Changing Your Mind About Evolutionary Psychology

 
Every year John Brockman collects essay from his friends (I want to be one) and published them on his website and in a little book [The Edge Annual Question - 2009].

This year's question was, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" Last year's question was, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?" The book is now out.

There are far too many answers to these questions. I usually look at a few of them but it soon becomes boring.

Sharon Begley feels the same way but she has picked out a few interesting mind changes from the 2008 question. She writes in the Jan. 3, 2009 issue of Newsweek [On Second Thought ...].

The most fascinating backpedaling is by scientists who have long pushed evolutionary psychology. This field holds that we all carry genes that led to reproductive success in the Stone Age, and that as a result men are genetically driven to be promiscuous and women to be coy, that men have a biological disposition to rape and to kill mates who cheat on them, and that every human behavior is "adaptive"—that is, helpful to reproduction. But as Harvard biologist Marc Hauser now concedes, evidence is "sorely missing" that language, morals and many other human behaviors exist because they help us mate and reproduce. And Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field "may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over" 50,000 years ago, Pinker says. How has the view that reproduction is all, and that humans are just cavemen with better haircuts, hung on so long? "Even in science," says neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, "a seductive story will sometimes … outpace the data." And withstand it, too.

There are many reasons for changing your mind about the validity of evolutionary psychology but the idea that "human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined" isn't one of them.

As you might have guessed, John Hawks is really happy to encourage that kind of thinking. Hawks is a proponent of the idea that genes can be fixed in the entire human population by natural selection in only a few thousand years [Recent evolution in Newsweek].

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