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You know, I spend a lot of time dumping on pop science reporting and, often, on pop science itself. I particularly spend a lot of time dumping on science that, in Venn Diagram terms anyway, falls into the category of evolutionary science. At a moment in time where seemingly increasing numbers of even educated citizens, of America and elsewhere, seem to be questioning fundamental ideas in science such as, well, evolution I want to take a moment to be clear — really, really clear — that I think science is cool and that the theory of evolution, like the germ theory of disease, or the theory of relativity, are overwhelmingly useful predictive tools and therefore instances of science at its best.

I think the problem with EP/sociobiology isn’t that there’s no theory behind it. For one thing there is! It’s certainly the case that some behaviors are genetically determined (consider sneezing or yawning) and very likely that other, more sophisticated behaviors are influenced by the expression of specifically-selected genes (consider, I dunno, maybe jealousy.)

Instead the problem is two-fold:

First, there’s the question of how much effect genes have. Take something as fundamental as sneezing, for instance. Something goes up your nose you’re going to sneeze, right? No problem. But then consider how intensely socialization affects how we sneeze and you have to start asking other questions. (A classic instance would be the difference between how “manly men” and “girly women” tend to exaggerate or suppress their sneezes.) So you can say sure, genes affect behavior but… you’re probably not going to see many people claiming that the way girly girls vs. macho boys sneeze is genetically determined.

Second part: well, you might find people who claim the difference in sneezes isn’t specifically determined… and then they’ll go to sometimes elaborate lengths to construct a case where, no, actually it was primitive men’s job to drive away predators and women’s jobs to… um… hide in a corner with the babies and be really quiet or something… and so it makes perfect sense that men sneeze loudly and women suppress… oh, and women select men based on the loudness of their sneezes and men on the demureness of women’s. (Sound far fetched? It’s been claimed men evolved snorning to scare away predators.)

The problem with claims of type #2, which is the main ones that get publicized by pop-EP types, is that a) many women don’t swallow their sneezes and some men do, b) there’s no evidence that sneezing scares rather than, say, attracts archaic predators, c) that women are particularly impressed by loud sneezing or men by the reverse, d) that even if there were such effects that they were significant enough to survival on the margins that they’d be positively selected for. Oh, and most important would be e) that the tools of both genetic analysis and behavioral observation were sophisticated enough to make such specific determinations that behavior X is founded in genetics, that it’s specifically selected for, that the observation supports the hypothesis, and that the hypothesized characteristic is the most likely reason the observed behavior would evolve… if it was evolved and not just learned… oh yeah, and that it’s the result of sexual selection (men and women select each other for it rather than, say, hyenas didn’t eat everybody who did anything else.)

And the further problem with item #2 is that the analytical tools at EP researcher’s disposal, and the sample sizes they almost invariably have to rely on, just don’t have the granularity to support the conclusions they draw.

So. Bottom line is that there’s actually plenty of good evolutionary behavior research going on, and even good sociobiology. And some day it’s entirely possible that those sciences will become sophisticated enough to separate cultural noise from genetic expression to make positive assertions about evolved human behavior as sophisticated as determining that, no, really, exaggeration or suppression of sneezing is genetically determined.

They’re just not there yet, they’re nowhere near that yet, and they’re probably not going to get near there till a whole lot more basic research is completed… by real, lower-case ep evolutionary scientists.

In other words, my objections aren’t about science, and definitely not about evolutionary theory. Not at all, at all. Science is cool. My issue is that it’s even cooler when you actually do it instead of just dressing up what might as well be Details Magazine or Cosmo articles with fMRI machines, precision that exceeds observational granularity, and rigorous statistics applied to data sets too small to distinguish results from background noise.

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Incidentally at least from my perspective the reason people on our side of the frequent arguments about upper-case EP pop Evolutionary Psychology and sociobiology don’t want to use those tools is that they’re bogus to the point that proponents might as well be making it up from old episodes of Gilligan’s Island. We could do that. And occasionally people on our side do. But since we’re actually trying to buck traditions instead of reinforce them (as EP strongly tends to do) it’d be a perpetually uphill battle. When you’re trying to change age-old assumptions, especially ones that just aren’t relevant in contemporary circumstances, there’s sort of by-definition not a lot of ancient myths and legends we can tie our wagons to.