Category Archives: EvoPsych

The “I” In The Eye Of The Beholder

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When “doing the right thing” is easy, people tend to not give others much credit for it. Chris Rock made light of this particular fact briefly in one of his more popular routines – so popular, in fact, that it has its own Wikipedia page. In this routine, Chris Rock says “Niggas always want some credit for some shit they supposed to do…a Nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does”. At this point, it’s probably worth pointing out that Chris Rock has an issue with using the word “Nigga” because he felt it gave racist people the feeling they had the license to use it. However, he apparently has no issue at all using the word “Faggot”. The hypocrisy of the human mind is always fun.

So here’s a question: which opinion represents Chris Rock’s real opinion? Does Chris believe in not using a word – even comically – that could be considered offensive because it might give some people with ill-intentions license to use it or does he not? If you understand the concept of modularity properly, you should also understand that the question itself is ill-phrased; implicit in the question is an assumption of a single true self somewhere in Chris Rock’s brain, but that idea is no more than a (generally) useful fiction.

On second though, maybe I don’t really want to see your true colors…

Examples of this line of thought abound, however, despite the notion being faulty. For instance, Daniel Kahneman, who, when working as a psychologist (that apparently didn’t appreciate modularity) in the military, felt he was observing people’s true nature under conditions of stress.There’s something called the Implicit Association Test – IAT for short. The basic principle behind the IAT is that people will respond more quickly and accurately when matching terms that are more strongly mentally associated compared to ones that aren’t, and the speed of your responses demonstrates what’s really in your mind. So let’s say you have a series of faces and words that pop up in the middle of screen; your task is to hit one button if the face is white or the word is positive, and a different button if the face is black or the word is negative (also vice versa; i.e. one button for black person or positive word, and another button for white person or negative word). The administrators and supporters of this test often claim things like: It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’, though the interpretation of the results of such a test is, well, open to interpretation.

“Your IAT results came back positive for hating pretty much everything about this guy”

Enter Nichols and Knobe,who conducted a little test to see if people were compatibilists or incompatibilists (that is, whether people feel the concept of moral responsibility is compatible with determinism or not). It turns out how you phrase the question matters: when people were asked to assume the universe was completely deterministic and given a concrete case of immoral behavior (in this case, a man killing his wife and three kids to run off with his secretary), 72% of people said he was fully morally responsible for his actions. Following this, they asked some other people about the abstract question (“in a completely deterministic universe, are people completely morally responsible for their actions?”), and, lo and behold, the answers do a complete flip; now, 86% of people endorsed an incompatibilist stance, saying people aren’t morally responsible.

That’s a pretty neat finding, to be sure. What caught my eye was what followed, when the author’s write: “In the abstract condition, people’s underlying theory is revealed for what it is ─ incompatibilist” (p.16, emphasis mine). To continue to beat the point to death, the problem here is that the brain is not a single organ; it’s composed of different, functionally specific, information processing modules, and the output of these modules is going to depend on specific contexts. Thus, asking about what the underlying theory is makes the question ill-phrased from the start. So let’s jet over to the Occupy Wall Street movement that Jay-Z has recently decided to attempt to make some money on (money which he will not be using to support the movement, by the way):

For every 99 dollars he makes, you get none.

When people demand that the 1% “pay their fair share” of the taxes, what is the word “fair” supposed to refer to? Currently, the federal tax code is progressive (that is, if you make more money, the proportion of that money that is taxed goes up), and if fairness is truly the goal, you’d suspect these people should be lobbying for a flat tax, demanding that everyone – no matter how rich or poor – pay the same proportion of what they make. It goes without saying that many people seem to oppose this idea, which raises some red flags about their use of the word “fair”. Indeed, Pillutla and Murnighan (2003) make an excellent case for just how easy it is for people to manipulate the meaning of the concept to suit their own purposes in a given situation. I’ll let them explain:

“Arguments that an action, an outcome, or decisions are not fair, when uttered by a recipient, most often reflect a strategic use of fairness, even if this is neither acknowledged nor even perceived by the claimant…The logical extension of these arguments is that claims of fairness are really cheap talk, i.e., unverifiable, costless information, possibly representing ulterior motives” (p.258)

The concept of fairness, in that sense, is a lot like the concept of a true, single self; it’s a useful fiction that tends to be deployed strategically. It makes good sense to be a hypocrite when being a hypocrite is going to pay. Being logically consistent is not useful to you if it only ensures you give up benefits you could otherwise have and/or forces you to suffer loses you could avoid. The real trick to hypocrisy then, according to Pillutla and Murnighan, is to appear consistent to others. If your cover gets blown, the resulting loss of face is potentially costly, depending, of course, on the specific set of circumstances.

References: Pillutla, M.M. & Murnighan, J.K. (2003). Fairness in bargaining. Social Justice Research, 16, 241- 262

Why Are Plumbers So Sexist?

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By now, most people have surely heard of the dreaded wage gap between men and women. If I am to believe what I have heard around the internet, women in the US earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man does, and – here’s the key part – this is because we live in a deeply sexist society that needs to be changed.

Oh yeah? Well my glass ceiling is still higher.

I could point out that the wage gap only reflects gross earnings, not things like hours worked, education, or profession, but those factors alone don’t explain the whole discrepancy; there’s still a couple cents left over. As for what percentage of the remaining is gap is due to sexism specifically, well, I can’t say. What we could say, with a reasonable degree of certainty is that there is a gap in gross earnings which can be divided up into explained and unexplained variance. What we cannot say is that the unexplained variance equals sexist discrimination.

Now before you decide to label me a sexist for daring to consider an alternative hypothesis, let’s consider some other gaps as presented by Susan Pinker (2008): In 1973, only 5% of lawyers in the US were women; in 2003 that number was 27%. That’s a pretty impressive gain, and we see a similar one for Aerospace engineers; up from 1% to 11% over the same time period. But what about plumbers? In 1973, women represented approximately 0% of the plumbers in the US; by 2003, women represented a mighty 1%. Why were women able to make such vast inroads in the fields of law and engineering, but somehow couldn’t break through the extremely sexist barriers put up by the field of plumbing?

“I unclogged that drain for you. Also, women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

Perhaps plumbers and plumbing culture are just vastly more sexist against women compared to lawyers. Then again, perhaps that huge gap between male and female plumbers reflects something else, such as women not being particularly interested in the idea of becoming a plumber. Pinker – not to be confused with her brother, Steven – makes the case for underlying differences in male and female psychology being an important factor in some of these gaps we see, from choice of employment to the pay gap. I feel it can probably help account for a hefty portion of that variance. It’s important to remember that when you see sex differences, like in the pay gap, you haven’t found direct evidence of sexism. For instance, in Michigan women now outnumber men in terms of earning all types of degrees, but this doesn’t mean colleges there are sexist against men.

So let’s forget about plumbing and focus on comedy. Someone happens to think there’s no difference between men and women in that area. Why, hello again Amanda. (I didn’t even notice who the author was until I was well into writing, it’s just a lucky coincidence that she’s consistently bad at science)

My posts have pictures with hilarious captions; your posts do not. Point: Men.

The idea of innate sex differences can be a touchy subject for some, and is no doubt responsible for part of the opposition towards evolutionary psychology (Geher, 2010). Marcotte thinks men and women are identical in the humor department, it would seem. Why does she think this? She reports that a study found 16 men and 16 women (I presume, from some college) were rated about equally when it came to how funny captions they came up with for a cartoon were. Despite this, 90% of people rated men as funnier than women, to which Amanda can only conclude “sexism did it”.

First of all, let me say that I’m happy to see Amanda has apparently gotten over her concerns about small, homogenous samples that she expressed about the hand grip research, at least temporarily; I suppose Amanda figures since the results sound nice, the work must be good enough to generalize to “men and women” everywhere.

Despite not knowing much about the research in the field of humor myself, the second point I’d like to make is that there’s probably a ceiling effect here; there’s only a certain range of possible captions to pre-drawn, pre-selected pictures that make sense and are funny. The claim was this helps “level the playing field”, much like only having 10 pound weights available can make differences between men and women in muscle mass seem irrelevant when recording how much they can lift (which would clearly mean men only lift more weight outside the lab because of sexism). Most people would agree there’s a lot more to humor than captioning pictures, but Amanda Marcotte is not most people.

Who’s got two thumbs and thinks captioning pictures is hilarious? This guy.

Did sexism play any role? Well, it seemed to. It’s reported that people tended to remember the funny captions as coming from men and unfunny ones coming from women, but since the current study appears to not be available to read, I can’t comment much further about that. I’m going to go ahead an guess that the effect wasn’t terribly large, let alone able to account for why 90% of people agreed that men were funnier, as there wasn’t much said about it other than “it exists”. Why it exists would be another question worth examining. Spoiler alert: Marcotte probably thinks it’s due to baseless sexism.

References: Geher, G. (2010). Evolution is not relevant to sex differences in humans because I want it that way! Evidence for the politicization of human evolutionary psychology. The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2, 32-47

Pinker, S. (2008). The sexual paradox: Extreme men, gifted women, and the real gender gap. Ontario, Canada: Random House Press

Some People Watch Too Much Law And Order

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Having watched a good deal of  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, I get the sense that some viewers take away the message that just about every case of rape involves a stranger violently raping a woman, though this accounts for only a minority of rapes in the real world (Palmer, 1988). This may reflect the fact that women are themselves more fearful of being raped by a stranger than an acquaintance, as well as take more precautionary behaviors to guard against the former (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1997). It is something of a mantra in our culture that rape is not about sex, but about violence – which is wrong, for the record (Palmer, 1988) – that probably also has a heavy contribution to the depictions of rape on shows like SVU. What makes these shows annoying – in addition to that heavily biased depiction of what rape is like – is that they normally also include some smug psychologist that apparently never progressed much beyond an introduction to psychology course – not unlike the writers, I’m sure – that gets called in to help out.

“Your killer was raping those women because of some deep-seated hatred towards his mother. Degree, please”

One person who may (metaphorically or actually) have watched too much Law & Order is Amanda Marcotte. She’s one of those “mad at evolutionary psychology without understanding what the hell she’s talking about” kind of people, and it’s my pleasure today to point out why she’s wrong at some length.

Since Marcotte doesn’t want to appear anti-science, she initially tries to co-opt the authority of two people only the “daringly stupid” would accuse of being anti-science: P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne. First, let me note that starting off with an explicit appeal to authority isn’t the best course of action for any debate. That said, I certainly wouldn’t accuse them of being anti-science, because that’s a daringly stupid label. People are not opposed to science in general; in fact, most people seem to love the idea of science. What people don’t seem like is when scientists reach an unpalatable conclusion.

Beginning with the first point, Marcotte expresses skepticism about the results of a study that showed women generated a stronger grip strength in response to reading a rape scenario relative to a control story, but only when they were in the ovulatory phase of their cycle and not taking hormonal birth control (Petralia & Gallup, 2002):

“Which is how I’m going to approach contesting this article by Jesse Bering at Slate about the supposed evidence that women evolved to fight back against rape … if they’re ovulating…Some of them failed to present the evidence that Bering suggests they have–the handgrip study was one where some researchers found no variation over a menstrual cycle.”

Let’s be clear: the hypothesis is not that women only evolved to fight back against rape if they’re ovulating; the claim is that women may have been selected to be better able to fight back if they’re ovulating, given the increased probability of conception and the resulting fitness costs. Fighting itself is generally not a costless act, and the conditions under which people are likely to fight should be expected to vary contingent on the potential costs and benefits. Women who do fight back are in fact more likely to stop a rape from being completed, but they also seem more likely to suffer physical injury (Ullman & Knight, 1993).

By “some researchers found no variation”, it’s not entirely clear what Marcotte is referring to (or rather, what Myers – whom she is parroting – is referring to), since she doesn’t reference anything. I assume she’s mentioning studies that found no variation across the menstrual cycle referenced by Petralia and Gallup that also didn’t involve any rape scenario story – the very thing that was hypothesized to be causing the effect. Comparing a study completely lacking an experimental manipulation to one with an experimental manipulation as evidence compromising the effect of the manipulation seems like a strange thing to do, probably because it’s a stupid thing to do.

“Who’s got time for actual replications? That sounds like work, and work isn’t fun. This should be close enough.”

Her next point is that one referenced in the very beginning: that rape is a violent crime, not a sexual one, even going so far as to say, “Rape, in this case, is just a certain kind of wife-beating.  It’s best understood as throwing a punch with your penis.” To quote Palmer quoting Hagen, “If violence is what the rapist is after, he’s not very good at it.” When it comes to the use of force in rape, the vast majority of times it’s used instrumentally – not excessively – if physical force is even involved at all. In this view, violence is the means to the end (sex), not the other way around. An example might clear this up a bit:

“The act of prostitution includes both a person giving money to another person and a sexual act. Does this mean that a man who goes to a female prostitute is motivated by a desire to give money to a woman?” (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 132)

I heard it’s not technically illegal if your motivation was to give her money and the sex was just instrumental

Marcotte’s final point would appear to be a stubborn misunderstanding of the difference between proximate and ultimate causation, as evidenced here:

“There’s also the weird side assumption that features prominently in many half-baked evolutionary theories, which is that sex is strictly about reproduction in a species that has homosexuality, contraception, and old people who get it on…that rapists get off not on the chance to plant their seed (some, after all, use condoms!)…”

I’m pretty sure there’s not a whole lot more to say about that, other than to point out it really does reinforce how little Marcotte knows about what she’s attempting to criticize. At this point in the field’s development, the only reason someone should make such a misguided mistake is near complete ignorance.

The only way this criticism could get any worse would be if Marcotte was foolish enough to imply evolutionary psychologists invoke genetic determinism and are attempting to give rapists a pass morally:

 ”…Bering’s article downplays the severity of rape. It suggests that there’s not much to be done about rape and that men are just programmed to do it… ”

Nailed it!

One would think, given her initial concerns about not wanting to come off as anti-science, Marcotte would have included more actual science in her post, but there really isn’t any to be found. There’s skepticism, ignorance, assertions, and moral outrage, but very little science. Perhaps it’s worth quoting Palmer and Thornhill (2003), quoting Coyne on the matter, since Coyne is an authority to Marcotte:

“It is true that in recent decades, the discussion of rape has been dominated by such notions [as rape is not about sex, but about violence and power], though one must remember that they originated not as scientific propositions, but as political slogans deemed necessary to reverse popular misconceptions about rape”

Would you look at that; Coyne seems to think Marcotte is wrong about the “not sex” thing too.

References: Hickman, S.E. & Muehlenhard, C.L. (1997). College women’s fears and precautionary behaviors relating to acquaintance rape and stranger rape. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 527-547

Palmer, C.T. (1988). Twelve reasons why rape is not sexually motivated: A skeptical examination. The Journal of Sex Research, 25, 512-530

Palmer, C.T. & Thornhill, R. (2003) Straw men and fairy tales: Evaluating reactions to A Natural History of Rape. The Journal of Sex Research, 40, 249-255

Petralia, S.M. & Gallup Jr., G.G. (2002). Effects of a sexual assault scenario on handgrip strength across the menstrual cycle. Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 3-10

Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C.T. (2000). A natural history of rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ullman, S.E. & Knight, R.A. (1993). The efficacy of women’s resistance strategies in rape situations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 17, 23-38.

Are We The 99 Percent?

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Amidst the protests of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, the refrain of “we are the 99 percent” seems to be thrown around like “devil horns” at any metal concert; it’s frequent, and it’s annoying. Without getting too much into personal politics, I will say I don’t appreciate a small group of people who presume to speak for much larger group of people, especially when the view points of that larger group are quite diverse.

A notoriously diverse group of people

Which is why it particularly irks me whenever I read any variant of the following thought: According to Evolutionary Psychology… 

When I was last grading papers for an undergraduate evolutionary psychology course, I can’t tell you how many times I saw that phrase in papers. Despite my frequent red-pen correctives, it was an error that persisted until the end of semester. Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated thought; if you type “Evolutionary psychology is” into google, you’ll notice one of the most frequent search results ends that phrase with “bullshit”. Go ahead and read over each article on the first page of results and their comments sections and count how many times that error is made. You’ll notice the error rate is somewhere between almost all the time to actually all the time. 

You’ll also notice that almost every page refers to this man. Behold the face of evil.

The very basic mistake that’s being made whenever the phrase is uttered is that evolutionary psychology is not a theory, and as such it makes no specific predictions. Rather, evolutionary psychology is a research framework that uses evolutionary theory to help both derive predictions and understand results concerning human psychology and behavior. If you were hoping for something a bit more sinister about oppression and hatred of people who aren’t white males, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. One of the downsides of this very basic mistake is that it leads some people to say – in a no doubt cocky tone – things like, “Is evolutionary psychology total utter and dangerous bullshit?” or, “Evolutionary Psychology is a load of fucking shit” all without actually discussing the underpinnings of the field (which is really a shame, as I’m sure these thoughtful and eloquent people would have a lot to add). As I mentioned last time, people don’t seem to have a problem with the use of adaptationist logic so long as it comes to the conclusion they’d prefer to hear.

Just imagine how well this one went over.

Much like Satoshi Kanazawa, the book pictured above generated a fierce amount of controversy for all the standard, muddle-headed reasons. Among other statements about why the book proved that evolutionary psychology is a bunch of misogynistic bullshit, one of the claims of the critics went something along the lines of “Thornhill and Palmer said rape was an adaptation”. What almost all the critics forgot to mention (or didn’t know) is that Palmer – one of the two authors – argued that rape was a byproduct. (Putting aside for minute the fact that the book was ended on the note that the case for adaptation or byproduct was left open…)

So Palmer’s views got (basically) ignored and he got lumped in with Thornhill through some misguided guilt-by-association. Similarly, almost every site that turned up on the “evolutionary psychology is bullshit” search – on top of blatantly misunderstanding the issue – attempts to make Kanazawa (and sometimes Thornhill) the face of what evolutionary psychology “says”. He is most definitely not the 99%, and evolutionary psychology as a framework is not the problem.

It can be hard to take critics seriously when they can’t demonstrate they know what it is they’re criticizing.

The Case Of The Female Orgasm: Bias In The Critiquing Of Science

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The last post dealt with the moralistic outrage that some people feel towards a trait being labeled an adaptation or a byproduct, but I only skimmed the surface of the issue. Since it’s such an important point, I felt it would only be proper to expand it a bit further.

Because I crave pain and disappointment, I actually read every last comment on both articles. A reoccurring theme seen throughout the comments sections is that many people seem to feel female orgasm is obviously and adaptation and anyone who comes to the opposite conclusion is probably a sexist being mislead by a male-centered society that’s out to demean women. It’s at this point they’ll generally state female orgasm clearly has the function of [making women have more sex, drawing sperm into the reproductive tract, making women lay down to retain more sperm, reinforcing the pair bond, even - are you ready for this one - feeling good. That's right, it evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with reproduction], and why haven’t people figured that out? It’s all because those silly evolutionary psychologists are blinded by current cultural trends and institutions, whereas their critics presumably feel they are not similarly influenced.

“Orgasms feel good, therefore they evolved to feel good. Duh”

In case you’re curious, those possible functions have already all been explored. The only one that seems like it might – and I do stress might – have some traction is the sperm transport hypothesis, though it rests on some questionable data.

These are some pretty strong intuitions people seem to have about whether female orgasm is adaptive based upon very little evidence, if evidence is involved at all. Ironically, people who are so fond of saying, “evolutionary psychologists spin just-so stories” appear completely willing to accept even a possible scenario as clearly true (say, female orgasm encouraged women to have more sex) if it matches their view of how the world should be; female orgasm should be socially important, therefore female orgasm is evolutionarily important (an adaptation).

“If this didn’t have anything to do with reproduction, I’d probably have to stop doing it”

What I feel we do have at this point is the knowledge that people are not overtly hostile to an adaptationist research paradigm in all cases, but will tend to be when it doesn’t come to the right conclusions. For instance, it’d otherwise be odd that people calling the byproduct hypothesis “evolutionary psychology bullshit” are perfectly happy to advance their own evolutionary accounts for female orgasm. You see, where evolutionary psychologists are naive, their critics are informed and knowledgable, having cast off their cultural trappings and viewed the underlying essence of human nature. I’d point out that evolutionary psychologists also proposed many of those other possible functions in the first place, but that would just totally ruin the buzz the critics have going.

Perhaps this whole debate makes more sense were we to view it as people attempting to persuade each other about something, rather than attempting to discover some historical truth. In this case, it could be that female sexual satisfaction is important; in others it could be that rape is bad, that jealousy should be minimized, or that depression has some cognitive benefits, so depressed people should feel better about their depression, thus cheering up and losing that benefit (read respectively as: rape is not an adaptation, humans haven’t evolved for pair-bonding, and depression is adaptive).

Viewing these debates as attempts at persuasion might help explain why the criticisms that come from the upper levels of academia do not seem substantially different than the ones that come from your everyday internet commenter; the foundation of these debates might not be academic in the first place. It may also help to explain why people who even just suggest certain hypotheses are painted as villains and the same tired straw men are pulled out again and again.

You Mad, Bro?

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Moralistic outrage, while infuriating and occasionally dangerous, is often fertile grounds for comedy; not that pre-packaged, bland artificial comedy full of preservatives either, but the organic, flavorful comedy that’s grown right in your own backyard and picked minutes before enjoying. It wasn’t too long ago that a banner reading, “You Mad, Bro?” was displayed at a football game in order to taunt one of the teams. (Story here). It wasn’t long before some people who didn’t understand the connotations of the phrase took it upon themselves to get quite mad, falling right into the lap of the internet troll community.

Could I interest you in a fresh glass of Schadenfreude?

Let’s now turn to an example of silly moralistic outrage as it applies to two things I hold dear: evolutionary theory and female orgasms.

Why do women have orgasms?

I wrote my thesis about a female orgasm, so I happen to know a thing or two about them (I know a thing or two now, anyway; my initial title of Female Orgasm and Other Myths of the Hysterical Woman required a little touching up). There is an on-going debate as to whether or not female orgasm is an adaptation or a byproduct. That debate also happens to involve a fair share of vitriol, with words like “chauvinistic” being thrown around a lot. As you can see from the article and several of the comments, there appears to be a sizable group of people who equate “adaptation” with things like social importance and justification, and “byproduct” with unimportance. (My personal favorite is this one: ”I think this whole article is BS! The writer only continues to denigrate women! Why would a woman be able to orgasm if there was no reason to?”)    

“Stop Denigrating Yourself”

Why does Lloyd (and Dan Savage) seem to suggest that the knowledge that female orgasm isn’t an adaptation might comfort women who experience frustration at an inability to do during sex – or at all – and have wider social implications (despite claiming she doesn’t think people should be deriving social norms from biology – but look, it’s natural that… so we should…)? Perhaps she hopes to make the point that society puts too much pressure on women to orgasm during sex, even though many of them probably won’t – at least not without some manual help – and that pressure makes people feel bad.

As I mentioned previously, no arguments for or against legal rights for homosexuals should turn on the genetic nature of the trait. I don’t think the gay community or their supporters would be comforted at the lack of rights afforded to homosexuals on the grounds that homosexuality isn’t an adaptation, or entirely “in the genes”, and they’d be less distressed if they stopped caring about having them. Similarly, in terms of the social or personal importance of female orgasm, nothing should turn on whether it’s an adaptation or a byproduct.

Strangely, it seems that it does for many people. It might be the case that “adaptation” and “byproduct” have just become placeholders for “genes” and “environment” – that classic false dichotomy – or something similar. For those people, calling a trait an “adaptation” is akin to saying it’s genetically determined and inflexible to environmental influences. This could be a byproduct of the same essentialist state of mind that tells us if we plant an apple seed in a field with pear seeds, it will still grow into an apple tree, not a pear one, or if we paint a lion so it looks like a leopard, it’s still a lion.

That probably also means people are more inclined to think of behaviors they want to encourage – or avoid blame for – as adaptations, and behaviors they want to discourage – or blame others for – as byproducts above and beyond what evidence suggests. As people are generally blind to their own biases, and tend to disagree on matters of morality, the debate about adaptations and byproducts, genes and environment, will continue to thrive and be filled with colorful rhetoric, leaving us to ask “You mad, bro?”

Descartes’ Balls

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As I mentioned in the last post, I think a good deal of opposition, to evolutionary theory in general and evolutionary theory when directed towards psychology specifically, is due to a certain fear of moral exculpation, with other concerns about evidence or method being post-hoc rationalizations for that unease. For some, the human mind is somehow different, escaping either the need for an evolutionary analysis or the ability to be explained by one. There are those, like Rene Descartes, who think that the human mind – or at least parts of it – is not even a physical thing to begin with, but rather some immaterial essence.

With a haircut like that, it’s probably a good idea to downplay physical features.

Today, I’ll talk about this man’s balls.

If Rene was anything like the average man alive today, his balls probably weighed between 40 to 50 grams, accounting for about 0.08% of his total – and very material – body’s mass (Smith, 1984; Dixson, 2009). For the percentage of you who aren’t either still giggling at the thought of balls (which accounts for roughly 100% of the men reading this) or questioning my sexuality, you might be curious why normal people would care about the size of balls in the first place.

To sate that curiosity of balls, there are many more balls to consider, but let’s just stick to two groups: the balls of some of our close evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzee and and gorilla. 

Warning: one of these pictures contains a graphic depiction of huge balls…wait, where are “warnings” supposed to go?

The chimp’s balls weigh in at an impressive 120-150 grams, whereas the gorilla’s come in at a combine 30ish. While the chimp may out-ball the gorilla by 4 or 5 times, that difference is actual an underestimate, as the gorillas are far larger in overall body size. When we adjust for the differences in body size, the gorilla’s balls account for a mere 0.031% of their body weight, whereas the chimp’s balls account for about 0.3% of their body weight. Pound for pound, chimps have about 10 times as much in their sack as gorillas. 

Sure, the TruckNutz may look big, but once you take the mass of the vehicle into account…


So where does all this talk of balls leave us? It helps to know one last fact: the size of the testes, relative to the body, correlates to patterns of mating – not to their ability to kickass, as many men seem to think. When the sperm from more than one male are in contest to fertilize the same egg(s), we, in the creative names department, call it sperm competition. The gorillas, with their tiny ball-to-body size, face almost no sperm competition; they typically mate in a polygynous fashion, where one dominant male has uncontested sexual access to a harem of females. Chimps, on the other hand, live in multi-male/multi-female groups and, while the females are certainly not without preference, they mate in a far more promiscuous fashion.

What about humans? We’re certainly less ballsier than chimps – by about 400% – but definitely ballsier than gorillas – by about 300%, which tells us our species has probably faced some degree of sperm competition over our evolutionary history, milder than chimps but more intense than gorillas. Knowing these facts help guide us towards some potential conclusions about the human mind, bringing us nicely back to Descartes.

Rather than viewing the body and mind as two distinct pieces, the body can help inform us as to the psychology of the species; our bodies (and minds) are kind of like time capsules of evolutionary pressures. Without females historically mating with more than one male within her fertile window, or without males forcing copulation, there would be no potential for sperm competition. Of course, without females desiring to mate with more than one male and/or males desiring to mate irrespective of the female’s wishes, no selection pressure would exist either.

Which reminds me how one of my professors – at the graduate level, no less – was trying to account for sex differences in behavior by simply appealing to body size differences between men and women, rather than differing psychologies. What he appeared to forget is that those body size differences require an explanation in the first place, and that explanation will ultimately returns to differences in psychology. Having the tools available without the will or knowledge to use them isn’t much better than not having the tool at all, and vice versa.         

(For those interested folk who like looking at naked organs, I’m told this is a comparison between a chimp’s balls and brains)

References: Dixson, A.F. (2009). Sexual Selection and the Origins of Human Mating Systems. New York, NY: Oxford University Press 

Smith, R.L. (1984) Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems, New York, NY: Academic Press.

We’re All Evolutionary Psychologists

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“A scientific theory tends to go through four stages before it’s accepted: (1) it’s wrong; (2) it could be right, but it’s dangerous; (3) it’s right, but trivial; (4) that’s what I’ve said all along” – Paraphrased from some source I forgot. 

If you happen to think evolution is true, you also happen to be an evolutionary psychologist (implicitly, in that you should conclude our brains are the product of the same evolutionary process that all life is). Every statement about the function (or lack of function) of our – or any other species’ – psychology is a statement about selection pressures and adaptations, however implicit. Some of these theories are not very good – the blank slate comes to mind -  or very explicit, but they all deal with the same underlying questions: what were the selective pressures on a species? How did said species evolve to deal with these pressures?

According to some, at some point in this process the entire process stopped mattering.

Which is why it’s strange that the term “Evolutionary Psychology” gets thrown around as a type of insult in some groups. For me, it works the other way around; those who actively don’t consider themselves evolutionary-minded researchers are the ones that have the cooties, sit around eating paste, and are to be shunned at playtime. Evolution is true, and its usefulness as a theoretical framework for conducting and understanding research about the human mind and body is well evidenced, so why should anyone actively avoid using it? The reasons for the opposition to evolutionary psychology are numerous on paper, but we can learn about their underlying causes simply by the critics – misguided as they are – speaking for themselves.

Yes, these are supposed to be actual criticisms. No, I’m not joking.

 

The colored dots in the bottom-left of each box represent a general category I see the criticism falling into: Red indicates “Just-So Story” criticisms; Green indicates charges of genetic determinism; Blue indicates attempts to distance the authority of “science” from EP; Black indicates a charge that EP will justify morally distasteful actions, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. While these four categories don’t wholly encompass the areas criticisms fall into, I think they’re an alright – if rough and perhaps arbitrary – start. (Edit: There is an additional category criticisms generally fall under: Conflating proximate and ultimate explanations, nicely summed up by quotes like this one. “Wanting to prevent sexual assault is evolution, instead of, like, wanting not to be assaulted.”

There was a certain amount of guess-work (or interpretation, if you want to put a positive spin on it) that went into my classifications: some of those criticisms are just stupid in a relatively straightforward way, while others are stupid in several ways, or stupid in ways that aren’t quite clear and I had to infer the intentions of the person writing them. By no means should these be taken as set-in-stone (unless it happens to agree or disagree strongly with your existing thoughts, in which case it probably will be).

The first thing I’d like to call attention to is that evolutionary psychologists – or those who defend the field – are portrayed as male (center square and bottom-right corner, the latter of which sends a pretty clear message). One could be left wondering why, considering that the majority of people working in the field are politically left-leaning women (about 65%, which is not significantly different from the 70% of women in other fields of psychology; Tybur, Miller, & Gangestad, 2007). Perhaps men are more vocal in their defenses of the field or are just better known. Perhaps it has something to do with the social views and goals of the person doing the critiquing. I can’t say for sure. 

The second thing to consider is breakdown by criticism: 11/25 squares deal with “Just-So” storytelling, 6/25 squares deal with genetic determinism, 4/25 squares deal with a lack of scientific rigor, and a whooping 13/25 squares deal with matters of moral justification or sexism, though I consider that 13/25 to be a conservative estimate; I can think of at least 4 more squares it might apply to.

 

What could these rough figures – and I do stress rough – potentially tell us about the opposition towards EP? The anecdata point towards the following picture of what the stereotype of an evolutionary psychologist is: men who are trying to justify their nasty and dominating behavior by claiming their genes determine their actions, always have, and always will, so there’s no point to try and change the “natural” order of things.

The people behind this BINGO board are winning at the pop anti-evolutionary psychology game

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the critics of adaptationist thinking often appear more aggressive towards the methods involved when applied to humans – as opposed to non-humans – nor is it just a string of chance happenings that the majority of the criticisms appear to mention perceived negative traits (violence comes to mind, though it could be any idea the author finds distasteful) rather than perceived positive or neutral ones.

Finally, I’m struck by the resemblance of the opposition towards evolutionary psychology specifically to the opposition towards evolution more generally: “evolutionary theory says there’s no such thing as morality and everything is permitted”; “you can’t test what happened in the past, so it’s not science”. There are many people who think evolution is true, but back off once they hit the human mind, much like Alfred Russel Wallace did.

Sounding familiar at all?

References: Tybur, J.M., Miller, G.F., &  Gangestad, S.W. (2007). Testing the Controversy: An Empirical Examination of Adaptationist’s Attitude Towards Politics and Science. Human Nature, 18, 313-328