Adaptation, Plasticity, and Massive Modularity in Evolutionary Psychology: An Eassy on David Buller's Adapting Minds

Abstract

Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature

DAVID BULLER

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005

564 pages, ISBN: 0262025795 (hbk); $37.00

Notes

Notes

[1]  A word about quotes and citations: Buller quotes abundantly from the works of the Evolutionary Psychologists that he critiques. In my discussion of his critique I quote abundantly from Buller's book and some of these quotes include passages that he quotes. I try to make the source identification clear, keep them distinct, and the documentation simple and transparent. To this end, in some cases of extended quotation, I specify that the passage(s) is quoted in Buller. Thus, unless otherwise noted, all page references are to Buller's book.

[2]  I follow Buller's convention of capitalizing “Evolutionary Psychology.”

[3]  Reports of recent challenges to String Theory are pretty much limited to physics journals and reviews of the books critical of it.

[4]  Brooks continues: There are a couple of reasons why the two lists might diverge so starkly. It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing happens, whereas the part of the brain where women experience negative emotion, the cerebral cortex, is well connected. It could be that women are better at processing emotion through words. Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more). It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.

[5]  Kitcher's book, Abusing Science, (1982) targeted first generation creationist's misappropriation and misconception of Popper's notion of falsification in their desperate and bungling efforts to show methodological parity between Darwinian evolutionary theory and their creation myths.

[6]  Radcliffe Richards (2000) has defended evolutionary psychology against Kitcher's 1985 critique. I examine her analysis in “Methodological and Moral Muddles in Evolutionary Psychology” (forthcoming). Kitcher's “Constraints on Free Inquiry” in his 2001 Science, Truth, and Democracy, augments his argument against Evolutionary Psychology, née sociobiology.

[7]  Chapter 4, Modularity, of Buller's book was co-written with Valerie Hardcastle.

[8]  Plasticity is a continuum allowing lots of room between the extremes. There are brain systems that are highly task-specific, e.g., control over certain digits, that can change their task in response to certain environmental changes, e.g., constraining two digits to move together. My thanks to Bill Bechtel for pointing this out to me.

[9]  See the work of Elissa Newport and colleagues on statistical learning and how it can be fixed into rules.

[10]  The Oxford philosopher L.J.Cohen (1981), for example, formulated the issue in his famous article, “Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated?”

[11]  See, the essays in Korta, et. al, Cognition, Agency, and Rationality.

[12]  For discussion see my “Methodological and Moral Muddles in Evolutionary Psychology” (forthcoming).

[13]  Buller notes, “Aspects of this theory of human origins have recently been challenged. Some paleoanthropologists argue, for example, that the early human population from which Homo sapiens descended may have spent much of the early Pleistocene in heavily forested area of Asia before migrating back to eastern Africa where Homo sapiens emerged. But none of the recent challenges to this standard view of human origins significantly affects the conclusions that Evolutionary Psychologists draw about the human EEA.” (pp. 59–60)

[14]  Hull (1978) puts the view that species are individuals this way: “… particular organisms belong in a particular species because they are part of that genealogical nexus, not because they possess any essential traits. No species has an essence in this sense. Hence there is no such thing a human nature.”

[15]  Cf. Radcliffe Richards 2000, especially Chapter Nine, where she criticizes the imposition of any sort of order on nature other than the exceptionless mechanical, i.e., non-intentional, regularities that are laws of nature. The idea, she says, is pre-Darwinian and efforts to identify harmony or evolutionary progress in nature testifies to the powerful grip this Aristotelian-like concept of natural order continues to have on our thinking.