Posted on May 3, 2010 - by David

Evolutionary Psychology: A Stone Age Mindset

The following paper was presented May 1, 2010 at a student conference at Boston University called ‘Mentalism, Madness, and the Mind.” Audio from the conference is available here. Thanks to all those who participated.

“Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause preceding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.”

-          Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

In the conclusion to this book – a work of undeniable importance to modern science and modern thought in general – after tracking natural selection through amazingly detailed observations of nature and logical deductions, Darwin imagined what his discoveries might mean for the study of humanity. He writes:

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (Darwin, Origin 476)

Empowered by the growing acceptance of his theories, Darwin himself endeavored to throw this light on human experience in The Descent of Man. His believed that there was “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties,” (Darwin, Descent 34) and attributed our sense of morality, in his eyes man’s most distinctive feature, to highly developed social instincts and advanced powers of reasoning.

Nevertheless, one can sense another phenomenon at work in Darwin’s descriptions. He notes man’s “large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas,” and sees the central place of language in the mind, writing that “a long and complex train of thought can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra.” (Darwin, Descent 53, 55) His insistence that the difference between man and animal was one of degree and not kind is challenged by obvious differences between cultures. He attributes the lower moral sense of “savages” partly to “insufficient powers of reasoning,” and speculates that moral tendencies might be inherited traits, though he admits that there is “hardly sufficient evidence on this head.” (Darwin Descent 93, 98) In trying to account for the many “absurd rules of conduct” proscribed by various religions, Darwin makes a decidedly non-materialist observation, writing, “it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated in the early years of life, while the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.” (Darwin, Descent 95-96) This power of culture was literally right next to him, waiting to be discovered and explained, on the ship which took him around the world. He writes: “The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians; but I was continually struck with surprise how closely the three natives on board  H.M.S “Beagle,” who had lived some years in England, and could talk a little English, resembled us in disposition, and in most of our mental faculties.” (Darwin, Descent 33-34) It seems with all his powers of observation and scientific genius, his attachment to his newly embraced theory and the predictable (and accepted) prejudices of a 19^th -century Englishman would not allow Darwin to see what he was missing.

I consider this extended Darwinian introduction justified, because despite the fact that these ideas were published nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, they are, with many of the same troublesome claims and implications, still very much alive today in the various strains of evolutionary psychology.

Before going any further, I must turn to mentalism, as developed by Liah Greenfeld, so that the basis for my objections to evolutionary psychology is clear. In her yet unpublished work (to which this conference is directly related), Greenfeld actually demonstrates how Darwin’s work made her own theories possible. Here I quote Greenfeld directly:

“On the basis of meticulously constructed circumstantial evidence (that is, pieces of empirical evidence, gaps in empirical evidence, considerations of scholars in other fields, specifically geology, certain beliefs regarding the nature of reality, contradictions in other beliefs regarding it, etc., that were fitted perfectly together, creating a logically watertight argument) Darwin proved that there was a law pertaining to the development of life on earth that had nothing whatsoever to do with laws of physics, and yet was logically consistent with them, because it operated within the boundary conditions of the physical laws. That is, in distinction to philosophical materialists, Darwin proved that life indeed could be irreducible to inanimate matter, but, in distinction to philosophical idealists, or vitalists, who claimed that life was independent from the material reality studied by physics, he proved that laws of life could only operate within the conditions provided by physical laws. By proving that life was an autonomous reality, Darwin made biology independent from physics: biologists now could take physics for granted and explore the ways biological laws operated.” (Greenfeld 69-70)

In short, rather than create “a unified framework in which everything could be understood,” Darwin made it possible to see the world in terms of emergent phenomena. Greenfeld defines an emergent phenomenon as “a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the sum of its elements, a case in which a specific combination of elements, which no one element, and no law in accordance with which the elements function, renders likely, produces a certain new quality (in most important instances, a certain law or tendency) which in a large measure determines the nature and the existence of the phenomenon, as well as of its elements.” (Greenfeld 71)

Unlike Darwin or the evolutionary psychologists, we see humanity as distinguished from all other forms of organic life by the emergent phenomenon of culture. Culture can be defined most generally as the symbolic transmission of human ways of life across generations and distances. In ‘Nationalism and the Mind,’ Greenfeld describes it like this:

The products of this cultural process are stored in the environment within which our biological life takes place, but the process itself goes on inside us. In other words, culture exists dynamically, develops, regenerates, transforms only by means of our minds – which makes culture a mental process. Let me reiterate: culture is a symbolic and a mental process. The fact that it is a mental process means that it occurs by means of the mechanisms of the brain. The fact that it is a symbolic process means that its logic cannot be reduced to the logic of the brain mechanisms, that it is an emergent phenomenon and a reality sui generis. (Greenfeld “N&M” 213)

Greenfeld has therefore described the mind as “individualized culture,” or “culture in the brain,” making the mind, like culture, an emergent phenomenon. Again I quote from her current work, to make clear that culture and mind should not be taken separately:

“These are not just two elements of the same — symbolic and mental — reality, they are one and the same process occurring on two different levels — the individual and the collective, similar to the life of an organism and of the species to which it belongs in the organic world. The fundamental laws governing this process on both levels are precisely the same laws and at every moment, at every stage in it, it moves back and forth between the levels; it cannot, not for a split second, occur on only one of them. The mind constantly borrows symbols from culture, but culture can only be processed – i.e., symbols can only have significance and be symbols — in the mind.” (Greenfeld 81)

————————-

In On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection (2008), Jonathan Turner and Alexandra Maryanski provide a theoretical description of how our nature as individualistic apes has shaped the evolution of human societies. In the conclusion to the first chapter they make the following statement: “All societies, we argue, go against humans’ ancestral ape propensities for weak ties, individualism, and mobility, but some social formations impose greater conflicts with our ape ancestry than others.” (T&M 27) They hypothesize that the development of an emotional language would have played the most important role in creating solidarity among our ape ancestors. They imagine an almost infinitely deep pool of complex emotions that could have been formed through combination of the four primary emotions – happiness, fear, anger, and sadness – which they say “all researchers agree” are hardwired into our brains. These emotions would have been communicated through vocalizations, gestures, and facial expressions to forge stronger social ties. Symbolic communication through language is given a kind of secondary status to this primary language of emotions. They tell us that, “sociality is enhanced by speech because inflections of voice and substance of sentences can add extra layers of emotional content to interaction.” (T&M 117). The chapter titled ‘The Emergence of Culture,’ is mostly devoted to describing the adaptations they believe would have been selected for to create an individualistic ape who forged social ties via an emotional language but also possessed the brain capacity for verbal, symbolic communication. Culture and its development, therefore, are just products of natural selection, though they admit the rules seem to change a bit once culture emerges. They outline five “forces of the social universe” which generate selection pressures – population, production, distribution, regulation, and reproduction. (T&M 125) Equipped with a theoretical image of our progenitors and these five forces, they proceed to explain the rest of human history, which for Turner and Maryanski consists of emotional, individualistic apes moving from one “sociocultural cage” to another.

In the final chapter, they defend individualistic modern society because it is less constraining than most of the “cages” we have lived in throughout history. They say that sociologists who see pathological elements are confused about our heritage. “Humans are not the descendants of monkey ancestors, as most sociological criticisms of modernity imply.” (T&M 316) I can’t rightly say what “most sociological criticisms of modernity imply,” but I know that it wasn’t confusion about our primate ancestors that led Émile Durkheim to first describe anomie; rather, it was the study of a real phenomenon, the fact that people in modern societies seemed to be killing themselves at an alarming rate. Likewise, Liah Greenfeld’s current work aims to address a similar phenomenon: the emergence of mental illness with the rise of modernity and its increasing prevalence in particularly individualistic and anomic societies like America.

For me, the most frustrating part of this book was the misuse of Durkheim. At one point, they give a one paragraph summary of his work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and then guess, on the basis of occasionally observed gatherings of groups of chimpanzees, that “there may be a hardwired basis for this propensity to symbolize social relationships with sacred totems.” (T&M 148) Durkheim’s name is sprinkled throughout the book, and– in what appears to me an attempt to give sociological weight to a book more concerned with apes than humanity – they conclude by quoting Durkheim on the importance of turning to the past if we want to accomplish something useful. What they effectively do is turn all the way back past the emergence of the very thing that makes us human, which allows them to make such insightful speculations as, “Contemporary humans enjoy travel perhaps because they are evolved apes.” (T&M 307)

Unfortunately, Durkheim’s own mistake of making a god out of society allows his ideas to be easily misappropriated, such that Turner’s and Maryanski’s congregation of chimps howling out their innate emotions doesn’t seem a far cry from the effervescence of a religious ritual. We can summarize Durkheim’s misstep using Greenfeld’s words from an essay written 15 years ago: “…Durkheim imagined the emergent phenomenon of society as, fundamentally, physical energy generated by the physical proximity of individual biological organisms,…” (Greenfeld “Praxis” 132) It is nevertheless clear that when Durkheim talks about society, he is describing something other than a material force, namely, the emergent phenomenon of culture and mind. The following comes from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, interestingly enough, from his chapter on ‘The Notion of the Soul’:

“… there really is a part of ourselves that is not immediately subordinate to the organic factor: namely, everything inside us that represents society. The general ideas that religion or science imprint in our minds, the mental operations these ideas presuppose, the beliefs and feelings that are at the basis of moral life – all the higher forms of psychic activity that society awakens and develops in us – do not follow in the wake of the body, like our sensations and our bodily states. This is because, as we have shown, the world of representations in which social life unfolds is overlaid on its material substrate and does not originate there.” (Durkheim 201)

This “world of representations” is a world of symbols. We can define symbols as intentionally articulated signs. What I see described in the Origin of Societies is a kind of gradual emergence of culture, and kind of effortless slide to symbols from signs. Statements like “we know that symbolic capacities were enhanced as the brain grew,” and “with the first push for a larger brain in Homo habilis, it became possible to construct a more symbolic culture,” give me the impression that symbolic processing was occurring in the brains of our ancestors before the emergence of articulate speech. (T&M 113,110) But how could symbolic thought take place without symbols to be processed?

The elements that made possible the emergence of symbols (and therefore culture and the mind) were a highly developed brain, the use of signs, and the larynx, but this combination in no way made the emergent phenomenon likely. Greenfeld writes:

“The biological species of homo sapiens had completely evolved — brain, larynx, and all — hundreds of thousands of years before the mind made its first appearance among its members. This means that it was not caused by the organic combination that made it possible, but a result of a most improbable accident — the transformation (a complete change in character) of one of its elements.” (Greenfeld 77-78)

This transformation of sign to symbol – however exactly this incredible accident occurred – was the point of emergence for culture and the mind. I quote Greenfeld again, because I believe highlighting the difference between signs and symbols is necessary to distinguish mentalism from evolutionary theories describing a weak, gradual emergence of culture:

“The meaning (the significance) of a symbol was not given in the phenomenon it was signifying – its referent, or genetically; it was given to it by the context in which it was used, and increasingly this context became mostly the context of other symbols. Thus the significance of symbols constantly changed. Unlike signs, which could be very many, but whose number was essentially limited by their referents in the environment, symbols were endlessly proliferating. (The very introduction of a symbol would change the environment and initiate a symbolic chain reaction.) Unlike signs, which exist in sets, they, from the first formed systems, ever changing and becoming more complex and connected by constantly transforming ties of inter-dependence. Symbols, in other words, constituted a world of their own; an autonomous, self-creative world in which things were happening according to laws of causation which did not apply anywhere else.”   (Greenfeld 78 -79)

I feel it’s important to state, despite how obvious this may seem to some of you, that this symbolic reality was made possible only by some collectivity. The homo sapiens who first discovered the ability to intentionally articulate a sign would have had to intentionally articulate to someone in order to spark the symbolic process which has created the world we live in today. Therefore, while the symbolic process occurs only in individual brains, to see it as a product of individual brains is a mistake.

Steven Pinker, in the The Stuff of Thought (2007), puts forth the theory of conceptual semantics, the idea that the true “language of thought” is a set of innate concepts, closely corresponding to the Kantian categories of space, time, causality, substance, and so on. Like Turner and Maryanski with their emotional proto-language hypothesis, Pinker tends to treat language itself as a kind of secondary phenomenon, almost coincidental to our innate conceptual processes. In a section of the book arguing against linguistic determinism, he writes:

“One reason that the language we speak can’t be too central in our mental functioning is that we had to learn it in the first place. It’s not hard to imagine how language acquisition might work if children could figure out some of the events and intentions around them and tried to map them onto the sounds coming out of their parents’ mouths. But how a raw stream of noise could conjure up concepts in the child’s mind out of nothing is a mystery. It’s not surprising that studies of the minds of prelinguistic infants have shown them to be sensitive to cause and effect, human agency, spatial relations, and other ideas that form the core of conceptual structure.” (Pinker 149)

But is Pinker saying that humans are the only animals sensitive to cause and effect or spatial relations? To demonstrate the existence and operation of this innate “language of thought,” he has to actually break down language itself. In other words, it is only when confronted with a system of symbols that these innate capacities or tendencies can have the sort of explicit work to do which Pinker describes. Apart from culture, we probably only possess these biological sensitivities to a slightly greater degree than other very intelligent animals.

At points, Pinker’s resistance to the idea of mind as a symbolic process is very clear, and rather weak. Using the example of Shakespeare, he argues that “a name really has no definition in terms of other words, concepts, or pictures,” but rather “points to a person in the world in the same way that I can point to a rock in front of me right now.” I understand that the thoughts that occur to me – what I know or feel about Shakespeare, – are not a definition of Shakespeare.  However, the flow of ideas and images which begins when I hear his name is much more than a connection to “the original act of christening” as Pinker puts it – it is steeped in the cultural context in which I learned about Shakespeare, and includes innumerable strands of connection to other ideas which, removed from the context of the symbolic process happening in my head, bear no relation whatsoever to the sound Shakespeare’s parents decided would signify their newborn child.  (Pinker 12)

Pinker’s theory still leaves us with the problem of the emergence of culture, and seems unable to account for the development of cultural differences apart from the idea that they are merely the result of the peculiar interplay of a set of biologically programmed concepts.

In Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1992), it seems to me there is also no strict emergence of culture in terms of a transformation from signs to symbols. He mentions “communicative (or quasi-communicative) acts” in which hominids would have shared useful information with one another -“asked” and “answered” each others questions – and hypothesizes that a hominid would have discovered that he could ask and answer his own questions, this over time becoming a silent internalized cognitive process. Again, like in Turner and Maryanski’s retelling, signs slide into symbols without much notice. (Dennett 194-197)

Once culture does exist, (I don’t feel I can say “emerge” and remain consistent with Dennett’s rendition), the law that governs its evolution is natural selection. Dennett subscribes to idea of the meme, defined by Richard Dawkins as a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.,” (in Dennett 202) Dennett tells us that Dawkins meant this to be taken literally: “Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly. The theory of evolution by natural selection is neutral regarding the differences between memes and genes; these are just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates.” (Dennett 202) Memes spread (and mutate), not necessarily because they are good for the individuals whose brains they infest, but simply because they are good replicators. Meme-vehicles are essentially physical – books, recordings, buildings, etc. – but, “memes still depend at least indirectly on one or more of their vehicles spending at least a brief, pupal stage in a remarkable sort of meme nest: a human mind.” (Dennett 206) Memes therefore are in competition for residence in a limited number of minds – memes may aid or block or be neutral to other memes.

It is definitely possible to see the meme story as culture in the brain, but lest we get confused, we should remind ourselves that culture is a symbolic process. A meme is an artificial chunk, chopped out of the process, removed from the mind, the only context in which elements of culture come alive. Attempting to explain culture by a law that supposedly governs the transmission of discrete units of culture necessarily does violence to the idea of a symbolic process. It seems to me that with the mental gymnastics required to extend natural selection to units of culture – constantly grasping for analogies from biology to provide justification – there would be little time to even attempt a true historical analysis.

In an article published last year in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Dennett and Ryan McKay look at ‘The Evolution of Misbelief.’ Dawkins’ cultural evolution says that memes, (and both true and false beliefs would be memes), are selected because they are good self-replicators and not necessarily because they enhance fitness. But here Dennett and McKay take a much more biological approach, working from the general assumption that “evolution has designed us to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs.” (M&D 494) Not surprisingly, they dismiss psychotic delusions rather quickly as “instances of biological dysfunction,” and spend a good deal of their time addressing “religious (mis)beliefs.” (M&D 493) When Yorick Wilks makes an insightful response to the paper, asking why the discussion of misbeliefs which are not genetically heritable is “taking place in the context of natural selection and Darwinian evolution,” they seem to duck behind the cover of the cultural evolution claim which they advanced with very little force or substance in the original article. (Wilks 539) If they can simultaneously apply the law of natural selection to two very different orders of phenomena – memes, as they call them, and genes – then it looks like they get to have their cake and eat it too. “Gene-culture co-evolution” looks to me like a seductive catch-all that explains very little.

While I feel I’ve only had time to briefly sketch the differences between mentalism and evolutionary psychology, and I especially regret not being able to address the specific structures of the mind as Greenfeld describes them, I felt it was important to first deal with this symbolic reality in general. The original title of this paper, ‘Evolutionary Psychology: A Stone Age Mindset,’ emerged simply out of the need to create a title for the conference program, but now that it’s all said and done I’m not sure it’s the most fitting. Still, it reflects my frustration with an approach that is stuck in the past, looking at humanity from tens of thousands to millions of years away from where we are now, telling us what we are based on what “science” seems to say we should be, dogmatically drawing authority from the name of Darwin, floundering out of its depth in a symbolic reality it has not even begun to explain. Humanity, a most worthy subject of study, deserves better.