Feb 18, 2005
Evolutionary Psychology and the Blank Slate
A lot of research in recent years has addressed the idea that free markets are fundamentally not natural to humans, and that, while large-scale free-market societies may be good, our brains have not been evolved to act in them. As Will Wilkinson writes (via Tim Sandefur),
Wilkinson writes:
Properly understood, tabula rasa was a wonderful heuristic that helped establish the modern idea of the social contract. It is still the best theoretical foundation for government that we have, and I would submit that even anarchists often reach for it in formulating their private, fragmented social contracts. It seems important to me to consider that in abandoning at least the presumption of tabula rasa, we may end up doing more harm than we imagined.
Admittedly, the foundations for tabula rasa were always fairly weak. Stories abounded even in Locke's day of nobles whose progeny were idiots and of born commoners who outdid their supposed betters. Against all expectations, women and blacks proved capable of acquiring an education. All of these supposed proofs, though, of Locke's tabula rasa were merely necessary conditions; none were sufficient to demonstrate the claim.
Comes now evolutionary psychology, which seems to have a fairly detailed idea of humans' innate ideas. During the period in which our brains evolved, it is claimed, human beings lived in bands of 25-150 people. Because of this, we experience difficulty trusting a cohort any larger.
In what frankly strikes me as a"just so" story, it is even revealed that people's address books seldom contain more than 150 names, and that military squadrons are of roughly the same size as Pleistocene hunting expeditions. Intervening human history can be understood as the effort to create institutions that will bridge the gap from our narrow, trusted circle of 150--up to a modern capitalistic society, which could theoretically encompass the globe. How do we get people to trust one another with their money, their property, even their children, when they are not hard-wired to do it? This is potentially the stuff of a radically new take on history, one comparable in originality to Marxism and with an explanatory power virtually guaranteed to be greater.
So far as I can tell (and I am hardly an expert), evolutionary psychology proposes to pick apart Locke's thought experiment entirely. Although there are some evidences against tabula rasa and no proofs at all for Locke's claim in its stronger senses (It is possible that there may never be such proofs), still I am reluctant to give up entirely on the idea.
Yes, tabula rasa may seem to justify socialism, but this is only in some of its formations; a philosophical concept that may be turned to a bad end is not in itself necessarily bad. A proper contextualization may very well save it, distinguishing along the way those consequences that are morally good (respect for individual rights) from those that are not (Stalinism).
A somewhat weakened tabula rasa might hold, for instance, that humans are subject to some forms of instinct or some innate tendencies, but that these are overwhelmed in most cases by cultural and volitional factors. It might argue that the essentials of human nature are not predetermined, even while certain inessentials are indeed innate.
Another take on tabula rasa may be that it is not a statement precisely about human minds--but rather about our capacity to know or to control the minds of our neighbors: We ought to think of people as if the proposition were true, for thinking of them otherwise tends strongly to bring out our worst authoritarian impulses. In this formulation, tabula rasa is not so much true as it is useful and good. It is no longer a scientific claim, but a moral one.
As I understand it, cultural anthropology tends strongly toward a tabula rasa view of human knowledge, often with this moral component as an implicit assumption. Yes, many in the discipline would be loath to admit such a western bias, yet I believe it exists all the same. In effect, cultural anthropology seems to hold that there is little or no significant innate component to human knowledge through its stress on the highly varied cultural forms found throughout humanity.
Our innate ideas certainly don't establish western-style monarchism, as was argued in Locke's day, and they seem to establish precious little else on their own. Cultures, and minds, always defy our efforts to nail them down, except in a few very isolated circumstances. Hunger and thirst, of course, are innate; what we do about them is not. Heterosexuality might be another one example, although even on this I'm not entirely sure, and obviously there are exceptions.
As Wilkinson describes it, evolutionary psychology adds the claim that dominance hierarchies are"natural," although I frankly find this deeply troubling. If it does not precisely revive the notion that some men are born to rule, still it seems to contradict the idea that all men are created equal. (And where did we come up with that idea, if dominance hierarchies are innate to humans?)
I am left with a number of serious questions for advocates of evolutionary psychology as it applies to human social behavior and ultimately to politics. I'd prefer to keep any ensuing discussion firmly within the realms of history and political theory, as I'm not much of a scientist. Still, I have many questions.
1. If the characteristics we have inherited from the EEA really are innate, then shouldn't we expect them to be obvious by introspection alone? Most people claim, for instance, that this is how heterosexuality seems to them: All they need is a single moment of reflection to convince themselves that this idea is innate. Likewise with hunger and thirst. Why then are the truths of the EEA so counterintuitive, and why have they only been discovered just now? Are there two different levels of innateness? What mechanisms establish them?
2. How can it be determined that human brains primarily evolved in the EEA as is claimed? What evidence is there for the environmental conditions that would give rise to these mental traits or habits? Didn't brains evolve gradually, over many millions of years? What evidence is there, come to think of it, that the change took place so suddenly? And what evidence is there that the change wiped out everything that went before it? In short, why go back 50,000 years--and then stop?
3. Early in ancient history, humans appear already organized into large cities and empires. From what little we know of preliterate societies, these too were often organized into groups that far exceeded the 25-150 of the EEA.
For example, many Native Americans of New France, particularly the Iroquois, organized themselves into groups of several hundreds or thousands each; these in turn were organized into still larger groups. They possessed no written language, no metal, and only rudimentary agriculture at the time of first contact. After they had been decimated by war and disease, these societies reformed into much smaller, more flexible bands--within the constraints of the EEA where they had not been before. But which was the more"natural" state for them?
How did the transition from small bands into groups of thousands occur, if 150 is the maximum"natural" size of human groups? This question may be impossible to answer, as we don't have any written records of the transition. Still, the formation of empires--almost universal in early ancient history--seems to be a problem with the theory, as do Native American societies such as the ones I have described. The Iroquois, for one, seemed on the verge of establishing an empire of their own in the great lakes region during the early 1600s; it is an open question what might have transpired had the Europeans not arrived with smallpox, the fur trade, metals, gunpowder, and so forth.
4. The putative prehistoric humans of the EEA are suspiciously rational. They act, I hate to say it, rather too much like good classical liberals, albeit blinkered by their bias toward small groups.
Again looking at early ancient history, I observe that these humans were often terribly irrational. Never mind how they ended up in large groups or cities: How did they all start worshiping the same gods, sharing the same superstitions, fighting massive wars, and so forth? Don't these examples all show both irrationality and mass allegiances not predicted by the EEA hypothesis? We could always dismiss these as"late" innovations, but this strikes me as ad hoc and quite lacking in evidence.
Add in the more rational yet still large-scale behaviors of ancient history (agriculture, shared oral and written language, common weights and measures), and you have a portrait of early ancient society that diverges radically and almost instantly from the EEA.
5. If the sudden emergence of oral language (which happened, most agree, long before written language) is the evidence for this imputed evolutionary change, isn't it possible that the capacity for language existed well before its actual development? And that the development of language may not have been a genetic/evolutionary step so much as it was an intellectual one? (I know there is a huge scholarly debate here, but I am curious how evolutionary psychology deals with the question.) How does the EEA interface with language at all?
6. We would never say that humans evolved vaccines, or air travel, or the Internet. Isn't language an invention rather than a genetic adaptation? And what about the formation of societies? Aren't they inventions too? Why are some societies (smaller than 150 people)"natural," while others (above 150 people) are"not natural?" Just where is the boundary between nature and nurture, anyway? And why set it here? (My own inclination is to think that there is no such boundary, and that neither"natural" nor"artificial" has any enduring metaphysical status, especially when it comes to humans, who transform everything they touch into the artificial.)
7. Does it strike anyone else that as presented here, evolutionary psychology is rather teleological? Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this, of course, but where does the science stop, and where do the ethics start? I'm having a very hard time finding the boundary.
8. To elaborate on the last question, we could easily imagine a group of thinkers far removed from the Cato Institute. These thinkers would make very different claims based on exactly the same data. Why not argue that because EEA traits are innate, we had best not fight them at all? Perhaps this is the long-sought path to human happiness: Let us return to small bands of hunter-gatherers, for this is exactly how our minds happen to be set up. Back to the Pleistocene, anyone?
Nor am I trying to be sarcastic by asking this question: A long tradition, in the spirit of Rousseau, holds that if we could only find our"natural" social relations, we humans would finally be happy. How does a political theory based on the EEA deal with these arguments?
[Incidentally, Wilkinson cites the books The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley, Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright as useful guides to the field. I would gladly read... well... maybe one of them. My plate is otherwise very full right now with finishing my dissertation and with several other books I've volunteered to read and review at Liberty & Power. If I had to add one more book to the list, Seabright's is my preference, in part because it was already recommended to me. Further guidance would be much appreciated, particularly if articles rather than books have what I'm after.]
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
A growing scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology specializes in uncovering the truth about human nature, and it is already illuminating what we know about the possibilities of human social organization.This argument accomplishes several things. First, it dispenses with the old Lockean idea of tabula rasa. The idea has been the source of a great deal of nonsense just lately in political thought, and I am glad to see that something is combating it. I do have some reservations, however.
Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand the unique nature of the human mind by applying the logic and methods of contemporary evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.
The main working assumption of evolutionary psychology is that the mind is a variegated toolkit of specialized functions (think of a Swiss Army knife) that has evolved through natural selection to solve specific problems faced by our forebears. Distinct mental functions--e.g., perception; reading other people's intentions; responding emotionally to potential mates--are underwritten by different neurological" circuits" or"modules," which can each be conceived as mini computer programs selected under environmental pressure to solve specific problems of survival and reproduction typical in the original setting of human evolution, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the"EEA." Strictly speaking, the EEA is a statistical composite of environmental pressures that account for the evolutionary selection of our distinctively human traits. Loosely, the EEA was the period called the Pleistocene during which humans lived as hunter-gatherers from about 1.6 million years ago up until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
According to evolutionary psychologists, the basic constitution of the human mind hasn't changed appreciably for about 50,000 years. Thus the evolutionary psychologist's slogan: modern skulls house Stone Age minds.
Wilkinson writes:
The key political lesson of evolutionary psychology is simply that there is a universal human nature. The human mind comprises many distinct, specialized functions, and is not an all-purpose learning machine that can be reformatted at will to realize political dreams. The shape of society is constrained by our evolved nature. Remaking humanity through politics is a biological impossibility on the order of curing cancer with pine needle tea [as attempted, pitifully, in North Korea]. We can, however, work with human nature--and we have. We have, through culture, enhanced those traits that facilitate trust and cooperation, channeled our coalitional and status-seeking instincts toward productive uses, and built upon our natural suspicion of power to preserve our freedom.These are all laudable goals. But Locke's idea has had many positive consequences, too. For instance, tabula rasa was instrumental in the fight to jettison monarchy's"natural" claims over humanity: No one, Locke said, was born to rule. It has also been helpful in combating racism, sexism, and other forms of collectivism. We now accept that no one is"born" to be a peasant or a slave, just as no one is"born" to be king. We arrived at this consensus chiefly through tabula rasa reasoning.
Properly understood, tabula rasa was a wonderful heuristic that helped establish the modern idea of the social contract. It is still the best theoretical foundation for government that we have, and I would submit that even anarchists often reach for it in formulating their private, fragmented social contracts. It seems important to me to consider that in abandoning at least the presumption of tabula rasa, we may end up doing more harm than we imagined.
Admittedly, the foundations for tabula rasa were always fairly weak. Stories abounded even in Locke's day of nobles whose progeny were idiots and of born commoners who outdid their supposed betters. Against all expectations, women and blacks proved capable of acquiring an education. All of these supposed proofs, though, of Locke's tabula rasa were merely necessary conditions; none were sufficient to demonstrate the claim.
Comes now evolutionary psychology, which seems to have a fairly detailed idea of humans' innate ideas. During the period in which our brains evolved, it is claimed, human beings lived in bands of 25-150 people. Because of this, we experience difficulty trusting a cohort any larger.
In what frankly strikes me as a"just so" story, it is even revealed that people's address books seldom contain more than 150 names, and that military squadrons are of roughly the same size as Pleistocene hunting expeditions. Intervening human history can be understood as the effort to create institutions that will bridge the gap from our narrow, trusted circle of 150--up to a modern capitalistic society, which could theoretically encompass the globe. How do we get people to trust one another with their money, their property, even their children, when they are not hard-wired to do it? This is potentially the stuff of a radically new take on history, one comparable in originality to Marxism and with an explanatory power virtually guaranteed to be greater.
So far as I can tell (and I am hardly an expert), evolutionary psychology proposes to pick apart Locke's thought experiment entirely. Although there are some evidences against tabula rasa and no proofs at all for Locke's claim in its stronger senses (It is possible that there may never be such proofs), still I am reluctant to give up entirely on the idea.
Yes, tabula rasa may seem to justify socialism, but this is only in some of its formations; a philosophical concept that may be turned to a bad end is not in itself necessarily bad. A proper contextualization may very well save it, distinguishing along the way those consequences that are morally good (respect for individual rights) from those that are not (Stalinism).
A somewhat weakened tabula rasa might hold, for instance, that humans are subject to some forms of instinct or some innate tendencies, but that these are overwhelmed in most cases by cultural and volitional factors. It might argue that the essentials of human nature are not predetermined, even while certain inessentials are indeed innate.
Another take on tabula rasa may be that it is not a statement precisely about human minds--but rather about our capacity to know or to control the minds of our neighbors: We ought to think of people as if the proposition were true, for thinking of them otherwise tends strongly to bring out our worst authoritarian impulses. In this formulation, tabula rasa is not so much true as it is useful and good. It is no longer a scientific claim, but a moral one.
As I understand it, cultural anthropology tends strongly toward a tabula rasa view of human knowledge, often with this moral component as an implicit assumption. Yes, many in the discipline would be loath to admit such a western bias, yet I believe it exists all the same. In effect, cultural anthropology seems to hold that there is little or no significant innate component to human knowledge through its stress on the highly varied cultural forms found throughout humanity.
Our innate ideas certainly don't establish western-style monarchism, as was argued in Locke's day, and they seem to establish precious little else on their own. Cultures, and minds, always defy our efforts to nail them down, except in a few very isolated circumstances. Hunger and thirst, of course, are innate; what we do about them is not. Heterosexuality might be another one example, although even on this I'm not entirely sure, and obviously there are exceptions.
As Wilkinson describes it, evolutionary psychology adds the claim that dominance hierarchies are"natural," although I frankly find this deeply troubling. If it does not precisely revive the notion that some men are born to rule, still it seems to contradict the idea that all men are created equal. (And where did we come up with that idea, if dominance hierarchies are innate to humans?)
I am left with a number of serious questions for advocates of evolutionary psychology as it applies to human social behavior and ultimately to politics. I'd prefer to keep any ensuing discussion firmly within the realms of history and political theory, as I'm not much of a scientist. Still, I have many questions.
1. If the characteristics we have inherited from the EEA really are innate, then shouldn't we expect them to be obvious by introspection alone? Most people claim, for instance, that this is how heterosexuality seems to them: All they need is a single moment of reflection to convince themselves that this idea is innate. Likewise with hunger and thirst. Why then are the truths of the EEA so counterintuitive, and why have they only been discovered just now? Are there two different levels of innateness? What mechanisms establish them?
2. How can it be determined that human brains primarily evolved in the EEA as is claimed? What evidence is there for the environmental conditions that would give rise to these mental traits or habits? Didn't brains evolve gradually, over many millions of years? What evidence is there, come to think of it, that the change took place so suddenly? And what evidence is there that the change wiped out everything that went before it? In short, why go back 50,000 years--and then stop?
3. Early in ancient history, humans appear already organized into large cities and empires. From what little we know of preliterate societies, these too were often organized into groups that far exceeded the 25-150 of the EEA.
For example, many Native Americans of New France, particularly the Iroquois, organized themselves into groups of several hundreds or thousands each; these in turn were organized into still larger groups. They possessed no written language, no metal, and only rudimentary agriculture at the time of first contact. After they had been decimated by war and disease, these societies reformed into much smaller, more flexible bands--within the constraints of the EEA where they had not been before. But which was the more"natural" state for them?
How did the transition from small bands into groups of thousands occur, if 150 is the maximum"natural" size of human groups? This question may be impossible to answer, as we don't have any written records of the transition. Still, the formation of empires--almost universal in early ancient history--seems to be a problem with the theory, as do Native American societies such as the ones I have described. The Iroquois, for one, seemed on the verge of establishing an empire of their own in the great lakes region during the early 1600s; it is an open question what might have transpired had the Europeans not arrived with smallpox, the fur trade, metals, gunpowder, and so forth.
4. The putative prehistoric humans of the EEA are suspiciously rational. They act, I hate to say it, rather too much like good classical liberals, albeit blinkered by their bias toward small groups.
Again looking at early ancient history, I observe that these humans were often terribly irrational. Never mind how they ended up in large groups or cities: How did they all start worshiping the same gods, sharing the same superstitions, fighting massive wars, and so forth? Don't these examples all show both irrationality and mass allegiances not predicted by the EEA hypothesis? We could always dismiss these as"late" innovations, but this strikes me as ad hoc and quite lacking in evidence.
Add in the more rational yet still large-scale behaviors of ancient history (agriculture, shared oral and written language, common weights and measures), and you have a portrait of early ancient society that diverges radically and almost instantly from the EEA.
5. If the sudden emergence of oral language (which happened, most agree, long before written language) is the evidence for this imputed evolutionary change, isn't it possible that the capacity for language existed well before its actual development? And that the development of language may not have been a genetic/evolutionary step so much as it was an intellectual one? (I know there is a huge scholarly debate here, but I am curious how evolutionary psychology deals with the question.) How does the EEA interface with language at all?
6. We would never say that humans evolved vaccines, or air travel, or the Internet. Isn't language an invention rather than a genetic adaptation? And what about the formation of societies? Aren't they inventions too? Why are some societies (smaller than 150 people)"natural," while others (above 150 people) are"not natural?" Just where is the boundary between nature and nurture, anyway? And why set it here? (My own inclination is to think that there is no such boundary, and that neither"natural" nor"artificial" has any enduring metaphysical status, especially when it comes to humans, who transform everything they touch into the artificial.)
7. Does it strike anyone else that as presented here, evolutionary psychology is rather teleological? Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this, of course, but where does the science stop, and where do the ethics start? I'm having a very hard time finding the boundary.
8. To elaborate on the last question, we could easily imagine a group of thinkers far removed from the Cato Institute. These thinkers would make very different claims based on exactly the same data. Why not argue that because EEA traits are innate, we had best not fight them at all? Perhaps this is the long-sought path to human happiness: Let us return to small bands of hunter-gatherers, for this is exactly how our minds happen to be set up. Back to the Pleistocene, anyone?
Nor am I trying to be sarcastic by asking this question: A long tradition, in the spirit of Rousseau, holds that if we could only find our"natural" social relations, we humans would finally be happy. How does a political theory based on the EEA deal with these arguments?
[Incidentally, Wilkinson cites the books The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley, Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright as useful guides to the field. I would gladly read... well... maybe one of them. My plate is otherwise very full right now with finishing my dissertation and with several other books I've volunteered to read and review at Liberty & Power. If I had to add one more book to the list, Seabright's is my preference, in part because it was already recommended to me. Further guidance would be much appreciated, particularly if articles rather than books have what I'm after.]
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]