New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

What female orgasm and deductive reasoning have in common: they are not adaptations

Evolutionary accounts of deductive reasoning have been enjoying a fair amount of popularity in the last decades. Some of those who have defended views of this kind are Cooper, Maddy, and more recently Joshua Schechter. The basic idea is that an explanation for why we have developed the ability to reason deductively (if indeed we have developed this ability!) is that it conferred a survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it among our ancestors, who in turn were reproductively more successful than those individuals in the ancestral population who did not possess this ability. In other words, deductive reasoning would have arisen as an adaptation in humans (and possibly in non-human animals too, but I will leave this question aside). Attractive though it may seem at first sight (and I confess having had a fair amount of sympathy for it for a while), this approach faces a number of difficulties, and in my opinion is ultimately untenable. (Some readers will not be surprised to hear this, if they recall a previous post where I argue that deductive reasoning is best seen as a cultural product, not as a biological, genetically encoded endowment in humans.)

In this post, I will spell out what I take to be the main flaw of such accounts, namely the fact that they seem incompatible with the empirical evidence on deductive reasoning in human reasoners as produced by experimental psychology. In this sense, these accounts fall prey to the same mistake that plagues many evolutionary accounts of female orgasm, in particular those according to which female orgasm has arisen as an adaptation in the human species. To draw the parallel between the case for deductive reasoning and the case for the female orgasm, I will rely on Elisabeth Lloyd’s fantastic book The Case of the Female Orgasm (which, as it so happens, I had the pleasure of re-reading during my vacation last week).

Marc Hauser's Second Chance

One annoying feature of re-reading other people's scholarship, is the possibility of discovering that one's  treasured ideas may well be anticipated by others. Memory and self-deception can be funny like that. So, it's probably not uncommon that folk really fail to attribute to others what is due to them without realizing they are in the wrong. Even when the mistakes are honest, they still involve injustices, and these may be quite large given that they may, say, reinforce gender related unfairness,  too. Such injustices are not easy to excuse or forgive when one feels that one's work or presence has been silenced or unfairly ignored. Even so, we try to cope with this kind of injustice. Yet, faking data or copying (and pasting) texts without attribution is legitimately an unpardonable sin in the Academy, especially if it is part of a pattern of such (plagiarism/faking) cases. One might be willing to give a student a second chance, but recoil from letting a confirmed fraudulent senior scholar back into the fold. Paradoxically many of us treat such cases as worse sin than many crimes on the 'outside.' (Coetzee's Disgrace reflects on this.)

It is, thus, understandable that the good folk at Retractionwatch react with dismay that prominent scholars, including philosophy's very own Philip Pettit, are willing to endorse Marc Hauser's forthcoming book, Evilicious. What really rankles Retractionwatch is that Hauser has not  owned up to his record of misconduct and "only acknowledged “mistakes.”" (As they write: "But we do prefer when those given a second chance acknowledge that they did something wrong. That might start with noting a retraction, instead of continuing to list the retracted paper among your publications.")

Evolutionary Psychology in Hollywood

Jason Read's latest post points to this quote from Neil Blomkamp, the director of Elysium:

You'd literally have to change the human genome to stop wealth discrepancy.... We have biological systems built into us that were very advantageous for us, up until we became a functioning civilisation 10,000 years ago. We are literally genetically coded to preserve life, procreate and get food – and that's not gonna change. The question is whether you can somehow overpower certain parts of that mammalian DNA and try to give some of your money out, try to take your wealth and pour it out for the rest of the planet.

The Spinoza question

But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; (Spinoza, TTP, Preface)

In The Evolved Apprentice Kim Sterelny claims there has been an over-estimation of the difficulty of cheater detection in small groups. (Hence he is not a supporter of Machiavellian Intelligence theories alone; in fact, cheater detection is less demanding than coordinating cooperation [2012, 7-10].) The real issue for him is to explain how cooperation in complex tasks works. His answer, apprenticeship, is fascinating in its own right, but what I want to concentrate on here is the way in which at the end of his book Sterelny poses the question of functionalism, or if you prefer, the Spinoza question: why do people go along with hierarchies when they are at the bottom – or at least not at the top?

Outsmarting Nietzsche

In the Philosophical Lexicon, we find the entry for outsmarting, in tribute to one of the favorite rhetorical / conceptual moves of JJC Smart in defending his act utilitarianism:  to accept, affirm, and even exaggerate the attempts at a reductio sent one's way. "Of course I would torture an innocent child in order to save the universe. Wouldn't you? What kind of moral monster wouldn't do that?" 

We see an example of the outsmarting maneuver in Christopher Boehm's Moral Origins, this time directed at Nietzsche: "Of course the herd of weaklings ganged up and killed the solitary strong ones! You say that like it's a bad thing, when in fact, it's the secret of human evolution!"

folk metaethics: does moral realism motivate us to act more morally, and if so, why?

In the 1980s, Ruse wrote a series of important papers that revived evolutionary ethics. The debate on the implications of evolved moral intuitions for ethics remains very active up to today (see e.g., this conference that I'll be attending in a couple of hours, at least if the British railway system isn't disrupted by half an inch of snow!). Contemporary evolutionary ethics can build on a wealth of research, for instance, in the cognitive neuroscience of morality, developmental psychology, and the study of altruism in animals. But the metaethics of the folk remains a relatively understudied area. Are people intuitive moral realists? If so, what is the connection between metaethics and behavior?

Ruse hypothesized that humans are intuitive moral realists, and that this metaethical intuition has an evolved function: "human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey" (Ruse & Wilson, 1986, 179). Ruse thought that if everyone thought that morality was subjective, that it was merely a matter of taste or convention, our social systems would collapse. Intuitive moral realism was thus a key component in human altruistic behavior, held together by moral beliefs, which in turn were cemented by intuitive moral realism. As Ruse wrote later on: "Substantive morality stays in place as an effective illusion because we think that it is no illusion but the real thing" (Ruse, 2010, 310).

When Ruse first formulated this hypothesis, it was by no means clear that humans were intuitive moral realists. Also, it was not clear to what extent an intuitive moral realism, if anything, helped us to act more morally. In the meantime, there is some empirical work on this, which I'll discuss briefly below the fold.

The phylogeny and ontogeny of deductive reasoning

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In a recent paper, the eminent psychologist of reasoning P. Johnson-Laird says the following:

[T]he claim that naïve individuals can make deductions is controversial, because some logicians and some psychologists argue to the contrary (e.g., Oaksford & Chater, 2007). These arguments, however, make it much harder to understand how human beings were able to devise logic and mathematics if they were incapable of deductive reasoning beforehand.

This last claim strikes me as very odd, or at the very least as poorly formulated. (To be clear, I side with those, such as Oaksford and Chater, who think that deductive reasoning must be learned to be mastered and competently practiced by reasoners.) It looks like a doubtful inference to the best explanation: humans have in fact devised logic and mathematics, which are crucially based on the deductive method, so they must have been capable of deductive reasoning before that. Something like: birds had to have fully formed wings before they could fly – hum, I don’t think so… Instead, the wing analogy suggests that there must be some precursors to deductive reasoning skills in untrained reasoners, but the phylogeny of the deductive method (and to be clear, I’m speaking of cultural evolution here) would have been a gradual, self-feeding process.

Evolution is Smarter Than You Think!

Evolution is a lot more subtle than it is given credit for. In 1987, Patricia Churchland, expressed a rather common take when she wrote “The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body part where they should be in order that the organism may survive.” (Whoa! Survival?! Isn’t reproduction the fundamental variable?) A tale of solitary organisms fleeing predators, finding scarce food, and pouncing on potential mates. No time for thought and reflection: “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Rarely is it noted (even by Churchland herself) that in the short space between those two sentences, she wrote “a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival.” A salutary turn, but then a reversion to that emphasis on survival. No thought that believing the truth can lead to speaking the truth, which, given a social “way of life” might be behaviour with positive evolutionary consequences.

In 1993, Alvin Plantinga seized on Churchland in an attempt to show that the theory of evolution is incompatible with naturalism. That is pretty cheeky, don’t you think? Could he be right?

The 'moral compass' of babies

In 2007, a study by Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom was published in Nature claiming to show that preverbal babies had what could be described as a ‘moral compass’ (not the authors’ own terms in the article). From the abstract:

Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take into account an individual's actions towards others in evaluating that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual. These findings constitute evidence that preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behaviour towards others. This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action, and its early developmental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a biological adaptation.

A puzzle for evolutionary aesthetics: the evolutionary basis for our appreciation of the sublime

Stephen Davies, an insightful philosopher of art (with specialism in music and naturalistic approaches in philosophy of art) has just written a wonderful book, The Artful Species. Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution, forthcoming with OUP. This book presents an evolutionary approach to art behaviors and aesthetic sensibility. What is particularly interesting in this book is that Davies attempts to link approaches in evolutionary aesthetics to more classical approaches in philosophy of art.

For example, the 18th century aestheticians regarded two qualities as primary: the beautiful and the sublime. As Davies notes, evolutionary approaches to art and aesthetics (EAAA) have payed a lot of attention to the former, but almost nothing to the latter. To explain why we find some things beautiful, EAAA examine the fit between properties and our evolved nature. Classic examples can be found in sexual selection theory, where aesthetic appreciation of physical traits is explained in terms of the fact that such traits reliably signal fecundity in potential sexual partners. Evolutionary approaches to landscapes, similarly, propose that we like park-like landscapes that are congenial to hominids, with animals, trees for shelter but still good visibility, and water in proximity (my picture from the beautiful Blenheim palace grounds is an example: these gardens were designed by "Capability" Brown in line with principles that EAAA would predict).

Evolutionary explanations of art can account for why we find this beautiful...

Minds on Monday: The Sense of Beauty Rests On Art

Last week, I argued that art couldn’t be a spandrel, at any rate not a spandrel on norms of beauty. In this, my concluding post on art and beauty, I want to advance two theses. The first is that our sense of beauty comes from art, not the other way around. And the second is that the art capacity is adaptive.

 

Let’s start with the sense of beauty, or more generally, the sense that things have aesthetic value. Throughout this series of posts, I have been sympathetic to Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure. I judge a thing to be beautiful because it gives me pleasure (or displeasure) in a way that is disinterested, i.e., which is independent of my desiring it, or feeling an aversion to it.

Minds on Monday: Why Art Can't Be a Spandrel

In an earlier post, I argued that all humans have a sense of beauty. That is, they have a capacity to derive disinterested pleasure from things, and, in this Kantian sense, to find them beautiful. But, I continued, there is no universal explanation for norms of beauty—such explanations as are offered for why we find certain things beautiful fail to capture all of the things we find beautiful, and admit many things that we do not find beautiful in the Kantian sense mentioned above. Finally, I argued that all human cultures practice art.

In this post, I want to begin to consider evolutionary explanations of the universality of art. Here, I make a simple point: evolutionary explanations should (but typically don’t) account for the essential role of form in art. Accounting for form has a surprising result.

Minds on Monday: Art is Universal. (Why?)

Last week, I talked about the sense of beauty. I argued first that it would be very strange if there were human beings, or even human-like beings, who are incapable of making Kantian judgements of taste. Then, in a second post, I reviewed some attempts to account for universal norms of beauty in evolutionary terms, i.e. the standards by which we determine what things are beautiful. These attempts get the domain of beauty wrong. From their perspective, chocolates and sex should also be objects of beauty. But this is not the right category for sex. In sum, I think that the sense of beauty is universal–but that norms of beauty are parochial and hard to account for in evolutionary terms, at least if it’s important to account for them as beauty.

Today I want to reflect on the universality of art, which has been illuminatingly discussed by Ellen Dissanayeke, Stephen Davies, Noël Carroll, and Denis Dutton. The phenomena are striking.

• Art has extremely ancient, perhaps even pre-Homo sapiens, origins. Hand axes made by H. ergaster one and a half million years ago display a symmetry unrelated to function, and these was highly time-consuming to produce. Forty thousand years ago, at Enkapune Ya Muto in Kenya, people made delicate strings of beads out of ostrich eggshell, an extremely delicate process. While these artifacts lack the individual style of their makers, and are hence better classified as craftworks, they nevertheless display a “disinterested”–this term will be explained later–regard for appearance and form that is the hallmark of art.

Minds on Monday: Is the Sense of Beauty Evolved?

Today’s not Monday, but I want to round out the discussion of the universality of beauty I started last Monday.

There I suggested that any (normal) human-like creature is capable of Kantian judgements of taste. Today, I want to consider the appreciation of beauty without restriction to the rigorous Kantian ideal. My concern here is the simple sense of beauty–the gobsmacked reaction that people have to gorgeous sunsets, magnificent mountain ranges, the starry sky, and also (my ultimate quarry) to great artistic creations. Obviously, SOB–I apologize for the rebarbative acronym, but perhaps some demystification is healthy–is universal among humans, and apparently not so among other animals. It must, therefore, be an evolved characteristic, something that sprung up in some hominin species and inherited by us. (Million year old handaxes are meticulously symmetric, and dubiously functional; so it seems likely that SOB is pre Homo sapiens.) The question is: why did it evolve?

Minds on Monday: Is Beauty Universal?

I have been writing an entry on “Art and Evolution” for the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (3^rd edition), and I am going to try out some ideas in a series of posts. On the main points that you might expect to hear about, my positions are (in ascending order of logical strength):

1. Art is culturally universal.
2. Art is evolved.
3. Art is selected for.

I won’t get to 3, the most contested of these theses, for a while.

I want to start by considering the question: “Is the appreciation of beauty culturally universal?” I also want to touch on whether it is evolved and/or selected for. (To be clear: this is just a preliminary to the above questions about art.)

Jesse Prinz against the Male Warrior

Many readers will have already seen Jess Prinz’s recent blog post criticizing a psychological study defending the Male Warrior hypothesis, according to which men are evolved to seek out violent conflicts in order to get women. He now has a reply to the objections raised by two other bloggers, one of them one of the authors of the study (H/T Feminist Philosophers). I’m not sure this is appropriate language for blogging, but I just can’t help myself: Prinz is really kicking ass, there is no better way to describe it. Some excerpts:

Evolutionary arguments and constrained cognition

In the spirit of the recent dueling posts here at NewAPPS, here’s a rejoinder to posts by my esteemed co-bloggers Helen de Cruz and Mohan Matthen. I am a big fan of the work of both, but disagree quite a bit with their take on evolutionary psychology, as I am no fan of most of the work done under this heading. (Ok, that’s a massive understatement.) What I don’t like about it is not only the fact that it is often much too speculative to my taste (Cosmides’ ‘cheating module’ being a good example), but also the fact that it takes the ‘wrong’ conception of evolution as its starting point. I am a staunch partisan of the anti-ultra-adaptionist conception of evolution of S. Jay Gould and others, and thus reject both the idea that phenotypic traits in organisms are primarily adaptations, and the related thesis of massive modularity. Gould emphasized in particular the constraints connected to the internal architecture of the organism, and the mutual influence of its different aspects (hence a rejection of massive modularity and a more holistic conception of organisms).

On the Evolution of Saints and Heroes

Helen De Cruz recently floated the idea that if our moral beliefs are produced by evolution, they are unlikely to be objectively true. “The prospects for an evolutionary-informed moral objectivism are grim, for here we stumble on the problem of the familiar Humean is/ought gap. . . It seems then that as we offer a plausible causal story of moral norms, we will be unable to make mind-independent moral truths figure in the explanation.”

Here I offer three arguments to counter what Helen calls “evolutionary debunking arguments” against moral objectivism.

Is there something special about evolutionary debunking arguments?

I just went to an APA session on evolution and meta-ethics, where one of the speakers was Sharon Street. A question that repeatedly came up was: do evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) against moral objectivism enjoy a special status? Differently put: Does the theory of natural selection as applied to our evaluative judgments add anything more that is not found in other types of debunking explanations (e.g., sociological or cultural explanations)? 

More hyphens please!

 

I usually start this talk with a joke that the title page needs more hyphens, since I'm really talking about "geo-bio-neuro-political-techno-affective assemblages." The slides are here. The text of the paper is here. My thanks to Andrew Marzoni, Joe Hughes, and everyone with the Literary Theory Reading Group at the University of Minnesota for the invitation.

The missing hominids

Many NewAPPS bloggers (Helen, John, Mohan, myself) are favorably disposed towards analyses of human cognition which could be described as ‘naturalized’ in that data from empirical sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science) play an important role.

Now, one crucial aspect in analyses of this sort in general is the issue of continuity and discontinuity between human and non-human animals. We are all familiar with Darwin’s idea that the difference between ‘us and them’ (Pink Floyd, anyone?) is “one of degree and not of kind”, and this seems to be the basic assumption underlying much of the work on non-human animal cognition that has the goal of producing a better understanding of human cognition. (Naturally, there is also the independent project of studying non-human animal cognition and behavior as a goal in and of itself.)

The two main camps are: those who marvel at the complexity of non-human animal cognition and deplore our tendency towards species chauvinism (fondly referred to as ‘monkey-huggers’ sometimes); and those who emphasize the abysmal distance between human and non-human cognition (whom I will refer to as ‘people-huggers’). (I’m using ‘cognition’ in a broad sense here, meant to include also work on e.g. sociability by someone like Frans de Waal.) And among people-huggers, at least some (but not all) end up defending a position that smacks of “We humans are so damn special and unique! There’s really nothing like us.” (also known as 'humaniqueness')

One aspect that is often (though not always) overlooked is the fact that there have been a bunch of closely-related cousins of ours roaming around the Earth at different times, but as it turns out they are all gone now: the missing hominids.

Mercier and Sperber on the origins of reasoning

If I had to bring only one journal to a desert island, it would probably be Behavioral and Brain Sciences; I am continuously amazed by the high-quality and innovative nature of its contents. It works with the very interesting format of one target article per issue (usually a long, controversial and ambitious piece), and short commentaries by peers. One of the signs that it is a truly exciting journal is that commentators often come from different disciplines; in particular, it is very common to see philosophers commenting. The current issue, for example, is dedicated to Sue Carey’s new book The Origin of Concepts, and has commentaries by people such as Tyler Burge, Christopher Gauker, Edouard Machery, Eric Margolis (just to mention some of the philosophers).

But today I would like to focus on the April issue of BBS, with a controversial target article by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: ‘Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory’ (an open-source pdf of the paper can be found here). Let me quote its abstract in full:

Trust, testimony and the gay girl hoax

The gay girl in Damascus, it turns out, is an American male, married blogger. Yet prior to the story of the so-called 'arrest' of the blogger, few people doubted her existence. Most of us trusted that the information on the blog was truthful, despite the fact that invented personas in blogging are quite common. The question of how far we trust information received through testimony has been the subject of intense debate, both in cognitive science and in social epistemology. Of course, nobody argues that people do not (or ought not) rely on testimony; that would open the door to an untenable form of skepticism. But clearly, people aren't blindly credulous either - we exhibit some form of epistemic vigilance, especially when the information is surprising or improbable. But the precise degree to which we are credulous or epistemic vigilant is still a matter of debate. 

Some authors, like Dan Sperber and Hugo Mericer, argue that people have evolved psychological mechanisms for epistemic vigilance to ensure that our reliance on testimony does not become disadvantageous. On the other hand, Paul Harris argues that trust in testimony is the default stance, and backs this claim up with psychological studies that indicate that young children (and sometimes also adults) do not even remember if they learnt something first-hand or through testimony (the well-observed distortion of eye witness accounts by posing leading questions is a good example of this). I am inclined to think that the fact that most people took the gay girl in Damascus story at face value lends support to the second position. 

As Dan Sperber and his commenters pointed out, the question of our reliance on human testimony was already considered by David Hume and Thomas Reid, and both seem to be precursors of current positions in cognitive science. 

Evolutionary psychology and high standards of scientific research

Since its official launch in the early 1990s, and its precursor sociobiology in the 1970s, evolutionary psychological research has been the repeated target of controversy. Dawkins, in his afterword of David Buss' Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), wondered whether EP really warrants this degree of controversy and scrutiny. At the 'high' end of the spectrum of scientific claims, we find controversial claims like the effectiveness of homeopathy or the existence of telepathy, at the low end of the spectrum, we find questions like the effects of alcohol on motor control, and it seems self-evident that the former type of claims need to be held to much higher standards than the latter. At what end of the spectrum does EP lie? To Dawkins "Evolutionary psychology is seen by its critics as out at the high hurdle end [in terms of the plausibility of its claims]--the telepathy end of the spectrum--while it is simultaneously seen by its practitioners as down at the plausible end of the spectrum" Dawkins (2005, 978) unambiguously sides with EP; he writes "Without a doubt, the evolutionary psychologists are right in this case. The central claim they are making is not an extraordinary one. It amounts to the exceedingly modest assertion that minds are on the same footing as bodies where Darwinian natural selection is concerned." This seems to capture the hard core of the evolutionary psychological research program quite well, and phrased in these generic terms, it does not sound at all uncontroversial.

Yet, the recent retraction of Kanazawa's paper on the alleged racial differences in perceived physical attractiveness, and the earlier controversy on Hauser's scientific misconduct have each sparked debates that do seem to question EP's most basic assumptions.

Why not all of Kanazawa's papers spark equal amounts of controversy

The title of this blog post emulates the titles of several of Prof. Satoshi Kanazawa's paper. To take a random sample of this: 'Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent', 'Why Night Owls Are More Intelligent', 'Why More Intelligent Individuals Like Classical Music', 'Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent.' or - his latest installment - the retracted blogpost in Psychology Today, which, after initial screening was rephrased as 'Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?'

Note that in each case, Prof. Kanazawa takes a controversial statement that needs to be proven as already established, and promises an evolutionary explanation of why the statement is true. Unfortunately, in many cases, the statistical data do not really support the controversial statement in the first place, as was shown in a re-analysis of the data of the retracted paper.

My question today is though: why do not all the other (dubious) papers spark the same amount controvery? Should we be OK with the assumption that less beautiful people being less intelligent, or with the conclusions in the paper "Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent"? This paper which appeared in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Social Psychology Quarterly,  basically says that people who are more religious are less intelligent, and offers a (to my mind ad hoc) evolutionary explanation for this. I skimmed the web for cries of outrage at this paper, but what I found mostly positive assessments, not just on atheist-friendly blogs but also on science blogs, such as here.

Yet, a re-evaluation of the experimental design indicates serious methodological problems with the study. For example, in study 1, Kanazawa did not use fine-grained measures of religiosity (merely the extent to which people consider themselves religious), and that he used two protocol that were designed to study verbal intelligence, however, he generalized these findings to make statements about the participants' general intelligence. The degree to which verbal intelligence is a good indicator of general intelligence remains unclear in cognitive psychology. Moreover, he makes the substantial assumption that religiosity is the default, standard mode of thinking, whereas atheism is evolutionarily novel. I have argued against this naturalness of religion elsewhere, but here it suffices to say that this is a controversial assumption even among cognitive scientists who study the evolutionary origins of religion.

In sum, a scientific study that could be equally hurtful and damaging to some people as the study on attractiveness in black women was reported and accepted without question. This can be problematic, as, at least in Belgium and The Netherlands, politicians get away with saying that people who practice some religions (notably Islam) are less intelligent, more backward (etc.), and they argue that it is not racist, since they do not target an ethnic minority, but are merely making statements about the effects of culture. It just goes to show that this type of 'research' can also be potentially hurtful and damaging to some people, not just research that is overtly racist.

Gabrielle Contessa leads by example

As Brian Leiter reported, Gabrielle Contessa (with a PhD in philosophy of science from LSE) writes the (new--recall the other LSE scandals!) Director of LSE a splendid letter protesting recent racism masquerading as evolutionary psychology emanating from LSE.

[Addition: here is a link to the Google cache version of Kanazawa's article, which was removed from the Psychology Today website; there are a number of responses to the article here.]

Good journalism on motivated reasoning research

This article would be a good way to introduce the topic to students and / or non-specialist friends. The author is the excellent science journalist Chris Mooney. Excerpts: 

... an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about....

Gary Williams: thoughts on Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

Williams provides some thoughtful remarks on a book we have mentioned several times lately on this blog. 

His punchline:

The only thing “essential” about the female and male brain is the essential tendency to change, adapt, and robustly respond to varying environmental conditions.

On historical records and language evolution

Alva Noe with great stuff. He explains what he calls the variation effect. Here's one example of it: "At some point in the last four hundred years or so, speakers of languages such as English, German and Danish, but not speakers of French, Italian and Spanish, started to say f whereas earlier we said p....How did this transition from happen? What's remarkable is that the change goes unmentioned in the historical record. How can this be? First, how can people have failed to notice and remark on a steady systematic change in the way people talk?...One hypothesis is that the change was imperceptible because it was gradual. As Deutscher explains, leading linguists as recently as the middle of the last century thought this gradual-change thesis was plausible. But it isn't. It's ludicrous [Fair enough--ES]...The very question — why didn't people notice the sound change when it happened? — relies on the tacit assumption that there was ever a single way people pronounced the words in question. But there is no one way to pronounce these words or any other. The ground of linguistic reality is comprehensible variation. And so there never was a single or unified sound change. Then what happened? All there is and ever was is variation, but what does change, over time, is the frequency of different forms or pronunciations across the field of variations. People didn't change the way they talked. What changed was the number of people who talked one way relative to those who talked another."

Well, okay. But there is a fallacious inference here from a) not preserved in the historical recorded to b) they didn't notice the change. In fact, old people constantly notice (and complain about) the fact that people change the way they talk. (Their complaining is often taken as a sign of aging!) Some newspaper columnists once made a decent living noticing and tracking those changes on the back pages (I always wondered why language columns got put there in the US and in the Netherlands). Moreover, some such changes were directed (as this site notes): http://books.google.nl/books!

Gary Olson: Cuban Internationalism as Engaged Empathy

 

Gary Olson's ZNet page is here. The article is here. Excerpts:

Some twenty-five years ago I edited a textbook on international politics (Olson, 1984) and included a carefully researched contribution by Gordon Adams on Cuba’s military actions in Southern Africa. I included that chapter because, in part, it effectively refuted certain widely-held misconceptions about Cuban foreign policy, one of which was that Cuba was acting as a surrogate, a pawn for the Soviet Union. But at least as important, the piece served to convey something of the societal wide, organic, cultural ethos of empathy that motivated and continues to nurture and affirm Cuban internationalism. That is, claims on behalf of a global praxis of empathy that fail to explicitly critique and attempt to eradicate global structural violence must be treated with skepticism. Such assertions fall outside the borders of any serious discussion of the subject (Huish and Spiegel, 2008; Gould, 2010). 

Today we know more about both Cuban behavior from that era and about current policies. We also know considerably more about the evolution and dynamics of empathy. Given recent advances in cultural neuroscience and related disciplines, there is strong evidence pointing toward a bidirectional connection between brain development and culture. One consequence is that our biological, hard-wired moral intuition, our predisposition toward empathy, may be short circuited by the influence of unchecked hyper-individualism (Olson, 2010). For example, after decades of unrelenting exposure to neoliberal ideology’s ‘Gekkoisation’ of culture, it’s hardly surprising that American college students are 40 percent lower in empathy than their late 1970s’ counterparts (Konrath, 2010; Bone, 2009). But far beyond undergraduates, as the hegemonic ideology of our era, neoliberalism also serves, in Henry Giroux’s apt phrase, as “public pedagogy” that anesthetizes feelings of social solidarity throughout society. It has “become an all-encompassing cultural horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices” (Giroux, 2008, p.113).

By contrast, Cuban internationalism—initially more military and now medical missions—is the most compelling large-scale example we have of empathic solidarity.

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