More "Evolutionary Psychology"

Here and Here.

It's good that there has been a rather swift response to this sort of garbage. But in the grand scheme of things, the criticisms of it miss the mark. The criticisms of this pseudo-scientific trash are too narrow. They miss the fact that this whole "research program" (I think it's already conceding to much to call it that) is based on faulty premises. Moreover, they miss the fact that this sort of garbage is hardly new- it is a revamped version of eugenics (which, we'd do well not to forget, went into extreme disrepute in the aftermath of Auschwitz for good reasons).

This isn't just about race and politics, though it is about that. This is about science. "Evolutionary psychology", as it has come to be known, is based on faulty reasoning, unfounded methodological assumptions, shoddy data, and is, on that basis, junk science. The "conclusions" reached by such charlatans are resting on thin air. They violate every principle of scientific inquiry in the book, while maintaining enough of an air of being "scientific" to piggy back on the credibility of serious science.

Suppose, for example, you were applying for a job. Suppose that you were asked by an interviewer what your major life goals were, and you replied "well, in line with evolutionary psychology, I guess my basic goals are just to pass on my genes as much as possible." By any reasonable standard, that would be a batshit crazy thing to say. Serious psychologists would correctly judge that such a person had some sort of psychological problem- surely no plausible conception of psychic health could countenance someone claiming to have such a basic life goal. Yet, for all that, these "evolutionary psychologist" charlatans claim that they're giving the best explanation of the data, where the data is supposed to be living, breathing human beings. But it's not even clear that they are looking at the data- they are simply deducing the implications of their faulty assumptions (which include misinterpretations of evolutionary theory itself). But, of course, science isn't a deductive enterprise. It's supposed to turn out that your hypotheses are falsifiable. But are the basic claims of "evolutionary psych" falsifiable? It seems as though they can give a revisionist interpretation of anything at all that we do where it turns out that we're just doing exactly what their theory says we're supposed to do. Of any human behavior whatsoever, they can devise some interpretation according to which it is an exemplification of their theory. But that is not how science is supposed to work. It should turn out that the basic claims of a theory could be dis-confirmed by the evidence.

This stuff is sloppy bullshit. Sometimes it is claimed that all human behavior is explainable in terms of the basic function of perpetuating the species. Sometimes it is claimed that all human behavior tends to serve the function of passing on a particular individual's genes. It's not even clear which of these is supposed to be operative, and often the two are run together. But both of them are quite obviously false, and both trade on misinterpretations of evolutionary biology.

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Pseudoscience in NY Times

The NYTimes pseduo-science bureau reports that "Taller people are Happier, Especially if they're Male". The article ends on this note: "I’ll let the sociobiologists among you out there theorize about why."

Two things.

First, the article makes a typical, ideological mistake common among neoclassical economists regarding "happiness" and "well being". Though such charlatans rarely explain what they mean by "happiness" in newspaper pieces like this, economics as a discipline is far more blunt about its assumptions, and they're not pretty. Since money is easily measured and quantified, economists typically let it act as a kind of stand-in for happiness as such. The more sophisticated way of explaining their view is to speak in the bogus language of "revealed preferences". The basic gist of their view is this: whether or not you are flourishing, whether or not your life is going well, is just a matter of whether your present consumer preferences are being satisfied. That is to say, your life is going well if only if you have money to purchase things to satisfy your preferences. But this is just to restate the (typical pro-capitalist) myth that you are what you buy. It makes it sound as though you should be fully satisfied if you have a TV and car and refrigerator (never mind whether you're exploited, alienated, oppressed, etc.) It elides the structural imperative within capitalism to continually generate new markets, manufacture new wants, and make people feel constantly unsatisfied so that they feel pushed to continue working and consuming in such a way that the system can reproduce itself. Now, to be sure, material resources (and, in capitalist societies, money in particular) are necessary in order to flourish. I don't want to make it sound as though an oppressed person living in dire poverty could be flourishing/well-off/happy in the fullest sense. But material resources that give one the capability to exercise her talents and natural powers are not the same as satisfied consumer preferences. There's much more to genuine happiness and human flourishing than that.

At the end of the day, economists work with an utterly anemic, implausible conception of human flourishing/happiness/well-being/etc. Any plausible conception of well-being would have to account for much, much more, e.g. meaningful relationships, non-alienation, fulfilling projects, the exercising of one's talents and natural powers, freedom to move about as one pleases, not being exploited or dominated by others, having free time to oneself, being healthy and working in a safe environment, etc. But it's clear why neoclassical economists can't accept this more robust conception of well-being: they are fundamentally committed to capitalism and capitalism simply cannot deliver if this more plausible conception of happiness is used. It would be too obvious that the working majority is denied the opportunity to flourish in the fullest sense. After all, if your basic goal is to continue to propagate the myth that capitalism is the best of all possible systems... then clearly you want a minimalist, money-based consumerist model of well-being so that you can make it seem as though most people are satisfied with things as they are.

Of course, it may be that the "data" in this "study" is nothing but an answer to a "yes" or "no" (or 1-10 scale) phone questionnaire in which respondents were asked whether they were happy. But what do such data actually show? "Happiness" without further specification is a highly vague concept- and there are deep problems with dominant ideas re: happiness in capitalist societies. Ruling class versions of what happiness is should not be confused with happiness itself. Also, isn't there strong pressure in our society not to admit when one's life isn't going well? Aren't we taught to blame ourselves for economic misery caused from without according to the mantra of "personal responsibility"? If that's so, we should expect the self-reporting of happiness levels to be distorted based on respondent's unwillingness to admit to the interviewer that things aren't going as well for them as they would have liked. Finally, we have to account for adaptive preferences. Clearly any scientific study of well-being must have more concrete, objective criteria than a simple yes/no response that elides people's reasons for saying whatever it is that they say.

Second, suppose that tall men really are happier in contemporary societies. Why on earth should the explanation for this be found in biology, as the article suggests? Why not talk to economists, sociologists, or political theorists? Why assume that differential levels of well being are in the first instance natural rather than social phenomena? This is pseudoscientific bullshit. It's a bit like thinking that physicists or meteorologists are the people we should go to first if we want to understand why women in the U.S. got the vote in 1920. This is bass ackwards.

If tall men are in fact happier, it is far more likely that it has to do with the ways in which our current (sexist) society rewards men in certain ways that reflect unequal relations of power among the sexes. Given the dominant norms that specify how women and men are to behave, interact, divide up domestic labor, and so forth, it is not hard to see how we should arrive at such a conclusion. The idea that our explanation must be based in immutable facts of our biological constitution is both unwarranted here and floating on thin air. This kind of determinism is at odds with all of the available evidence: if true, how on earth could it explain the vast changes in gender relations that have been brought about throughout the 20th century as the result of political struggles? Plus, deterministic move has a long and unsavory history. Everyone from slave-owners, to kings and lords, to colonial elites, to capitalists, to sexist corporate leaders have used this argument to claim that their dominance was justified by unchanging facts about our constitution. Every single one of them have been shown to be dead wrong by history. Once we've actually overturned all of the contingent, human-constructed forms of exploitation and oppression in the world... perhaps then I'll entertain such discussions about how talent and natural abilities might be unequally distributed. But until we reach such a state of affairs- there is no scientific way to know what we're truly capable of. To say otherwise is to manipulate natural science into apologetics for the status quo. That is not science but pure ideological distortion.

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Once more on "evolutionary" psychology

This is a kind of follow-up on two recent posts (here and here) on "sociobiology" and "evolutionary" psychology.

It's obvious to all (and to scientists in particular) that human beings learn from science and act on the basis of scientific knowledge all the time. That is to say, we rationally regulate our conduct on the basis of beliefs grounded in scientific knowledge (e.g. I don't bring a plugged-in toaster in the shower with me because I have the belief that it would electrocute me, a belief that is based on accumulated scientific knowledge about electricity, etc.).

This illustrates the obvious point that we act on the basis of beliefs we hold. The set of beliefs I hold forms the framework within which I act. Beliefs may be considered separately from actions, but actions (in order to be such) cannot ever be made sense of apart from beliefs. For something to be an action at all, apart from a mere event (e.g. physical movement), it must express some belief we hold. It's worth saying a bit more about the distinction between a physical movement and an action in order to drive the point home. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it:

The distinction is obvious if we consider the criteria of identity in each case. The same physical movements may constitute in different contexts quite different actions. So a man may go through the same physical movements involved in signaling his name and be concluding a treaty or paying a bill, which are quite different actions. But is not this man performing the same action in each case, namely signing his name? To this the answer is that writing one's name is never merely by itself an action; one is either signing a document or giving information or perhaps just doodling. All these are actions, but writing one's hand is not. Equally, the same action may be constituted by quite different physical movements. Writing on paper, passing coin, even saying the words may all constitute the same action of paying a bill.

When we talk about explaining human behavior, we sometimes blur this distinction. Because there is no human action that does not involve physical movement we may suppose that to explain the movement is to explain the action... My head nods and I am asked, "why did you nod your head?" If I answer by referring to a nervous tick, I point in the direction of a story about necessary and sufficient antecedent conditions, a story about nerves and muscles and possibly about conditioning in early childhood... But to explain the nod as a nervous tick is precisely to explain it not as something that I do, but as something that just happens. If on the other hand I explain the nod by saying that I had been asked a question and was answering "Yes", then I certain explain the nod as an action. I do so by pointing to the purpose which it serves. This reference to an agent's purpose always carries with it implicitly and often explicitly a reference to some antecedent event or condition... But if I explain my nod of the head as an answer to an antecedent question, I certainly do not refer to a generalization stating some constant conjunction which holds between questions and answers. From the fact that the question has been asked it never follows that it will be given some particular answer or indeed any answer. What makes a reference to antecedent questions part of an explanation of what one was doing is that one is explaining the role of one's nod in carrying through a socially established and recognized practice, that of asking and answering questions. That is, the background to my explanation is formed by the customarily recognized rules of a particular social order". (See MacIntyre (1969: p.56) in Laslett et al. Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford: Blackwell)

Something will not have been an action unless some agent undertook it and did so on the basis of a reason. Actions are those "distinct sorts of events for which we may appropriately demand reasons or justifications from subjects whom we take to be responsible for such events occurring."

As MacIntyre makes clear, it is quite obviously true that the beliefs that I am liable to hold are strongly influenced by the available concepts in the society into which I am thrown at birth. I couldn't reasonably have formed beliefs about electricity in the Bronze Age, say, since electricity presupposes all sorts of bundles of complex knowledge and concepts that did not exist at the time. If you want to understand and explain why people act the way that they do, you cannot but include in your explanation the concepts, dominant ideas, theories, culture, etc. that are available to the agent. Without taking such things seriously, you cannot explain human behavior at all. Again, as MacIntyre describes it:

Suppose that a team of Martian social scientists is observing human behavior. What they are watching we should describe as chess-playing, but unhappily they lack the concept of a game. Mars is gameless. They therefore do not discern the rule-governed character of the players' behavior, although they arrive at many statistical generalizations about the movement of small pieces of wood by human beings. What is it that they do no understand when they fail to understand these movements as a game of chess?

They fail of course first of all to grasp the players' action as distinct from their physical movements. It is not that they wrongly explain what is done; rather they fail to identify the actions which are to be explained.... The analogy with a social system is clear. To explain actions within it we have to identify the rules and their connexion with reasonable or unreasonable, true or false beliefs. Thus we cannot explain actions by means of beliefs and not raise questions of truth and falsity, reason or unreason... Thus in any society we shall only be able to identify what is going on if we have identified and assessed the established methods of reasoning and criticism in that society... Explaining actions is explaining choices, and explaining choices is exhibiting why certain criteria define rational behavior for a given society.

So, let us compare all of this with the model of explanation adopted by "evolutionary" psychologists (I use scare quotes because I doubt that such a research program has any serious scientific grounding in the theory of evolution itself).

For these folks, human behavior is explained in mechanistic terms. The lines between beliefs, purposes, reasons on the one hand, and action on the other, are cut. Actions are understood in the same way that mere physical events are understood.

Here's what I mean. Think of the way that a physicist explains events. They observe a lot of events, note the constant conjunction of what appear to be cause and effect, and then, by way of an inductive inference, hypothesize about general laws in light of which such events are to be understood. We have no reason to think that the conditions in which such laws are valid are subject to change anytime soon.

Now, what the sociobiologist does is assume that human actions are just like physical events. They conflate physical movement with action. Thus they can say that there are general laws, like those governing the behavior of gases, that can explain human behavior. They assume that actions are mere events which can be explained by reference to general laws inferred from the constant conjunction of certain variables.

So, for instance, they see, say, men in the United States behave in a certain way (e.g. hit on women at bars) and then say: "might there not be some invariant general law that explains this behavior?". They assume that human beings are mere objects that are caused ("programmed", "hardwired") to act in this way: the only question then becomes what the natural law is that appropriately generalizes from this cause and effect relationship. Finally, they go all-in for the view that the content of such general laws are wholly (or largely) determined by an individual's genetic makeup. The line of causation from genetic makeup to behavior, they think, is one that is opaque to us from the first-person perspective. There's nothing internal here at all: the causal story here has nothing to do with what it's like to be a human agent from the inside. It is purely external, in the same way that we externally explain and observe the behavior of gases.

So there are at least three components to their view: (1) the mechanistic view of human action which says that there are general laws that explain it (analogous to ideal gas laws), and (2) the view that the general laws boil down to facts about genes, and (3) the view that the causal mechanism from genes to behavior is non-rational and external to first-person reasons, intentions, etc.

Let me say why I think (1) is false. First of all, it is absurd to say that we can understand human actions without reference to belief. We cannot even identify an action as such without at least in principle presupposing that some belief is being expressed by it (the MacIntyre examples above make this point clear). The social sciences (or the "human sciences") must therefore study beliefs in order to study human action. But, and this brings me to my second point, studying the beliefs of an agent means studying the available concepts, theories, socially recognized practices, norms etc. in the society in which the agent is located.

But what is a social scientific theory? It is a collection of concepts, beliefs about humans, etc. Sophisticated social theories are continuous with our "naive" beliefs about the society we live in that guide our actions. So this means that social science is part of its own object of study, it is a self-reflexive undertaking. This is not so with physical science. It is not the case that our beliefs, concepts, scientific methods, norms and justification practices are part of the object of study of physical science itself. Such things are external to the object of study of physical science: physical science does not study it's own methods and practices as physical objects: it is not the case that physical science itself is part of the object of study of physical science.

So, physical science is not self-reflexive in the way that human sciences are, and that's fine given its object of study. Raymond Geuss is excellent on this point:

"To treat a belief as if it were about a mere object in nature implies both something about how one can and should investigate it, and about how one can use it to argue, evaluate, and guide action. An inert external object can sometimes be manipulated if I have sufficient knowledge of it. If I discover that the unwieldy sofa has a handle on the other side, I can perhaps grip and shift it, whereas I could not before. In doing this, of course, I need take no account of the beliefs or preferences of the object- it has none... Objectifying thought is especially prone, however, to false universalization for the obvious reason that it will encourage investigators to construe local phenomena as universal... If I think it will rain tomorrow, my belief and the weather are two distinct states of affairs. The weather is what it is regardless of what I might think. My belief itself is completely "external" to it and would not appropriately figure as part of the meteorological report. It is perfectly natural for us to adopt an objectifying attitude towards the nonhuman world of nature. The question is whether it is also appropriate to adopt such an attitude toward a society of which I myself am actually a member... But the beliefs and attitudes people in the society have about themselves and their society are themselves an integral part of the society. If everyone in a society, say, early twenty-first-century Britain thinks that people are universally selfish, then that belief is reflective in a way that my belief about the weather is not. Since it is a belief about people in general, it includes the members of the society in question, and holding it will have an effect on that society."

This is all just to say that beliefs are part of the object of study of the human sciences, and therefore the social/human sciences are self-reflexive. Social theories are continuous with their object of study, and, interestingly, they can therefore play a role in their own falsification and confirmation. If propagating a certain theory causes people to have different beliefs and thus to act in radically different ways, then the data which could confirm or disconfirm this very theory have themselves changed radically. This is not true of the physical sciences. So much for the assumption that human behavior could be studied mechanistically, on the model of the physical sciences. So much for the assumption that human behavior could be explained by reference to invariant physical laws. Human behavior is bound up with beliefs, and the possible beliefs an agent could hold must be explained by reference to a certain social order. And as everyone knows, social orders change and develop over time. Thus, human behavior must be explained and understood in historical context. Throw in the premise that history is political (all history is the history of class struggle), and you have thus reached the conclusion that human behavior is dynamic, plastic and must be understood relative to the configuration of power in that society, the level of material development, etc. This does not mean that human behavior is determined by social/political causes rather than physical ones. It only means that behavior is dynamic, liable to change, and develops in relation to a determinate context.

All of this should make clear how absurd it would therefore be to suppose that extant social norms, practices, and human actions could be explained by a collection of facts about our genes. At best, our genes are but one variable in a very complex field. There is no scientific warrant for singling out one such variable, genetic makeup, and supposing that it trumps all others.

The reasons to reject (3) are largely supplied above by the MacIntyre quote. It is patently absurd to say that we could explain actions without reference to beliefs and reasons. That is to say, it's patently absurd to say that we could explain human action without reference to what it's like to be a human agent from the inside. We are the kinds of beings that have identity crises, who are not sure what we should do with our lives, who struggle with hard decisions as to what the right thing to do is. That is because we act on the basis of reasons. We think that the question "what should I be when I grow up?" is a real question, and a genuinely hard one at that. Nobody thinks that "do what will best pass on your genes" is a plausible answer to that hard question. No parent would suggest such a thing to their child. From the inside, internally, we take ourselves to act for all sorts of reasons, the vast majority of which are not explainable in terms of the external function of "passing on one's genes". What the fuck do I care about my own genes anyway? I care about my life going well. I care about love, relationships and people. I care about justice, about fighting oppression, about human emancipation and freedom. It's highly possible that caring about these things puts me at odds with the goal of passing on my genes most effectively. I care about all kinds of things that don't seem at all to me like mere epiphenomena, mere window-dressing for the "unconscious desire" to pass my genes on.

When someone unfairly wrongs me, or breaches norms governing our relationship, I don't think it would be acceptable for them to say "but I'm just passing on my genes" or "I'm just allowing my genetic makeup to manifest itself behaviorally unbenknownst to me". I would hold such a person responsible for what she did. I would resent them in a way that I would not resent a mere object.

I think we should be more than a little suspicious of a theory of human action which is so radically at odds with everything we, as human beings, think about human action. At the very least, the burden of proof on such a theory should be extremely high, given that it should cause us to doubt and revise the vast majority of what it is we think that we're doing when we act.

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Follow-up on "Evolutionary" Psychology

I haven't yet received any feedback on my recent post on sociobiology/"evolutionary" pysch. But I thought I would head off a few obvious objections from folks disposed to accept the legitimacy of such projects.

First, I'm not putting forward some position to the effect that "everything is just socially constructed" and there is not such thing as the "natural". I'm not saying that science, as such, is just mere political ideology (although it is clearly an instrument put in the service ends, and often unjust ends at that). My claim is that the facts about what human beings are like contradict the pseudo-scientific theories that fall under the heading of "sociobiology". My claim is that such projects are bad science.

These folks like to talk about "human nature". But there are deep confusions lodged at the heart of this idea. We talk about the idea often enough, but what exactly does it mean? What are we really asking when we ask if human beings are "naturally selfish", say?

It seems to me that we presuppose a mechanistic, objectified picture of human beings when we ask such questions. We assume that we are like computers and we then ask what the programming is like. This metaphor is deeply misleading.

A better way of thinking about our "nature" is a follows. Human beings, because of the way that we are biologically constituted, have certain capacities, natural powers that we can exercise in a variety of ways. We have the capacity for creativity, to ask ourselves questions like "should I have done x?", to reflect on abstract theoretical matters, and so forth. We have the capacity to feel a rich array of different kinds of pleasures and pains. We have a certain degree of plasticity: we can determine who we are in some sense (and this is why the difficult life choice of deciding "who you want to be" is so hard... any theory that suggested such a choice was easy or pre-determined is clearly missing something). We have the capacity to be responsive to reasons, though we often fail for various reasons to be so responsive. Having a capacity doesn't mean it must be exercised.

To be sure, affective impulses and motivations need to be taken into account- but such matters are hardly as simple as having a transparent "desire set" or a collection of "revealed preferences" or whatever. Moreover, any plausible theory of human agency would have to make the distinction between "natural" desires and "conventional" desires. As Raymond Geuss puts it, "it is by no means obvious that the hunger that is satisfied when Neolithic human tore raw meat with their fingers is the same kind of thing as the hunger that is satisfied by dining in a five-star restaurant in 2008." The broader point here, however, is that we have the capacity to not act on desires, whatever their grounding may be, as when the heroin addict decides to buck his overwhelming desire to continue taking the drug in order to begin recovery. To say that there must be some "higher order" desire dictating and mechanistically determining this person's desire to get sober is ad hoc and implausible; nobody working at a rehab clinic would agree that such an assumption makes sense at all. The point is that the addict could relapse, or she could not; the genuine uncertainty is what makes the job of helping addicts get clean so difficult.

Let's take a slightly different tack. To suppose that human behavior is mechanistically determined or predictable is a bit like making the following mistake. Suppose someone gave you a set of oil paints, a brush and a blank canvas and told you that you had to create some art object with only those materials. Now, clearly, there would be constraints on what you could do with those materials. You couldn't, for example, create a marble statue out of them. You couldn't make a film with them. But there is a wide array of possibilities before you nonetheless, as the history of painting makes clear. It would be absurd to say that because you had certain materials with certain physical constraints, that those materials determined (mechanistically) what it is that you would end up painting. It would be absurd to say that the subsequent artwork was predetermined by the materials you used in some law like way. But that is just like saying human beings are determined by their biological constitution. Giving us facts about our constitution doesn't yet say anything about what human agency is like. It's like saying that because you know how my bike is configured and what its function is, you're therefore in a position to say exactly where I'm going to ride on it. Absurd, to say the least.

There is a distinction between having some generative capacity to do something, and being mechanistically caused to do something. Adobe Photoshop, for example, is an open-ended platform that allows users to do a huge array of different things. But it does not follow that each time I use Photoshop that I am just being determined by Photoshop. It doesn't follow that Photoshop mechanistically causes and thus determines whatever I end up doing with it. The same mistake is made when we think about human powers and capacities in a mechanistic way.

So I am by no means ignoring or denying that we're part of the natural world: we have natural powers and capacities in virtue of which we are properly called "human". And I would be the first to say that we should investigate them scientifically and learn more about them. But the fact that we have natural powers and capacities doesn't give us much to go on if we want to understand what human behavior (or human societies, culture, or social norms, etc.) is going to be like in the future. That would be a bit like saying that because I knew you had a brush and a certain set of paints that I could mechanistically determine, from a mere analysis of those artistic materials, exactly what imagine you must end up painting. That is patently absurd. There is no way to draw a valid inference like that from a mere analysis of the paints and brushes. Every one of these pseudo-scientific charlatans should be forced to read Nelson Goodman's excellent 1954 Fact, Fiction and Forecast, particularly his famous article "The New Riddle of Induction".

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Against "Evolutionary" Psychology

There is a tendency these days (anyone teaching in a university setting cannot fail to notice how thoroughly students exemplify it) to assume that anything that aspires to the mantle of "hard science" is therefore legitimate and has something important to tell us about topics as far flung as social justice, economic growth, sexuality, interpersonal relations and the structure of human agency.

What I mean by "hard science", of course, is the paradigm (the characteristic methods, assumptions and so forth) exemplified by Newtonian physics. In Newtonian physics, we're after mechanical explanations of the phenomena about which physics theorizes. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, "at the core of the notion of mechanical explanation is a conception of invariances specified by law-like generalizations. To cite a cause is to cite a necessary condition or a sufficient condition or a necessary and sufficient condition as the antecedent of whatever behavior is to be explained." As far as the practical aims of physics are concerned, such methods and assumptions seem to be warranted and justified.

It is not clear that the same is true of the scientific study of human behavior. Whereas a "number of thinkers in the 17th and 18th century" may have been forgiven for transferring the "ideal of mechanical explanation from physics to the understanding of human behavior", there is little excuse for such a mistake today. The material motivations to do so ("scientific" technocratic management practices, business accounting, social control, etc.), however, are important for understanding why the mistake persists. Why, however, is the application of mechanistic explanation to human action a mistake?

There is a lot to say about this, and I wouldn't pretend to be able to give a full answer here. But let us first just take a moment to consider what it would be to understand human action mechanistically. It would mean, first of all, to hold that all talk of "intentions, purposes, and reasons for action" must be entirely eliminated, or reduced to talk, crudely put, of "matter in motion" (or, if you like, of a person's genetic makeup, or her "evolutionary" hard-wired disposition to perform certain behaviors that have the macro-function of preserving the species or whatever).

If merely stating what the view entails isn't enough to convince you of its unsoundness, let me say two further things. First, it is obvious that such theories put forward controversial claims. But from what standpoint are such claims made? They are self-consciously made from the standpoint of a rational human scientist testing the soundness of a hypothesis. But if this human scientist accepts what the mechanistic approach says about human action (namely, that it is causally determined by asocial, non-rational factors reducible to "matter in motion"), what is she to make of her own scientific undertaking? That is to say, what is she to make of herself and what she's up to? What is she to make of what she's doing when she proposes, tests, evaluates, defends and rationally reflects on scientific theories in the scientific community? If her own theory were true, it would clearly undermine the practice of science itself, for what could the scientist herself be doing if not merely expressing, say, her irrational "hard-wired" casually-determined impulse to behave in certain ways? Think about it: what would it be to rationally justify a scientific theory if that were true? That is, if we eliminate all talk of intentions, beliefs, purposes, reasons, etc. then how could we plausibly make sense of the practices of evaluating theories, testing hypotheses, reflecting on the consistency of scientific arguments, etc?

This is all a way of saying that the mechanistic view objectifies, and thus distorts, its object of study (human behavior). Human action, and the complex social formations in which such actions occur, is not like the weather. We have no reason to assume that human behavior is law-like, predictable, and mechanically explainable in the same way that the weather is. In fact, all of the facts about humans about which we are most confident suggest that such assumptions radically misconstrue and distort what human beings are like. The obvious inference to draw, then, is that our methods must be different from those which we use to make sense of weather. Methodology must be appropriate to assaying its object of study. It would be absurd to stubbornly impose inappropriate methods and concepts on some phenomena and expect the phenomena to give way (yet, as an aside, I note that this is more or less exactly what neoclassical economists do).

The second thing I'll say is this. Imagine that you are reflecting on some putatively scientific theory of human behavior. Suppose that you are reflecting on whether or not it is sound, viz. whether or not is the most plausible theory about such matters. Suppose further that the theory you are reflecting about is a mechanistic one, viz. one in which all human behavior is explained in terms of the agent's motivation to "pass on" her genes. Now, in evaluating such a theory, you couldn't take a merely external perspective. You, after all, are a human agent. And any theory of human agency must have something to say about what it's like from the inside, viz. what it's like to be a human agent. So you'd have to ask yourself: have I ever thought about any action I undertook in terms of whether or not it satisfies the goal of "passing on my genes"? The answer that every single human being ever would unequivocally have given to such a question is "no". After all, for most of human history we didn't even have the concept of a gene, and such biological matters weren't even studied until relatively recently. So it can't be that we have always been consciously acting in that way; if the theory were true we'd have to be determined wholesale by forces about which we could have no direct awareness. If true, the theory suggests that something is radically mistaken about all of our ordinary practical concerns, daily reasons for action, (indeed all of our communicative practices in which we offer reasons to others in order to justify the ways in which our action impinges on their lives), etc. In other words, if true, the theory holds that we are all radically mistaken about what it is we're doing when we act in the world.

This is obviously a bit of a problem for any plausible theory of human behavior, for more reasons that I can count. First, such a theory appears to radically distort it's own object of study on the basis of unsupported, unjustified assumptions (i.e. that the exact methods and mechanistic assumptions of physics and natural science are appropriate to the social/human sciences). Second, the theory undermines the possibility of justifying itself, because it undermines the process of offering reasons in defense of beliefs, viz. it undermines the idea that human beings are responsive to reasons. Third, such a theory, in requiring ex ante that its object be predictable and law-governed, sets itself the insurmountable task of explaining how complex and dynamic the development of human history has been. There is more to say, but let us stop there.

So, what has this to do with "evolutionary" psychology? Well, it should be clear that the very form of some of its explanations of human behavior are radically misconceived. Human behavior is an extremely complex phenomenon, and establishing a clear link between certain facts about a person's genetic makeup and their behavior would require a scientific theory more precise, more articulated, and more robust than any "evolutionary" psychologist could reasonably say that they possess. Any sober practician of such a project would surely admit that what they are doing is highly speculative. After all, surely they know about the problem of underdetermination of theories by the data. Or, surely they would concede that some of the behaviors they observe could be overdetermined in important ways: if 17 different variables, 16 of them social/political/historical/etc., contribute to a certain behavior, on what basis can we reasonably attribute sufficient causation to just one of those (putative) variables, namely, someone's genes? This is pure quackery. Rigorous scientists have the modesty to tell us that even the relationship between dog breed and dog behavior is not well understood. But these "evolutionary" psychological zealots sell us trumped-up speculative non-sense as clearly verified fact. That is a crime and a serious detriment to the entire idea of what science is. It distorts the scientific content of evolutionary theory itself. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Stephen Jay Gould made this point forcefully in the wake of the re-emergence of eugenics under the name of "sociobiology". But that hasn't stopped ideologists for the existing order from running with genetic-determinism.

But, as I suggested above, we should not assume that the wide currency and popularity of such "theories" is due to some understandable error in reasoning. No, the wide currency of such views has to be explained politically. They are popular because they are discussed so often, and they are discussed so often because they fit cleanly into existing legitimating frameworks. The status quo almost always justifies its myriad inequalities by telling us that they are inevitable and natural (rather than contingent and open to the conscious re-shaping by human beings).

We should be far more skeptical about the findings of psychology. Any fair appraisal of psychology must take seriously the implicit disagreements generated by the disciplines of political science, economics and sociology- all of which ostensibly study similar subject matter. Moreover, any legitimate appraisal would have to answer the objections posed by philosophy as to the methodology and normative assumptions undergirding the practice.

But at the very least, the unsatisfactory paradigms within the discipline itself that have dominated over the last 80 years (from radical behaviorism to introspectionism), should give one pause as to whether to jump on the bandwagon of the latest craze.

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"Scientific" Racism 2.0

While the eugenics morons doing "evolutionary" psychology are busy finding ways to explain away social injustice with pseudo-arguments about genetic determination of social hierarchies... the ostensibly more progressive (and, typically, more empirically sound) discipline of sociology is seeing a resurgence of racist "culture of poverty" ideas.

Switching gears to more respectable sociological research programs, I don't happen to think that the sociology of knowledge is complete. That is, I don't think it is able to give a full account of it's own conditions of possibility, or of the extent to which it also produces knowledge of the social determinants of what's already recognized as knowledge, etc. But it's pretty damned useful for politics, and the above is a case in point. That is, we should be asking the following sorts of questions about the "culture of poverty" ideology: whose interests are served by it? What is the functional role of this ideology in maintaining and stabilizing existing hierarchies and inequalities? In what institutional and political context did this ideology develop? What political or historical shifts are to explain its decline and subsequent reemergence?

There is no place for the disinterested, neutral gaze of natural science in the discussion of the "culture of poverty" ideas. They've been refuted several times over. Their genetic properties, so to speak, (i.e. their lineage, where they emerged from historically) are damning, as the article above makes clear. So to present these ideas as possible contenders among other neutral ways of making sense of deep social inequalities is already to do something ethically and politically suspect.

The fact is that in the face of the continuing oppression of non-white peoples, the idea of a "culture of poverty" is a convenient way of blaming the victims and tabling demands for justice. It says, in effect, that there is no racism, no oppression, no unequal relations of power, no historic injustice: only "pathological" groups who have a faulty culture, who need to "pull their pants up" and "act white". That's got to be music to the ears of conservative, white suburbanites. But any critical program would take that fact as grounds to reject the ideology entirely.

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