Someone's at home - This is good
Nikolas Lloyd replies to David Large
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David Large asserts that we do not know what a gene is, and in this manner
seeks to write off what the likes of Pinker are saying as bunk. While it
is true that many ignorant and unprincipled journalists are guilty of using
phrases such as "the gene for" in a sloppy and misleading manner, this
criticism is not fairly aimed at Pinker. Although David Large does not say
this implicitly, he very strongly implies that Prof. Pinker is committing
the same error that the journalists are. This is the reverse of the truth.
Writers trying to explain to the public the tremendous advances in
evolutionary psychology commonly plunge their heads into their hands in
near despair when yet another journalist gets it wrong. Pinker is
innocent.
As science advances, we learn more and more. No scientist is stupid enough
to say that we know everything, but this does not make it true that we know
nothing. We know a great deal about genes, and are finding out more
all the time. We know their chemical formulae, we know the structure of
them right down to the individual molecules. We know about meiosis and
chromosomes, and this knowledge explains a wealth of observations. We know
that people with Down's Syndrome have an extra chromosome. It is now, one
would have thought, impossible to argue that the characteristics of Down's
Syndrome could be put down to upbringing or trauma in the womb, as they
have been in the past. Similarly, we have found individual genes which are
predictors of certain diseases with 100% accuracy. If a person inherits
the gene, he inherits the disease. The purpose of the gene is not to
create the disease, genes do not have purposes, they are just
unthinking lumps of chemical, but they do have repeatedly demonstrable
effects. It is not unreasonable, sometimes, to write "the gene for",
assuming a level of understanding in the reader.
Two men walk to a door, both wanting to go through it. On the far side of
the door, a broom has fallen against the door, and become propped up
against it. The conversation goes as follows:
Clive: Right, well, we'll just go through here and [pushes at door]. Oh,
that's strange: it's stuck.
Brian: Try pushing harder.
Clive: [Pushes harder, but the door doesn't open] No, no good. I don't
think it likes me. It just doesn't want to open for some reason.
Brian: Actually, you are operating under a fallacy. You presuppose that
the door has intentions and perceptions. Your saying, "I don't think it
likes me" makes it clear that you believe that the door is aware that you
exist, and has a set of emotional and rational organs rendering it capable
of deciding or feeling that it likes you. Similarly, your saying, "It just
doesn't want to open for some reason" suggests wrongly that the door has
plans for the future, and has reasons for a certain line of policy. In
fact the door is a large artefact composed of dead wood, paint, and brass
fittings. It has no perceptions, feelings, or intentions. It is an
inanimate and non-sentient object. I therefore suggest that you revise you
beliefs so that you are more able to form an effective strategy based on
fact that will enable you to open the door.
Clive: Thank you for saying that. It was tremendously helpful. Please
hand me that crowbar.
Was Brian actually helpful? Was he instead an irritating git? When Clive
said, "It just doesn't want to open" he was presupposing not that the door
had conscious intentions, but that the person he was speaking to would
understand what he meant, and not prove himself to be tiresome and
pedantic. Sometimes, when someone writes, "the gene for", they do so
presupposing that the reader will be able to understand what he means by
this. Unfortunately, this means that it is possible for the Brians of this
world to exploit the confusion many people have over genes, and to put
forward the same daft argument that Brian did about the door. All this
does is further confuse people who don't understand about genes, and
irritate those who do. Actually, there is another effect: it potentially
raises the status of the Brian in the eyes of the ignorant.
We know a lot about genes. Genes are being found that have strong
associations with human traits. We do not necessarily know exactly how a
gene does what it does, nor what the full effects are, but we are able to
use a vast database to show convincingly that genes affect and effect human
behaviour.
David writes about Nature and Nurture that, "we have long recognised the
part played by both". Steven Pinker's point is that this is far from true.
Many people have and still do deny that there is such a thing as human
nature. Pinker is not so stupid as to suggest that genes and genes alone
account for all of human behaviour. He has never said or written this, nor
have any evolutionary psychologists done so. No one is that stupid.
Instead, he is defending a very reasonable and moderate standpoint: that
genes have a significant role in human behaviour, and he is defending this
against a bizarre and extremist one: that genes have no role in human
behaviour. The general public knows that what Pinker believes is right.
Anyone normal person who has had any experience of dealing with human
beings knows this. It takes an intellectual to deny it.
I have attended many nature/nurture debates, and they bore me. This debate
proves over and over again a useless and frustrating starting point for
serious and productive debate. Two camps always quickly emerge. One is
scientific and moderate, using facts to back up arguments, and the other is
political and extremist, and believes that its opposition is made up of
evil people. The latter goes to tremendous lengths to misunderstand
everything that the former says, and the result is confusion and
entrenchment. Steven Pinker's book is something that the public might read
alone, and come to its own conclusions. Naturally some people will
misinterpret it. No matter how simple a message is, people will choose to
misinterpret it for their own ends. Many Christians have disagreed on the
meaning of "Thou shalt not kill".
David Large sees no reason for Pinker's assertion that there are people who
deny human nature. This is strange, given how many and how loud these
people are. I have witnessed well-educated people denying human nature in
public debates on more occasions that I can count, and Pinker's book gives
plenty of examples. David also criticises Pinker for unoriginality.
Pinker is not claiming originality of this idea. He is writing a book to
inform and entertain the public, and he is very good at this. The point
isn't whether he is original or not, but whether or not he is right.
Quoting again from David Large: "Pinker. thinks that all humans are born
with a common set of predispositions and abilities which come from our
evolutionary past." Yes, that is right, Pinker does think that, as do many
others, including me. This sentence implies that Pinker is wrong. It also
contradicts Large's own point that surely there are no people who would
think otherwise. Large himself does, it seems. Large then asks, "Stop
there. Let's ask: What are these? Where are they? Can I have surgery on
them? Therapy? Can I do anything about this for me? For my children?" The
implication of these words seems to be that Large thinks that this idea is
useless. No idea based on truth is useless. If the truth is that human
nature is indeed based on our evolutionary past, then this is the one and
only thing on which to base our efforts to answering the questions.
Large writes, "Well I don't know about you but it seems obvious to me that
mere predispositions are a rotten description of human nature". Rotten?
Why? It is not obvious to me. Rotten because this is not the way he would
prefer the world to be? If so, tough - Large will have to get used to it,
and should not criticise scientists for preferring truth to a more cosy set
of wrong ideas. Rotten because it is it wrong? If so, it is up to Large
to show how it is wrong. Rotten because it is not clear? It seems very
clear to me that I was born with innate predispositions and abilities. I
can see through my eyes very well, but I have no memory of ever having been
to classes in which I was taught to use my eyes. The skill came quite
naturally. Evolutionary psychology explains such abilities, and it
explains why men are more interested in World War Two, while women are more
interested in childcare. Any theory that can explain a great deal is a
good one, and evolutionary psychology offers good explanations for the
entirety of human behaviour. I'd say that that is quite a lot.
Large: "do you really think that Leonardo was predisposed to paint the Mona
Lisa. and that this was because of something that happened in our
evolutionary past? Boy, do you need help! " The question is asked in a way
that implies that only a fool would think such a thing. In truth, many
very intelligent people think precisely this. The world is a very big and
complicated place. It is so complicated that no one could possibly have
analysed the genes of Leonardo's parents and by this predicted the Mona
Lisa. However, it is true that Leonardo did inherit genes, and these
caused him to grow fingers that could hold a brush, and a brain that could
use his eyes. Furthermore, it gave him a character that made him
inquisitive and creative. He was born into a world that had patrons of art
in it, had a need to make a living in it, and had the model for the
painting in it. Put these things together and you get the potential for
the Mona Lisa.
"Pinker attempts to explain the roots of the behaviour of modern humans in
terms of abilities that our ancestors of 100,000 years ago needed to
survive. Why on earth do they do this? Why go back to no one knows where
and no one knows when? Who had these ur-dispositions? Why them?" asks
Large. I'll answer him. Evolutionary psychologists go back many thousands
of years because that is when human nature evolved. Evolution is slow, and
works by a process known as natural selection. Therefore, in order to
study human nature's evolution, we have to consider the environment in
which it evolved: that of stone age hunter-gatherers. This is very simple
to understand and definitely necessary. Thanks to archaeological evidence,
the study of modern hunter-gatherers, as well as the study of our own
bodies we know that humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. It would be a very
unusual person who would suggest that we evolved from some other sort of
subsistence. What could that be? Farming? What would have preceded
farming? The people who had these predispositions were our ancestors, and
we get our genes from them. The question "why them" is a daft one. There
needn't be a reason. The people who passed their genes on to us were the
people who passed their genes on to us. That is it - there is no reason.
Some people in the past were different from us, and they didn't pass on
their genes to us, and that is why we are different. Large asks his
questions as though they are difficult to answer. They are not. They are
very simple to answer.
"We can't test it, so we can't deny it! . Or maybe it is because the
theories of Evolutionary Psychology fall apart if tested on anything we
have available to us" writes Large. This is a very strange thing to write,
given how very thoroughly testable evolutionary psychology is, and how much
it has been tested. We have fabulously huge databases to work from. We
have the whole of animal behaviour, the whole of human behaviour, the whole
of history, the whole of archaeology, and quite a lot of palaeontology as
well. Many experiments have tested the theory. People have tried bringing
up baby chimps among humans, and humans in the company of chimps. People
have studies a myriad of times the mental differences between men and
women, and have come up with consistent results showing that the
differences are real and innate. Experiments have shown that the degree of
relatedness between humans correlates excellently with the behaviour of
those humans. Studies of twins have famously shown how astonishingly
similar these people are, even when reared apart. What is more, all of
these results just happen to match perfectly the predictions of
evolutionary psychology. To say that evolutionary psychology is not
testable is just plain wrong.
Large says that we should instead read the works of John Locke in 1658.
This is strange because Large says that Locke came to the same conclusions
as Pinker, but if Pinker is wrong, why recommend Locke? Also, Pinker has
the massive advantage of all the latest understanding and data. Locke
didn't know about DNA, nor had he run tens of thousands of words used in
lonely-hearts adverts through a computer to study human mating patterns.
In his opening paragraph, Large uses the term "cod-Cartesian materialist
dogma", which I find a little inconsistent with his scorning Pinker for his
"trendy meaningless neologisms". He ends writing, "Whatever happened to
me, to persons, to reasons and acting for reasons? And that's just for a
start." Well, again this is easy to deal with. Despite Pinker's book, you
still exist, and so do other people. There is nothing in evolutionary
psychology that suggests otherwise. I am an individual. I have inherited
a unique set of genes and a unique environment. I have a brain with the
ability to reason and to spot that Large's arguments are flawed. I have my
ancestors to thank for that. I have also inherited some instincts, honed
by my upbringing, that spur me to write this essay. I might raise my
status by writing this, and I have instincts that encourage me to seek
status. I like to practice the art of putting forth an argument, and my
instincts encourage me to practice such things, because one day they may
help me pass on genes. I was asked to write a reply to David Large's essay
and I have inherited instincts to grant such requests, because my ancestors
who helped others did better than those who didn't. Not only do I have
reasons to write this essay (status, fun, challenge, helpfulness etc.), but
also I have a deeper understanding of my reasons thanks to evolutionary
psychology.
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Lloyd is a research associate at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Psychology Department. He is the maker of the video Built for the
Stone Age which attracted great praise from many prominent academics
in the field of evolutionary psychology.