The third rampage of evolutionism: evolutionary pscyhology

Mainly the one where you think that repeating an idea over and over again without backing it up will give it additional strength.If you're gonna do that, at the very least you could work up a mantra for it. Here, I'll put one together for you."Doraw-nosam-cuteh-lot". Enjoy, and don't say I never gave ya' nothing.

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"Egos drone and pose alone, Like black balloons, all banged and blown
On a backwards river, infidels shiver In the stench of belief
And tell my mama I'm a hundred years late
I'm over the rails and out of the race
The crippled psalms of an age that won't thaw ringing in my ears"
-Beck

I find it very unlikely that there is an evolutionary behaviour to fear snakes. That over so many years the population shifted from organisms that didn't fear snakes towards organisms that did fear snakes.I think they all feared snakes right at the start, and the explanation for that fear is the same as that for fearing a stranger, it's because of the strangeness to the organism.Gee, you might have wanted to take some examples that are actually credible. Since you can just make up these examples more or less, I fail to see, why such an apparently weak example as snakefear is chosen to advertise evolutionary psychology.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

If your explanation was this... ...then I can only restate my plea that you actually try and learn something about probabilty.Just to add, nothing reaches unity by being close to 1, either it is 1 or it isn't, the possible exception might be 0.9 recurring. Or rather none of us know what you are talking about.TTFN,WK

You must be misconstruing what I write. I am not saying that the chance of heads increases with each throw of not turning up heads.I asked you for where science recognizes decision, as a point at which something goes one way in stead of another. So you came up with a "probability reaching unity". But actually it seems this term is used when the outcome of the "probability" is always the same. It is so to say the upperbound in a window of oppurtunity in which a decision can take place. So that would be quite an absurd term to use for "decision", and not what I asked for at all.Again, please reference somewhere where a "probability reaching unity", turns out one way one time, and another way another time.edited to add: as far I can tell a probability reaching unity is simply the opposite of a probability reaching zero. So at the least you would have to rephrase as a probability reaching unity, or zero. But that is of course not a name for the event of decision, but a definition. As before, it's proven beyond reasonable doubt that scientists simply don't know about decision, as the point where something goes one way in stead of another, to the point that they don't even have a common name for it which is generally known.regards,
Mohammad Nor SyamsuThis message has been edited by Syamsu, 02-03-2005 23:57 AM

I never said that you did. You aren't just misconstruing what I say, you are making it up as you go along. Again you show your flawed grasp of probability. Our calculations of
when p=1 are based on our previous observations of related phenomena. If something is in a state we have previously observed many times and in every previous case the outcome has been of one type then we would probably give it p=1 to be of that type again. Up until it reached that point there were a variety of possible outcomes, therefore when that particular point is reached it is determined which outcome will be realised, i.e. which way things will go. [qs] as far I can tell a probability reaching unity is simply the opposite of a probability reaching zero.[qs] As I pointed out before, in a binary situation p=0 is the complement of p=1, the point at which one possible outcome becomes certain to happen and all the others are precluded, i.e the point when things go one way instead of any other.TTFN,WK

Well you are simply mistaken. It is not determined there which way it will go, because actually it can't come out any other way there.I read some references about it, and as far I can say, you don't know what you're talking about. Texts that go like, for S1>3 probability of person dying in car crash reaches unity, meaning simply that if S1 is larger then 3, the outcome will always be the same, the person will always die. There is no other outcome, there is no decision.I'll thank you to have shown how engrained the prejudice is, when you just put up some mechanism that can't turn out one way or the other at all, as decision.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

With all due respect, you are simply assuming that because you have come across the term in one specific context then that is the only context in which it can ever be applied.Probabilities have a number of different applications, the term unity is applicable for all of them for p=1. But the point when something goes one way or another is the point when it can't go any other way. Obviously you actually want the point just before things go one way or another, but at that point nothing has been determined.p can be equal to 1 for an awfully long period of time but the instant when p becomes equal to 1 is the same instant at which the determination of the outcome occurs. How is this not what we were talking about?TTFN,WK

I can only say as before, you only have given an incomplete definition of "decision", you omitted the probability reaches zero part, and it's still not a name. As before, you are just noting the limit on a window of oppurtunity. When S1=>3 then nothing is decided in the accident, it is predetermined.But even in the unlikely event that your usage is correct, you can't very well communicate about "unities" as if they are points where something turns out one way in stead of another. And not being able to communicate about it easily still means that it is fundamentally underdeveloped.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

I don't see any problem communicating easily except when trying to communicate with someone who is entirely unwilling to enter a dialogue in good faith.As far as I can see what you are saying is that simply because you don't understand something it is therefore 'fundamentally underdeveloped'.The fact that you love arguing word choice and terminology rather than actually addressing scientific issues or real world examples of how probabilities are used is one of the reasons why the threads on this issue never get anywhere.TTFN,WK

I was hoping to see a response to Holmes post above.--Syamsu, on the off chance that you have been misunderstood, there is an observation in quantum physics of a "wave function collapse". Because the object is inderterminate until measured, when it is measured the probability that it occupies one possible slot or another will "collapse" into a certainty, here and now.While I am not actually familiar with the term "probability collpase" in statisticis, I think the same idea holds, and that stistics will also refer to probabilistic functions. The same concept of "collapse" would then apply.

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I was hoping to see a response to Holmes post above.

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Coming up this weekend Thrusdays and Fridays are 16 hour days for me.

Same for you, you also try to argue in good faith. What I say about "unities" not communicating very well for a point where something goes one way in stead of another is reasonable by any standard. Nobody here understands it in relation to things going one way or another, which includes you, nobody here knows to use it, while it is supposedly a fundamental principle like "cause and effect". Yet you go on, and on, and on, pretending that decision is perfectly well handled in science, that everybody understands it, except me because I never studied probabilities. Mere obstinacy.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

I agree your story is logical, it could have happened that way. But there are other just as logical stories that have been proposed. For example, that the system of very hardwired nature did not change into a more blank slate design but instead new areas with this ability were incorporated. So say, older areas of the brain have very strong instinctual effects, while the pre-frontal cortex has lots of plasticity. Or maybe very little plasticity evolved at all.As in all science, I think the verdict has to come from empirical studies. The bad news is that there is a lot lacking in this area, not the least of which is because all previous methods of study were extremely invasive and couldn’t be done on humans. The good news is we are starting to develop technology that is making this possible. So the research is starting to be done.As an example of the kind of research that I think is going to start coming out in droves is an experiment being performed now up in Michigan. Female mice assesse certain genetic alleles in males during their estrous point as well as strong testosterone cues. A specific area of the brain was identified in the mice that were instrumental in the process. When removed, the assessment and preferences disappear. A VERY similar structure was found in human females. They are doing a series of FMRI studies now on women to see if during their peak fertility points on the cycle the brain lights up in these areas in a similar fashion as in the mice while assessing testosterone cues of men in photos. This is conservation and constraint. If the processes worked well then it would continue to be co-opted into each organism even over great spans of evolutionary time. Since the experiment is being done now and isn’t published I am not drawing any conclusions from it. But the idea is being looked at, about older areas of the brain, or more domain specific areas of the brain and how we can study them.In the mean time, just how much evidence is there that the human brain is produced as a blank slate? Well I think it can be shown that humans are born with a lot of things built into them. We are not blank slates by any means. Something as simple as looking at language acquisition can tell you that the brain has system to incorporate language at birth, and that we are born with this system in place. The language we learn is encoded differently but the rules we use to learn language, we seem to be born with. And you can find a range of other such instincts we are born with, from precipice avoidance, to attachment. Also as we grow older, the sexual responses, mating strategies, mate assessment, hell liking fatty foods, all seem to have components that are intrinsically born into us. A blank slate would mean that humans could in theory develop an infinite range of cultures and interactions. But that doesn’t seem to happen. We should be able to find cultures where people hate fatty foods, where men are not attracted to young women with small waist to hip ratios.The evidence I can see now against the blank slate is pretty strong. You have evidence from people who have suffered brain injuries to specific areas which show deficits in specific areas. You show evidence of specific areas of the brain that respond to specific stimuli. You see VERY VERY little neuronal plasticity. Brain tissue from other areas of the brain can not co-opt function in most cases. And some of the most dramatic examples of neuronal plasticity aren’t that impressive. There was that seminal study where they wired the optical nerve of ferrets into the audio cortex and showed that the ferrets could still see. But really the audio cortex is structured VERY similar to the visual cortex, and the ferrets actually saw with the kind of restraints (directionality, frequency, intensity) we normally find in hearing. If the blank slate were real I would expect to see a whole lot more evidence for it.You then bring up the idea that I think is basically encapsulated into the theory of adaptationism. The phrase we coined in the Gould/Lewontin articles on spandrels and exaptations. They argued that many things that could be identified as adaptations are really just evolutionary spandrels or exaptations. There has been a raging debate on both sides for twenty years. How do you know something is an adaptation and how do you know the selective forces behind it? This isn’t just a problem for evolutionary psychology it is a problem for all of evolution.You have trait A at one point in time then trait B at another point in time. That’s all you have. How do you know that the change in the trait was due to selection pressures? How do you know what the trait was for? There is no sure fire way in evolutionary science to answer these questions but people have been trying to come up with ideas.Concepts such as universality, early development, and optimization have been proposed. But you have yourself pointed out some problems with these. For example, in evolutionary psychology we say there is a universal language acquisition device. But you can’t just use the fact that it is universal to prove it. In 100 years everyone might know how to read, but that doesn’t mean we have psychological adaptations for reading, in fact there is really no way we can. In language Steven Pinker offers how we begin to try and solve this problem. Pinker points out that the universal language acquisition device makes it so people just naturally learn language. You don’t have to be taught it during the critical period, you just have to be exposed to it. In fact, if you are not exposed to it you often develop your own pseudo languages. This doesn’t happen with reading, learning to read is a struggle. You can’t just be shown a series of pages and over time pick it up naturally.This is exhibiting what has come to be called functional design or special design (don’t start dredging up Intelligent Design quite yet, hear me out on this). Selection pressures are unique in evolution in that they can shape traits for a specific function. Things like spandrels, exaptations, and drift do not have this ability. Selection though favors variants and over time traits get shaped for performing specific operations. In a sense you can call this designed but I don’t like to use that word in these kind of environments because its deadly. Instead I will say, functionally shaped. Assume a trait has developed because of evolution, if it has a specific function shaped to a specific reproductive or survival problem, selection is the only known mechanism that can do this. And the better we understand what the specific function is the more sure we can be of the selective force that shaped it.The waist to hip ratio is an interesting problem. It is good for at least 5 different things, but it was only shaped by selection for one thing and later exapted for these other functions. How can you tell what the selection force actually was? Well one way that’s being looked at is to see what WHR is optimal for each function. So a WHR of .7 is optimal for parasite load detection but a WHR of .8 is better for assessing pregnancy. If the preferred WHR is .7 then you have stronger evidence that the shaping selective force was parasite detection.You also bring up the question of heritability and genetics. We have no proof that psychological mechanisms are derived by genes. It’s all anecdotal. But at this point I am not too worried about it. I would be bold enough to state that any complex phenotypic trait it is unknown exactly how it is related back to genes. With as few as 20,000 genes in our genome how we get from gene A to trait B is a long and winding path involving introns/exons, pre-rna processing and vast regulatory networks. Is our hand a product of evolution? It think most people would say yes, but how do we know? We don’t have a model for how we got from our genes to our hand and how that worked through evolution. Instead we have the fact that most people have a hand, that we can find examples of similar hands in close species, similar adaptations in other animals in the similar niche as ours, and more primitive examples in the evolutionary past of our species. And even functional shaping of our hand.We have all of this for psychological mechanisms except for fossilization. Why is so crazy to think that our behaviors are caused by the same things as other more somatic phenotypes? There is STRONG heritability of various mental states and abilities in our species even in examples of same gene different environments.

I must not have told my story well enough, as this was exactly the story I was trying to tell. I was trying to say that the brain system started purely hardwired (simple) and grew to more complex levels of hardwired systems, eventually (at what point we do not know when) developed areas of the brain which were open to creating new rules due to environmental interaction. This is what you are refering to as areas of plasticity.It is of course possible that there is very very little plasticity, and most decision making areas are purely hardwired and the plasticity is simple reconnections from some hardwired "groups" to other hardwired "groups"... kind of like crossing cables to different computer systems.This does not detract from my point, indeed it solidifies it. We do not have accurate knowledge of the functioning of the brain system now, much less how it functioned in precursor species to draw accurate analogies. The best we have are speculative analogies. This statement is problematic for me. It is almost identical to what ID theorists claim for their own scientific field, and my reply is the same... if research in an area required before making positive claims within the stated scientific field being advanced, why is it necessary to study or advance that scientific field at all? I realize it is interesting in a speculative way, but such things are easily clipped by occam's razor when it comes to the general field.Once we get significant knowledge of how psych mechs (PMs) are developed in a brain system, just like significant knowledge of biochemical systems of cells and precells, then we can start discussing accurate study of change over time. This is of course an interesting study in comparative biology, specifically of brain structure, and has ramifications regarding hardwired nature of some PMs.But every PM is on a case by case basis, and it is a bit of a leap to go from the brain using testosterone cues in mate selection, to the prevalance of phobias regarding snakes. The latter has so many more levels of possible interaction between the environment and the brain, that it would be much more difficult to assess whether it is adaptational (to environment, culture, etc) or evolutional (hardwired and then selected for).If Buss's article had not leapt toward the more generic and broad PMs, I would have been less agitated by his work, and it is suggestions that we are anywhere near such an understanding to announce evo-psych at that level of assessment is plausible or helpful, that make me wince.It really appears to me that the best that can be said is that the doors have been opened for a greater analysis into the debate of genes vs environment, nature vs nurture, regarding PMs, and after that is significantly concluded... and compared to equally understood brain systems of relevant ancestors... we can move into evo-psych.The idea that the brain is evolved does aid in arguing for comparative brain biology studies, but that is still neural in nature, and not positing what PMs we see now are hardwired. It is of course possible that we lost a hardwired "decision" and the plastic section commonly recreates it due to common (and coincidental) environmental effects.Indeed I think that is one of the similarities between EP and ID that I am seeing. You find a plausible connection between PM and an advantage in a speculated environment, or a direct correlation between a hardwired PM in a near ancestor and a PM in a human, and thus we can make a conclusion of any kind?That seems like much too large a step. Let me repeat this to be very clear, I am not advocating the position that the brain is wholly empty disk. Indeed it is possible that it is almost entirely hardwired with the only adaptational changes being changes in links (cables) between separate predetermined (hardwired) decision groups.My argument is we don't know enough about the brain to make definite statements regarding this, and that is why EP is premature at best.I will say this however, no matter what level of proportion of decisions are hardwired, it is also pretty damn conclusive we are not 100% hardwired. There is some proportion of empty disk space which gets filled up with some sort of rules. Otherwise we would be as alike as other animal species in our functioning. I think this is vastly overstated and where EPs need to stop trying to undercut anthropology just to try and make points. Cultures have been found to be vastly different, especially as one moves back through time where cultural interaction and imposition was not a factor. Within 100 years it may be possible that there is no cultural diveristy outside of minor sub-cultures, but that is because everyone will be dealing with a near identical cultural environment.Mating rituals and assessments do vary. Indeed I would like some good links to that WHR study as it seems rather inconsistent with my own understanding of sexual attraction. Some cultures (it would seem) cannot have such prefs as actual forms are obscured by required clothing and even by racial body type. For example thai and chinese girls generally do not have similar whr to western women, yet are found attractive. And some cultures preferred very large hips or breasts.As far as food preference goes, have you ever had Kim Chee? Heck, have you ever smelled Kim Chee? I remember an asian friend of mine was eating something either japanese or korean and the look on her face was that of absolute revulsion (my cue to her look of "disgust"). She absolutely loved it and I later found that food was actually a culturally popular item and the facial look (which is commonly seen as disgust) was one of enjoyment!On the flipside the like/dislike of coriander seems to be genetically linked to a specific racial grouping. And even that is particular to europe, though it is perhaps a lack of early exposure to coriander within that cultural population which makes it unpopular? I dunno. I am also a bit skeptical on this item. How was it determined that the neural system is specific to language acquisition and not simply pattern recognition which allows for language acquisition as a side effect? I do get this point, but the fact that it can occur does not justify conclusions based on what I am seeing conclusions being based upon (ie PM popularity combined with speculative advantages within speculative environments for speculative ancestor). And that is where the problem exists. I admit it seems a likely conclusion that there are many many hardwired PMs within humans, or at least hardwired groups of decisionmaking rules which result in PMs based on environment.Yet there is a huge gap between arguing that and what evolutionary reason generated, or likely generated, any particular PM.You gave the example of a hand. It is true that people believing in evolutionary theory will believe that its form was genetically derives and influences by selection on function.But the hand is not like a brain in one very crucial way. It is not capable of changing on its own due to environmental influences in order to work better within them. That is the hand is incapable of "learning", the brain is.Let us say hands did have this ability and so could combine digits or remove them at will based on need, say to help climbing if one found onesself needing to be in trees, or swimming if one were to become aquatic for a while. Then we could not as easily discuss any particular temporary handshape as having come from a specific evolutionary environment. The best we can say is that the hand's greater plasticity was an advantage evolutionarily and so was selected for.Any current hand shape could be adaptational (the possibility resulting from evolution of plasticity and coincidental form mimicking another species' limb shape), or evolutionary (the hand remembers or has stored previous ancestor limb shapes and simply shifts into them). I have yet to see this for most PMs, at least in any way that cannot also include common environmental adaptation or cultural interaction.Once again I will mention that fear of the undead or anything unliving, and a belief in the afterlife and powerful entities beyond human life is extremely common (more so than fear of snakes I'd think)... does that suggest our ancestors dealt with these creatures on a routine basis?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

...and she jumps in!

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And what idea of mine in particular do you find to be crazy?

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That you have constantly, for years invoked Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" as some kind of support for your argument when you have never read the book.You have never read the book, Syamsu.Why do you think you can use it in your arguments if you have never read it?If you have never read it, you cannot know what it says, can you?You have never read the book. You don't know what it says.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 02-05-2005 08:34 AM