In Our Time - Evolutionary Psychology

Episode Date: November 2, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational of our existence…they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines”. Potent ideas like this have given birth to a new discipline, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’: It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion - we must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed, what can it tell us of how we behave, and can it be trusted? With Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Nicholas Humphrey, Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York; Professor Steven Rose, Professor of Physic, Open University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, there are those who believe that Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976 when he wrote in the selfish gene. They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots,

sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous and indirect roots, manipulating it by remote control. They're in you and me. They created us, body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale of our existence. They go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Potent ideas like this have helped give birth to a new discipline called evolutionary psychology. It claims that all of human behavior can be understood in terms of a single compulsion, can be traced back to it. We must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed and what can it tell us about how we behave? And above all, can it be trusted? With me to discuss the summits or pitfalls of evolutionary psychology

is the philosopher Janet Ratcliffe Richards, author of a new book, Human Nature After Darwin. We also have an evolutionary psychologist with us, Nicholas Humphrey, author of A History of the Mind. And we're joined by Professor Stephen Rose, whose book of essays, edited with his wife, Hilary Rose, is called Alas, Poor Darwin. arguments against evolutionary psychology which indicate the way that he's of a different persuasion. Nicholas Humphrey, I'm given a very broad definition of evolutionary psychology.

Can you identify its core beliefs? Yes, well you say, how the ideas developed since that point. I think they've developed by not starting at that point, which you read out from Richard Dawkins. That's one particular position about an important component of human nature. But evolutionary psychologist starts, not by talking about genes, but by talking, about human nature, about the possibility and, in fact, as we believe, the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, which is pretty universal to human beings, disposes them to behave in many similar ways and similar circumstances, and in ways which are constrained by the ways that they've evolved, that human nature came into being, to caricature it, because our ancestors with those particular natures were more successful than the competition in reproducing.

but the ways by which you come to be successful in reproducing are of course extraordinarily elaborate and subtle. It's not just a matter of having sex. You have to find a mate, you have to survive to mating age, you have to be able to look after your children, you have to be successful in society in order to get status and material goods and so on. And so success in all those different areas

is what has contributed to the evolution of human nature. One of the major important contributions of recent evolutionary psychology is to say that much of that selection for human nature took place in really rather recent times in the last million and a half years or so since we parted from chimpanzees. And that if we want to understand

what human beings are like deep down, we need to think about the environment in which they lived in the savannah in Africa and in the years since they migrated out of Africa. And that world was very different from the world in which we now live so that we come into present civilized societies with the burden, if you want to put it that way, but with the glories

of our Stone Age past behind us. And we approached modern problems very often through the filter of a Stone Age mind and Stone Age interpretation of it. And you think, you put aside the notion that Richard Dawkins' idea that were humans, a survival machine for genes, you don't think that is particularly central irrelevant to evolutionary psychology? Well, Well, evolutionary psychology doesn't need to talk about genes. And in fact, I've been an evolutionary psychologist for 30 years now without actually knowing much genetics or ever actually making use of some of the core principles of evolutionary genetics. Genetics has had an important input,

particularly in explaining how it is that certain sorts of behavior, which would seem rather surprising from if one was simply thinking about why they would be selected, can in fact be selected given some of the peculiar ways in which, which selection operates on genes which pass as single units between individuals. So that that kind of particulate inheritance has been an important source of information and an insight into why humans and how they've evolved in the ways they have. Thank you. Janet Radcliffe Richards. Do you have anything to add to that definition of evolutionary psychology?

Not much, but the important thing about the subject as a whole is to realise that the basic principles of it go right back to Darwin, who realised that as soon as... animals developed consciousness and the ability to act and make choices, the kinds of choices they made would be one of the main determinants of how successful they were in evolution. If you were a sexual animal who happened to have no interest in sex, your lineage would not be very successful. If you were a female mammal averse to suckling, you wouldn't do very well. So the idea is just that one's psychology from other animals as well as

us is an integral part of the understanding of why they survive. And what evolutionary psychology is, is just the general application of understanding principles of evolution to questions about why human psychology is the way it is. Stephen Rose, could I, just to complete the triangle, could I ask you where you think the origin and definition of evolutionary psychology lies? I don't know whether it's quite clear enough for listeners yet. So if we could really clarify it as much as. possible then move on. Let me try. Firstly, to go back to Richard Dawkins,

in your quote, Richard notoriously referred to evolutionary psychology as rebranded sociobiology. That is a theory of the ways in which genes affect human and other animal behavior, which was developed in the 1970s. So it has a lineage which goes back to that. It's not quite the lineage, I think, which either Janet or Nick were talking about. I mean, I think one of the problems with evolutionary psychology is precisely what Nick said. He didn't know much about genetics. And I think that many of the people

who now call themselves evolutionary psychologists do come from philosophy or psychology because they're rather happy with not knowing the biology which actually underpins many of these ideas. The common core, of course, is that humans are in evolved species. Whether we have a nature as such, and if we can actually divorce that nature and say it's been unchanged ever since a million years ago,

the Paleolithic, the Stone Age or whatever else it might be, which is what evolutionary psychology calls the environment of evolutionary and evolutionary, adaptation seems to be much more doubtful. I think that the core of evolution in psychology is indeed the argument that humans are evolved, they have developed certain characteristics as males and females during this Stone Age period, and nothing has changed since. The second core feature of evolution in psychology is expressed by people like Stephen Pinker and others

is that there is an architecture to the human mind, that is the mind is locked into certain modules which develop in eight-clipsy, they're there at birth and they just grow larger and the people have claimed this is like a Swiss army knife that we have all these modules inside the mind which you can open up and lock into particular places

and these are also evolved in the Stone Age period common ground is that we've evolved but where I think that we would differ from the claims that are made by evolution psychologists is to insist that in order to understand humans you actually have to understand us as evolved as developed as social, cultural and technological organisms and societies,

not just as individuals who haven't been changed since the Stone Age. And I think that's part of the core difference. And that's partly, I think, because the claims of evolution psychology ignore what we know, both about genetics and about evolutionary processes and about development, to say nothing of what they ignore about what social scientists tell us about the way societies are. So what you're saying is that the quotation I read at the top from Richard Dawkins, does have irrelevance. Janet Radcliffe, Richard, you wanted to get in there. You have to distinguish between evolutionary psychology as a direction of inquiry,

which is what I think it's most important as, and the particular theories held by particular evolutionary psychologists. Now, this is a new area, and you expect a lot of dispute within the discipline. So to defend the discipline is not to defend any particular theory within it. Come on, we can't simply do that. I mean, what one goes by the core and writers, and they are pinker, their cosmedias and tubis, they're Daly and Wilson, they're Helena Cronin.

You look at what they write, and you have, in fact, I think, to build on those claims. To say that there is some abstract... Excuse me, excuse me, one of the time. Let him finish, otherwise we can't hear him. Then you've got just bags of time. To say that there's some abstract concept of evolutionary psychology, to say that it would be desirable to understand humans as evolved creatures,

everyone, any biologist and most others, would actually accept that. But what when he's then looking is what the actual claims are. Of course you have to discuss the actual claims because evolutionary psychology doesn't become a plausible discipline until some of the claims start being plausible. So if Nick, for instance, wants to defend some particular claims, those are the ones we should discuss rather than just evolutionary psychologists as a group

who are, of course, disagreeing among themselves. I do think that evolutionary psychologists would want to say that there was now enough evidence to take the core of the subject, to take the direction of approach as valuable. This is a useful set of questions to ask. Nick, you were trying to get in. Well, it seemed to me what you were doing was as if you'd ask William Hague to define the core beliefs of the Labour Party,

and of course what you got was a caricature, with his being able to point to certain people who've made some rather surprising and, I think, scientific claims about the origins of human mind and so on. Nonetheless, ideas which we should entertain because they're interesting in their own right, but which have on the whole not been taken seriously by the main core of those who now contribute to the development of evolutionary psychology in the journals and the conferences and so on, which Stephen Rose never attend.

He reads the pop literature, writes books attacking the pop literature, but actually never bothers to get to grips with what people are really hammering out at the cutting edge of the science involved here. There was a lot of very... Actually, he said a view that you didn't know a great deal about the signs in terms of the genes. I don't think that knowing population genetics and so on is necessary. I mean, it's one essential part of understanding the evolutionary history of the human mind, but there are a lot of other approaches through cognitive psychology, through embryology,

through social psychology, for that matter. To come back to Janet's point, Darwin himself was the first evolutionary psychologist in the origin of species, he said, psychology will be placed on a new foundation. And within the next 25 years, he proceeded to place it on a new foundation. The descent of man is full of the most wonderful speculations about human nature and how it came into being, how it evolved from primitive ancestors. He discusses music, sex, religion, politics, and he did it brilliantly without knowing anything about genes. The invitation to redevelop a new form of psychology was not taken up.

The social sciences took over and rejected biological thinking for the next 80 years or so. It wasn't until the Second World War soon afterwards that some new thinking, which did come out of genetics, began to breathe new life into speculation about human evolution, and the subject was reenlivened. But it's been reenlivened in a whole lot of different ways. And there are many different approaches converging and competing and clashing in fertile ways to try and address fascinating problems about the nature of human beings. Stephen Rose wants to put a kind of gag on it.

He wants certain sorts of research not to be pursued. Yes, he's regarded it. He says that this is culturally pernicious. Most of the work in evolution and psychology is culturally pernicious. If that's not asking us to put a gag on it, what is? Well, he can answer for himself. He will answer for himself, indeed. I've never wanted to put a gag on anything,

certainly not in a program like in our time. I've never put a gag on you, Nick, even when you intervened at the launch party that we had for, alas, poor Darwin, when you were allowed as much time to speak as anyone else. But the point is this, that I do regard the claims about, as it were, the innate structure of the human mind and the unchanging nature of human nature back from the Stone Age period as pernicious in a variety of ways. Now, let me finish for a moment. But you have your history wrong. Firstly, it is quite untrue to suggest that social science ignored Darwin for the first part of the century. they were very interested in Darwin. Secondly, I think once you go back to Darwin himself

and point out that Darwin said, great is the power of steady misrepresentation of the people who insisted that they understood his theory better than he did himself. And I think that some of the fundamentalist Darwinians that we have today certainly fall into the category that Darwin would have regarded as misrepresenting him in this context.

I don't think it's good enough to do this peculiar thing of saying the people before, the sociobiologists, or these quotes pop evolutionary psychologists are wrong, we've got it right now. That's not the way that science proceeds and simply to dismiss the others on the grounds that you guys who are at your private conferences are doing the real work and ignoring the main claims that are being made. If all that is being said is that we are evolved and in order to understand what it is to be human, we have to understand our evolutionary

and our psychology, that would be nice, but that is not all that is being said. I think the pop evolutionary psychologists are putting forward highly plausible theories. And since, because most of them are very accurately representing the kind of thing that goes on among the professionals. So this is not about private conferences. I'm a philosopher. I came to this from outside via the pop people. So I didn't get any of my ideas from Nick's private conferences. This struck me as an extremely interesting line of inquiry.

And I think instead of just trying to make a generalization about what various numbers of people say, We should actually engage with particular issues and see how those work out. Let's talk about the substance. Can we start this next chapter with the phrase stone-aged mines in a space age world? It's perhaps too crude, but it's a useful headline. Now, what does that mean to you? Does it mean much or nothing? I think, well, to me, it's a slightly misleading way of putting the whole thing

because it rather implies that we were evolved to suit the Stone Age and we may be very uncomfortable now. And one of the important things about understanding Darwinian evolution is that it never had any intention of making creatures happy or contented or harmonious. That may have come about. And one of the interesting things about the genetic input into evolutionary psychology is that it begins to give us a better understanding of how it came about.

But I don't think we should mistake this for implying that everybody was happy in the Stone Age and we should go back to that. As for the question of how much minds have changed since the Stone Age, I have no idea, but I think it's entirely possible that they have. But I'd like to pursue this a bit further, if I could. Nick, there was something in what you said near the top of this programme, if there wasn't, you will certainly correct me,

which did imply that a very, very long time ago, as Stephen Rose has referred to one to other people, various things were put in place, which is still in place, and which are still overwhelmingly powerful and a great determinants of the way we behave in major manners today. Now they were put in place then,

and these are the massive great, let's say the four pillars. Structures come and go since then, but there they are. Now, what are they, and how were they put in place, and why haven't they changed when we've had language, culture, goodness knows what else? Can we do those one at a time? Yes, no, you're not wrong. I mean, I think that many central features of human nature were adapted to a style of life

which was persisted for a very long time from, let's say the last million years, an environment which is no longer present. For example, to give some very obvious things, which manifest differences between modern contemporary civilization and the kind of world in which our ancestors lived, there was probably not monogamous marriage or the institution of marriage.

Most men would not have had children. the children were being born to a few successful males, therefore the kind of male competition, which was present for that long period of evolution, has stamped its mark on male and, for that matter, female psychology, almost certainly. In the area of health and disease, there was very little infectious disease, for example.

Therefore, some of our attitudes towards food and cleanliness and hygiene and so on, again, are inappropriate to a situation in which flu epidemics can race around the world and take us by surprise. We lived in small, relatively integrated villages in which strangers would have been unusual and maybe objects of suspicion.

Some of the attitudes which now manifest themselves as xenophobia almost certainly have those origins in those days. For that matter, we probably lived in a world in which there were other species of human beings looking and behaving very much like ourselves, not only the Neanderthals, but it's reckoned that 100 to 200,000 years ago there were probably 13 species of human beings living in Europe.

it was essential to distinguish yourself your own kind from these other kinds of human beings. We still have the legacy of that in the xenophobia and stereotyping and the innate racism which we see in little children. It's an extraordinary and rather frightening fact that children seem to be born racists. They have essentialist ideas about what it is to be part of their own group based on skin color and looks and other features

which we no longer regard as being of any biological importance. but children from the age of about three months to about five years, home in on these, and they have to be educated out of them. That's a legacy of our Stone Age past, if you like. I could run on through more and more examples. But let's take the case of violence, for example. We lived in a world in which when tempers flared and even homicidal tendencies erupted, it wouldn't usually have led to death because our means of killing were very much more limited.

Guns did not exist. That's a crucial difference between our present world and the one in which we evolved. I know you've got more to say because I've read what you. have said on the subject, but that's a very good outline. Now, Stephen Rose. Well, Nick's speculations about the past are, I don't wish to dispute at this moment. They may or may not be plausible.

I'm very surprised at his claim about the innate racism of children because there's a lot of evidence that goes in quite different direction so far as that's concerned. But this is not the point. The point about a science is that it has to be of any utility. It has to make predictions. It has to be able to say, under what circumstances will X happen,

under what circumstances will Y happen. and I cannot see any of the claims of being made of the sort that Nick is describing, which help us understand and make predictions about the present situation, either about individuals in the way that we live in our lives, or about those great societal issues which confront us at the moment. From the point of view of making predictions, science certainly has to make predictions. The social sciences are notoriously difficult. The question is, what alternative view of things has made better predictions?

Now, there are some interesting questions here, If we go back to the male and female issue again, we simply don't know looking at men and women how much are the cultural background and how much is a difference of nature that lies underneath it. We can experiment as much as possible as we have been doing since feminism by trying to get the environment more and more similar so that women have opportunities.

We find that differences persist. What's the explanation? It might be an evolutionary difference. It might be more subtle things. things in the environment because we know how very subtle social pressures can be. Now, if you have evolutionary psychology coming in and saying, look at it from a different direction, you would expect men and women a priori to be different in these ways if there hasn't been much change evolutionary recently. Do these differences which evolution would predict coincide

with what we actually see? Now, there's a very interesting case in the context of feminism, because the traditional feminist view was that women went for certain kinds of men, in particular high-status men, because they were economically dependent on men because they'd been forced into this. Now, it's true they had been forced into it, so we just didn't know. But evolutionary psychologists would predict that women would go on wanting high-status men, even when they became independent. and if you look at the sociological patterns now,

you find that more and more women who've become wealthy and independent can't find men who are of higher status than them because they've overtaken them. And so you get the, I believe it's the Alley Macbill situation, though I've never seen that. That prediction is an interesting prediction, and it's been explored by anthropologists. And some of the tribes in non-industrial societies,

the people in non-industrial societies, that was the case about 20 or 30 years ago. They then go back, 30 years later, revisit the same populations and discover that as the women have become more economically self-sufficient, they no longer go for older men, high-status men. They prefer men closer to their own age and probably, therefore, in more conventional terms, more sexually attractive. And what this indicates is the liability of the situation that we're facing,

and it indicates that predictions of that sort are so universalistic that they are not borne out when you look at the rapidly changing societies in which we live. John? We're coming towards the end of the time, and there's one crucial issue we haven't raised yet, and this is the idea that these ideas are pernicious, culturally pernicious, that they've underpinned all kinds of corrupt politics and such like.

And we've got to tackle that because a great many people think as a matter of principle that they must reject evolutionary psychology because it has these terrible implications. So we have to address the question of whether the implications are what they are thought to be. as well as the question of whether it's true. Now, I would want to take this up from this point of view

and say even if evolutionary psychology is right, and I think it's certainly on the right track, it does not have the implications that are usually attributed to it by its opponents. That is, it has no... Suppose we write about women and men, suppose this is what they are like by nature, that implies nothing at all about how we could construct, to construct our society between women and men.

There's no direct inference whatever from claims about human nature to claims about how we should construct the society. Well, what you're saying is that one shouldn't deduce an ought from an ears, but I'm afraid that is what evolutionary psychologists whom I read, and they include those who actually draw radical conclusions and those who draw conservative conclusions from evolutionary psychology do persistently. And that is there are persistent claims which are derived

from the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about, for example, whether we should construct a welfare state, how we should live, what are the relationships between men and women and so on. There is also the persistent claim, which comes from the chief exponents of evolutionary psychology, that what are the sciences, the disciplines which come from social science or even art, culture, music, philosophy and so on,

should in some sense be subservient to the claims which are being made by the geneticists and by the evolutionists. And that's true. you will find that in virtually every one of what you persist in calling the pop books, but are essentially the books which set out the central agendas of evolutionary psychology. But Stephen Kappa, who are you reading? Indeed. You claims about the welfare state.

Matt Redley, I imagine, is who you're referring to. A very good writer, but a journalist and not a scientist or someone who claimed to have had original contributions to this subject. If you go to the people who are actually creating the scientific work and the theories, you just won't find those sorts of claims. But you're doing it again, and that is, you're saying there's this core of evolutionary psychology where these people who are grubbing around somewhere around writing little research papers,

but if one actually looks at the synthetic books which are coming out from them, I mustn't take any notice of them because they're written by journalists, or they're written by people who are old, or they're written by people who have been bypassed by the new work. And yet those are the ones which are setting out the claims. And when we wrote the colleagues

who actually assembled to produce the edited collection called Alas Poor Darwin, the sensible thing to do to us was to take on the central claims which were being made by those, by those authors, including cognitive psychologists like Stephen Pinker, including animal psychologists like De Leon Wilson, psychologists like Cosmedes and Tooby, and Richard Dawkins himself.

And if you actually say that these are not the people who count, there is some hidden things... It's not... You don't take on Peter Singer, for example, who's written a recent book about the way in which evolutionary psychology supports what he calls the Darwinian left. I do know that. That's why I was accepting Janet's point,

that in fact evolutionary psychologists produce claims about the sort of society we ought to live, which come from a variety of different perspectives. But that they infer oughts from isses seems to me to be unequivocally the case for all of them. Well, Peter Singer certainly doesn't do that. I haven't seen a single one who does. I don't know who these people are.

I just cited them to you. Well, yes, but I've read them too. And so you've not read Stephen Pinker's claims about the sort of society about the welfare state. You've not read, you've not read E.O. Wilkins. Wilson's book on conciliants, which makes those claims. Matt Ridley, Nick wants to call a journalist at this particular stage. Matt must answer for himself on this issue.

But I do think, as it were, what you're doing is simply saying there are all these people whom we don't care, but somehow there are you and me and some private people somewhere who are not saying these things and they're doing the real work. But you had not told us what the real work is. I'm about to say the real question here, supposing all these people say all the things you've accused them of, they are evolutionary psychologists

if you're right they're inferring certain political conclusions I would want to say even if they're right about the evolutionary psychology we can challenge them about inferring those political conclusions and I would want to see the argument laid out they would say for instance

men and women are different by nature therefore we should have this kind of society and I would want to know what premise they put into the middle to reach that conclusion now I think if you find any of them if they reach a conclusion there must be an implicit premise about the way things ought to be or the kind of things we do.

And if they get that, if they suppress that premise so we can't see it, what we need to do is challenge their inference from the premise to the conclusion and not say because we don't like their conclusion, we have to challenge what they say about evolution with psychology. Which, in fact, I think we have to allow our valid ones. One of the claims of people who write in this area is that we'll be making a mistake if we think we can direct society in ways which in fact will be resisted by aspects of the... That's what Wilson says precisely about the differences between men and women.

And if everybody said it would be awfully nice if under the influence of some new political theory, people could develop wings and fly. We could say to them, well, you know, it's a nice idea, but it's not going to work. In certain areas of social policy, we could make the same kind of claim. We have to, to some extent, limit our goals and adapt our goals to what we expect will work, given the kinds of people that we are. Well, I wish we had a lot more time. Thank you. Thanks for listening.

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