7:18 AM May 22, 1997
THE POLITICS BEHIND EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
By David King* TWN Feature Anyone who has opened a newspaper recently can hardly have failed to notice the tide of theorising about psychology, evolution and the meaning of life that has swept over the British press. According to the new theories, a central force in human psychology is the need to ensure that our genes live on in the next generation. This is because, it is argued, like other organisms, we have evolved through natural selection. Thus we all compete with each other to pass on our genes, and any psychological characteristics that help us compete will be selected for. But evolutionary psychology claims as its central achievement not merely an explanation of competitive behaviour, but also of altruistic behaviour, which according to a simple Darwinist perspective, should not happen. According to the theory of kin selection, first proposed by the zoologist W D Hamilton in the late 1960s, apparently altruistic behaviour is, in fact, basically selfish, since it is really aimed at perpetuating the genes of close relatives, who will carry the same genes as the altruist. Thus parents nurture children, often with great self-sacrifice, so that they will pass on their genes. The message of evolutionary psychology is that there is really no such thing as altruism, only disguised "gene egotism." What are we to make of all this, and the proliferating literature on Darwinist approaches to everything from medicine to literature? First of all, the explanations of evolutionary psychology are extraordinarily implausible. I see no reason to believe that the reason I love my son is because I want to pass on my genes. Yet evolutionary psychology says it knows my mind better than I do. It posits abstract reasons for our actions, reasons derived from some remote calculus of gene frequencies. Sometimes, in carrying the calculus to its logical conclusions, the proponents of evolutionary psychology reveal just how silly it is. Thus Helena Cronin of the London School of Economics, one of the key figures in the new movement, informs us that the reason for parent-child conflict is that, from a parent's point of view, the child carries only half his or her genes and so merits only half the attention that a clone would. Furthermore, each child is only a small portion of the parent's gene-passing-on potential. The child, by contrast, wants all the parent's attention, so hey presto, conflict. Well that isn't the way it works in my family. Most often, the reason for conflict is that my son simply has a different agenda from me. Why do we need explanations about gene frequencies? Why does a valid argument about the evolution of parenting behaviour in species which do not have a hundredth of the psychological complexity of humans, have to be extended to explain everything that goes on in human families? Another example cited by Cronin would be sinister if it weren't so obviously fatuous: apparently the reason why men beat up their wives is because of their genetic unrelatedness (hence no need for compassion) and their different reproductive strategies, rather than the fact, for example, that men are socialised to be violent and to dislike women. The implausible simplicity of evolutionary psychological theory derives, of course, from its determinism. In similar fashion to economic determinism, it tells us that our actions are determined by evolutionary "imperatives". The evolutionary psychologists when faced with the human species, have failed to come to grips with the fact that there is nothing of remotely comparable social complexity (and variability) in other animals. The existence of the social changes the whole picture. Firstly, it radically attenuates selective pressures. In all societies other than those historical and geographic curiosities most closely approximated by 19th century British capitalism, social protection for all except the extremely "unfit" is the rule. The large majority of people get married and have children. Another socially and economically, rather than evolutionarily determined effect, which has always caused eugenicists to gnash their teeth, is the greater rate of reproduction amongst those whose genes are supposed to be inferior - the ugly, stupid (in the eugenicists'eyes) working classes. Meanwhile, career women are clearly putting individual egotism above gene egotism. What have the evolutionary psychologists to say about all this? Are they going to start demanding that career women have more children in order to conform to natural laws? In short, natural selection does not work the same way for humans as it does for fruit flies. The most important thing that evolutionary theory can tell us about humans is that evolution produced a marvellous invention, the human brain, and nothing was ever the same again. Human psychology is no more determined by evolution than it is by economics or culture. Another objection to most evolutionary psychology is scientific. Of course, much of its prestige is due to its supposed scientificness, but in fact, despite its statistics and equations, most evolutionary psychology belongs in the literature department. A basic requirement of a scientific theory is that it should be disprovable by experimental tests. No doubt, by sufficiently contorted reasoning, hundreds of observations about human behaviour can be "explained" by evolutionary theory. But theories which depend upon the existence of a selective force in human prehistory can never be experimentally tested. So all we are left with is a set of sometimes elegant and clever fairy stories, not science. Moreover, the stories are based on a very narrow and naive version of evolutionary theory which relies entirely on natural selection. Yet there are other forces at work in biological evolution, and much change happens in a purely random fashion. So why the obsession with natural selection? This brings us onto the third critique of evolutionary psychology, the political. The clearest indication of where evolutionary psychology is coming from, politically, is its selection of altruism as the target to be demolished, and its insistence that, really, there is nothing in human behaviour but self-interest and "gene egotism". Evolutionary psychology claims to derive its analysis from biology, but just as Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith's theories of the free market, so evolutionary psychology's eagerness to do away with the idea of altruism is obviously a politically-motivated attempt to slay the dragon of socialism, which, despite the defeat of communism, doesn't seem to want to lie down. But with the exception of some early versions of socialism, which were actually radical liberalism, socialism has never depended on the requirement that people behave altruistically, with no payback. Most versions of socialism have merely relocated the source of payback for non-selfish behaviour to the collective, most often the state. Clearly, the main ideological function of evolutionary psychology is the same thing we have been hearing since the 19th century: that individualistic capitalist competition is "natural" and inevitable. What is clear is that evolutionary psychology, like its parent, sociobiology, is basically an ideological fantasy. It is simply not believable that calculations about passing on genes have any serious impact on human psychology. There is no doubt truth in its fundamental assertion that natural selection must have influenced some basic human psychological characteristics, and that individuals deficient in such characteristics would have been eliminated. But it is a far cry from this fairly self-evident fact to the vast theoretical edifice which is currently being constructed on the very narrow base of kin selection. Like all emerging academic fashions, it contains some useful ideas, mixed in with a large degree of speculation and over-interpretation of evidence. When you next encounter an evolutionary psychologist ask them this question: having discovered this fundamental key to human psychology, do they now go around calculating their degree of genetic relatedness with everyone they meet before deciding how they will treat them? An ancient Chinese philosopher based his system of ethics on the following scenario: that every human being, seeing a child about to fall into a well, would spontaneously move to save the child. Do our evolutionary psychologists first calculate how closely related the child is? I would hope not, but I don't think we really need to worry. My guess is that they love their spouses and families, and their genetically unrelated friends, just like the rest of us, for the simple reason that human psychology, and life in general, is a lot more complex than kin-selection equations. * David King is Editor of GenEthics News, in which this article first appeared (Issue No.15 Nov/Dec 1996).