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Notities

Dit is een bundel artikelen over het onderwerp in de titel, samengesteld door feministisch sociologe Hilary Rose en haar echtgenoot de neurowetenschapper Steven Rose.

Er komen heel wat argumenten naar voren die laten zien dat evolutionaire biologie en evolutionaire psychologie gevaarlijke modieuze mythen zijn geworden, in de lijn van de vroegere sociobiologie, waarbij alle mogelijke fenomenen teruggevoerd worden op de natuurlijke selectie in 'de natuur'. De feiten kloppen meestal al niet - natuurlijke selectie zoals Dawkins en Dennett die bijvoorbeeld zien bestaat helemaal niet, de evolutie verloopt veel complexer dan dat - en desondanks worden door dat soort auteurs uit die 'feiten' conclusies getrokken over hoe dingen 'noodzakelijkerwijs zijn geworden' of 'moeten zijn'. Die sprong van is naar ought, van zo is het naar zo moet het zijn is een fundamentele denkfout.

Het gevaarlijke eraan is dat rechtse conservatieve groepen dit soort opvattingen al snel gebruiken om de status quo te verdedigen met zijn racisme en anti-semitisme, zijn vrouwvijandigheid, zijn vijandigheid tegenover de minder bedeelde klassen, met zijn geïdealiseer van het individu. Je treft die bijvoorbeeld aan bij Republikeinen in de VS, onder QAnon-aanhangers, en zo verder.

Voorkant Rose-Rose 'Alas, poor Darwin - Arguments against evolutionary psychology' Hilary ROSE / Steven ROSE
Alas, poor Darwin - Arguments against evolutionary psychology
London: Vintage / Random House, 2000, 589 blzn. (epub);
eISBN-13: 978 1446 4121 76

(4) 1- Introduction [Hilary Rose and Steven Rose]

"Why is this book important? Because it brings together a multidisciplinary group of authors with the shared aim of challenging what we feel has become one of the most pervasive of present-day intellectual myths." [mijn nadruk] (5)

[Een veelbelovend begin :-)]

"Among the disciplines rebranding themselves with the prefix ‘evolutionary’, the most influential has been evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology, henceforward EP, is a particularly Anglo-American phenomenon. It claims to explain all aspects of human behaviour, and thence culture and society, on the basis of universal features of human nature that found their final evolutionary form during the infancy of our species some 100–600,000 years ago." [mijn nadruk] (6)

Voorbeelden van de onzinnige consequenties waartoe die insteek leidt zoals in het boek A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion van Randy Thornhill en Craig Palmer.

"It is the argument of the authors of this book that the claims of EP in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and philosophy are for the most part not merely mistaken, but culturally pernicious. Further they claim that their new view of human nature should inform the making of social and public policy. Thus the new science has a directly political dimension, although its protagonists vary in their advocacy of both the direction and the speed of implementation." [mijn nadruk] (10)

Er is een samenhang met sociobiologie (Dawkins en zo) maar dat valt toch ook weer niet samen met EP.

"Part of and parallel with this geneticisation of culture are the twin technologies of informatics and genetic engineering, unquestionably the technosciences set to dominate the twenty-first century. Within this framework new forms of biological determinism have arisen. (...) This new determinism takes two apparently antithetical forms. On the one hand, it claims, our biology is our destiny, written in our genes by the shaping forces of human evolution through natural selection and random mutation. This biological fatalism is opposed by Promethean claims that biotechnology, in the form of genetic engineering, can manipulate our genes in such a way as to rescue us from the worst of our fates. It offers to eliminate illness, prolong life, grant our children enhanced intelligence and better looks – a cornucopia of technological goodies undreamed of even in the science fiction of prior generations. These contrasting claims have been fanned by a host of popular books, television programmes and films" [mijn nadruk] (12-13)

"The predestinationist claims of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries divided the human world along new faultlines which predestinationist biology faithfully began to mirror in the concepts of race, class, gender and ethnicity." [mijn nadruk] (15)

"Thus to dissociate science from racism became a crucial cultural objective at the end of the Second World War. To secure this goal, the newly formed UNESCO commissioned a statement on race by a group composed primarily of US cultural anthropologists inspired by Franz Boas.(...)
Thus, despite UNESCO, biologically determinist ideas lived on. During the 1960s they took the form of pop-ethology books stressing the evolutionarily determined innateness of human aggression (as in the writings of the ex-Nazi ethologist Konrad Lorenz or the American science writer Robert Ardrey). The claim of black/white racial differences in intelligence resurfaced in 1969 with the writings of Arthur Jensen in the USA and Hans Eysenck in the UK – forerunners of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve in the 1990s. By the early 1970s sociologist Steven Goldberg was arguing for The Inevitability of Patriarchy on the basis of hormonal differences between men and women. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis sought to transcend these early works (Hilary Rose’s chapter maps this process in more detail) by providing what seemed like an all-embracing theoretical framework. Within this the human condition could be seen as an epiphenomenon of evolution by natural selection based on the ‘drive’ by individual genes to reproduce copies of themselves. The pretensions of sociobiology – at least insofar as they reflected on humans as opposed to other species – were soon under heavy criticism in such books as Biology as a Social Weapon (the Science for the People Editorial Collective), The Uses and Abuses of Biology (Marshall Sahlins), Not In Our Genes (Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Leo Kamin) and the Genes and Gender series (edited by Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff).
Despite the political implications for both the women’s and black civil rights movements, however, the cultural struggles around the central concepts and claims of sociobiology were primarily waged between biologists, although they were followed by a much wider public. The attacks came from left, liberal and feminist biologists together with a handful of non-biologists, notably the US anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Ashley Montagu, who had drafted the original 1950 UNESCO statement. Slightly later the attack was joined by the elegant critique of the US philosopher and historian of science Philip Kitcher (Vaulting Ambition). By the late 1980s the conflict settled down into a stalemate. US school curricula, for example, found it necessary to include both sociobiology and its critics. The criticism of sociobiology as updated Social Darwinism, with all that that entailed for support of elite white male social dominance, stuck. In response sociobiologists themselves muted their claims that their discipline was primarily concerned to explain human nature, and instead refocused their discipline as a branch of animal behaviour – behavioural ecology.
It was at this point that a new group of players entered the game. Psychologists, sometimes with a past in studying animal rather than human behaviour, together with cognitive psychologists and biological anthropologists, were all attracted to the view that evolutionary insights provided a powerful new tool for transforming the social sciences into soundly biologically based disciplines. Drawing on the reductionist claims of the earlier sociobiologists, both individual human minds and, even more controversially, the complex and multifarious forms of human society, were to be reduced to the – admittedly mediated – workings out of genetic and evolutionary imperatives. These claims were fanned by popularised accounts and found their way into day-to-day broadsheet newspaper discussions and TV programmes. Unlike sociobiology, they have been included in the teaching syllabuses of university courses in many areas of the social sciences and humanities without critical comment." [mijn nadruk] (17-20)

"Elsewhere the political agenda of EP is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state." [mijn nadruk] (21)

Volgt een overzicht van de inhoudelijke opbouw van deze bundel.

"In the first chapter, the sociologist Dorothy Nelkin reflects on the religious language and metaphor with which so much evolutionary psychology, particularly in its US variant, is suffused. EP, she shows, seeks to take its place within and alongside a form of scientific Christianity." [mijn nadruk] (25)

[O wauw :-)]

(34) 2 - Less Selfish than Sacred? Genes and the Religious Impulse in Evolutionary Psychology [Dorothy Nelkin]

"Religion has been defined as a belief system that includes the idea of the existence of ‘an eternal principle . . . that has created the world, that governs it, that controls its destinies or that intervenes in the natural course of its history’. Believers understand this eternal principle – whether a God or a powerful idea – to be the key to all knowledge, the explanation of history, and the guide to the conduct of everyday behaviour."(35)

"Edward O. Wilson developed the all-encompassing dimensions of this principle in several books, including Sociobiology (1975), On Human Nature (1978) and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). He claims that individual and cultural practices, including kin selection, parental investment, mating strategy, status seeking, territorial expansion and defence, and contractual agreements are all determined by the impulse to confer Darwinian advantage to the genes. The eternal principle of natural selection, he believes, shapes our behaviour, moral impulses, human relationships and cultural norms. He and other scientists have promoted this model of human nature in popular books and magazines with missionary fervour, aiming to convert the unenlightened. Their claims, their language and their style have striking religious overtones." [mijn nadruk] (36-37)

"Scientists promoting genetic explanations use a language replete with religious metaphors and concepts such as immortality and essentialism – indeed, the gene appears as a kind of sacred ‘soul’. And as missionaries bringing truth to the unenlightened, they claim their theories are guides to moral action and policy agendas. They are, I argue, part of a current cultural move to blur the boundaries between science and religion." [mijn nadruk] (37)

"Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are but the latest efforts to develop a unifying theory that will explain the meaning of ‘Life itself’."(39)

"Natural selection to evolutionary psychologists is a ‘theory of everything’, an eternal principle that explains why we behave the way we do and what makes us what we are; it defines the very meaning of human existence."(40)

"Such beliefs are not theistic; they are not necessarily based on the existence of God or a spiritual entity. But they do follow a religious mindset that sees the world in terms of cosmic principles, ultimate purpose and design." [mijn nadruk] (41)

"The language used by geneticists to describe the genes is permeated with biblical imagery. Geneticists call the genome the ‘Bible’, the ‘Book of Man’ and the ‘Holy Grail’. They convey an image of this molecular structure as more than a powerful biological entity: it is also a mystical force that defines the natural and moral order. And they project an idea of genetic essentialism, suggesting that by deciphering and decoding the molecular text they will be able to reconstruct the essence of human beings, unlock the key to human nature." [mijn nadruk] (43)

"Like the sacred texts of revealed religion, the ‘evolutionary epic’ explains our place in the world, our relationships, behaviour, morality and fate. It is indeed of truly epic proportions."(45)

"Evolutionary psychologists are missionaries, advocating a set of principles that define the meaning of life and seeking to convert others to their beliefs. They are convinced they have insights into the human condition that must be accepted as truth. And their insights often come through revelations." [mijn nadruk] (46)

"Missionaries, inspired by their revelations, often place limited value on empirical evidence. Holistic narratives become more important than detailed logical structure, for theories follow from a kind of revealed truth." [mijn nadruk] (46)

"Missionaries also tend to dismiss their critics. Evolutionary psychologists reject all postmodern thought, a category in which they include Afrocentrism, constructive social anthropology, eco-feminism, deep ecology, neo-Marxism and New Age holism. They label non-believers unenlightened, misguided, ignorant, unwilling to learn the truth, deluded, ideological or politically correct. They regard their critics as hostile forces, an image held over from the robustly belligerent response to sociobiology when Wilson first promulgated his ideas in the 1970s – a period less receptive to biological explanations of behaviour. These days, however, theories about the biological bases of human behaviour enjoy greater public and media support. But evolutionary psychologists are still frustrated by the reluctance of social scientists to adopt their models, and accuse them of ‘tribal devotion to past masters and ideological commitments’, of having a ‘left wing political axe to grind’. (See Hilary Rose’s chapter.) Deluded and unenlightened beliefs about human behaviour, they believe, are more than a theoretical problem; they obstruct effective and moral social action." [mijn nadruk] (48)

"Evolutionary psychology is not only a new science, it is a vision of morality and social order, a guide to moral behaviour and policy agendas. By attributing human behaviour to the occult operations of the cell, evolutionary explanations lift behaviour out of the social context, denying the influence of human agency. And by defining behaviour as ‘natural’ – the consequence of evolutionary adaptations – these explanations convey a message about appropriate social policies. Evolutionary psychologists call for ‘realism’ based on the principle that behaviour is mediated by evolutionary forces." [mijn nadruk] (48)

"Such arguments, dealing with popular stereotypes, quickly reach the public through the mass media."(50)

"Evolutionary explanations combine the credibility of science with the certainty of religion. They are especially convenient at a time when governments, faced with cost constraints, are seeking to dismantle the welfare state. Why support job training, welfare or childcare programmes when those targeted are biologically incapable of benefiting from the effort? Theories about the evolutionary basis of status distinctions are a way to explain persistent poverty and social inequalities." [mijn nadruk] (51)

"The appeal of evolutionary psychology is, in part, politically driven. Evolutionary principles imply genetic destiny. They de-emphasise the influence of social circumstances, for there are natural limits constraining individuals. The moral? No possible social system, educational or nurturing plan can change the status quo. Evolution, defined as an eternal principle ‘writ large’, becomes a way to justify existing social categories and to deflect critical examination of the powers underlying social policy." [mijn nadruk] (53)

[Dat is de perfecte samenvatting van hoe akelig conservatief dat denken is.]

"William Provine, historian of biology from Cornell, argues that the conflict between science and religion is fundamental and profound, and that the traditional truce between science and religion, based on the assumption that they deal with distinct domains, has been a convenient but unrealistic myth."(54)

"Indeed, some cosmologists and physicists – and now evolutionary psychologists – sound like theologians seeking final answers to ultimate mysteries."(56)

"Reasoned debate has not mitigated the perennial struggles between science and religion. The religious impulse among scientists – the God talk, the cosmic claims, the organisations for dialogue and reconciliation – may, to use their own favoured metaphor, be an adaptive strategy, a way to minimise the distance between science and religion. It is also, as evolutionary psychologists and their publishers have found out, a way to market books and ideas to a broader, non-scientific public in a society, notably the USA, where religion plays a powerful role." [mijn nadruk] (59)

(64) 3 - EP, Phone Home [Charles Jencks]

[Nogal badinerend stuk, vind ik. Bovendien van iemand die duidelijk postmoderne achtergronden heeft en het bijbehorende vage taalgebruik hanteert.]

"is the world ruled by animal nature or human spirit? Or, as we’d say today, genes or cultural environment? (...) for the last 50,000 years Homo sapiens has wanted to know: which is it? Nature or nurture? Now it appears that evolutionary psychology, EP, will give the answer."(65-66)

"So we are in a bit of a trap: nature predetermines us to want to know about causation and nurture, while the spirit of the age, postmodernism, predetermines us to be dubious of all metanarratives."(68)

"Here we are in the realm of creativity, self-organising systems, art, individual expression, and what Steven Rose calls ‘lifelines’, that is, the personal history constructed within the constraints of biology, society and all the rest of it."(75)

"We slide all the time from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, no matter how many road signs we put up condemning the logical slip. And by the same token, of course, this is no reason to excuse the behaviour; it is merely to point out its common occurrence. Nowhere is it so prevalent as with evolutionary psychologists, who often study human behaviour and then, like Wilson, tell us to get in step with it; or, as he does, generalise about what most art has been and deduce therefore what it should be." [mijn nadruk] (103)

(106) 4 - Anti-Dawkins [Gabriel Dover]

Een kritiek op het denken van Dawkins zoals Engels in zijn Anti-Dühring een kritiek uitwerkte op het systeem van Dühring.

"There is a story here to be told in itself, how the ‘meme’ of the ‘selfish gene’ replicated and infected the studies of human psychology, animal behaviour, philosophy, sociology and medicine. But that is for the historians of the sciences to fathom one day. (...) The essential wrongfootedness of the selfish gene as a serious concept in evolutionary genetics, and the overwhelming ignorance of this failing in so many peripheral disciplines, are now of major concern." [mijn nadruk] (108)

"Genes are so battered, misunderstood and abused that I make no apologies for starting from the beginning with the genetic material. Genes are not self-replicating entities; they are not eternal; they are not units of selection; they are not units of function; and they are not units of instruction. They are modular in construction and history; invariably redundant; each involved in a multitude of functions; and misbehave in a bizarre range of ways. They co-evolve intimately and interactively with each other through their protein and RNA products. They have no meaning outside their interactions, with regard to any adaptive feature of an individual: there are no one-to-one links between genes and complex traits. Genes are the units of inheritance but not the units of evolution: I shall argue that there are no ‘units’ of evolution as such because all units are constantly changing. They are intimately involved with the evolution of biological functions, but evolution is not about the natural selection of ‘selfish’ genes." [mijn nadruk] (108-109)

"Dawkins’s selfish genery propagates a nonsense that is genetically misconceived, operationally impossible and seductively dangerous. It is Dawkins’s dangerous idea, not Darwin’s dangerous idea, which is seriously misleading. Theorists from diverse disciplines seem, unfortunately, quite happy to accept that evidence for a genetic contribution to complex human behavioural or morphological traits inevitably means evolution of that trait by a natural selection of selfish genes." [mijn nadruk] (115)

"Whatever phenotypic selection and genetic sorting might have happened at any given generation, it is the uniqueness of the components involved with the selection phenomenon which ensures that the same selections and sortings will never reoccur. On this basis, natural selection is not only not an active process (that is, some force directly selecting phenotypes or, if you will, selecting Dawkins’s genes), it is not a process, as such. Darwin himself advised against the potential confusion over this issue, advice ignored by generations of so-called Darwinists, culminating in Dawkins." [mijn nadruk] (119)

"The movement of modules around the genome from gene to gene and from regulatory region to regulatory region ensures that new constructions can engage in a whole variety of new functions. Biology has found an easy way of teaching new tricks to old modules through the expediency of sharing new modular neighbours. Genes are pleiotropic: that is, they are capable of teaming up with many other genes to generate complex phenotypic functions. They can be involved in many different types of cellular and developmental processes. It is highly unlikely that there are consciousness-specific or language-specific genetic modules in humans that are not already in use in a multitude of other cellular processes throughout development. No one gene can selfishly self-select itself without precipitating a multitude of developmental problems, given its multitude of activities." [mijn nadruk] (132)

"The forces that underlie evolution are tractable but not reducible to the supposed primacy of the ‘masters of the universe’ – the so-called selfish, eternally self-replicating Mendelian genes."(145)

[Met andere woorden: evolutie verloopt helemaal niet zo simpel als de aanhangers van de evolutionaire psychologie willen geloven en er zijn helemaal geen duidelijke processen in bepaalde richtingen. Mensen als Dawkins doen aan reductionisme omdat ze iets geloven, de willen de complexiteit niet zien omdat hen dat slecht uitkomt.]

(148) 5 - Why Memes? [Mary Midgley]

"Of late, however, it has been strongly suggested that, in studying thought, the atomising approach is the only truly scientific one and should take precedence over other methods. Accordingly, Richard Dawkins has suggested that the scientific approach to culture is to split it into units called memes, which are in some ways parallel to its atoms, in others to its genes, and to study their interactions. (...) All the same, these lines of thought cannot really help us in this quite different situation. The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sorts of thing that can have distinct units at all. They do not have a granular structure for the same reason that ocean currents do not have one – namely, because they are not stuffs but patterns." [mijn nadruk] (149)

"The meme project has, however, been rather widely accepted because it is exactly what our Western cultural tradition has been waiting for. For two centuries, admirers of the physical sciences have wanted somehow to extend scientific methods over the whole field of thought and culture. They wanted it for the entirely proper reason that they wanted to reunify our thinking, to heal the breach in our world-view made by Descartes’s division between mind and matter, between the physical sciences and humanistic ways of thinking." [mijn nadruk] (152)

"Newton’s example, too, tended to be used as a justification for any simplification on social subjects, as if the physical sciences always proceeded by making things simpler."(154)

"They claimed scientific status for an almost infinite variety of simplifications pursued from various ideological angles, so that eventually the excesses of allegedly scientific prophets such as Marx, Freud and Skinner began to cause a great deal of alarm. This is why, in the mid-twentieth century, serious admirers of science, led by Karl Popper, narrowed the meaning of the term science in a way designed to cover only the physical sciences themselves." [mijn nadruk] (156)

"Though Popper’s campaign was aimed primarily against ideologists such as Marx and Freud, on the face of things it also disqualifies the social sciences and humanities from counting as fully ‘scientific’. And since the term scientific remains a general name for academic excellence, people conclude that these cannot be serious, disciplined ways of thinking at all. Social scientists and humanists therefore often feel that they ought to make their reasonings look as like physical science as possible. This is the demand that memetics satisfies. We need to be clear why this whole ambition is unnecessary as well as impossible. The right way to remedy the Cartesian split is not for one half of the intellectual world to swallow the other but to avoid making that split in the first place." [mijn nadruk] (156-157)

[Dat vind ik dus ook.]

"Is any stricter, more formal kind of unity possible? The great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century were obsessed by the ambition to drill all thought into a single formal system."(158)

[Dat is waar filosofie de mensheid in de verkeerde richting heeft gestuurd. Er is geen Grand Universal Theory of Everything à la Dennett.]

"In short, Darwin understood that large ideas do indeed become dangerous if they are inflated beyond their proper use – dangerous to honesty, to intelligibility, to all the proper purposes of thought. For him the concept of natural selection was strictly and solely a biological one and even in biology he steadily rejected the claim that it was a universal explanation." [mijn nadruk] (161)

"Meme-language is not really an extension of physical science but, as so often happens, an analogy which is welcomed, not for scientific merit but for moral reasons, as being a salutary way of thinking." [mijn nadruk] (171)

"It is clear that the suggestion is, like so many other learned suggestions about selves, merely a paper doctrine about other people, not one by which anyone could live." [mijn nadruk] (173)

(184) 6 - More Things in Heaven and Earth [Stephen Jay Gould]

[Marx wilde zich geen marxist noemen, Darwin wilde zich ongetwijfeld geen darwinist noemen, want zijn ideeën over natuurlijke selectie werden verkeerd begrepen en veel te simpel voorgesteld als de enige sturende factor in de evolutie. Zo ook door de evolutionaire psychologen.]

Darwin was zelden onvriendelijk of kritisch. Maar in de laatste editie van The origin of species moest hij toch kwijt;

"As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work and subsequently, I place in a most conspicuous position – namely at the close of the Introduction – the following words: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.
Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection – the powerful ideas that he often identified in letters as his dear ‘child’. But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.
In this light, especially given history’s tendency to recycle great issues, I am amused by an irony that has recently ensnared evolutionary theory. A movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence in a variety of fields, from the English biological heartland of John Maynard Smith to the uncompromising ideology (albeit in graceful prose) of his compatriot Richard Dawkins, to the equally narrow and more ponderous writing of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett.1
" [mijn nadruk] (186-187)

"My colleague Niles Eldredge, for example, speaks of this co-ordinated movement as ultra-Darwinism. Amid the variety of their subject matter, the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection’s ubiquity." [mijn nadruk] (187)

"... the invigoration of modern evolutionary biology with exciting nonselectionist and nonadaptationist data from the three central disciplines of population genetics, developmental biology and palaeontology (see examples below) makes our pre-millennial decade an especially unpropitious time for Darwinian fundamentalism – and seems only to reconfirm Darwin’s own eminently sensible pluralism."(188)

[Volgt een mooie sneer naar al die gelovigen die de evolutiethorie niet zien zitten:]

"Virtually all thinking people accept the factuality of evolution and no conclusion in science enjoys better documentation. (...) Natural selection, an immensely powerful idea with radical philosophical implications, is surely a major cause of evolution as validated in theory and demonstrated by countless experiments. But is natural selection as ubiquitous and effectively exclusive as the ultras propose?
The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, prove the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the old-style theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version).
To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success – nothing else, and nothing higher (no force, for example, works explicitly for the good of species or the harmony of ecosystems)." [mijn nadruk] (190)

"The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature’s factuality in any case, so why not take the ‘cold bath’ of recognising nature as nonmoral, and not constructed to match our hopes?" [mijn nadruk] (191)

"The generally accepted result of natural selection is adaptation – the shaping of an organism’s form, function and behaviour to achieve the Darwinian summum bonum of enhanced reproductive success. We must therefore study natural selection primarily from its results – that is, by concentrating on the putative adaptations of organisms. If we can interpret all relevant attributes of organisms as adaptations for reproductive success, then we may infer that natural selection has been the cause of evolutionary change. This strategy of research – the so-called adaptationist programme – is the heart of Darwinian biology and the fervent, singular credo of the ultras." [mijn nadruk] (192)

"But selection cannot suffice as a full explanation for many aspects of evolution: for other types and styles of causes become relevant, or even prevalent, in domains both far above and far below the traditional Darwinian locus of the organism. These other causes are not, as the ultras often claim, the product of thinly veiled attempts to smuggle purpose back into biology. These additional principles are as directionless, non-teleological and materialistic as natural selection itself – but they operate differently from Darwin’s central mechanism. In other words, I agree with Darwin that natural selection is ‘not the exclusive means of modification’." [mijn nadruk] (194)

"Natural selection does not explain why many evolutionary transitions from one nucleotide to another are neutral, and therefore nonadaptive. Natural selection does not explain why a meteor crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, setting in motion the extinction of half the world’s species. As Orr points out, Dennett’s disabling parochialism lies most clearly exposed in his failure to discuss the neutral theory of molecular evolution, or even to mention the name of its founder, the great Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura – for few evolutionary biologists would deny that this theory ranks among the most interesting and powerful adjuncts to evolutionary explanation since Darwin’s formulation of natural selection. You don’t have to like the idea, but how can you possibly leave it out?" [mijn nadruk] (201)

"Dennett describes evolution as an ‘algorithmic process’. Algorithms are abstract rules of calculation, fully general in making no reference to particular content. In Dennett’s words, ‘an algorithm is a certain sort of formal process that can be counted on – logically – to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is “run” or instantiated’."(203)

[Weer zo iemand die denkt dat alles te formaliseren valt en logisch in elkaar steekt. Weer een vorm van reductionisme.]

"Daniel Dennett devotes the longest chapter in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defence of Darwinian fundamentalism. If an argued case can be discerned at all amid the slurs and sneers, it would have to be described as an effort to claim that I have, thanks to some literary skill, tried to raise a few piddling, insignificant and basically conventional ideas to ‘revolutionary’ status, challenging what he takes to be the true Darwinian scripture. Dennett claims that I have promulgated three ‘false alarms’ as supposed revolutions against the version of Darwinism that he and his fellow defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy continue to espouse." [mijn nadruk] (207)

"Taken together, punctuated equilibrium and spandrels invoke the operation of several important principles in addition (and sometimes even opposed) to conventional natural selection working in the engineering mode that Dennett sees as the only valid mechanism of evolution."(210)

"This crucial difference between biological and cultural evolution also undermines the self-proclaimed revolutionary pretensions of a much-publicised doctrine – ‘evolutionary psychology’ – that could be quite useful if proponents would change their propensity for cultism and ultra-Darwinian fealty for a healthy dose of modesty." [mijn nadruk] (215)

"Evolutionary psychology, as a putative science of human behaviour, itself evolved by ‘descent with modification’ from 1970s-style sociobiology. But the new species, like many children striving for independence, shuns its actual ancestry by taking a new name and exaggerating some genuine differences while ignoring the much larger amount of shared doctrine – all done, I assume, to avoid the odour of sociobiology’s dubious political implications and speculative failures (amid some solid successes when based on interesting theory and firm data, mostly from nonhuman species)."(215)

"But how can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago? These ancestors left some tools and bones and palaeoanthroplogists can make some ingenious inferences from such evidence. But how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about an EEA: relations of kinship, social structures and sizes of groups, different activities of males and females, the roles of religion, symbolising, story-telling and a hundred other central aspects of human life that cannot be traced in fossils? We do not even know the original environment of our ancestors – did ancestral humans stay in one region or move about? How did environments vary through years and centuries?
In short, evolutionary psychology is as ultra-Darwinian as any previous behavioural theory in insisting upon adaptive reasons for origin as the key desideratum of the enterprise. But the chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable and therefore unscientific. This central problem does not restrain leading disciples from indulging in reveries about the ubiquity of original adaptation as the source of revolutionary power for the putative new science. " [mijn nadruk] (221)

"If evolutionary psychologists continue to push the theory of parental investment as a central dogma, they will eventually suffer the fate of the Freudians, who also had some good insights but failed spectacularly, and with serious harm imposed upon millions of people (women, for example, who were labelled as ‘frigid’ when they couldn’t make an impossible physiological transition from clitoral to vaginal orgasm), because they elevated a limited guide into a rigid creed that became more of an untestable and unchangeable religion than a science."(225)

(232) 7 - Colonising the Social Sciences? [Hilary Rose]

"In kindred spirit the founder of sociobiology and naturalist E. O. Wilson calls his latest book Consilience. In this chapter I argue that although this respectful approach to other disciplines, both as agenda and title, is to be welcomed, the problem is that EP, like sociobiology before it, singularly fails to deliver. Beneath the new rhetoric lies the old project of colonising the social science under the banner of biology. Where its immediate progenitor sociobiology turned to animal behaviour, the new evolutionary psychology turns to a universal human nature as it evolved in the Pleistocene period." [mijn nadruk] (234)

"A restored and re-energised neoliberalism has provided the perfect ecological niche for a new wave of biology-as-destiny." [mijn nadruk] (235)

Darwin haalde inspiratie bij Auguste Comte en vooral bij Thomas Malthus.

"For both Comte and Darwin law was the hallmark of a mature science. That Comte also coined the word sociology and was to become the father of positivistic sociology was of less moment; Darwin took what he wanted and left the rest – but not without distress. The Frenchman’s atheist materialism intensifed Darwin’s own rejection of free will, bringing his faith under even greater pressure." [mijn nadruk] (236)

"Malthus’s bleak message that the growth of human populations inexorably outstripped the available food supply was immensely widely read. Its thesis of the iron necessity of laissez-faire capitalism spoke directly both to the troubles of the times and to Darwin of a solution to his theoretical troubles." [mijn nadruk] (237)

"Because Malthus’s work was part of the new scientific political economy, it claimed law-like status for its propositions. This gave Malthus even greater legitimacy both with the reform-minded bourgeois Whigs and the troubled biologist. The softening of the sixth edition, which Darwin read, hugely increased its acceptability, as in this version Malthus offers emigration of the surplus population as a kinder way out. The successful bourgoisie is no longer compelled to witness the unsuccessful surplus population dying before their eyes; instead the poor, 400,000 a year, were loaded on to ships and exported to the colonies."(238)

"Nonetheless Darwin’s extreme sensitivity to the materialist implications of his theory of natural selection led him to postpone publication for almost twenty years [naar 1859 - GdG]."(239)

[Toch raar dat Darwin die vreselijk arrogante beweringen van Malthus zo kritiekloos overnam.]

"By then [1859] Malthus was no longer in intellectual fashion, instead Victorian England had begun to set about improving the condition of her people; thus the context of publication was markedly different from the context of theorising. While energetic ideologues of laissez-faire were conspicuously present throughout the century, they no longer dominated; now the social interventionists were equally robustly present. These very different contexts have facilitated two very different readings of Darwin. Broadly speaking, the biologists’ reading more or less erases Malthus and instead stresses Darwin’s brilliant induction from meticulous observation and careful experiment. Equally broadly speaking, the social historians of science insist on the importance of social context. Many, as I have done here, insist on the relevance of Malthus and 1830s’ laissez-faire for an adequate understanding of Darwinian theory. Much to the irritation of the biologists’ reading of The Origin as a hugely innovative and purely scientific text, the social historians see Darwin’s theorising as part and parcel of his times – the innovation lies in transferring a social theory into biological discourse." [mijn nadruk] (240)

"It is his contradictory use of the term ‘fitness’ which points to the problem. Typically when Darwin is discussing flora and fauna, fitness means reproductive success; however, when he is discussing human populations fitness suddenly no longer means reproductive success, as that would entail recognising the poor with their large families as the fittest. Suddenly ‘fitness’ becomes suffused with the dominant social values of his time, filled with the ideas of social progress and superiority that elsewhere are given no tolerance in Darwinian theory. This ambiguity around ‘fitness’ – not to say downright slipperiness – in the original Darwin texts means that this central concept sits there almost asking to be recruited around any political project, typically by the social conservatives but also by social revolutionaries."(241)

Herbert Spencer en Karl Mark lieten zich door de evolutietheorie inspireren.

"Spencer (like today’s EP theorists) was primarily interested in the mechanism of competition and (again like the EP theorists) relatively uninterested in Darwin’s grand project of providing an account of transmutation over time. Competition and natural selection served Spencer well enough in what was a fundamentally political project to explain why existing social hierarchies were natural and hence immutable. Despite Spencer’s work being acclaimed as Social Darwinism, Darwin firmly dissociated himself from the theory; he regarded Spencerism as grandiosely abstract and empty of factual detail.
However, it was precisely the theory of change over time through conflict which attracted Marx and Engels. Preoccupied with explaining historical change, that is, the transmutation of societies (for example, from feudalism to capitalism), Marx and Engels had settled on class conflict as the key mechanism. That the great biologist also selected conflict as his key mechanism of change was seen as welcome reinforcement." [mijn nadruk] (243)

"One conspicuous shaper in the 1930s was the wealthy Rockefeller Foundation, which had enhancement of the rational control of human behaviour as its overall objective and saw the expansion of genetics as a key mechanism. Within this project the Foundation was concerned that the social sciences were becoming too autonomous and were no longer paying adequate attention to biology. The still new institution of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) was seen as a key target and the US-based foundation offered the director, William Beveridge, a substantial grant to advance this scientific direction." [mijn nadruk] (246)

"Darwin@ LSE attempted to marry sociobiology and evolutionary psychology into one indissoluble unity which took evolutionary theory, above all adaptationism, as a universal and irrefutable explanation. Unequivocal sociobiologists from Richard Dawkins and Robert Trivers to Matt Ridley and Kingsley Browne dominated the seminar series, and were joined by the new voices from evolutionary psychology, most visibly the high-profile MIT cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, but also the Canadian-based psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson." [mijn nadruk] (250)

"Such distancing of a claimed new science from its immediate ancestor is integral to the peculiar history of the story of ‘biology-as-destiny’ throughout the twentieth century. Each new wave of biology-as-destiny distances itself from its precursor, which is portrayed as too populist, or, worse still, must now be dismissed as having admitted an unequivocally political agenda into its discourse. By contrast, whatever the present wave, it has now achieved full scientific status. This rhetoric of arrival, which is built into the twists and turns of biology-as-destiny, is radically different from that of normal science."(251)

"This gives rise to two sets of difficulties. First, Wilson cannot even persuade biologists such as Ashworth, who are friendly to sociobiology’s core project and hope for the unity of the life and social sciences, that what he does is quite science. Second, this view of science as privileged knowledge, outside cultural, economic and social influence, has come under intense interrogation over the last three decades from the philosophy, history and sociology of the sciences. This interrogation has not been received without fierce resistance from sections of the natural science community. (...) In this situation the old appeal to scientificity by those proclaiming versions of biology-as-destiny no longer carries such cultural weight." [mijn nadruk] (253-254)

"Feminism has challenged biological claims that women’s subordinate place can be explained in terms of their hormones, brain size, reproductive capacity, and so on, and has fought for more reliable accounts of women’s biology. Environmentalism has seen the growing threat to the environment and challenged science’s reductionism and exploitative stance to nature. At the same time, historians, philosophers and sociologists often influenced by these two movements have developed both micro and macro accounts of scientific knowledge, showing science as socially constructed. These critiques have been widely taken up in media accounts of science."(255)

"Today’s public discussion of science is not only attentive to who pays for research and its commercial or governmental links. In a more subtle way the social, economic and cultural interests that come into the research as part of the researcher’s taken-for-granted values come under question. Are these interests going to be problematised and dealt with as part of the research, or are they to be left unaddressed, with the scientists simply huffing about their objectivity and integrity?" [mijn nadruk] (256)

"In the UK evolutionary psychology has needed the alliance with sociobiology, an arrangement with which sociobiology is entirely happy. However, in the United States there are enough psychologists involved in the construction of evolutionary psychology for it to have become widely accepted as a new academic discipline. Further, with some conspicuous exceptions (not least Gould), in its country of origin EP has not received the same intensity of intellectual criticism as in the UK." [mijn nadruk] (257)

"Attention to difference, whether by behaviour geneticists or social scientists, spoils their [Tooby en Cosmides - GdG] assumption of a universal, gendered human nature fixed in the Pleistocene. Hence they concentrate on what they claim are universal cultural practices, such as the age difference between men and women in marriage, child abuse by stepfathers, universal standards of female beauty, and so forth, arguing that these are evolutionary adaptations. The social sciences, they insist, must conform to Pleistocene psychology."(258)

"For those conscious that scholars of prehistory work with highly fragmentary evidence, from shards of bones, fossils and very occasionally entire bodies preserved by ice or some geological quirk, the belief that late twentieth-century people can know the human psychological architecture of our early ancestors with any degree of certainty and accuracy is difficult to take seriously.(...) The rhetoric of ‘reverse engineering’ which EP deploys to explain its search for the present in the human psychology of prehistory is an inadequate cover-up for a fundamental problem of evidence and its interpretation."(259)

"Yet like the religious fundamentalists, the fundamentalist Darwinians who wish to colonise the social sciences have political as well as cultural objectives. Under the banner of an evolutionary account of human nature the new discipline offers to guide society."(274)

(281) 8 - Evolutionary Psychology [Barbara Herrnstein Smith]

"Entitling a book How the Mind Works, as Steven Pinker does, is already to presuppose a good bit of the answer: first, that ‘the mind’ is a discrete and readily distinguishable entity; second, that it operates mechanically; and, third, that its operations could be the object of a causal and presumptively scientific explanation. Each of these suppositions can be and has been questioned."(282)

[Mooi aangeduid. Het probleem met mensen als Pinker en de hele EP is "a strictly computational model of mind and a narrowly adaptationist account of human behaviour," schrijft ze daarna. Ook zeer spits.]

"Though psychologists, Pinker informs his readers, have been unable even to approach this task properly in the past (the history of the discipline being represented, accordingly, as a series of bumblings and bungles), current practitioners of evolutionary psychology, by virtue of their rigorous adherence to two key ideas, have now almost completed it. The first is the idea that the mind, like a computer, is an information-processing machine, the purpose of which is to solve problems through rule-governed manipulations of symbols that represent objective features of the world. The second is the idea that the mind, like the body, consists of multiple individual organs or ‘modules’ engineered by natural selection to maximise the reproductive fitness of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors and reflecting that design more or less directly in their current operations." [mijn nadruk] (287)

"Evolutionary psychology appears to be a theory that yields a method of analysis which generates the solution of problems created by the theory itself. Of course, it has some good company in those respects.
A crucial feature of the self-promotion of evolutionary psychology are claims to the effect that the programme and ideas it advocates are opposed only by such readily discountable adversaries as self-deluding theologians, sentimental humanists, political ideologues, social scientists clinging to ‘archaic concepts of mind’ (p. 57)12 and, to be sure, ‘postmodernists’. Contrary, however, to the implications of such claims and lists, the founding ideas and assumptions of evolutionary psychology remain controversial within their originating disciplines and among cognitive scientists more generally."(288-289)

"Computational models of mind can explain intelligent behaviour or cognition only to the extent that ongoing activities or processes can be decomposed into sets of context-free manipulations of discrete bits of ‘information’ in accord with supposedly prior and fixed ‘rules’. From the perspective of these alternative accounts, this would be, at best, but a fraction of what might reasonably be understood as cognitive activities and processes."(291)

"Evolutionary theory is, of course, crucial to evolutionary psychology, but aspects of it are appropriated by Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists in dubious ways.(...) Thus, as other evolutionary theorists point out, many of the explanatory accounts of evolutionary psychology, like those of its most immediate ancestor, sociobiology, require the assumption of prehistoric scenarios that range from the speculative to the unimaginable."(296-297)

"The problem is not the technically imprecise language but the crucial explanatory oversimplification." [mijn nadruk] (298)

(317) 9 - Why Babies’ Brains Are Not Swiss Army Knives [Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

"Evolutionary psychologists and nativists speak the same language – an inappropriate one, in my view. Evolutionary psychology claims that the millions of years of evolution have resulted in our brains becoming increasingly complex and ‘pre-specified’. Nativists, who are committed to the view that many aspects of human behaviour are genetically determined, endorse this view. Both assert, therefore, that the human brain is innately pre-specified not only for low-level perceptual processes such as vision, but also for such higher-level cognitive functions as the capacity to acquire and use language and number, and to recognise faces. Furthermore, they argue that each mental domain functions independently of the others. This domain specificity is often referred to as ‘the modular view of the mind’" [mijn nadruk] (318)

"Clearly some influential nativists believe in innately specified, domain-specific representations. Critics are not fabricating myths; the nativists are propagating them. Those like me who work on child development see plasticity during brain growth as the rule, not simply as an exception or response to injury."(322)

"Although it is rare to find such pure cases, I have no problem with the logic of the argument as it pertains to the adult brain. Clearly, when an already structured, normal brain becomes damaged in adulthood, the damage may well impair specialised areas of processing. But this does not necessarily mean that the brain started out with these specialised circuits already in place. It could be that specialisation builds up gradually and is actually the product of child development, not its starting point. So even if modules were identified in damaged adult brains, this in no way entails that they were prespecified by evolution in the newborn brain."(325)

(344) 10 - Taking the Stink Out of Instinct [Patrick Bateson]

"As I will show, such thinking has something in common with that of the ethologists around the middle of the twentieth century. The ethologists’ instincts may be traced back to Darwin and earlier writers. However, most ethologists subsequently gave up their ideas about instinct because they generated so much confusion. Did they give up too easily? Have the evolutionary psychologists rediscovered something which had been mistakenly lost? My answer is ‘no’. They rediscovered the malodorous aspects of instinct – the stink of confusion that arose because it had been defined in so many different ways." [mijn nadruk] (345)

"The reason why Darwin wisely refused to provide a comprehensive definition was because the concept has so many different dimensions to it. The same is true today. At their simplest, instincts may be nothing more than reflex reactions to external triggers, like the knee-jerk or the baby’s sucking of a nipple in its mouth. In more complex forms, they are a series of movements all co-ordinated into a system of behaviour that serves a particular end, such as locomotion or non-verbal communication." [mijn nadruk] (347)

"The crosscultural agreement in the interpretation of complex facial expressions is also remarkable. People agree about which emotions are being expressed. They also agree about which emotion is the more intense, such as which of two angry people seems the more angry."(348)

"By the mid-twentieth century, those studying human behaviour, particularly in the United States and the Soviet Union, found the late nineteenth-century hereditarian notions offensive. In America the ideology of individualism suggested that everybody could be instrumental in their own route to personal success, while in the Soviet Union the line was that everybody could learn to co-operate and their individualism be subordinated to the common good – and indeed the interests of the state. Behaviourist psychology in the United States and Pavlovian psychology in the Soviet Union provided just the support that was needed for the respective local ideologies. Both schools of thought placed heavy emphasis on the role of learning in the development of behaviour. A new reductionism was born, namely environmental determinism." [mijn nadruk] (350)

"Despite all the empirical evidence that some elements of behaviour can develop without opportunities for learning, the ethologists’ notion of instinct attracted strong criticism in the 1950s from a group of American comparative psychologists who studied animal behaviour."(356)

"The stink (as some of us would see it) of instinct has resurfaced strongly in the late twentieth century, in the writings of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists."(358)

"The debate has been confused because the term ‘instinct’ means remarkably different things to different people."(359)

"The Various Meanings of Instinct
1 Present at birth (or at a particular stage of development)

2 Not learned
3 Develops before it can be used
4 Unchanged once developed
5 Shared by all members of the species (or the same sex and age)
6 Organised into a distinct behavioural system (such as foraging)
7 Served by a distinct neural module
8 Adapted during evolution
9 Differences between individuals are due to genetic differences"(361)

"A formidable obstacle to proving that a behaviour pattern is not learned is the capacity that animals have to acquire the necessary experience in more than one way.(...) It is not as easy as it might seem to demonstrate that a behaviour pattern has not been shaped by some form of experience that has a particular influence on the behaviour."(364-365)

(380) 11 - Beyond Difference: Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology [Anne Fausto-Sterling]

"According to the fundamentalist Darwinists, feminism is doomed because it refuses to acknowledge scientific truths about human behaviour. True to a long tradition of feminist bashing, science writer Robert Wright, a popular apologist for evolutionary psychology, compares feminism to communism and other ‘ideologies that rested on patently false beliefs about human nature’. Like the communist dinosaur, feminists refuse, he suggests, to acknowledge the scientific truth about human nature." [mijn nadruk] (380)

[Tjonge, wat een domheid toch.]

"Wright summarily dismisses feminists who have demythologised the sorts of claims just described. Giving his critics (including many professional biologists) ‘a C– in Evolutionary Biology 101’, he opined that ‘not a single well-known feminist . . . has learned enough about modern Darwinism to pass judgement on it’. Wright claims to champion the Truth as Science irrevocably teaches it, while painting feminist biologists (and other critics – he does a lot of lumping) as enfeebled thinkers. We are apparently so blinded by political zeal that we have – despite its unassailable truth and our own training as scientists – rejected his view of evolutionary psychology merely because we reject its political message."(387)

[Het is het niveau Trump.]

"What we have, in the end, is a mishmash of argument in which often very beautifully done contemporary studies of mating behaviours in animals are thrown in with far less elegant surveys of contemporary human behaviour. The latter are then combined with unsubstantiated but plausible postulates about some unspecified earlier period of human evolution in which contemporary behaviour might have had its origin. I do not argue that it is wrong to think about the evolution of human behaviour. Rather, one must do it using the high standards of the best studies of behavioural evolution in animals. And if one is going to build hypotheses about prehistoric evolution, then, too, one must use the standards of the field and the rich, albeit imperfect, information already obtained from the fossil record" [mijn nadruk] (397)

"Based on such examples, a model of human behaviour driven by male competition, male power-plays and often male violence seemed like a natural (in many senses of the word) conclusion.
Over the last two decades, however, ideas about animal sexual behaviour and the evolution of sexual differences have undergone a revolution. During the 1970s women flooded into the field of animal behaviour – especially the study of primates. The new feminism gave them a new way of viewing the world. Most dramatically they began to carefully watch the behaviour of female animals in the field – with astonishing results. For example, they found that female kin groups are responsible for determining much of the social lives of baboons. Why were earlier observers ‘unable’ to see what today seems obvious? It is possible that their a priori notions about sex roles hindered their abilities to observe. It was not the feminists who were blind to the scientific truth. Rather, their male-biased predecessors made one-sided observations that led them to lopsided accounts of sexual difference." [mijn nadruk] (399)

"Although the actual rates of offspring fathered by interloping males differ, the message is clear: female behaviour can determine the path of evolution and their activities are every bit as varied, dynamic and complicated as that of males.
The focus, as with Darwin himself, is on variation. A key feature of human evolution was the expansion of the trait of developmental flexibility, leading to the ability to adapt behaviour to context. Careful observations of wild or semi-wild primate populations have yielded some fascinating discoveries about male and female sexuality. Patient observations over many years and several generations, noting which individuals mated, and with whom, which individuals initiated sexual encounters and the consequences of each choice refuted the dogmatic assertions that females don’t really want sex, females don’t gain from exuberant sexual behaviour, and that females do best by choosing their mates prudently and with discrimination." [mijn nadruk] (401-402)

"The essential point is that, in animals and humans alike, male–female interactions around sex and the rearing of offspring are variable matters. Depending on their environments, both sexes can exhibit a wide range of behaviours. Changing the environment can change a set of behaviours. These conclusions contrast sharply with the ideas championed by Wright."(403)

"The result might be the evolution of elaborate cultural mechanisms, not some built-in hard-wired unchangeable brain response. It is precisely the plasticity of the ways in which genetic mechanisms can respond to environmental differences – the so-called norm of reaction – that this hard-wired approach ignores." [mijn nadruk] (405)

(416) 12 - Different Strokes: Beyond Biological Determinism and Social Constructionism [Tom Shakespeare and Mark Erickson]

"This chapter offers ways forward for understanding the complex inter-relations which operate in the everyday world of disabled people. We draw on the lived experience of difference to develop alternative approaches which avoid the extremes of biological determinism and social constructionism that have bedevilled so many attempts to theorise difference."(417)

(450) 13 - Social Causes and Natural Relations [Ted Benton]

"These quotations come from the writings of two of the most celebrated evolutionists of the nineteenth century. The first, Ernst Haeckel, identifies human cultural difference with biological race and uses the Darwinian concept of ‘struggle for existence’ to describe the violent conquest and race extermination carried out by the European imperialist powers as a regrettable, but inevitable instance of the progressive workings of natural selection. The second, Alfred Russel Wallace, characterises the social life of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and south-east Asia as morally ‘near perfect’, by contrast with the moral and mental ‘barbarism’ of his own society." [mijn nadruk] (452)

"Both men work with unquestioned gender stereotypes, but it is clear that Wallace leaves open far more possibilities for future transformation in the relations between the sexes than does Darwin. Moreover, Wallace’s argument suggests that progressive social change will make a contribution to the continuing evolution of humanity."(455)

"So, for these Darwinian evolutionists, there was no fundamental disagreement about the origin of species, nor about the status of ‘man’ as an evolved primate species. But there were very big differences of view about the nature and fixity of observable differences between human groups: between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ races, men and women, and the social classes. These were, of course, related to wide differences in the moral and political outlooks of the evolutionists themselves. Darwin was a moderate liberal-progressive in outlook, Wallace a committed socialist and proto-feminist, whilst Haeckel moved, through his long career, from liberal-progressive to become the intellectual inspiration of a ‘monist’ movement which some have seen as precursor to the Nazi ideology." [mijn nadruk] (456)

[Met andere woorden: je waarden en normen bepalen hoe je omgaat met de feiten van de evolutie.]

"These differences continue to resurface in the evolutionary debates of our own time, and, as in the nineteenth century, they continue to be inextricably bound up with differences of moral and political outlook." [mijn nadruk] (456)

"It is possible to call up Darwin in support of just as many conflicting social and political doctrines today as it was in the nineteenth century. There are three basic reasons for this. (...) In other words moving from general theoretical statements to particular applications of the theory is not (as in more abstract sciences) just a matter of logical inference, but of immensely detailed historical and ecological investigation. This is no less true of the lineage that led to modern humans. (...) The space between what is known and what has to be assumed is particularly liable to be filled with unquestioned political and moral prejudices." [mijn nadruk] (457-458)

[Waar informatie ontbreekt lopen de interpretaties van die informatie alle kanten uit.]

"Generally, however, these social evolutionary ideas relied on specifically social explanations of the advance from one evolutionary stage to the next. Set against these were the continuing advocates of the ‘nature’ side in the nature/nurture controversy. They have tended to be on the side of resistance to the emancipatory struggles of the last century and a half. Their aim has been to show that the profound inequalities of social opportunity, recognition and life chances associated with class division, racial and gender domination and social hierarchy are ‘natural’, largely the result of unalterable inherited differences. In their most virulent forms they have provided intellectual comfort for projects of eugenic racial purification and outright genocide. However, the legacy of cultural horror left in Europe by the Holocaust has put all would-be biological determinisms sharply on the defensive." [mijn nadruk] (463)

"The last two decades have seen a marked downturn in the influence of the traditional movements of the progressive left. This has coincided with the re-emergence, as popularised secular religion, of new forms of genetic determinist ideology." [mijn nadruk] (463)

De socioloog Runciman wordt besproken. Die wil een evolutionaire sociologie.

"As a research programme for sociology, there are three main reasons why this is unworkable. First, the analogy between practices and genes doesn’t stand up to serious examination. Second, the whole idea of practices as basic ‘units’ or building blocks of society, and of societal change is inconsistent with basic common knowledge about social life, and, indeed, with many things which Runciman himself says. Third, the view of humans as machines for replicating practices involves a fundamental misunderstanding of individual human participation in social life. This further undermines the analogy Runciman claims between his approach to sociology and Darwinian evolution." [mijn nadruk] (469)

"Societies, unlike species, do have designers. What sociologists have to explain is why the designs so often don’t work! So there is a place for unintended consequences, contingency and impersonal forces in historical explanation: but these are the results of the institutional structures, power relations, social conflicts, mistaken assumptions, betrayals, communicative failures, and so on, of intentional agents, not of ‘machines for the replication of practices’." [mijn nadruk] (474)

[Geweldig geformuleerd.]

(492) 14 - Evolving Skills [Tim Ingold]

"All agree, however, on two points. First, humans rely on culturally acquired skills to an extent unparalleled elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Second, whatever biological differences may exist among human beings, they are irrelevant so far as their acquisition of culture is concerned. Or, to put it another way, every creature born of man and woman should, in principle, be capable of acquiring the skills appropriate to any form of cultural life."(493)

"Thus while the capacity to walk is a biological universal, particular ways of walking are expressive of social values. Would it not suffice, then, to combine the biology of human nature with the sociology of cultural difference to produce a complete ‘biosocial’ account of the ways people walk?" [mijn nadruk] (495)

"I refer to this idea of the human being as the sum of three complementary parts, namely body, mind and culture, as the complementarity thesis. It is backed by a formidable intellectual alliance between the theoretical paradigms of neo-Darwinism in biology, cognitive science in psychology and culture theory in anthropology. Far from advocating this alliance, I shall argue that it is dangerously misconceived. Before doing so, however, I should explain how its constituent parts fit together, beginning with biology." [mijn nadruk] (498)

1 Evolutionary biology

"For humankind, it follows that it must be possible to specify what a human being is, independently of the manifold conditions of development under which humans live. This possibility is entailed in the assumption that human beings together make up a species – that is, a class of entities that may be grouped together on the grounds of their possession of certain design features transmitted along lines of descent from a common ancestral source. The sum of these features amounts to what many call ‘human nature’." [mijn nadruk] (500)

"Thus humans are said to be universally equipped with an innate capacity to walk on two feet, regardless of how they walk in practice, or of whether they walk at all – or go everywhere by car! Specific ways of walking have not themselves evolved, they are just alternative phenotypic realisations of a pre-established, genotypic trait."(501)

2 Cognitive science

"Just as neo-Darwinian biology presumes a context-independent specification for the design of the body, so cognitive science posits an independent specification for the architecture of the mind. This includes the various cognitive mechanisms or processing devices which would have to be in place before any kind of transmission of cultural representations could take place. Cognitive scientists generally assume that the problem of the origin of these mechanisms has already been solved by evolutionary biology. Since the information specifying the mechanisms cannot be transmitted culturally, there is only one possibility: it must be transmitted genetically. Indeed, by and large in the literature of cognitive science, the postulation of innate mental structures receives no more justification than vague references to genetics and natural selection." [mijn nadruk] (502)

"However, this union of evolutionary biology and cognitive science is not without its contradictions, which are proving to be a particular source of difficulty for the new discipline of evolutionary psychology to which it has given birth. The trouble lies with the distinction between innate and acquired structures (see Pat Bateson’s chapter). This distinction lies at the heart of cognitive science’s account of how the mind works. A mind without innate mechanisms – that is, one conceived as a ‘blank slate’ – apparently could not learn, since it would have no way of making sense of the data of experience. And without learning there could be no transmission of representations across generations and hence no culture." [mijn nadruk] (503)

3 Culture theory

"The final component of the trilogy is a certain notion of culture, conceived as a corpus of knowledge or information that can be transmitted across generations independently of its practical application."(504)

"Yet in each of the three disciplines the dominant paradigms have come under attack, and for similar reasons. Neo-Darwinism has been criticised for its inability to offer an adequate account of ontogeny, cognitive science for its removal of the mind from human bodily engagement in the world and culture theory for its separation of knowledge from practical application.
By combining these lines of criticism, coming respectively from developmental biology, ecological psychology and the anthropological theory of practice, it should be possible to produce a counter-synthesis much more powerful than the prevailing biopsychocultural orthodoxy. In this, to which I now turn, the conventional divisions between body, mind and culture would be dissolved, though not as in the more extreme versions of sociobiology or cultural constructionism, by reducing everything to one or other of these terms." [mijn nadruk] (507)

Developmental biology

"Are we to conclude, then, that unlike walking carrying things on the head is not innate to humans but culturally acquired? What of the capacity to read and write? Any catalogue of alleged human universals tends to project the image that people of affluent, Western societies have of themselves. Thus where we, as privileged members of such societies, can do things that they – people of ‘other cultures’ – cannot, this is typically attributed to the greater development, in ourselves, of universal human capacities. But where they can do things that we cannot, this is put down to the particularity of their cultural tradition. This is to apply just the kind of double standards that have long served to reinforce the modern West’s sense of its own superiority over ‘the rest’, and its sense of history as the progressive fulfilment of its own ethnocentric vision of human potentials. Once we level the playing field of comparison, however, only one alternative remains: that all human beings must have been genotypically endowed, at the dawn of history, with the ‘capacity’ to do everything that they ever have done in the past, and ever will do in the future – not only to walk, talk, swim and squat but also to read and write, do the pole vault, ride on horseback, drive cars or fly aeroplanes." [mijn nadruk] (510)

"Thus the notion of capacity is vacuous unless it refers back to the overall set of conditions that must be present, not only in the individual’s genetic constitution but also in the surrounding environment, to make the subsequent development of the characteristic or capability in question a realistic possibility." [mijn nadruk] (511)

"The genotype, conceived as a context-independent design specification, does not exist. It follows that the forms and capacities of human and other organisms are attributable, in the final analysis, not to genetic inheritance but to the generative potentials of the developmental system, that is, the entire system of relations constituted by the presence of the organism, including its genes, in a particular environment." [mijn nadruk] (512)

"As the philosopher of biology Susan Oyama has pointed out, only within the context of such a system can we possibly say what any gene, or cluster of genes, is ‘for’. And so too, in the particular case of human beings, there can be no determination of what a human being is, no human nature, apart from the manifold ways in which humans become, as they live out their lives in diverse communities and environments." [mijn nadruk] (513)

"Walking is certainly biological in that it is part of the way human organisms work. But it is only thanks to the person’s involvement in a social world that he or she can undergo normal development as an organic being."(515)

Ecological psychology

"This environment, then, is not a source of variable input for a preconstructed ‘device’, but rather furnishes the variable conditions for the development of the neurophysiological structures underwriting the child’s capacity to speak. As the conditions vary, so these structures will take manifold forms, each ‘tuned’ both to specific sound patterns and to other features of local contexts of utterance. These variably attuned structures, and the competencies they establish, correspond to the diverse languages of the world. In short, language – in the sense of the child’s capacity to speak in the manner of his or her community – is not acquired. Rather, it is continually being generated and regenerated in the developmental contexts of children’s involvement in worlds of speech. And if language is not acquired there can be no such thing as an innate language-learning device.
What applies in the case of language and speech can be extended to other aspects of cultural competence. Thus learning to walk, like learning to talk, is a matter not of acquiring from an environment representations that satisfy the input conditions of some preconstituted cognitive device, but of the formation within an environment of the necessary anatomy, neurological connections and musculature that underwrite the skill. In short, the systems that actually generate skilled activity are not hard-wired but ‘softly assembled’." [mijn nadruk] (519-520)

"For the growth of practical knowledge in the life history of a person is a result not of information transmission but of guided rediscovery."(521)

"Ecological psychologists reject the view that individuals acquire the knowledge needed to operate in the external world through a processing, in the mind, of sensory inputs delivered to it from the receptor organs of the body. This view artificially separates the activity of the mind in the body from the reactivity of the body in the world, and in so doing merely perpetuates a mind–body split that has bedevilled our thinking since the days of Descartes. An ecological approach, on the contrary, takes as its point of departure the condition of the whole organism-person, indivisibly body and mind, actively engaged with salient components of the environment in the practical tasks of life. Humans, like other animals, get to know the world directly by moving about in the environment and discovering what it affords, rather than by representing it in the mind. Thus meaning, far from being added by the mind to the flux of raw sensory data, is continually being generated within the relational contexts of people’s practical engagement with the world around them." [mijn nadruk] (526)

The anthropological theory of practice

"In a series of works dedicated to the elaboration of a theory of practice, Bourdieu has attempted to show how knowledge, rather than being imported by the mind into contexts of experience, is itself generated within these contexts in the course of people’s involvement with others in the ordinary business of life."(524)

"Our bodily equipment is not ready-made but undergoes continual formation in the course of our lives."(531)

"Humans are not born biologically or psychologically identical prior to their differentiation by culture. There has to be something wrong with any explanatory scheme that needs to base itself on the manifestly ludicrous claim – in the words of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides – that ‘infants are everywhere the same’."(532)

(540) 15 - Escaping Evolutionary Psychology [Steven Rose]

"The declared aim of evolutionary psychology is to provide explanations for the patterns of human activity and the forms of organisation of human society which take into account the fact that humans are animals and, like all other currently living organisms, are the present-day products of some four billion years of evolution. So far, so good. The problem with evolutionary psychology is that, like its predecessor, sociobiology, it offers a false unification, pursued with ideological zeal. Far from creating a genuine integration, it offers yet another reductionist account in which presumed biological explanations imperialise and attempt to replace all others. In order to achieve this vain goal evolutionary psychology misspeaks and impoverishes modern biology’s understanding of living systems in three key areas: the processes of evolution, of development and of neural function. Underlying all of these are two major conceptual errors: the misunderstanding of the relationship between enabling and causal mechanisms, and the attempt to privilege distal over proximal causes. It is on these shaky foundations that prescriptions for how humans do and must behave, and for the social policies that flow from this, are based. My hope in this chapter is that, by exposing the biological misunderstandings that underlie evolutionary psychology’s claims, I will also offer pointers towards the richer concept of living processes towards which I believe the biological sciences should aim." [mijn nadruk] (540-541)

"There are two distinct strands of thought within the twentieth-century history of biological determinism. The first, which derives from genetics, is the argument that assumes socially relevant differences between individuals and groups – for instance, in sexual orientation or intelligence – can be accounted for by genetic differences. The second claims to account for, not differences but assumed universals in human nature (such as male aggression or female coyness) by selection pressures derived from human evolutionary past." [mijn nadruk] (542)

"The ontogeny of evolutionary psychology’s ways of thinking about the living world – its roots in sociobiology and before that eugenic and Social Darwinist thinking, discussed by Hilary Rose and Ted Benton – goes a long way towards explaining both its current agenda and its biological misconceptions."(557)

"There is an ultimate contradiction at the core of evolutionary psychology theory. Whatever the claimed evolutionary honing of our every intention and act, evolutionary psychologists remain anxious to insist on at least their own autonomy. ‘If my genes don’t like it,’ says Pinker, ‘they can go jump in the lake.’ Rather less demotically, Dawkins insists that only we as humans have the power to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. Such a claim to a Cartesian separation of these authors’ minds from their biological constitution and inheritance seems surprising and incompatible with their claimed materialism. Where does this strange free will come from in a genetically and evolutionarily determined universe?" [mijn nadruk] (575)