The Red Notebook

One of the more useful developments in podcasting in recent years has been the publication of full, unexpurgated versions of interviews as supplements to the podcasts in which they originally appeared in edited format. This gives people who were interested in the edited interview the opportunity to delver deeper into the subject.

I am glad to note that this very useful development is starting to be adopted with video interviews. Richard Dawkins’s official website recently published on YouTube full versions of interviews Dawkins conducted as part of his recent documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the series, which was rather light on Darwin, and rather heavy on God-botherer bashing, but I found the following unedited interview with Steve Pinker very entertaining (despite my general disdain for evolutionary psychology):

Richard Dawkins scared of scorpions: who’d have thought it?

The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews can be purchased from the official Dawkins website.

[Hat-tip to Nada Cabani for the link.]

Charles Darwin was later to become something of an authority on worms, but he opened a huge can of them back in 1859 when he predicted in the final chapter of ‘On the Origin of Species’ that “psychology will be based on a new foundation”, thanks to his theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection. Although I don’t think the following is quite what he had in mind.

Most sociobiolgists might have dropped the name sociobiologists these days, but, as modern-day evolutionary psychologists—yes, I know they’re not quite the same thing, but they are really—they continue to come up with any number of new suggestions—you’ll note I don’t call them theories—to explain the evolutionary advantages of all manner of human traits, from masturbation to Methodism. I’m sure some of these suggestions must have some merit—even the ones that aren’t bleeding obvious—but it’s pretty hard to sort the wheat from the chaff: unfalsifiable chaff, as it almost invariably is.

As Adam Sedgwick claimed he did on first reading On the Origin of Species, I laughed out loud last week when I came across the latest suggestion by evolutionary psychologists in New Scientist (I really must cancel my butler’s subscription). Get this: it seems that the reason we read literature might be that it “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way” because the characters in novels fall into groups that “[mirror] the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gatherer society”. Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Well, I couldn’t at least—although clearly someone is.

Note that they’re not merely suggesting that novels often reflect the moral norms of society (which clearly is bleeding obvious); they’re saying that the reason we read literature might (there’s that word again) be to help re-enforce such social norms, thereby increasing our chances of getting on with each other and having more offspring. That’s because reading literature and telling stories is a human trait, you see; and all human traits have to give us an adaptive advantage—otherwise we wouldn’t do them. Obviously.

As you’ll have gathered, I don’t have much time for evolutionary psychology. Granted, most of the time, as in this case, it’s nothing more than a little harmless fun which the newspapers love. But what happens when unwelcome human traits such as sexism, racism and supporting Manchester United are explained away by evolutionary psychologists? Sexists, racists and any Manchester United fans capable of parsing a sentence might then argue, “It is an evolutionary adaptation; it’s perfectly natural; it’s a good thing“. The harmless fun suddenly begins to feel rather sinister.

The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Its curious, difficult-to-define software by-product, the human mind, is, if anything, even more complex. Both brain and mind are perfectly valid subjects for scientific enquiry, but coming up with specious evolutionary explanations for whatever human trait happens to grab your fancy adds nothing to our understanding of what it is to be a member of one of the most interesting species on the planet.

I never had much time for evolutionary psychology. It’s not that I think modern-day human behaviour has nothing to do with our evolutionary heritage; it’s just that it’s far too easy to invent plausible yet ultimately untestable evolutionary explanations for pretty much any human behaviour you care to mention. And it’s so much fun! Particularly if it involves sex.

There was a great example of this in New Scientist the other week. Unfortunately, most of the article in question is hidden behind a subscribers-only paywall (why do they still insist on doing that?). So here is my highly condensed and edited summary:

Researchers have found that women have the sexiest walk during the part of the monthly cycle when they are least fertile.

Video analyses of women’s gaits showed a correlation between the way the women walked and their time of the month. Forty men were shown the same images of the women walking, rating those in the less fertile part of their cycle as having the sexiest walks.

Previous research investigating men’s response to fertile women focused on signals such as smells and facial expressions, which can only be detected at close range (i.e. by the men the women have decided are worth having children with and have therefore allowed to get close to them). The advantage of having a less sexy walk around the time of ovulation is that it allows a woman to hide her fertile period from undesirable men (i.e. those who can only admire her from afar), who might take advantage of her at that time.

“If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile,” says Meghan Provost, one of the researchers.

Ah, yes, but…

If there’s anything in this evolutionary psychology malarkey, shouldn’t it work on both sexes? What possible evolutionary advantage could there be for a man to find a woman’s wiggly (i.e. non-fertile) walk sexy? Shouldn’t he have evolved a preference for the non-wiggly walk that she performs in her most fertile period?

But I’m sure there will be some perfectly plausible yet ultimately untestable evolutionary explanation for why us chaps should allow ourselves to be duped in this way.

• All very interesting, but so what?
• Nice work if you can get it

They’re at it again. Sociobiologists are looking for evolutionary explanations for phenomena that don’t seem to need them:

New Scientist: Caring grandmas explain evolutionary role of menopause

The menopause may be an ordeal for women experiencing a ‘hot flash’, but new research suggests it had a good evolutionary cause — freeing women to be good grandmothers.

To be fair, the article does argue that the human menopause requires a special evolutionary explanation because, in other mammals, female reproduction simply stops because of ageing, at a variety of ages. But in humans the shutdown is deliberate and early. And it is genetically controlled, meaning the genes responsible were selected by evolution.

I’m not sure how authorative this genetically controlled argument is. Personally, I had assumed that the human menopause was simply one of those age-related phenomena that is never selected against in old age because it happens after the people concerned have lived long enough to have children and pass on their genes. This still seems like the simplest explanation to me—although I freely admit I could be wrong.

But where do you draw the line? If sociobiologists feel the need to find an evolutionarily advantageous role for the menopause, why not also concoct them for Alzheimer’s Disease, diabetes, baldness and wrinkles? All of these are age-related phenomena with a genetic component.

In fact, it might be kind of fun, in a totally pointless way.

BBC: Orangutans use ‘charades’ to talk

No they don’t.

This sort of anthropomorphising in popular science news stories really irritates me—especially when, as in this case, the anthropomorphising is being done by the scientist involved:

“When the keeper gave the orangutan the really nice food, understandably, that was the end of it,” explained Professor Byrne [an evolutionary psychologist]. “But when the keeper pretended to fail to understand the original gesture and gave the wrong food, the orangutans stopped using the gestures they had used before and started using some different gestures,” he explained. “And when the keeper half understood and gave the orangutan part of the treat, the orangutans started to repeat the same gestures that they had used, but they would repeat them even more enthusiastically.”

Professor Byrne likened it to a game of charades. He said: “Part of the skill is to do the miming and the gesturing in the cleverest way – but also you are paying attention to what your team is guessing, and you tailor what you do next to what they are doing.” Effectively, the orangutans were able to take into account the states of knowledge, ignorance and partial knowledge of the keeper and react, said Professor Byrne.

Setting aside the fact that the orangutans’ behaviour is nothing like a game of charades, can anyone explain how this tells us anything about what is going on inside the minds of these great apes? In what way does their behaviour differ significantly from that of a dog that is being teased with a treat? If the dog begs in some way and you ignore it, it tries something else; if you give it some of the treat, it begs some more, getting more excited if you pretend to ignore it; if you then give it the remainder of the treat, it soon realises and stops begging.

I am pretty sceptical of evolutionary psychology as a whole. This sort of experiment simply bolsters my scepticism.

I caught Desmond Morris on a radio questions and answers programme this afternoon, and he really did talk a load of old nonsense.

The question was, “Why do people kiss?” Morris’s authoritative, yet totally unsubstantiated explanation was that our ancestors used to pre-masticate food for their infants before feeding them mouth-to-mouth. We kiss, because passing stuff from mouth-to-mouth helped our ancestors survive.

Bollocks to that!

Now I’m not saying that our ancestors didn’t chew food for their kids (in fact, it sounds like a damn good idea to me), and I’m not saying that certain animals (especially dogs) don’t lick each other around the face when begging for food, but it’s a huge leap of sociobiological faith from there to saying that we have an explanation for kissing.

Why do pop scientists do stuff like that? It’s really annoying. Specious explanations like these give science a bad name.

And it’s not even good radio.

I have to admit, I’ve never had much time for sociobiology or its close relative, evolutionary psychology. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with seeking evolutionary explanations for social behaviour—how could I, when Darwin himself predicted similar studies:

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

The problem I have with sociobiology is the same problem I have with psychology in general, and sociology in particular: it tries so hard to be recognised as a rigorous, scientific discipline, but any armchair hypothesist can come up with a sociobiological explanation for pretty much any behaviour they care to think about. And because sociobiology often provides simple (and, in some cases, over-simple or obvious) explanations for quirky human behaviour, any crackpot theory emanating from a university department with an -ology suffix is pretty much guaranteed plenty of media coverage—especially if it involves sex: the punters (and lazy science correspondents) just love it!

I appreciate this is being totally unfair to serious sociobiologists. In my defence, however, I would add that most serious sociobiological studies I have read about left me thinking that’s all very interesting, but so what?

There was a typical example of it this week. Sociobiologists in Norway published a serious academic paper entitled Why do blue-eyed men prefer women with the same eye color? It’s all good stuff, and received plenty of press coverage. Their hypothesis (supported by, as far as I can tell, a well-designed experiment) is that blue-eyed men tend to be attracted to blue-eyed women because blue eyes are the product of recessive alleles; so choosing a mate with blue eyes means that any offspring they have with her must also have blue eyes. So blue-eyed men who have children with blue-eyed women can be slightly more confident—possibly only subconsciously—that their blue-eyed children are their own (and, conversely, will know for certain that any brown-eyed children are not theirs). On the other hand, brown-eyed men, whose eye colour is based on dominant alleles, can end up having children with eyes of either colour, so there is no genetic reason for them to have a preference for any particular eye-colour when selecting a mate.

Does this tell us anything particularly important about what it is to be human? Is eye colour now, or has it ever been, a major factor in mate selection for males with blue eyes? Does it come anywhere near more traditional visible sexual factors? Somehow I doubt it. The sociobiologists carrying out the study are not suggesting that whatever genetic benefits there might be are sufficiently strong to make it a positive evolutionary advantage to have blue eyes (in which case, there would presumably be selective pressure for there to be all sorts of other eye colours associated with recessive alleles); they are simply saying that, given that there is a visible (possibly non-adaptive) trait that is associated with recessive alleles, males who happen to have that trait appear to have a slight preference for females who also happen to have it.

Which is all very interesting, but so what?

In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that this study establishes categorically that there is a clear genetic reason for blue-eyed men’s preference for blue-eyed women. I can certainly imagine alternative, cultural explanations for such preferences—although they wouldn’t be nearly as neat (or newsworthy) as the sociobiological interpretation, and I don’t have an armchair to hand at the moment.

I appreciate I’m probably being a bit unfair quoting from a brief news article, but is this a total non-story or what?

BBC: Study uncovers ‘chimp cross code’

Experts studying chimpanzees while investigating the evolution of human social behaviour have uncovered their ability to safely cross roads.

They said the discovery has shown chimps’ ability to cope with the risk of man-made situations…

It found the dominant adult males took up protective positions in the group when it was tasked with crossing roads…

The study has built on prior research showing that adult male monkeys took similar action to reduce the risk of being attacked by predators when travelling towards potentially unsafe areas, such as waterholes.

Kimberley Hockings, who worked on the study, said: “Road-crossing, a human-created challenge, presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses by chimpanzees to variations in perceived risk, helping to improve our understanding about the evolution of human social organisation.

In other words, what they appear to be saying is that, when presented with an unusual and/or potentially dangerous situation, dominant male chimps and monkeys take protective positions in front of and behind the group. An interesting, if pretty unsurprising observation.

But why do the people carrying out the study think that road-crossing presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses? Aren’t the chimps simply giving a perfectly normal response when presented with a potentially risky situation? And why on earth do they think this is going to teach us anything about the evolution of human social behaviour? Don’t loads of other animals (elephants, for example) do exactly the same thing?

I’m sure we can make certain inferences about the evolution of human behaviour by studying chimps, but I can’t help feeling people read far too much into such studies. Why not study the chimps for their own sakes, rather than trying to bring in pretty tenuous links to human behaviour?