Saletan's still driving me crazy with practically the premise of "Human Nature," though it mostly has been somewhat innocuous recently. But the "gossip" thing -- there's no particular reason to think that gossip specifically is coded as an evolutionary trait -- indeed, Occam's Razor would imply that there's no reason to ascribe gossip vs. "real fact" behaviors directly to evolution rather than culture. That is to say, of course our brain has evolved to encompass complex behavior, and some traits may still be strongly genetically controlled -- picky eating being a possible example -- but all traits are a combination of environment and genes to some degree, and in the case of gossip it seems almost certainly the case that genes dictate a complex, problem-solving brain and environment co-develops the brain with the genes such that a cultural trait leads to this gossip result. After all, the contrary case, a strong genetic influence, would imply that people who believe facts over gossip are genetically different, a very high bar of evidence and hard to establish. This study certainly does not. And surmising evolutionary reasons for it, no matter how many times Saletan insists in doing so, is not science, it's supposition -- the evolutionary mechanisms proposed cannot be directly tested, and one can propose alternative reasons why this trait would be adaptive ad infinitum, with no particular reason to believe one over the other if they all fit facts.

The study was interesting, but to say it reflects (genetic) evolutionary influence directly onto gossip belief is ludicrous and shows again the silliness of careless evolutionary psychology, the "just-so" story strikes again.

<link>

HopefulCynic:

And surmising evolutionary reasons for it, no matter how many times Saletan insists in doing so, is not science, it's supposition -- the evolutionary mechanisms proposed cannot be directly tested, and one can propose alternative reasons why this trait would be adaptive ad infinitum, with no particular reason to believe one over the other if they all fit facts.

C'mon. You can't rule suppositions out of science. They're part of the process, and they can be and are tested all the time, partly by discoveries about the past, partly by running experiments, and partly by making predictions about the present and then checking them. Yes, you can cheat by checking the data first, and yes, you can spin out your next ev-psych hypothesis ad infinitum, but eventually you've bent the pipe cleaner till it breaks, and people give up on you.

That, BTW, is exactly the point of the item: the invention of "new rationalizations" within ev psych to paper over the previous hypothesis that just got smacked by data. Wink, wink.

And yet, the taking an "intentional stance" in adaptationism and investigating what possible evolutionary reasons there might be behind various psychological features of the human animal has been a very powerful tool in the armamentarium of science.

See Daniel Dennett's excellent refutation of Gould et al.'s attack on adaptationism in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea".

Pair0dox - you're talking about the making of hypotheses, which is a very powerful tool. But you can't base scientific theory purely on that. It's great for them to imagine, and it's produced a lot of interesting ideas, but sociobiology/ev. psych. always falters on its methodology. Dennett falls into the same trap that Ridley, Buss, et al do, in which they have a wildly incorrect conception of evolution and how it works. They all assume that people have evolved to a specific environment and plausible hypotheses that are spun off that environment - when supported by superficially similar behavior now - must be true.

That of course is wrong. No one can really determine with any specificity to what environmental or social pressures humans have evolved. And my biology professors always said that was the critical trick in evolution: separating out what actual occurs from natural selection from what occurs from other forces. Remember, natural selection isn't the only selective force out there. Chance and selective neutrality are also important. I would daresay that culture and socialization are part of that as well, but in the end, there are very few meaningful ways to disaggregate the evolutionary (but not necessarily the biological) reasons from the social ones for why humans act the way they do.

And I will say that, up until the gossip post, I always thought that Saletan was quite good on the sociobiology thing. He came close to the edge of their hypotheses, but never took the full leap in.

Chengora,

I see that we disagree on Dennett's depth of understanding of the process of evolution. I am not sure if you've read the book I referred to, but I found it to be quite well aligned with my understanding of the process. I am not a specialist in this area of biology, but I have devoted a fair amount of study to it, and I think he nails it.

We may have to agree to disagree on this. Regardless, looking at hypotheses such as the ones discussed critically also means giving them a chance to generate testable predictions, not dismissing them out of hand as "just so stories" because you're not comfortable with applying biology in this way.

Respectfully,

GVG

HopefulCynic adheres to a popular criticism of ev psych, but misguided still for all of its respectable practitioners. I will admit that a lot of the day-to-day discussions revolving around evolutionary psychology are dorm-room B.S. sessions...thinking up a plausible selection pressure and leaving it at that. However, to state that these hypotheses are untestable is to sound like a creationist! "You can't recreated millions of years of evolution in the lab, so you can't scientifically state it happened." Nonsense. If cognition were designed according to natural selection it should make testable predictions about the current functioning of human cognition. Testing these predictions is MUCH harder than making them, but people are doing it and the results are compelling. When the data collected in the modern world determine that: all proposed alternative hypotheses to a "cheater detection" mechanism fail, when mate-choice sex differences turn out to be universal, when females show a selective advantage in spatial cognition when tracking food items (and accuracy is tied to caloric density), when people automatically attend to animals but NOT the cars which are actually dangerous in thier environment...you start to see a body of evidence that is predicted by thinking of the brain as a mechanism designed by natural selection to be selective about its response and development in relation to its environment and NOT one that begins equipotential and is then shaped by experience.

As for the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness) I've heard this one a bunch of times. It is NOT necessary to know all of the details, and nail the EEA into a certain time and place. The EEA is a composite of all of the features of the human environment which have, in a statistical sense, remained constant enough over enough time to have had an impact on our adaptations. That's it. So, we don't need to know that humans evolved in a particular sized group ALL THE TIME, or hunted only with male bands all the time, or evolved at a specific latitude with a specific length of day and ate a specific fruit. Good ev psych hypotheses are based on KNOWABLE aspects of the EEA...over time, it is statistically reliable that humans...need a male and a female to make a baby. Humans need calories to function. Humans are omnivores. Human fitness is lowered by pathogens and parasites. Male reproductive success is limited by access to females, more than female success is limited by access to males. Condoms, cars, televisions, and welfare were NOT part of the EEA. If human cognition emerged in response to an EEA with these features, it makes straightforward predictions about the nature of that cognition. That's what good ev psych practitioners test.

As for the assumption that all data can be explained by environmental influences and experience...this is an interesting fallback assumption, but in its unsupported form it is just as much of a "just-so" story as the worst ev psych explanations. If a man is better at navigating a 3D environment, let's say, an environmental explanation could take the form of "well, society expects men to be better at that. They play more sports, more video games. There MUST HAVE been more experience in 3D enviornments for boys than for girls." These hypotheses require evidence, too! Demonstrate the link between sports, video games, and 3D navigation ability independent of sex per se. Show me that the individual differences predicted by the "blank slate" actually exist, and that they account for the variance actually observed. Outside of that kind of evidence, I don't have any reason to find experienced-based explanations compelling as a scientist.

Yes, all human behavior is an interaction between genes and environment. Let's not forget this. However, genes are responsible for taking a specific environment and making specific adaptations out of that environment. The question, then, becomes the nature of those adaptations. Are they domain-general systems which observe statistical correlations in the environment, and absorb cultural invformation wholesale in determining the functions of a person? Or do cognitive mechansims have the design they do because they have historically succeeded in taking specific information from the environment and doing a specific thing to that information to confer a reproductive benefit? Basic adaptationist thinking (as well as continually emerging evidence) leads to the conclusion that the latter is quite probably true.

You make good points Mangar, and I feel my comments were taken a bit farther than they were meant to be. There is indeed good ev-psych being done, carefully, by many scientists. But the pop-news version, I hope you'll grant, almost always ends up going out of line. I mean gossiping? Really? And the repeated references to evolution of "early (hu)man" tends to be incredibly reductionist, as if that's the only part of our evolutionary history that mattered, and ignoring that around the same time, culture was founded, and culture has affected how we've evolved just as how we've evolved has affected our culture. And I don't mean to underplay genes; rather, I want to play them correctly -- in chords with environment. As with Odling-Smee's Niche Construction, we need to realize that environment and biology create each other.

My contention is not so much with all ev-pscyh, but rather the kind of excited just-so stuff Saletan often giddily reports. And he's right that suppositions/hypotheses are an important part of the process, but biologically determinist suppositions made about the genetic basis of gossip is one step from hopelessly silly. I don't know if Saletan means to imply a sort of philosophical relativism -- where all ideas are equally true and worthy of voicing -- but I was just trying to say that the ideas he tends to voice in this area tend to, in my view, border on the farcical. Not all ideas are created equal, and WS traffics in just-so stories of the spurious kind. Just because pure speculation is fun and often useful doesn't mean it's always productive, scientific, or a good idea to base a column on.

Though I do admit, my subject heading was too categorical -- oops! *All* ev-psych is *not* just so, just most of ev-pscyh as reported in the media is...

And of course the media is waaaaay behind on understanding the possibly huge relative importance of neutral theory and drift... Nei came to lecture at my school recently, and asserted that adaptation was almost never present and that neutral theory could explain everything... i.e. an outdated rehash of the "neutralist-selectionist" debate. Nevertheless, drift/neutral theory is hugely more important than it gets recognized for in press accounts (unsurprisingly).