Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
Product Description
Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided.
Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology’s most highly publicized “discoveries,” including “discriminative parental solicitude” (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence.
Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
Herbert Gintis said,
Wrote on October 3, 2010 @ 12:00 am
David Buller, a philosopher, has written a book critiquing the scientific work of a subgroup of evolutionary psychologists who adhere to a doctrine first clearly articulated in a series of brilliant articles and books by D. Symons, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby. Their work was immeasurably enhanced by its uptake by popular science writers R. Wright and S. Pinker.
I think the philosophy of science is quite important, but I cannot think of a case where philosophers, qua philosophers, have added anything substantive to the critique of a scientific theory. I read this book only because of the extravagant praise afforded it by prominent behavioral scientists, including David Sloan Wilson, Linnda Caporeal, and Kim Sterelny. While I think this book does have a lot to offer the interested lay reader, it certainly does not violate my generalization about the worthlessness of philosophers criticizing scientific theories.
The author is clear in stating that his contribution is not a critique of evolutionary psychology in general, but only of this particular subgroup, which he distinguishes by capitalizing the name. For a general description of evolutionary psychology and Evolutionary Psychology (which I call EvPsych), please see my review of Scher and Rauscher, Evolutionary Psychology.
Much of Buller’s effort goes to criticizing a few prominent examples of the empirical research of EvPsychers, including D. Buss’s analysis of mate preference, M. Daly and M. Wilson’s analysis of parenting vs. step-parenting, and C. Cosmides and J. Tooby’s analysis of cheater detection modules. I think this was an unfortunate choice because the general EvPsych approach does not stand or fall on these examples in any way. Despite Buller’s strong critique of Daly and Wilson, I suspect that their data analysis will emerge superior to Buller’s, if only because they are consummate professionals in the area and he is a rank amateur. But, either way, their predictions do not depend in any way on the particular doctrines of EvPsych, but are broadly based on the evolutionary psychology paradigm. Buss’s analysis of mate choice is impressively broad-based and thorough, but he has not been able to show that his results are due to EEA adaptations as opposed to strong cultural uniformities across societies, based on male dominance of modern political and economic hierarchies. Cosmides and Tooby’s analysis of cheater detection modules is directly related to a major EvPsych proposition (the modularity of mind), but the only people convinced by their cheater detection argument are themselves and their disciples.
In dealing with the theoretical basis of EvPsych, Buller is very successful only one point, albeit a major one: the existence and nature of mental modules. His success is based on a highly cogent critique of the EvPsych position that the human mind is composed of a set of distinct, complexly organized and independent modules, each of which evolved as a solution to a particular evolutionary challenge to our species. The critique, however, is not philosophical but scientific, based on the work of contemporary developmental neurobiologists. This is perhaps the best part of the book.
Buller also critiques somewhat effectively the notion that there has been little development in the human gene pool, vis-à-vis mental development, in the past 50,000 years, and hence that we possess “stone-age minds.” The arguments Buller uses are plausible, and take the form of noting that genetic change is much faster in many cases than assumed by the EvPsychers. Nevertheless, this point has not been nailed down by population biologists or quantitative geneticists, as far as I know.
Buller also deploys the argument that there was no single EEA, and hence there is no basis for the notion that human nature is homogeneous. This is a correct, but well-known argument. Only the EvPsychers themselves stick adamantly to the Orthodoxy on this point.
Doubtless the least effect part of this book is Buller’s extended attempt to deny that there is a such thing as “human nature.” Borrowing an argument from Hull, he asserts that species are “individuals” rather than “natural kinds” and only “natural kinds” have the sort of being that allows us to discuss their “nature.” This, to my mind, is exactly the type of philosophizing that renders the philosophical critique of science so bizarre and ineffective. Ducks have duck nature. It is what we learn when we study the character and behavior of ducks. Mosquitoes similarly have mosquito nature. Humans being are no different. The philosopher is not allowed to define the terms of science in his own bizarre way and then claim to have detected a synthetic a priori inconsistency in the scientific use of the term.
In short, I do not believe this book is an important contribution to the development of evolutionary psychology or to the critique of EvPsych, although it is a great introduction to the literature for an interested lay person, since Buller develops his themes carefully and lucidly, never leaving even the most uninstructed reader behind.
Rating: 4 / 5
J.P. Franks said,
Wrote on October 3, 2010 @ 1:45 am
This is not a book attempting to debunk evolutionary psychology, broadly speaking. It is a book that attempts to debunk a number of ev psych’s specific theses about human psychology, for example, the existence of a cheater-detection module. Buller’s critique of the latter is quite good, though the chapter on mate preferences I didn’t find as convincing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the philosopher Buller relys more on empirical studies than airy philosophical argument to create doubts about the veracity of ev psych’s claims. He is best when building cases for alternate explanations of the experimental results prominant evolutionary psychologists claim support theirs.
Buller does not deny that the evolutionary perspective is the correct one through which to view human psychology. He simply argues that the conclusions drawn by many prominent evolutionary psychologists have reached too far and are without sufficient evidentiary support. Those who, from a visceral feeling of repulsion at the thought that humans are evolved animals whose minds are products of natural processes, simply loathe the evolutionary perspective of human psychology, will not find this book comforting.
Rating: 4 / 5
James Daniels said,
Wrote on October 3, 2010 @ 3:38 am
Author David Buller was initially attracted to evolutionary psychology. The field attempts to explain the basic mechanisms of the human mind by extrapolating from the kinds of problems that our human ancestors faced. Unfortunately, the field is riven with conceptual and empirical problems, and Buller was ultimately forced to write this book as a critique.
Unlike most attacks on the field, this book is based on an examination of the theoretical principles and empirical data used to bolster the theory. He does not reject the idea that one might use evolutionary theory to understand human psychology, or worry at all about the possible ethical, moral, or political implications that such a theory would generate. Rather, he asks what evidence there is for the currently accepted hypotheses in the field. On this score, Buller finds numerous faults with the approach.
Evolutionarly psychologists use three lines of evidence: present adaptations, data on past environments, and data from other, related primates.
Present adaptations, however, are a product of recent selection, past selection, and individual differences in experience, and thus do not reliably tell us anything about our ancient past, even if we can find them.
With regard to past environments, Buller makes what is perhaps his strongest argument: there was no stable environment in human evolution to which the human organism could become progressively adapted. At every stage, the problems faced by animals changed. This was true when primitive hominids began to construct tools, use language, farm, and so on. For example, Buller shows that hunter man must kill or scavenge an animal to find food, but the specifics of this problem change when he makes tools like spears, and again when he domesticates animals. If there was no long period of stability in the past, then our minds are constantly changing to cope with ongoing problems.
Inferences from the lives of other primates are also of limited value, since the closest ones, chimps, diverged from us over 1 million years ago, and have lived in different environments ever since. If we could identify the environment in which we evolved, we could identify primates that currently inhabit similar niches, but such overlapping ecology is hard to find.
After dealing with these three conceptual problems with evolutionary psychology, Buller attacks the data for such things as massive mental modularity, cheater detection, and mate choice theory head on. At every point, the data are impressive, and can be interpreted as vaguely in support of some evolutionary psychological principles. However, as Buller shows, this is not the only possible interpretation of these data. Since both the theoretical arguments and the empirical data are only weakly in support of the theory, Buller argues that the theory ought to be much more limited in its scope and claims. It is refreshing to see such an honest appraisal of the primary theory and evidence, and see it discussed warts and all.
My only complaint about the book is that Buller too easily concedes the idea that language is modular and requires some kind of innate knowledge at birth. This idea was made popular by Chomsky, but modern linguists and neuroscientists have shown that these claims suffer from the same problems Buller finds for modularity, cheater detection, and so on. For example, very simple neural networks are capable of abstracting grammatical rules and word use heuristics, very rapidly, without any innate knowledge or pre-programmed modularity. Given that the bulk of evolutionary psychology is reasoned by analogy to language, I would have thought Buller would seek out and exploit these more recent findings that make Chomsky’s claims obsolete. Perhaps in the sequel we will see this.
The book is well written and designed for the lay public and interested undergraduates. No background in genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, or anthropology is necessary. Some knowledge of philosophy of science, notably Popper, Kuhn, and Laudan, would be helpful but not necessary. Those who have read and enjoyed Gould’s salvos against evolutionary psychology will enjoy this book even more. Acolytes of Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides, et al. would do well to read and heed the advice in this book.
Rating: 4 / 5
Thor Simon said,
Wrote on October 3, 2010 @ 5:25 am
Buller’s fair-minded and generally gentle critique of evolutionary psychology is well considered and strong. One almost wishes, however, that he had not occasionally chosen to thumb his nose at EvPsych orthodoxy, for example by choosing a title so close to that of Tooley and Cosmides’ own 1992 polemic “Adapted Minds”.
Buller’s grasp of evolutionary theory is strong, and his application of it responsible — he cogently pinpoints the faults of previous critiques of evolutionary psychology, for example that of Leontin and Gould. He also applies a philosopher’s grasp of logic to the notoriously problematic Wason task that unfortunately lies at the heart of the EvPsych “social exchange” theory. Problems with the Wason task, both within and between studies, are rampant, and hardly limited to its use by Cosmides and her collaborators; but this does not mean that Buller is in any way wrong to point out that the use of the task in key EvPsych studies displays problems both of experimental design and interpretation of results. Handwaving about how cheater detection and deontic logic are coextensive mental capacities aside (ironic because Cosmides herself has published papers claiming the opposite), one needs only the appreciation of translation difficulties granted by an elementary course in formal logic to realize that claims about “switched” sentence structures giving “switched” logical forms, independent of context, are extremely questionable; claims about the representative ability of logic that restrict themselves to the propositional calculus (ignoring even first-order logic, much less modal logic) are embarassing.
What is more noteworthy is that despite claims about mate selection and child abuse based essentially on the mining of public data of questionable reliability, the cheater-detection result is one of the only EvPsych results claiming to demonstrate a domain-specific improvement in performance over general reasoning processes on a concrete, repeatable cognitive task. We should certainly be excited about the potential of evolutionary psychology to deliver genuine explanations about the nature of human cognition, particularly in the social domain, where diverse results from other areas of work (e.g. motivated reasoning research) make it clear that there is _something_ beyond simple logical processing going on. But it is unfair to take Buller to task simply because he — correctly, in my opinion — points out that, thus far, the enthusiastic and broad theories of evolutionary psychology are a check that the basic experimental results cannot cash.
After 20 years of work, it is fair to ask whether evolutionary psychology has in fact earned the great excitement generated by the bold theoretical pronouncements and initial experimental successes of its early days. This is an important book because it casts a critical, but not rancorous, eye over the playing field and asks where, thus far, the pieces have landed. As another reviewer suggested, if taken as constructive scientific criticism rather than as blasphemous assault on dogma, it will do much to clear the way for future work. Whatever one’s present opinion of evolutionary psychology, this book deserves a careful reading simply because of the intellectual honesty of the task it sets itself, whether it succeeds or fails.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Spinozanator said,
Wrote on October 3, 2010 @ 6:24 am
I read Robert Wright’s celebrated “Moral Animal” some 10 years ago, and was thoroughly impressed. Finally I had found a theory of human nature and psychology I could wholeheartedly believe in. Now along comes David Buller and says it’s not so? Well, not so fast. This book is not so much a dismantling of the theory of evolutionary psychology as it is an assertion that the original evidence used in forming evo/psych (EP) – may have been overinterpreted.
Disclaimer: For those who were offended by the very suggestion that our behavior is just a more sophisticated version of similar behavior by our primate ancestors – you won’t like this book, either.
Buller’s complaints about EP:
EP theory is off-base in considering the brain to consist of thousands of evolved “modules.” Instead, in his version, the mind is “adapted to adapt” to highly variable and rapidly changing environments.
He differs from EP thought, also, in that he thinks we are not psychological relics of our stone age ancestors – we have continued to evolve. Buller cites studies suggesting that N/S can overhaul species adaptations in 18 generations (450 years for humans) – concentrating on “cortical plasticity,” thus his title “Adapting Minds.”
He questions (among other things) the evidence for EP’s conclusions about the human sexual behaviors of infidelity and jealousy, and the different (male vs female) manifestations of these traits.
He questions statistics that suggest step-children are frequently and almost predictably mistreated (compared to genetic children) by step-parents. EP absorbed completely the step-parent/step-children studies of Daly and Wilson, and Buller is particularly critical here.
He is negative about the EP advocacy of the “cheater-detection” module, an important section of EP studies.
I am not an expert in this field, but my feeling is that EP will weather this tropical disturbance. Psychology in general is a difficult field for data analysis – the same data in psychology can easily be logically interpreted in several different ways – much more so than data in, say, chemistry or physics.
I realize the following assessment of mine is anecdotal, but here goes: I have seen step-children treated differently than genetic children. I have seen how men and women pair off in society according to commonly accepted determinants of status, differing depending on sex. I have read about and subsequently observed how people (unconsciously?) score each other during their social interactions, rating relationship values for the future. I have observed how cheating (generic sense) is more rampant in very large groups where peer-pressure ceases to be such an important deterrent. Finally, game theory concepts utilized in EP are widely adapted and used in self-help books. In short, I’m a sucker for EP.
At the same time, if some of the conclusions of EP are not right on target, books like Buller’s can be valuable in order to stimulate more finely-tuned studies and to verify those conclusions that are valid. Nobody in science would suggest that every discipline always gets all the nuances just right the first time around. Perhaps this is the take-home message of Buller’s book.
Rating: 4 / 5