There's a lot of good stuff in here, which I intend to respond to as soon as I've attended to my "traditional social science" responsibilities.

As to the predictive power of natural selection, that's not how I understand it working. Wasn't it Gould who said that if you rewound the clock a few million years and let evolution play out again, it would come out completely differently? That's because of the random nature of adaptive mutation. Therefore, nothing in natural selection predicts outcome per se in that it cannot tell you which of many possible beneficial adaptations will prevail or even occur.

There is a similar problem with functionalism in the "traditional social sciences" (see Durkheim), which basically says that social systems are responses to societal needs. Basically, you risk creating "just-so" stories about how needs lead to culture because nothing in functionalism explains why a particular system emerges and not others. But the biggest problem is that you might simply go hunting for "needs" you presume exist due to the prevalence of some cultural phenomenon, and you step into a tautology. Needs create structures, therefore structures prove the existence of needs. Thus, Krasnow et al provide a compelling explanation for a rather interesting finding. In the absence of other competing explanations, I'm even likely to believe it. Still, nothing I've heard in the explanation precludes the possibility that alternative explanations exist. Thus the phrase "a prediction made only by a theory..." is overly confident. It may be a matter of professional etiquette, but I've been trained to use language more along the lines of "a prediction best explained..." Such confidence is great in some ways, but it can get you into trouble because it demands a greater degree of perfection.

As for cognitive pre-wiring (hardware and software), that is true and salient to a degree. I would take issue with the claim that traditional social scientists treat cognition as a blank slate. I think many would prefer the term "black box," indicating a belief that there is something going on in there, and that something has a fairly stable internal logic, but it's not always fruitful to the project at hand to unpack that something.

Human cognitive programming is, on the one hand, limited, and on the other, adaptive. So, when its limits are tested by un-handled stimuli, it reconfigures itself (see Stravinsky's "Right of Spring"; performance one caused a bloody riot, performance two was a triumph; both had roughly the same audience). But the underlying biology does not change. Cognitive adaptation is therefore enabled (and constrained) by biology, but neither predicted nor explained by it with much precision.

As to the handling of idiosyncracies, this is the utility of considering History a social science. Historians are quite comfortable with particularistic explanations that do not require and often reject predictive theorizing.

In all, I don't really consider cognitive neuroscience all that different from other social sciences (by the way, the psych department is in the social sciences division at my university, as is history). It has different measurement tools, but many shared interpretive principles. As a political scientist myself, I'm fairly agnostic with respect to the various perspectives. We're a rather mercenary bunch taken as a whole, and (at our best) rather accustomed to meditating on the best tools to solve a chosen problem and bracketing aspects of a question that these tools fall short of answering. So, I might choose neuroscience as a way to explain "culture" as a general phenomenon that seems fairly universal to all human populations. But there are clearly better tools available for understanding the development of a particular culture. Isn't it really all about choosing the right tool for the job, lest depending too much on a hammer make everything start looking like a nail?

Myself, I feel that adding new tools to the mix is a terrific thing. I don't, however, take sides in any food fights about which is the ultimate methodological position that surpasses all others in explanatory and predictive power over the most important social questions. If there's one thing about proponents of social neuroscience that I find truly problematic, it's the presumption of superior scientific authority. The highly technical and presumably objective nature of the measurement tools grants it a perceived superiority in credibility. One student here calls it "shock and awe," too often deployed not to inform but to intimidate. But, it is still dependent on processes of intellectual reasoning familiar to the traditional social scientist, and such reasoning is the real meat of any research program.

Moreover, biological determinism has a pretty sketchy history that contemporaries must acknowledge (though they don't necessarily have to apologize for it). Each prior generation seems to have believed that it had the objective tools necessary to prove certain things about race and gender (for example) based on biological attributes, and each generation has turned out to be wrong (either in conception or intention or both). Now, that kind of thing is true until it's not (how many failed light bulbs did Edison's lab invent?). But, as with all science, caution must guide us. Certainty is our enemy, skepticism our friend.

And as a parting shot, brain-design might explain why people enjoy playing sports, but that wasn't my intended question, which has two logical components: 1) Why football, and not some other sport? and 2) why is it more popular in Brazil than elsewhere?

PS - some bits in here might be interpreted as accusations (eg, "shock and awe"). They are not intended to be.

Thanks for writing back. As much as I love reading Gould, he always had a flair for getting attention even if it meant obfuscating the debate. (Even today, guys like Ian Tattersall still get a lot of attention by acting as if they have a principled objection to natural selection even if they really don't.) Yes, mutation is random. However, selection is decidedly nonrandom. Functionality is an extremely constrained set of arrangements of a system, relative to all the possible arrangements that would be given to you by a system that was truly random. The "just-so" point of view is a popular one, and I articulated some objections to it a while ago (although it's buiried in an unread thread here <link> )

I agree...the tautology of "need implies adaptation implies need" is a very easy trap to fall into. It needs to be applied carefully, and supported by evidence. People also need to realize that not just any need, and not just any response, are viable options in a well-understood theory of selection. The needs of "societies" are not selection pressures, as "group selection" is not a force which builds adaptations. Selection happens at the level of the gene, and the functional designs those genes build; not the group or even the individual.

So yes, I do agree that in a sense the explorations of functional designs and selection pressures is, in a sense, a historical undertaking. Take, for example, a historical occurence used by Jerry Fodor in his latest screed against natural selection (<link> )...Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. I suppose Napoleon COULD have won the Battle of Waterloo but he didn't. Why? A thorough understanding of what makes a difference in battle will constrain the possible explanations (that is, the fact that it was an oddly numbered day is probably not going to be considered a factor). In the end, though, it's a matter of taking the evidence available TODAY (historical documents, our current knowledge of: the era's weaponry, animals, human motivation, weather, etc. etc.) and re-assembling a causal explanation that does the BEST job of explaning the event.

That gets us into the sociology of science. The way I understand it, a good theory is the one that does the BEST job of explaining and predicting the available data. Science is the battleground of ideas, and today's victor will be tomorrow's loser, if for no other reason than the theory (even if basically right) will be refined. So, when Krasnow et al. make the case that their findings are predicted by a theory of cognition based in natural selection but NOT by any other known theory, they are right. Maybe not in terms of "all possible theories in theory space past, present or future", but relative to the theories articulated in the present they have a point. It's not the end of the story, but they're making a case of it being the best story on the market right now.

Thank you for reminding me of the "black box" position as opposed to "blank slate"...it's not quite fair to make my accusation without a little explanation. The fact is, I've come to equate them. The Skinnerians always insisted that they were agnostic as to what was going on inside the head, but their actual position told another story completely. "We study BEHAVIOR", they said "and behavior is explained by the history of punishments, reinforcements, and co-occurrences in the lifetime of an organism." This may not look like it says anything about cognition, but it speaks volumes. This clearly lays out a cognitive model that is 1) content free (equipotential) and 2) capable of incorporating reward, punishment, and contingency. In essence, a model of connection-making. In my opinion, EVERY theory of sociology, psychology, human behavior, etc. has an implied model of cognition built in whether people want to acknowledge it or not.

"Shock and awe" is a perfect term to use for high-falutin' cognitive science, especially the neuroimaging. As useful as it might be, I believe that fMRI actually tells us very little that is interesting about the way a brain actually processes information. Even the fMRI study I was an author on was basically theoretically motivated, and showed nothing more than brain activations which were pretty much the same ones that OTHER studies had shown, in what we called (for theoretical reasons) similar tasks. It had pretty, color pictures of brains, though, so the people at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society came to look at our poster, and published our paper. :-)

I understand the politically sketchy and abused history of "biological determinism", but I think (as you've acknowledged) that it doesn't really inform us about what's likely to be true about people.

Lastly, the football...no, I don't think evolutionary psych (the study of "universal cognitive design") is a fine-tuned enough tool to tell us all that much about cultural differences. Differences are very very interesting to us, and they are worth studying, but I hate the idea that people are so focused on them (to the point where they assume that human nature is just a collection of things that are culturally determined and "could have been" differences.) Universailties are easy to overlook, but I think they are the bedrock of human nature and human cognition. So when you ask "why football and not something else, in Brazil?" I have to say "I don't know, and I don't think universal human cognitive design is going to explain that idiosyncrasy." Culture is real! I certainly think that there are some things which DO basically randomly fluctuate within the constraints of the behaviors called for by human universal cognitive design. (Language is a great example...humans deploy only a small subset of logically possible and useful grammars, and seem to acquire language in a highly biologically constrained way. But the differences between one culture and another's particular word for "house" is not something that a biolinguist is going to give you a satisfying answer for.)

However, I think these things are a idiosyncratic in a different KIND of way than questions like "Why 3D vision and not 2D?" or "Why detect animals in our environment but not cars?" And again, I challenge any level of explanation in any science to give a truly satisfying and predictive answer to "Why Brazilian football?" That is, an answer that is a part of a larger explanatory structure, and not a description of the idiosyncratic phenomena itself.

P.S. - You're a saint if you've managed to read all of this, by the way. I really like (and dislike) many people on the Fray but I may never have had a sustained conversation with someone so thoughtful as yourself. We'll probably have to wind down sometime soon and get back to our jobs, but in the meantime it has been a real pleasure! Academia is insulated, and it's really good for me to talk to someone outside of my enclave every once in a while. I hope it's noticeable that you've forced me to clarify, rethink, and even soften my views on several things as you remind me of what intelligent, dissenting vioces say.

Cultural selection is natural selection. It's all about reproduction in the end. Unselected populations die off. The culturally selected live. Rinse, repeat.

Essays confuse issues that those who are bright as the galactic core and have knowledge know intuitively. Don't bullshit. Arts students don't ever take the time to observe, only brag and auto erotically referee their theses. Both are puns.

3D vision is actually two inputs of 2D vision that the brain interpolates into depth. It's an illusion, and most of our senses are.

This was naturally selected. In flatworld they see in 1D. Lineworld sees only a dot.

You can fit two electrons in an s-shell, but it's an unstable configuration. DNA and organic chemistry and complicated, they are incredibly simple and a first year university student could figure out most of the basics if they tried. What's interesting is the chaotic nature of which it has evolved. What do those chromosomes do? Let's change them and fiddle with them until we get a hunch of an idea.

I wonder if this has happened elsewhere. How large in number are those worlds suitable for organic life, and are we actually from a previous star, now cold and dark. Bacteria can live for millions of years, maybe though panspermia we came from another system out there.

Anyone who doesn't get what I'm saying, put down the metaphysics for a sec and read Feynman. You'll reach the enlightenment you were desperately searching for.

Chemistry is "uncomplicated". Typographical error.

""Shock and awe" is a perfect term to use for high-falutin' cognitive science, especially the neuroimaging. As useful as it might be, I believe that fMRI actually tells us very little that is interesting about the way a brain actually processes information."

You know nothing. Billions of neurons, thousands of connections each. It's insanely difficult. Science is hard. We may take a century to figure this out, but it's bloody important. I'm bipolar, I service these machines, I want to know and you're an idiot. Educate yourself and fix that.

So, have we come to an agreement that culture is biological, but cultural difference is not (not in a scientifically useful way)? If so, I feel that we've actually found some non-trite common ground (cf agreeing to disagree). I am thoroughly satisfied with this formulation, as it avoids shutting out research in either area, and even clarifies the division of labor (heh, more Durkheim).

That gets us into the sociology of science. The way I understand it, a good theory is the one that does the BEST job of explaining and predicting the available data.

Agreed. A lot of folks are uncomfortable with that, but I think it strikes the right balance between ambition and humility.

In my opinion, EVERY theory of sociology, psychology, human behavior, etc. has an implied model of cognition built in whether people want to acknowledge it or not.

Again, agreed, but in a more qualified fashion. That is, different perspectives vary with respect to the degree that they specify a model of cognition. Proponents of psycho-analysis are probably the most explicit (though sometimes misguided). The structuralists have a rather explicit model, though it can tend toward binary reductivism. Interractionists have an explicit model, though it's rather thinly defined around face-saving and embarrassment. Rational-choicers are pretty adamant about their cognitive model, though it's extremely thin and stylized (and probably not at all satisfying to a neuroscientist). Basically, I think one is generally able to infer a model of cognition by identifying the scholarly heritage of the author, even if it isn't acknowledged in every single paper.

One thing about the black box vs the blank slate: the latter is actually an implied theory of cognition; the former is more of a strategic maneuver to facilitate research.

As for whether there can be an intellectually satisfying answer to "why football," may I submit that it might simply be a rather uninteresting question (my bad)? Although that may depend on the answer.

And in response to your other comment: absolutely agreed (not that I'm a saint, but that I have also never had such sustained thoughtful interchange with another commentor). I think we have evidence close at hand that many fraysters are here to vent, rant, and generally misbehave, but I really have enjoyed this conversation. Cheers to you, and I hope to cross paths again soon.