Boys are made to squirt and girls are made to lay eggs. And if the truth be known, boys don't very much care what they squirt into." Crude though it may be, Gore Vidal's pithy quote neatly sums up the argument of evolutionary psychology.
The human mind is created by genes, the argument goes, the sole purpose of which is to reproduce themselves. The genes, which have been selected through evolution, programme the mind with behaviour patterns best designed to carry out their selfish aims. The reproductive strategies of men and women are different, so they have been programmed to exhibit different behaviours. The edifice of human society and culture is built on this need for genes to reproduce themselves, and on the different needs of men and women.
This argument has become increasingly fashionable. Darwinian thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have become superstars. A multitude of non-scientists, including Booker prize winner Ian McEwan and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, have become proselytisers for the new vision of Man. From Cosmopolitan to Time (and, indeed, to Prospect) the media has been seduced by the charms of the new science.
Fashionable, perhaps, but is it credible? Consider three premises of evolutionary psychology. First, that human beings are not born as blank slates, but are preprogrammed with specific knowledge about the world. Second, that most human behaviour patterns, as well as social structures, have been selected for a purpose through the course of evolution, and that the ultimate (if not immediate) cause of such behaviour is the need to spread genes. And third, that many of the social problems which beset humanity arise from the mismatch between our genetic heritage (adapted for a Stone Age environment) and the world in which we live today. In effect, we are Stone Age people living in a Space Age world. The first argument is largely correct, the second largely wrong, and the third is specious nonsense.
For most of the past half century, the orthodox view within the social sciences has been that human beings are born as blank slates-what Darwinists dismissively dub the Standard Social Science Model, or SSSM. The human infant learns entirely through experience; its behaviours are moulded by the culture into which it is born. Most scientists acknowledged that humans had a number of basic instincts, but felt that these did not amount to much, given the almost infinitely impressionable mind. Finally, according to this view, the human brain works like a general purpose computer, using much the same method of reasoning to tackle every problem, whether reading a book or making a marriage proposal.
In recent decades it has become clear that the blank slate view of the human mind is untenable. An infant which began life with an empty head would be in a similar predicament to Funes, a character in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Funes never forgot anything, and consequently spent the whole day recalling the events of the previous day. Similarly, the infant would not know which stimuli to attend to and which to ignore, or how to transform relevant stimuli into meaningful perceptions. An infant, like Funes, needs a mechanism to filter incoming data and to attach meaning to it. It thus needs to know something about the world into which it is about to be born.
Over the past two decades, psychologists have devised ever more inventive experiments to tease out what this "something" might be. We now know, for example, that infants have an innate concept of the difference between animate and inanimate objects, and an intuitive preference for the human face. As Noam Chomsky first argued, they also have an innate capacity for language, thanks to the "universal grammar" hardwired into the brain. When a child encounters maths, it has to memorise the multiplication table. When it learns to play the piano, it must learn the notes and chords and then the way that these combine to form musical phrases. Yet when it learns its native language, it uses complex grammatical constructions such as the conditional subjunctive, or the past perfect tense, without knowing that it is doing so.
These considerations have led cognitive psychologists (analysts of thinking) to replace the blank slate with a "modular" view of the mind. The mind possesses innate knowledge about the world. This knowledge is contained in a collection of distinct modules, or mini-minds, each specialised to perform a distinct task: understand physical relations, analyse visual data, process speech, and so on. Most cognitive psychologists believe that only part of the mind-the part dealing with language and with perception-is modular. Cognition and social behaviour, they argue, result from more general brain processes.
Not so, say evolutionary psychologists. They too have adopted the modular model of the mind, but have taken it much further than cognitive psychologists. They argue that almost all thought processes are modular. Moreover, they believe that modules are not simply innate (hardwired into the brain) but evolved (designed by natural selection to perform functions important to the survival of the organism).
The starting point for evolutionary psychologists is not so much how the brain works today, as how it would have worked 50,000 years ago. The brain, they observe, evolved to solve the problems characteristic of our hunter-gatherer past. Because each type of problem faced by our Stone Age ancestors was unique, trying to solve them all with a single reasoning device would not have been very useful. The smartest ancient human brains would have been composed of dozens of different instincts (or modules) each designed by natural selection to aid survival and reproduction. Thus, according to the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, these ancient modules would have included ones for "face recognition, spatial relations, rigid object mechanics, tool use, fear, social exchange, emotion perception, kin-oriented motivation, effort allocation and recalibration, child care, social inference, sexual attraction, semantic inference, friendship, grammar acquisition..."
Cosmides and Tooby argue that because the modern brain is not genetically very different from that of our ancestors, so our minds, too, must be comprised of these modules. As with our ancestors, our mind is a nest of instincts, all adapted for a Stone Age life.
The trouble with this theory is that the human mind doesn't seem to work in this way. There is little evidence that the higher level cognitive skills on Cosmides and Tooby's list-such as friendship and tool use-exist as modules in the mind. Further, the modern mind is characterised not so much by its modularity-a capacity to respond to many tasks in a fast but rigid fashion-but by its flexibility, an ability to think laterally, and to use analogy and metaphor.
Take something as basic as children's play. According to evolutionary psychology, the brain contains two innate modules, one of which allows us to deal with animate objects, the other with inanimate ones. But, as Steven Mithen has pointed out, in treating an inanimate doll as if it were an animate being, a child is tearing up the blueprint. She is displaying a form of lateral thinking not permitted by the modular model.
Evolutionary psychologists respond that their critics misunderstand the nature of flexibility. "Having a lot of built-in machinery," Steven Pinker argues, "should make a system respond more intelligently and flexibly to its inputs, not less." Humans are intelligent "not because we have fewer instincts than other animals but because we have more. Our flexibility comes from scores of instincts assembled into programmes and pitted in competition."
This, however, misses the point. Human flexibility arises not because our instincts are allowed to compete with each other, but because we can transcend the disparate views available to any single module or instinct. It is this ability to create an integrated view of the world that we call reasoning. By definition, modular problem solving works with less than all the information that a creature possesses. Eventually, however, the mind has to synthesise the results of all those modular computations to create a human-like view of the world. And this, as the philosopher Jerry Fodor says, cannot be a modular process.
Fodor was one of the original proponents of the modular view of the mind. But he is highly critical of contemporary evolutionary psychology. He points out that there must be more to cognition than the work of modules: "The moon looks bigger when it is on the horizon; but I know perfectly well that it is not. My visual perception module gets fooled, but I don't. The question is: who is this I? And by what-presumably global-computational process does it use what I know about astronomical facts to correct the misleading appearances that my visual perception insists on computing? If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had better be somebody in charge; and by God it had better be me." Fodor is suggesting that a brain full of modules could not give rise to self-awareness. And self-awareness, as we shall see later, is crucial in understanding what it means to be human.
the second premise of evolutionary psychology-that human behaviour patterns and social structures are the products of natural selection-is even more problematic. This claim rests on two beliefs: first, that modern behaviours are analogous to those of our ancestors; second that, short of evoking divine intervention, natural selection is the only force which could have shaped the human mind and society.
Like the claim for a modular mind, this argument is based on a view of how humans would have conducted themselves 50,000 years ago. But how do we know the behaviour of our ancestors? Behaviour, unlike bone, does not fossilise. This is a problem for disciplines, from archaeology to zoology. But it is a particular problem for evolutionary psychology because the discipline rests on understanding modern behaviour in the light of ancient behaviour. Studying contemporary hunter-gatherers does not solve the problem, because their behaviour is not necessarily the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Consider, for example, the claim by some evolutionary psychologists that we possess an "intuitive biology" module-an innate evolved capacity to understand and order the natural world. A number of anthropologists have pointed out the remarkable similarities between the way that "primitive" societies classify the living world and the Linnaean system of classification at the heart of modern biology. According to Scott Atran, cross-cultural studies suggest that people universally group local plants and animals into kinds which correspond to the Linnaean categories such as class, genus and kingdom.
For evolutionary psychologists, the fact that hunter-gatherers have developed such superb taxonomic skills reveals these skills to be innate and evolved. But if this were true, then, given our common genetic constitution, people living in modern industrial nations should be as capable of classifying animals and plants as hunter-gatherers are. Quite clearly they are not. Put the average Englishman on a desert island and you would quickly find that his "natural" abilities were less than intuitive.
The taxonomic skills of hunter-gatherers are inherited through their cultures, not their genes. Evolutionary psychologists are confusing innate knowledge with folk knowledge. Darwinists assume that folk knowledge must be intuitive. But why? Non-scientific peoples are as capable of reasoning about the natural world as scientists are. The empirical reality of the biological world, together with a common propensity of human cultures to categorise at some minimal level (a propensity which may or may not be innate) is sufficient to explain similar taxonomies among different peoples. It is nonsense for Steven Pinker to write that, because "most people feel, along with biologists, that the caterpillar and butterfly are the same animal, and the caterpillar and centipede are not, despite appearances to the contrary," this demonstrates an "intuitive" capacity to classify living forms. In fact it simply demonstrates that we have learned that caterpillars become butterflies but are unrelated to centipedes, just as we learn that whales are mammals, not fish-and just as the Aborigines or the !Kung San people learn the differences between birds, fish and quadrupeds.
The absurdities of using contemporary hunter-gatherers as templates for ancient humans is shown in EO Wilson's book On Human Nature. Here Wilson examines sex roles among the !Kung San, observing that the !Kung do not impose sex roles upon their children. As adults, women gather nuts and other plant food, usually close to the camp, while men range further to hunt game. But, writes Wilson, "!Kung social life is relaxed and egalitarian and social tasks are often shared." Where, however, the !Kung San have settled into an agricultural form of life, the sexual roles are more entrenched. Wilson suggests that as societies develop, so sex roles become more demarcated: "When societies grow still larger and more complex, women tend to be reduced in influence outside the home, and to be more constrained by custom, ritual and formal life."
A reasonable interpretation of this might be that sexual differentiation is a product of social development. To find the causes of the subordination of women in modern society, then, we should look at the organisation of modern society. This, however, is not Wilson's conclusion. According to Wilson, sexual differentiation is the product of a natural process: hypertrophy. Hypertrophy refers to an increase in the size of a tissue or organ, often in response to an increased workload. A similar process, Wilson suggests, has led to sexual differentiation in modern societies. "Like the teeth of baby elephants that lengthen into tusks, and the cranial bones of the male elk that sprout into astonishing great antlers," he writes, "the basic social responses of the hunter-gatherers have metamorphosed from relatively modest environmental adaptations into unexpectedly elaborate, even monstrous forms in advanced societies."
Even by the standards of evolutionary psychology this is spectacularly wild. To begin with, hypertrophy is a developmental, not evolutionary, process. It refers to a process that takes place within an individual's lifetime, not within a species across evolutionary time. It also refers to a process of physical, not behavioural or social, change. As a scientific theory, it's on a par with the belief that aliens built the pyramids-or that Elvis is still alive. None of this prevents Wilson from arguing that a whole host of other social phenomena, including racism and nationalism, are also "hypertrophic modifications of the biologically meaningful institutions of hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal states."
Wilson is taking a modern behaviour-in this case sexual discrimination-and translating it back into hunter-gatherer life, and then assuming that these early behaviours must be "biologically meaningful" because the only force acting on ancient humans was natural selection. He then notices that the same behaviour appears in modern humans. So, presto, the modern behaviour must also be the result of natural selection. When the conclusion is smuggled into the method, it is not surprising if you always end up with the conclusion you want-in this case, that modern human behaviour is the product of natural selection.
This circularity is common to much of evolutionary psychology. Take Cosmides and Tooby's list of modules. How do they know that early humans possessed those modules? They don't. They describe, rather, modern behaviours, needs and knowledge. These then get translated into the ancient mind. In any case, even if we did know the behaviour patterns of early humans, this would not necessarily help us understand the roots of modern behaviour-because of the problems of using analogies as a scientific tool.
Metaphor and analogy are important to scientific reasoning because they allow us to view phenomena in new ways. Perhaps the most evocative modern scientific metaphor is Dawkins's "selfish gene." It replaces the drab mathematics of population biology with an illuminating picture of how natural selection might work. But it also illustrates the dangers of metaphoric thinking. Too often, writers, including Dawkins, forget that they are dealing with a metaphor and argue as if genes actually were independent agents acting out their selfish desires. This forgetfulness becomes a real problem when psychologists consider the link between modern and ancient behaviour.
Modern life is very different from Stone Age life. We take part in many activities, from going on holiday to wearing a condom, from watching television to holding political demonstrations, that did not exist in the Pleistocene. How then do we translate from modern behaviour to ancient behaviour-and vice versa? By assuming that modern behaviours are analogous to ancient behaviours. Cornering the futures market is like moving in for the kill in a hunt; following the party line at Westminster is akin to submitting to the authority of the alpha male; and so on. Too often, evolutionary psychologists fail to appreciate that these are just imaginative analogies. "It is poor science," Rosalind Arden pointed out in her Prospect debate with Kingsley Browne (October), "to pretend that stockbroking is like hunting and that staying at home with a small screamer is what women have evolved to cope with." Indeed. Unfortunately, evolutionary psychology rests almost entirely on such assumptions.
The problem of analogical reasoning is particularly acute in making comparisons between the behaviours of humans and non-human animals. Unlike early hominids, animals are available for psychologists to observe and record their behaviour. This has made it very tempting to draw analogies between animal and human behaviour. Fighting between troops of chimps is like tribal warfare. A male orang-utan's attack on a female is akin to rape. Anal intercourse among rats is homosexuality. And the ever-reliable EO Wilson has suggested that the behaviour of overcrowded rats is similar to that of concentration camp victims.
John Maynard Smith has pointed out that such anthropomorphism does little harm as along as our only interest is in animal behaviour. The problems, he observes, begin when we assume that animal "rape" or "war" can illuminate human behaviour of the same name. This is exactly what evolutionary psychologists do assume: that because only natural selection has shaped the human mind, it is valid to compare human behaviours with those of animals to whom we are evolutionarily related.
Natural selection and divine intervention, however, are not the only explanations for the development of the human mind. There are material causes and motivations to human behaviour that are entirely absent from animal life. Unlike animal behaviour, human behaviour can only be understood within a social and cultural context. Of course, many animals are also social. But there is a fundamental distinction between the social behaviour of animals (and of early hominids) and that of Homo Sapiens.
"Social" conduct in animals refers to any behaviour exhibited by a group whose members interact with each other. It can range from zebras moving as a herd to minimise the effects of predators, to bees in a highly organised hive. One of the triumphs of modern Darwinism has been its explanation of how selfish genes give rise to social behaviour, including altruism.
Human sociability is different. At its heart lies a skill that is uniquely human: language. Language allows humans to create a symbolic representation of the world separate from the world itself. Without language, an animal may be able to react to the world, but it cannot, in any significant sense, think about it. It can have beliefs about the world, but cannot know it has such beliefs. In other words, without language animals cannot possess self-awareness.
Humans, on the other hand, do not simply have experiences, desires and needs, and react to them-we are also aware that we have them, that there is an "I" which is the subject of these experiences. Humans are aware of themselves as agents, and of the world towards which their agency is directed.
Language and self-awareness may themselves be evolved traits, but they have nevertheless transformed humanity's relationship to its evolutionary heritage. Take a basic biological response such as pain. All animals show pain. It is usually an automatic reflex which we can easily recognise-we are rarely in doubt when a dog or even a lizard is in pain. Yet language transforms such a basic instinct within humans. One does not have to be a Baron Masoch to recognise that pain can sometimes be pleasurable; that we may seek pain, as part of sexual or other forms of gratification. Thus, a basic physiological response such as pain can be transformed through language and social conventions.
Similarly with anger. In Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist, Lorraine, niece of the central character, Ira Ringold, refuses to salute the American flag at school in protest at the McCarthyite witch-hunt against her uncle. Years later, Lorraine's father, Murray, remembers how he pleaded with her. "It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the right things. I told her, look at it from a Darwinian perspective. Anger is to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato."
Murray is right: anger is a Darwinian response and has a survival function. But the very fact that he can recognise this, and understand also that there are other forms of anger available to human beings, reveals that here, too, the meaning of a simple Darwinian response has been transformed.
If basic emotions such as pain and anger can be given new meanings, how much more is this true of more complex emotions such as guilt and shame? This is not to deny that emotions are evolved traits, many of which we share with our evolutionary relatives. But even basic human emotions cannot be understood in a purely naturalistic fashion. And if this is so, how can complex relationships such as power or love be understood in purely evolutionary terms, through analogies drawn from animals, who possess neither language nor self-awareness?
Because we are conscious of ourselves as agents, we are aware of our capacity to transform the world around us. Human history is different from evolutionary history because it is Lamarckian, not Darwinian, in form. The French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck believed that changes which occur to an individual during its lifetime, in response to a "felt need," can be inherited by its progeny. This, he claimed, was the basis of evolution. The long neck of a giraffe, for example, evolved through the animal stretching its neck to eat the foliage of trees; its offspring were subsequently born with longer necks.
Darwin rejected this idea of the "inheritance of acquired characteristics." Instead, he argued that "chance mutation" creates variations which make some individuals more successful in the struggle to survive and reproduce; and their characteristics become dominant in subsequent generations. Lamarckism describes a willed change, Darwinism an evolutionary process based on chance variation. We now know that natural evolution works in a Darwinian fashion. But development in human society is Lamarckian in form. Because humans possess language, and because we have created institutions which allow us to possess knowledge not simply as individuals but collectively as a society, so acquired habits and knowledge can be passed from generation to generation, transforming human life-and human nature-in the process. Humans are different because we are makers of our own history. Human nature is dynamic, a fact which evolutionary psychologists fail to grasp; they believe human nature was constituted in the Stone Age and there it stopped. The most important aspect of what it means to be human-our sense of agency-is missing from naturalist accounts.
I do not deny the influence of evolution on human conduct. Humans certainly have an evolved psychology, but it cannot be understood in the same terms as the evolved psychologies of non-human animals. Nor can it be understood simply as an evolved psychology. Moreover, the blithe assumption that the evolved traits of the individual can explain the evolution of social forms-that playground bullying, tribal conflict and world war, for instance, can all be explained in the same terms-is certainly false.
Consider, for instance, racism. It has become commonplace for evolutionary psychologists to explain it in Darwinian terms. One view is that racism is the product of an innate tendency to form groups and to exclude others. But the problem with such explanations is that, as many historians have pointed out, racism has not existed throughout history. Like the idea of race itself, racism is a social form specific to modern society. An ahistoric explanation which takes us back to the origins of humanity cannot capture the specific properties of racism. Both the SSSM and evolutionary psychology fail to understand the relationship between our biological and social aspects. While the one denies Man's biological heritage, the other subsumes culture to biology.
Implicitly, evolutionary psychologists understand that the human mind cannot be understood in simple Darwinian terms because humans often act contrary to Darwinian principles. Thus, in his book Evolution in Mind, the psychologist Henry Plotkin opens his discussion on human culture by claiming that "there is not much intellectual risk... in making the assumption that human culture is the product of human evolution." A few pages later, though, he is forced to admit to a problem with this view. If "culture is the direct product of evolution," how is it possible, he asks, for culture to create forms that can "adversely affect our biological fitness?" How can we understand celibacy or the risking of life and limb in wars? "The only explanation," Plotkin believes, "is that culture entails causal mechanisms that are somehow decoupled... from the causal mechanisms of our biological evolution." Dawkins similarly writes in The Selfish Gene that while "we are built as gene machines... we have the power to turn against our creators." Steven Pinker has put this point most boldly of all. "By Darwinian standards," he writes, "I am a horrible mistake." Why? Because he has chosen to remain childless. "I am happy to be that way," he adds, "and if my genes don't like it they can go and jump in the lake."
This is a very stirring defence of human freedom. But how is it possible? If culture is "the direct product of evolution," whence the capacity to "decouple" the two? How do we possess "the power to turn against our creators?" Presumably Pinker believes that his ability to tell his genes to go "jump in the lake" must itself be an evolved trait. But how could such a trait survive? By definition it reduces biological fitness to zero. So however did it get passed on from one generation to the next? If a chimp or a horse told its genes to go take a jump, it would not survive long.
The mysterious ability that Plotkin, Dawkins and Pinker all attribute to humans to turn against their genes smacks of Cartesian dualism. We seem, on the one hand, to be the product of our genetic heritage. But, on the other, we also seem to be animated by some mysterious non-natural force which turns us into genetic rebels. One reason why evolutionary psychologists are so keen to stress the notion of free will is that they are wary of committing the "naturalistic fallacy"-the belief that because something is natural it must be right. This belief underlay social Darwinism and racial science in the 19th century, and today's Darwinists are keen to dissociate themselves from such views. Pinker, therefore, proposes that ethics should be separate from the scientific study of behaviour. Ethics, presumably, are not metaphysical entities, but an aspect of human behaviour. How then do they originate, if not through "natural selection and neurophysiology" which Pinker considers the basis of all human behaviour? Descartes, unable to comprehend how a mechanical science could explain the mind, divided the human into a mechanical body and an unknowable soul. Pinker has done the same-except that he has relabelled the soul as "ethics."
this brings us to the third premise of evolutionary psychology-the belief that there exists a conflict between our Stone Age genetic heritage and the modern world in which we live. "Our brains," Steven Pinker writes, "are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology and other newcomers to the human experience."
We can certainly imagine the distress that might be caused by mismatches between genetic capacity and environment. If someone transported a herd of elephants to the slopes of Mt Everest the results might be disastrous. But we humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created that environment, through historical struggle and development. It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is "wired up" to invent modernity but not to cope with it.
In asserting a mismatch between genetic heritage and the modern environment, evolutionary psychologists are adopting a particular philosophical stance about human nature and its limits. That is their prerogative. But they should not dress it up as science.
The idea of a mismatch between genes and environment articulates the sense of dislocation that many people feel today. The first person I recall arguing about this mismatch was not an evolutionary psychologist but the Unabomber, the most potent expression of the modern sense of alienation. "I attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society," he said in his manifesto, "to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved."
At the height of the cold war, it was a common aphorism that humanity's technical prowess outstripped its moral advancement. With its "mismatch" theory, evolutionary psychology has repackaged this sentiment for the post-cold war era. But if evolutionary psychology gives vent to our sense of dislocation, it also seems to provide a ticket to salvation, by creating a new myth about what it means to be human. "People need a sacred narrative," EO Wilson argues in Consilience. "They must have a sense of larger purpose... however intellectualised." Such a sacred narrative, he believes, can be either a religion or a science. "The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic... The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realise that Homo sapiens is far more than a congerie of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved."
We began with evolutionary psychology as an objective science of Man. We end with evolutionary theory as a New Age religion. The Darwinian approach has certainly provided some valuable insights about human nature. It has demonstrated the weaknesses of many social theories of human nature, and stressed the importance of understanding human beings in our biological context. One of the ironies of evolutionary psychology, however, is this: its adherents believe that their methodology allows them to study human behaviour with the same scientific objectivity and rigour as is generally applied to the study of physiology or biochemistry. Yet the mishmash of wild speculation, banal generalisations, circular arguments, giddy leaps of logic and uncorroborated assertions which make up the bulk of the discipline would be treated with derision if applied to the study of physical rather than behavioural processes. The success of evolutionary psychology lies less in its scientific insights than in its ability to fill a gap left by discredited sociological explanations of human nature and to articulate a view of humanity that seems to make more sense in a pessimistic age.
