Psycho Babble

Evolutionary Psychology's Remarkable Rubbish

Is evolutionary psychology going the way of Freudianism?

Commentator Roger Kimball captures the immense cultural power of evolutionary psychology in an anecdote he relates in his Introduction to the second edition of Darwinian Fairytales (Encounter, 2006). This book, by agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove (1927–1994), was a risky takedown of the discipline at the time. In the Introduction, Kimball writes:

I remember leaving a party a few years ago with a friend, an eminent biologist, who I knew admired some of David Stove's other writings. I was in the midst of reading Darwinian Fairytales for the first time. At the coat check, I retrieved the book and gave it to him to leaf through. I looked on with concern as the smile on his face faded and a frown appeared. "But this is terrible!" he said, turning the pages, "this is awful!"¹

Kimball makes clear that neither he nor Stove (by then deceased) objected in principle to Darwinism, as applied to nature. In fact, Kimball was contemptuous of the very idea of design in nature. His (and Stove's) target was rather "evolutionary psychology," the application of Darwinian "selfish gene" principles to human society. Kimball agreed with Stove that this pseudo-discipline was ridiculous.

But frankly, to question any silliness whatever that derives from Darwinism comes perilously close to questioning Darwinism itself. Hence Kimball's biologist friend's reaction.

And hence also, most likely, the reason why science media yawn and continue to publish evolutionary psychology's remarkable rubbish even now. Thus, it was not until 25 years after the first edition of Fairytales (Avebury, 1995) that another philosopher decided to weigh in, declaring that evolutionary psychology may be "impossible." The University of New Hampshire's Subrena E. Smith asks, How would we know if evolutionary psychology's claims about human psychology are true?

The Module Problem

As Smith explains in a recent paper, evolutionary psychologists posit that our behavior is governed by modules in our brain, which we inherited from our remote ancestors and pass on to our descendents. These modules perform tasks such as "predator avoidance, mate selection, and cheater detection." We don't and can't realize that our behavior today is not generated by conscious awareness of and reactions to our current circumstances, but rather is governed by these modules. As one research group claims, "Behavior in the present is generated by information-processing modules that exist because they solved adaptive problems in the past."

Awkwardly, modern neuroscience, which has mapped the brain in exquisite detail, has not identified any of these storied modules. But suppose it did. How would we know that these modules were identical to the ones that governed humans who lived in the vastly different environment of 50,000 years ago? There are no fossil brains. Smith calls this the "matching problem": "Unless the challenge can be overcome, evolutionary psychological explanations fail. Put more strongly, if the matching problem cannot be solved, evolutionary psychology is impossible."²

Evolutionary psychologists generally respond to this problem—seldom put to them as starkly as it has been by Smith—in one of two ways. One is to identify a typical modern behavior (how we vote, for example³) and then try to explain how that behavior would have helped our remote ancestors survive. Alternatively, they identify challenges that our ancestors faced and then try to determine how their way of facing those challenges shapes our behavior today. Snake avoidance, for instance, helped our ancestors stay alive; thus, our typical dislike and fear of snakes is just that same "module" kicking in.

No one can know, of course, if these speculations match history, because history is just what we don't have. Advantage Smith.

But Smith isn't done yet. She points out a critical distinction between evolutionary human psychology and contemporary animal psychology. We have no reason to believe that chimpanzees' lifestyle today is much changed from the way they lived millions of years ago. Thus, if we want to argue that chimps' current behavior reflects past survival advantages encoded into their brains, we at least have the evidence of the pattern's stability, even if we can't find those modules. But human life has changed vastly over the same period. So we have no basis for assuming that people today behave as they do because of modules created by Stone Age survival rates. Not that we have much information anyway.

Deeper Problems

Smith raises yet another issue, one that is in certain ways far more troubling. Evolutionary psychologists offer what she calls "subpersonal" explanations for human behavior. She offers an illustration of the problem: A 2009 study using American college students as subjects claimed to provide support for the view that men care more about infidelity than women do because in the Stone Age the biological cost of raising another man's offspring was so high.⁴

There's a lot wrong with such a claim, which Smith explores. But there is a deeper issue as well, implied in the term she uses in her paper: "subpersonal." Any such thesis makes no distinction between what humans can know and what animals can know.

A recent buzz in the popular science media provides a handy illustration: we are informed, as if it were some kind of a surprise, that men see themselves as fathers and male gorillas don't.⁵ Explanations for this difference are offered, but the most obvious one is simply ignored, like the elephant in the sunroom: Does it make a difference that men know how children come to exist and which children in a community are their own? We know nothing of how such momentous realizations came about. We are reasonably sure, however, that they never happened to gorillas.

A Clear Warning

Kimball identifies a useful habit of thought that Stove sought to pass on, one that may help us understand the sunset of Darwinism better: Stove is good at exposing the "amazingly arrogant habit of Darwinians" of "blaming the fact, instead of blaming their theory" when they encounter contrary biological facts:

Doctrinaire Darwinists have an answer for everything, always a bad sign in science, since it means that mere facts can never prove them wrong. Does it regularly happen that increasing prosperity leads to lower birth rates? And does this directly contradict Darwinian theory? No problem, just announce that the birth rates in such cases are somehow "inverted," evidence of a "biological mistake."⁶

In short, evolutionary psychology is, like Freudianism, unfalsifiable on the basis of evidence. With Freudianism, eventually, public patience ran out. Time will tell if the same thing happens to evolutionary psychology. But Subrena Smith's critique is a clear warning.

Notes
1. Archived here: https://tinyurl.com/y8nhkyed
2. Subrena E. Smith, "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?", Biological Theory 15 (1): 39–49 (2020): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4 (subscription required).
3. Denyse O'Leary, "Post-Election Special: The Evolutionary Psychologist Knows Why You Vote—and Shop, and Tip at Restaurants," Evolution News and Science Today (Nov. 5, 2014): https://evolutionnews.org/2014/11/post-election_s.
4. Aaron T. Goetz and Kayla Causey, "Sex Differences in Perceptions of Infidelity: Men Often Assume the Worst," Evolutionary Psychology 7 (2009), 253–263.
5. Elizabeth Fernandez, "Why 'Fatherhood' Is Unique to Humans Among the Primates," Forbes (May 23, 2020); Ingela Alger et al., "Paternal provisioning results from ecological change," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 2020), 117 (20) 10746–10754: DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1917166117 (open access).
6. Ibid., note 1.