perceptive question?

"Is Darwin your king?"

asked a Saudi student at Central Language School last week.

Whether that tells us more about the educational provision in Saudi Arabia or about the cultured propaganada plastered around Cambridge at the moment is anyone's guess.

Short and sweet

The title of this piece by Massimo Pigliucci (distinguished scientist and secularist) is not short and sweet, but the piece itself is. Evolutionary psychology provided most of the theoretical underpinning (if you can dignify it with that name) for the 'nature' explanations of gender difference that I was investigating last year. Nice to see it getting a poke in its palaelithic eye. And for Pigliucci to manage to cover chess and Freud as well is pretty good going.

Got to this thanks to the ever-diverting chessbase.com, which I really must stop reading.

...part deux...

The combination of direct selection, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism provides the sociobiologist with a battery of speculative possibilities that guarantees an explanation for every observation. The system is unbeatable because it is insulated from any possibility of being contradicted by fact. If one is allowed to invent genes with arbitrarily complicated effects on phenotype and then invent adaptive stories about the unrecoverable past of human history, all phenomena, real and imaginary, can be explained.

Lewontin, Rose & Kamin, Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (NY: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 261-2.

What happens if we substitute 'average evolutionist' for 'sociobiologist'?

With thanks to Walter James ReMine's remarkable exposure of evolutionary theory's varied and contradictory expressions, The Biotic Message (St Paul, Minn.: St Paul Science, 1993).

out of the mouths of...

If one simply cannot measure the stated variables or the parameters with which the theory is constructed, or if their measurement is so laden with error that no discrimination between alternative hypotheses is possible, the theory becomes a vacuous exercise in formal logic that has on points of contact with the contingent world. The theory explains nothing because it explains everything. It is my contention that a good deal of the structure of evolutionary genetics comes perilously close to being of this sort.

Richard Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (Columbia UP, 1974), p.12.

a difficult task

Writing a short piece on moral intuitions is not easy. And it's likely that Peter Singer was not responsible for the silly strapline of his piece in today's Guardian, which didn't really reflect what he was trying to say ('Would you kill one person to save five others? Your intuition is probably wrong').

As I went to find the web version of the piece I began to read the responses posted below - many of which are very sane, exposing the weaknesses of this type of 'moral' thought-experiment (FLYSWATTER at 2:39pm is sweeeet) - though few of them mention one of the largest problems with the article, namely the recourse to a just-so story (otherwise known as 'our evolutionary history'). [The poster TerenceUSA, 12:19pm, did note this in passing in his excellent analysis of the examples cited by Singer from the research by Greene.]

Basically, Singer has to try to explain why we would generally find it harder to push someone off a bridge to save five lives, than we would to flick a switch to save five lives at the cost of one. (And he also wants to suggest that this preference is dubious, and that arithmetic is best in these situations.) Based on fMRI data collected from those considering these particular moral problems ('increased activity in areas of the brain associated with emotions' in the pushing example - gosh, there's a surprise) he resortrs to the just-so story.

Apparently to deal with such [difficult/easy?] situations as must have been common for most of our evolutionary history (up-close and personal violence) 'we developed immediate, emotionally-based intuitive responses to the infliction of violence on others'. And this guy is a professor! How did these responses develop? There is no mechanism given, or even suggested. Why did we develop emotional responses? Oh, because we have them now, so we must have developed them (anyone else see a circle here...?) But the nature of the response over the last few hundred thousand years is not stated or explored at all.

Those lacuna are perfectly typical of the way the evolution is referred to in the media (and, sadly, in textbooks) - a cheap assertion of facticity without a shred of evidence or a moment of genuinely critical thought! But, to be quite specific, why is the particular 'immediate, emotionally-based intuitive response' that we have now more selectively preferable than the response exhibited or 'developed' (magically, of course) by an intelligent being with no compunction about killing a threatening person up close. Emotional responses to this sort of trauma and surprise are surely a selective disadvantage! It would seem that if the fittest are to survive they need to able to kill the slightly less fit, who might attack them or use up their resources...

GavP at 1:21pm points out that Singer's rather fatuous closing line, '...we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions', implies that modern weaponry is a good thing because it liberates us from having to confront [bad/inadequate] emotional reactions to killing and enables reason ('cold-hearted rationalism') to reign (and have full rein - and just how many times have those phrases been muddled!?). Quite so, and since Singer has already told us the correct, liberated answer, he is not encouraging us to think for ourselves, but to swallow a half-baked utilitarianism. A healthy and intelligent conversations did open up on the Guardian site following this opinion piece, but the article itself is all too ready to rush into the space recently vacated by vanquished moral intuitions...