Epic smackdown. EPIC.
I'm taking a class in Evolutionary Psychology right now and it's making me crazy.
This article blows it out of the water:
...evolutionary psychologists are greatly concerned with sex, and with women’s bodies. Barash speculates at length on why women don’t have something similar to chimps’ bright-pink sexual swellings to advertise their most fertile time of the month. There are several ways, he thinks, in which female hominids could have boosted their reproductive success by concealing their time of ovulation. Perhaps it was a game of “keep him guessing to keep him close”: if a male could not tell when his mate was fertile, he would have to stick around for more of the month to insure that any offspring were his and thereby, perhaps, provide better parental care. Among the other possibilities considered-some rejected, many not-are that concealed ovulation gave females more freedom in their choice of mates, perhaps by reducing the frenzy of male competition.
This is all quite entertaining-almost as entertaining as Barash’s romp through eleven evolutionary theories about the “biological pay-off” of the human female orgasm, which unfittingly comes to no gratifying conclusion. But “concealed” ovulation seems to be an example of what George Williams called a nonexistent problem. Barash dismisses, on flimsy grounds, the idea that it is the florid advertisements of chimps that need explaining, and not our lack of them. Yet chimps are the exceptional ones in our family of the great apes, and there’s reason to think that the most recent common ancestor of chimps and humans displayed, at most, only slight swellings around the time of ovulation.
The simplest theory is that these swellings dwindled to nothing after our ancestors began to walk upright, because the costs of advertising ovulation in this way came to outweigh any benefits. Swellings could have made it harder to walk for several days each month, could have required more energy and a greater intake of water, and would be of less use as a signal when you were no longer clambering up trees with your bottom in males’ faces.
A larger difficulty vexes evolutionary psychologists’ sexual speculations in general. Especially on this topic, work in psychology can unwittingly accommodate itself to the folk wisdom and stereotypes of the day.
Darwin built the prejudices of Victorian gentlemen into his account of the evolution of the sexes. He wrote that man reaches “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain-whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,” and he looked to the struggle for mates and the struggle for survival to explain why. He also noted that some of the faculties that are strongest in women “are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”
These days, what evolutionary psychologists have mainly noted about the sexes is that they look for different things in a mate. The evolutionary psychologists have spent decades administering questionnaires to college students in an effort to confirm their ideas about what sort of partner was desirable in bed before there were beds. “Men value youth and physical attractiveness very highly, while women value wealth and status (though they don’t mind physical attractiveness too),” Dario Maestripieri, a behavioral biologist at the University of Chicago, bluntly summarizes in his new book, “Games Primates Play.” It is also said that men are much more interested in casual sex; that sexual jealousy works differently for men and women (men are more concerned with sexual fidelity, and women with emotional fidelity); and that all these differences, and more, can be explained as the traces of behavior that would have enabled our distant ancestors to leave more descendants. Many such explanations arise from the idea that males have more to gain than females do by seeking a large number of mates-a notion that is ultimately based on experiments with fruit flies in 1948.
It’s not inconceivable that in a hundred and fifty years today’s folk wisdom about the sexes will sound as ridiculous as Darwin’s. It will surely look a bit quaint. Sexual mores can shift quickly: American women reared during the nineteen-sixties were nearly ten times as likely as those reared earlier to have had sex with five or more partners before the age of twenty, according to a 1994 study. As for women’s supposedly inborn preference for wealth and status in a mate, one wonders how much can be inferred from behavior in a world that seems always to have been run by and for men. Although it is, in some places, now easier than ever for a woman to acquire power without marrying it, economic inequality has not disappeared. Even in the most egalitarian countries, in Scandinavia, the average earnings of male full-time workers are more than ten per cent higher than those of their female counterparts; and more than ninety per cent of the top earners in America’s largest companies are men.
A study of attitudes toward casual sex, based on surveys in forty-eight countries, by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, found that the differences between the sexes varied widely, and shrank in places where women had more freedom. The sexes never quite converged, though: Schmitt found persistent differences, and thinks those are best explained as evolutionary adaptations. But he admits that his findings have limited value, because they rely entirely on self-reports, which are notoriously unreliable about sex, and did not examine a true cross-section of humanity. All of his respondents were from modern nation-states-there were no hunter-gatherers, or people from other small-scale societies-and most were college students.
Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species. American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens. The relatively few experiments conducted in non-Western cultures suggest that the minds of American students are highly unusual in many respects, including their spatial cognition, responses to optical illusions, styles of reasoning, coöperative behavior, ideas of fairness, and risk-taking strategies. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia concluded recently that U.S. college kids are “one of the worst subpopulations one could study” when it comes to generalizing about human psychology. Their main appeal to evolutionary psychologists is that they’re readily available. Man’s closest relatives are all long extinct; breeding experiments on humans aren’t allowed (they would take far too long, anyway); and the mental life of our ancestors left few fossils.
Perhaps it shouldn’t matter whether evolutionary psychologists can prove that some trait got incorporated into human nature because it was useful on the African savanna. If they were really in the history business, they wouldn’t spend so much time playing Hot or Not with undergraduates. A review of the methods of evolutionary psychology, published last summer in a biology journal, underlined a point so simple that its implications are easily missed. To confirm any story about how the mind has been shaped, you need (among other things) to determine how people today actually think and behave, and to test rival accounts of how these traits function. Once you have done that, you will, in effect, have finished the job of explaining how the mind works. What life was really like in the Stone Age no longer matters. It doesn’t make any practical difference exactly how our traits became established. All that matters is that they are there.
Then why do enthusiasts for evolutionary psychology insist that politicians and social scientists should pay attention to the evolutionary roots of behavior? In theory, historical conjectures might point to useful patterns that hadn’t been noticed before, though convincing examples are hard to come by.
This article blows it out of the water:
...evolutionary psychologists are greatly concerned with sex, and with women’s bodies. Barash speculates at length on why women don’t have something similar to chimps’ bright-pink sexual swellings to advertise their most fertile time of the month. There are several ways, he thinks, in which female hominids could have boosted their reproductive success by concealing their time of ovulation. Perhaps it was a game of “keep him guessing to keep him close”: if a male could not tell when his mate was fertile, he would have to stick around for more of the month to insure that any offspring were his and thereby, perhaps, provide better parental care. Among the other possibilities considered-some rejected, many not-are that concealed ovulation gave females more freedom in their choice of mates, perhaps by reducing the frenzy of male competition.
This is all quite entertaining-almost as entertaining as Barash’s romp through eleven evolutionary theories about the “biological pay-off” of the human female orgasm, which unfittingly comes to no gratifying conclusion. But “concealed” ovulation seems to be an example of what George Williams called a nonexistent problem. Barash dismisses, on flimsy grounds, the idea that it is the florid advertisements of chimps that need explaining, and not our lack of them. Yet chimps are the exceptional ones in our family of the great apes, and there’s reason to think that the most recent common ancestor of chimps and humans displayed, at most, only slight swellings around the time of ovulation.
The simplest theory is that these swellings dwindled to nothing after our ancestors began to walk upright, because the costs of advertising ovulation in this way came to outweigh any benefits. Swellings could have made it harder to walk for several days each month, could have required more energy and a greater intake of water, and would be of less use as a signal when you were no longer clambering up trees with your bottom in males’ faces.
A larger difficulty vexes evolutionary psychologists’ sexual speculations in general. Especially on this topic, work in psychology can unwittingly accommodate itself to the folk wisdom and stereotypes of the day.
Darwin built the prejudices of Victorian gentlemen into his account of the evolution of the sexes. He wrote that man reaches “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain-whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,” and he looked to the struggle for mates and the struggle for survival to explain why. He also noted that some of the faculties that are strongest in women “are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”
These days, what evolutionary psychologists have mainly noted about the sexes is that they look for different things in a mate. The evolutionary psychologists have spent decades administering questionnaires to college students in an effort to confirm their ideas about what sort of partner was desirable in bed before there were beds. “Men value youth and physical attractiveness very highly, while women value wealth and status (though they don’t mind physical attractiveness too),” Dario Maestripieri, a behavioral biologist at the University of Chicago, bluntly summarizes in his new book, “Games Primates Play.” It is also said that men are much more interested in casual sex; that sexual jealousy works differently for men and women (men are more concerned with sexual fidelity, and women with emotional fidelity); and that all these differences, and more, can be explained as the traces of behavior that would have enabled our distant ancestors to leave more descendants. Many such explanations arise from the idea that males have more to gain than females do by seeking a large number of mates-a notion that is ultimately based on experiments with fruit flies in 1948.
It’s not inconceivable that in a hundred and fifty years today’s folk wisdom about the sexes will sound as ridiculous as Darwin’s. It will surely look a bit quaint. Sexual mores can shift quickly: American women reared during the nineteen-sixties were nearly ten times as likely as those reared earlier to have had sex with five or more partners before the age of twenty, according to a 1994 study. As for women’s supposedly inborn preference for wealth and status in a mate, one wonders how much can be inferred from behavior in a world that seems always to have been run by and for men. Although it is, in some places, now easier than ever for a woman to acquire power without marrying it, economic inequality has not disappeared. Even in the most egalitarian countries, in Scandinavia, the average earnings of male full-time workers are more than ten per cent higher than those of their female counterparts; and more than ninety per cent of the top earners in America’s largest companies are men.
A study of attitudes toward casual sex, based on surveys in forty-eight countries, by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, found that the differences between the sexes varied widely, and shrank in places where women had more freedom. The sexes never quite converged, though: Schmitt found persistent differences, and thinks those are best explained as evolutionary adaptations. But he admits that his findings have limited value, because they rely entirely on self-reports, which are notoriously unreliable about sex, and did not examine a true cross-section of humanity. All of his respondents were from modern nation-states-there were no hunter-gatherers, or people from other small-scale societies-and most were college students.
Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species. American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens. The relatively few experiments conducted in non-Western cultures suggest that the minds of American students are highly unusual in many respects, including their spatial cognition, responses to optical illusions, styles of reasoning, coöperative behavior, ideas of fairness, and risk-taking strategies. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia concluded recently that U.S. college kids are “one of the worst subpopulations one could study” when it comes to generalizing about human psychology. Their main appeal to evolutionary psychologists is that they’re readily available. Man’s closest relatives are all long extinct; breeding experiments on humans aren’t allowed (they would take far too long, anyway); and the mental life of our ancestors left few fossils.
Perhaps it shouldn’t matter whether evolutionary psychologists can prove that some trait got incorporated into human nature because it was useful on the African savanna. If they were really in the history business, they wouldn’t spend so much time playing Hot or Not with undergraduates. A review of the methods of evolutionary psychology, published last summer in a biology journal, underlined a point so simple that its implications are easily missed. To confirm any story about how the mind has been shaped, you need (among other things) to determine how people today actually think and behave, and to test rival accounts of how these traits function. Once you have done that, you will, in effect, have finished the job of explaining how the mind works. What life was really like in the Stone Age no longer matters. It doesn’t make any practical difference exactly how our traits became established. All that matters is that they are there.
Then why do enthusiasts for evolutionary psychology insist that politicians and social scientists should pay attention to the evolutionary roots of behavior? In theory, historical conjectures might point to useful patterns that hadn’t been noticed before, though convincing examples are hard to come by.