Another wayback post from my pile of inexplicably never-published drafts.
Via Matthew Yglesias we learn that former Bush minion and permanent-war proponent John Bolton is also a follower of pull-it-out-of-your-ass evolutionary psychology. Quoth Bolton
You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.
Yglesias’s reply refutes not only Bolton but the core assumption of every pop evolutionary psychologist who’s ever flunked a biology, statistics, history, psychology, or logic course.
For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence. Doing it as a primary means of subsistence, as opposed to a hobby, has become even more marginal. Doing it with stone tools is even more marginal, though it does of course still happen.
Nicely put. If in just a generation or two we can transcend something that was so immediately, directly, and incontestably essential to human survival as the use of stone tools… something that dates back at least 1.5 million years no less… then we can probably also transcend impulses as marginally adaptive as 3-5% biases towards hip-waist ratios in mate selection. Assuming those ratios were ever really shaped by evolution to begin with.
Because whatever other “hard wiring” we’ve got (and sure, we’ve clearly got a lot of it) we’re also clearly hard-wired for something called technology and culture. Not to mention stuff anticipation, learning by example, and, especially, learning from your mistakes. Natural mistake for Bolton to have missed all those, but it’s not due to his “hard wiring.” Having no personal experience of the kind of violence he imagines we’re hard-wired for, nor experience* of the actual capacity for the unprecedented violence of modern warfare (itself only a few generations old!) he’s developed his theories only through the channels of culture and technology he imagines can have no impact on our “hard-wired” natures.
* Like virtually all Bush administration warmongers John Bolton used cultural leverage to dodge military service himself, thus demonstrating his own ability to transcend the “hard-wiring” he alleges we’re stuck with.
As Laura Kipnis said: “When
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2010-08-31 20:45.As Laura Kipnis said: “When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive.”
As someone with a lot of
Submitted by Asehpe (not verified) on Mon, 2010-09-06 05:23.As someone with a lot of interest in ev psych (and a good understanding of both biology and statistics), I can say that most “Pop Ev Psych” arguments are frustratingly obtuse because they seem to assume the following position:
(a) if we evolved some behavior then we should continue to do it
(b) whatever psychological traits we may have that have come from evolution will never change, shouldn’t be tampered with, and there’s nothing we can do about them
Of course this is not correct. Even if we assume a strong “essentialist” position (I put “essentialist” in quotes because this position is not really philosophically essentialist — no “transcendent essences” — but it assumes features stable enough to deserve the name “essence” in a practical sense) that has there are certain psychological features that are “hard-wired”, this doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about them. What this would at best mean is that we can’t just tell people to “turn off” these features; but this does NOT mean that we have no power to affect their expression.
So, it may well be that there are psychological mechanisms underlying “conflict” that are “hard-wired”; but this does NOT mean that we have to live in societies with high levels of violence; it simply means that real solutions to the problem of violence have to take the above psychological mechanisms into account.
The correct conclusion from “there are hard-wired psychological mechanisms that play a role in generating conflict” is NOT, as the quote you mentioned seems to imply, that “we’ll always have all kinds of violence in our society, so just relax and accept it”. NO. The correct conclusion is that we can’t just say “hey people, violence is baaad… so let’s now do violence anymore, m’kay?” and think this will be enough. It won’t. We need to do more than that, and in different ways. But THERE ARE THINGS WE CAN DO, and we should find out what they are. (Cue to more research.)
Richard Dawkins once described how distressed a lady viewer in one of his talks was who thought that some feature or other was “genetic”. ‘So we can never be free of it?’ she is supposed to have said while sobbing. Hell no. We can solve genetic problems, there are solutions for (some) genetic illnesses; we’re not simply the slaves of our genes. We just have to take them into account when deciding what to do. Same thing for any psychological features we may have evolved during the Pleistocene.