his world. So why haven't cats invented a better mousetrap yet? One possibility is that they don't have the capacity to name, and without that capacity they are limited in what they can do with their generalizations. It seems to me that the capacity to name is generic: if we can name particulars, we can also name generalizations or abstractions. It's also the case that a name does not have to be a single word: Julius Caesar is just a good a name as Aristole. |