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Nordic Psychology 2011, Vol. 63(3), 50-67 © 2011 The authors & Nordic Psychology DOI 10.1027/1901-2276/a000039
Can We Save Darwin from Evolutionary Psychology?
SVEND BRINKMANN, PHD1
Department of Communication & Psychology, University of Aalborg, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark, [email protected]
Abstract This article presents the fundamental paradigmatic principles of evolutionary psychology, which are then subjected to criticism. It is argued that evolutionary psychology suffers from both a number of unfounded empirical presuppositions and from conceptual confusion. Evolutionary psychology invokes Darwin as a background figure, but the relationship between the two is rather problematic. Although critical of evolutionary psychology, the article argues that psychology could favorably maintain a form of Darwinian thinking, albeit one that is more dynamic and transactional than evolutionary psychology’s modular thinking. We need to conceive of organism and environment as much more closely inter- woven than in evolutionary psychology, and to think of human development as one continuous, transactional process that cannot be factored out into separate “biological” (brain, genes) and “cultural” strands.
Keywords: Evolutionary psychology; Darwin; reductionism; pragmatism; transaction
1 Svend Brinkmann (b. 1975) is a professor of psychology in the Department of Communication & Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His main interests are philosophical, methodological and moral issues in psychology and other social sciences.
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Introduction When Charles Darwin articulated his evolutionary perspective on human beings, now a little more than 150 years ago, many aspects of the human self-under- standing changed. What became clear in The Origin of Species (first published 1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (first published 1871), and what every school child learns today, is that human beings are just another biological species that does its best to survive in a challenging world. Human nature, like the rest of nature, is malleable and changing rather than forever static and fixed. When this evolutionary insight was coupled with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the genetic inheritance of traits (originally discovered in pea plants), the result was the so-called neo-Darwinian or modern evolutionary synthesis. This is a synthesis of Darwin’s theory of gradual evolutionary develop- ment through selection mechanisms and Mendel’s detection of the laws of genetic inheritance. The modern synthesis was finally achieved in the 1930s by Fisher and Haldane, who, according to one assessment, took the study of evolution out of the qualitatively observed natural history (think of Darwin in Galapagos) and replaced it with a more abstract mathematized theory (S. Rose, 2000, p. 249). Darwin’s original focus on organisms in their environments gave way to one on gene frequencies within populations.
Before this, however, Darwin’s ideas had disputed the traditional theological cosmology, according to which a Creator had made human beings in his image once and for all. It is now a commonplace to see Darwin’s theory as part of the gradual decentering of humanity that began with Copernicus’ advancements in astronomy, which implied a “loss of centrality” and a destruction of the geocentric worldview, and which culminated with Freud’s depiction of a “loss of transparen- cy” of humanity (Weinert, 2009). Whether one agrees with Freud’s psychoanalysis or not, it is unquestionable that the view of the human being as in some sense opaque to itself had a profound influence on people’s self-understanding in the twentieth century and beyond. Between Copernicus and Freud stands the “loss of rational design” described by Darwin, which, besides its formidable scientific implications, has had more philosophical, ideological and political implications than any other scientific theory before or after (p. 94).
Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s ideas have also deeply affected the human and social sciences, including psychology. In addition to a general naturalistic outlook on human beings as a species of animals, we have also seen more specific, yet problematic (from the point of view of the present article), reinterpretations of Darwinian thinking, first in the upsurge of socio-biology in the 1970s, represented by scientists like E.O. Wilson (1975), which was heavily criticized from within biological circles, e.g. by Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould (e.g. 1980), and more recently in what has come to be known as evolutionary psychology.
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Evolutionary psychology is currently one of the fastest growing fields in psychol- ogy. It seems to be applicable to almost any aspect of human behavior, and it enjoys a massive popularity in the mass media due to its often appealingly simple explanations. It should be clear, however, that leading figures in evolutionary psychology such as David Buss (2004), Steven Pinker (1997), and also Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (2005) have not simply translated Darwin’s biology into a psychological idiom. What they have done, rather, is develop a very specific theory of the mind that rests not just on a (questionable) interpretation of some of Darwin’s ideas, but equally so on certain assumptions made by the cognitive scientists from the mid-twentieth century and onwards.
What I intend to do in this paper is to subject the psychological paradigm known as evolutionary psychology to criticism. My main point is that evolution- ary psychology has some inbuilt theoretical problems to such an extent that it would be preferable to go back to Darwin and more or less start over to develop psychology on fresh Darwinian grounds. I shall end the paper with some brief remarks about how psychology could approach human life in more genuine Darwinian, dynamical and “transactional” ways, e.g. by going back to the writings of the American pragmatist John Dewey. In many ways, pragmatism represents a promising Darwinism without the problems of evolutionary psychology. This more subtle (and “non-genetic”) Darwinian psychology, however, was largely forgotten in the course of the twentieth century.
One line of criticism that will not be pursued here, but which deserves to be mentioned, is the political one. The program of evolutionary psychology – to explain human behavior with reference to mental modules that are supposedly located in the individual’s brain – fits well with the current political order and its individualizing tendencies (N. Rose, 2007). The individual is approached as a storehouse of mental modules that are in principle independent of social and cultural factors. The downplaying (or outright denial) of the importance of social- ity has ideological affinities with how life is governed in late modern capitalist societies, and although it is too simplistic to reduce evolutionary psychology to a pure reflection of these societal conditions, they may nonetheless help explain its remarkable public success.
Evolutionary psychology as it appears today is obviously an enormous field with much internal controversy and a huge amount of empirical research, and I cannot even begin to do justice to its scope and complexity in this context. Instead, I will refer in particular to one foundational text by Cosmides and Tooby that lays out in a perspicuous way the main tenets of evolutionary psychology. I will thus focus on the basic theoretical foundations and less so on the many differ- ent ramifications of evolutionary psychology. After that I will point to some more general problems inherent in evolutionary psychology, some of which affect the
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paradigm more seriously than others, before briefly presenting a way of preserving Darwin’s great ideas in psychology that does not suffer from these problems. My answer to the question that forms the title of this paper is therefore yes, we can and must save Darwin from evolutionary psychology.
What is evolutionary psychology? Its principles and problems An authoritative source on the main tenets of evolutionary psychology is “Evolutionary psychology: A primer” by Cosmides and Tooby, which appears as a programmatic text on the website of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology (directed by Tooby and Cosmides) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). Other noteworthy members of this center include Daphne Bugental and Michael Gazzaniga. From a reading of other recent pro- grammatic texts (e.g. Confer et al. 2010; Cosmides & Tooby, 2005), it seems fair to conclude that the principles of the primer are on the whole unaltered today, which is corroborated by the fact that this text is chosen by the main proponents of evolutionary psychology as a key representative text of the paradigm. In the primer, Cosmides and Tooby characterize evolutionary psychology in an admira- bly clear way by outlining what they see as its five fundamental principles. Before that, however, they make clear that evolutionary psychology is not an area of study in psychology (like vision or cognition), but an approach to psychology as a whole. And they define psychology as: “that branch of biology that studies (1) brains, (2) how brains process information, and (3) how the brain’s information- processing programs generate behavior.” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997).
It is noteworthy that this definition does not include any reference to persons or organisms. Psychology supposedly deals with brains and how these organs allegedly process information and subsequently generate behavior. Conceptual analysis reveals that evolutionary psychology runs into problems already at this stage, for, strictly speaking, brains do not process information. The brain is an organ that transmits electro-chemical signals in specific neural circuits, but it does not process information any more than the liver or the kidneys do. For information is always information for someone. In an ordinary semantic sense, information is a set of true propositions, and there can be found no such propo- sitions, nor “processing” of propositions, in the brain (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 141). Specifying information independently of a subject to whom the given pieces of information make sense is impossible. Otherwise, the concept “infor- mation” could be applied to anything and it would lose its meaning. A brain is not a “someone”, a subject, in the relevant sense – indeed in any conceivable sense. Only persons and other living organisms process information as they go
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about performing different operations in their environments, and they could surely not do so without their brains, but this does not mean that their brains as such are doing the processing. Analogously, my car could not move through traffic without its engine, but that does not mean that it is its engine as such that is moving through traffic.
In an influential critique of current neuro-reductionism, Bennett (a neurologist) and Hacker (a philosopher) have referred to the fallacy of ascribing psychological predicates to the brain as the “mereological fallacy” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003). Mereology is the logic of part-whole relations, and the mereological fallacy is committed when scientists ascribe (psychological) properties to a part of the liv- ing human being, typically the brain or the mind, which in fact make sense only when ascribed to a human being (or an animal) as a whole (see also Brinkmann, 2006). So persons, as living and acting human beings, can meaningfully be said to process information (as when they consider whether to buy a house or not) and act on the basis of whatever seems warranted in light of the evidence – but not their brains.
Similarly, the statement by Cosmides and Tooby that “the brain’s information- processing programs generate behavior” is deeply questionable, for such pro- grams would, in analogy with the digital computer, have to operate according to specific algorithms, but such algorithms have never been found in the brain. What happens in the brain is neurons firing and blood flowing, but talk of programs in the manner of Cosmides and Tooby is speculative at best and illusory at worst. It is related to the central idea of evolutionary psychology that “the mind is modu- lar” (like a Swiss army knife, to invoke the preferred metaphor of evolutionary psychology), which has had some popularity in cognitive science and classical artificial intelligence research (see Gardner, 1987), but which is unsupported by brain research (Karmiloff-Smith, 2000). The very definition of psychology found in Cosmides and Tooby’s programmatic text, therefore, is highly contestable, since it (1) excludes reference to persons and organisms acting in environments as central to the discipline, (2) builds on what appears to be a (mereological) fallacy about the capacities of brains, and (3) rests on a postulate about programs in the brain that is highly speculative. We shall return to these problems below.
The authors go on to explain, however, that the five basic principles of evolu- tionary psychology, to which I now turn, can be applied to “any topic in psychol- ogy” ranging from vision to sexuality (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). This, indeed, is ambitious and something that has been referred to as an attempted colonization not only of psychology, but of the social sciences at large (H. Rose, 2000). Such imperialist ambitions provide reasons for people outside evolutionary psychology to engage critically with the fundamental assumptions of the paradigm. I will now cite each of the principles directly from the primer and, after each one, point to
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significant and likely insurmountable problems related to the principle. My criti- cism is inspired in particular by the edited book Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Theory by Rose and Rose (2000), but I borrow freely from various critics (and other sources) to articulate specific arguments against each of the principles.
Principle 1 “The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.”
It is hard to disagree with the first sentence of principle 1, but the next sentence presents us with a problem that we have already touched upon, for, given what we know about the brain, it does not function as a computer. A computer is a tool that humans have developed to help them process information. It works algorithmically and linearly according to the rules of the software that clever humans have composed. According to Barbara Herrnstein Smith and a host of other critics, however, this computational model does not adequately reflect “the peculiar structural and operational properties of living systems, including their characteristically global, self-regulating and, in important respects, nonlinear dynamics.” (Smith, 2000, p. 132). Neither minds nor brains are information- processing machines like the computer, for neither minds nor brains work by solving problems through rule-governed manipulation of symbols. The brain, to repeat, is an organ that transmits electro-chemical signals, and decades of criti- cism of artificial intelligence research (Dreyfus, 1979, was an important early critic) should be enough to convince us that building a psychological paradigm upon a view of the brain/mind as a device that processes information according to rules and algorithms is, if not downright faulty, then at least a very shaky founda- tion. More recent theories of human cognition (sometimes referred to as theories of the “embodied and embedded mind”) seem like promising alternatives, point- ing to the role of experience, the body and situational understanding rather than rules and programs as explanatory (cf. the contributions to Robbins & Aydede, 2009). To follow in the footsteps of the researchers of “situated cognition” would pose a major problem for evolutionary psychologists, however, since this would force them to give up not just the idea that the mind is a discrete information- processing machine, but also the idea that “the mind’s architecture” was designed in the Pleistocene (see the next principle).
Principle 2 “Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.”
This is one of the most frequently invoked tropes of evolutionary psycholo-
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gists: We have Stone Age or Pleistocene minds, they say, but live in the twenty- first century, and this allegedly explains a host of human doings and sufferings today, ranging from rape to the stress epidemic. The very idea that the structure (or “architecture”, to use the favored expression of evolutionary psychologists) of the mind was fixed during the Pleistocene is curious, for, as Hilary Rose (a sociologist) and Steven Rose (a neurobiologist) point out (2000, p. 2), we know that non-human animals can evolve significantly through natural selection (not to speak of artificial selection as in breeding) in the course of just a few decades, e.g. the finches studied in Darwin’s own Galapagos that develop new shapes of beaks and feeding habits very quickly in response to climate changes, so why not humans? Furthermore, we know very little about what life was like 100,000 years ago. Anthropologists have found shards of bones and a few bodies, but there is substantial disagreement even at the level of establishing the sex of Lucy, the early hominid discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia (H. Rose, 2000, p. 118). In light of this (unsurprising) lack of evidence about life in the Pleistocene, it seems quite speculative to use this period, and how “neural circuits were designed by natural selection” during the period, to explain purportedly universal cultural practices to do with the age difference in marriage between men and women or female beauty, to cite just some of the well-known arguments of evolutionary psycholo- gists (p. 117). We simply do not know in sufficient detail which problems our ancestors faced.
Even worse for evolutionary psychology, biologists and biological anthro- pologists have argued that it is senseless to say that neural circuits as such are designed by natural selection. It is not so much the design-part of the sentence that is problematic (although this too is strange, for there is no designer involved in evolution), but the very idea that natural selection as such works on the genetic materials that co-determine the neural machinery. As Tim Ingold has put it: “Natural selection, in short, may occur within evolution, but does not explain it.” (2000, p. 243). Why not? Because the idea of the genotype, which is necessary to account for the link between gene frequencies and capacities of organisms that are independent of the concrete dynamics of development, is dubious (p. 243). According to Ingold, there simply is no such thing as a genotype conceived as a context-independent design specification (p. 234). It is impossible to factor out what the purely genetically based capacities of humans are (that are thought of, by evolutionary psychologists, as identical in the Pleistocene and today), and what is ontogenetically acquired. There are no pre-programmed essences in the genes.
Genes are parts of long molecules (DNA) that control the production of proteins in organisms, but genes only interact with cells that are the building blocks of bodies that operate in environments. Natural selection, when it works, works on organisms in environments, and not on genes. And what organisms are is a result
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of complex developmental processes that cannot be predicted by looking solely at genes. Evolution, according to Ingold’s much more complex and dynamic view, “is the process in which organisms come into being with their particular forms and capacities and, through their environmentally situated actions, establish the development for their successors.” (Ingold, 1998, p. 95). Natural selection may play a role in this process, and it would be foolish to deny that cumulative chang- es in gene frequencies within populations take place over time, but Ingold’s point is that there is no link between change in gene frequencies and the capacities of organisms independently of the dynamics of development itself (Ingold, 2000, p. 243). The evolutionary-developmental process is primary as such, and includes both what we conventionally refer to as natural and cultural aspects (which is a highly problematic distinction, as we shall see). The problem with evolutionary psychology in this context is that it is based on the fundamental mistake of assum- ing that phylogeny is a process separate from ontogeny (Derksen, 2010, p. 480). Natural selection does not “design” organisms, as evolutionary psychologists say, and the role of genes cannot be specified independently of other factors (p. 480).
In short, the “selectionist view” of evolutionary psychology is problematic, since it treats the animal (or organism) and environment as two separate entities, with the environment existing prior to the animal (Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010, p. 495). This is problematic for the plain, yet radical, reason that there sim- ply is no environment independently of organisms. There certainly is a physical world, but this world becomes an environment (with selection pressures) only when there are animals that operate in it and determine what constitutes the environment. Even the lowliest animals, like the earthworms analyzed by Darwin himself, construct their environments (see Costall, 2004). Or, to put it in more dynamic terms, there is a mutualism at work in which animals and environments construct each other. The earthworms, which are actually not well adapted to life in the topsoil due to their sensitive epidermis that must be kept warm and moist, create vegetable mold in their life processes and thereby change the topsoil in which they live (Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010, p. 499). Even such primi- tive animals construct the very environments in which selection takes place, thus complicating the simple model of natural selection in evolutionary psychology. The offspring of the earthworms inherit not only genes, but also an environment that fits their epidermis better (p. 500). Have birds developed color vision because apples are red, thus enabling them to locate and eat the nourishing fruits, or have apples developed their red hue because birds have color vision, thereby attracting the birds to help spread the apple seeds? Obviously, both are correct, and the mutualism works even more pervasively in the case of humans with their immense niche construction capabilities, which – for all we know – were also exercised in the Stone Age.
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Principle 3 “Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve – they require very compli- cated neural circuitry.”
Cosmides and Tooby here employ a certain modern – one might even say pecu- liar – psychological interpretation of what a mind is, viz. a place where things can “go on”. Some of these things are conscious while others are unconscious. It is curious how naturalistic attempts within the sciences (such as evolutionary psychology) to move beyond Descartes often invite him in through the back door, for this form of imagery of the mind as a “place” or an “entity” was in fact force- fully articulated by Descartes. A fundamental critique of principle 3 will state that the term ‘mind’ does not refer to some entity, place or mechanism, but rather to a set of skills and dispositions that are rightly ascribed to living organisms, humans included. And nothing “goes on” in skills and dispositions, which renders the idiom of Cosmides and Tooby (which they share with much of contemporary cognitive science) quite mysterious and possibly even meaningless (see Bennett & Hacker, 2003). Again, this is not to deny that the brain is an indispensable component that is needed in order for organisms-in-environments to exercise the skills that we refer to with the concept of mind (e.g. perceiving, remembering, problem-solving etc.), but it does mean that we cannot meaningfully say that it is the brain – or the mind – that is performing these activities.
How can I know that the mind is not a place where mental phenomena (only some of which are conscious) “go on”? My answer is that this Cartesian idea of the mind is ontologically flawed. It is ontologically flawed because it intro- duces the untenable dualisms of mind and matter, and also inner and outer, and although evolutionary psychologists are materialists and would reject the charge of Cartesian dualism, their idea of the mind as something inner, related to the brain’s alleged information processing, does represent a kind of materialist “neural Cartesianism”, which has simply replaced the immaterialist Cartesian Res Cogitans with the brain as the locus of the mind (Coulter & Sharrock, 2007, p. 11). In short, the evolutionary psychologists’ principle 3 largely repeats a Cartesian image of the mind as a place in which events take place, some of which are “hidden” (i.e. unconscious). Mental life is conceived in spatial terms, and mental phenomena are seen as “objects” of some peculiar mental kind, potentially hid- den from the conscious observer. But we do not observe the contents of our minds anymore than we fail to observe them, for the mind is not a place with contents, and there is no homunculus inside us to do the observing.
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Principle 4 “Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.”
I have already criticized the contents of this principle above when I argued against the modular theory of the mind, which does not hold up in light of current neuroscientific evidence. Modern brain science does not support that idea that there are these sorts of specialized neural circuits (Hamilton, 2008), and there is no reason to think that such specialized circuits would be favored by evolution anyway. In fact, as Karmiloff-Smith has argued, the reverse may be true in the sense that evolution “has helped to guarantee human survival by raising the upper limits on complexity and avoiding too much prespecification of higher cognitive functions.” (2000, p. 154). Babies’ brains are not Swiss army knives, and this very image rests on the false dichotomy of evolution (phylogeny) and ontogeny. If there is brain specialization, it is actually the product of child development (within the relevant biological and social contexts) rather than its starting point (p. 147).
Again, the problems of evolutionary psychology here are related to the core problem of wanting to specify what is innate and what is “culturally” acquired. According to Ingold (2004), it makes as little sense to say that the human capac- ity for walking is innate (e.g. in some alleged bipedal locomotion module) as it does to say that cello-playing is. Ingold insists on analyzing these forms of activity (in fact, all human activities) symmetrically. Walking is biological through and through and cultural through and through – just like cello-playing is. We cannot factor out what is hardwired and what is culturally acquired. Both are skills that are gradually incorporated (or not) into the operations and life process of human organisms. And people walk differently in different cultures – just as they play music differently. In Japan, people traditionally “walk from the knees”, while Westerners “walk from the hips”, keeping the legs as straight as possible (p. 216). Playing the cello, like walking, is a bodily skill (and there surely is no prespecified neural circuitry for cello-playing!), and cultural differences are not “added on” to biological universals, but are, as Ingold tells us, themselves biological (p. 216).
Principle 5 “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”
Again, I have already argued against the idea that the so-called architecture of the mind was fixed during the Pleistocene. In light of the arguments of Ingold and a number of neuroscientists cited by Herrnstein Smith and Karmiloff-Smith, it is not possible to factor out a genetically hardwired baseline of mental functions, supposedly fixed in the Stone Age (of which, to make matters worse, we have very little evidence anyway). Rose and Rose conclude that evolutionary psychol- ogy on this note is based on “speculative fantasies” (2000, p. 2), representing
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almost the antithesis to solid scientific work, which, however, is the official self- understanding of the paradigm.
I have also argued that the very metaphor of the mind being “housed” is prob- lematic, since it rests on the misguided idea that the mind is a place where mental events and processes “go on”. But we can push the critique of evolutionary psy- chology further on this point by pointing again to the scores of dynamic theories of the mind that have emerged in recent years, demonstrating that organisms, who construct the conditions of their own existence, have what Andy Clark has called “extended minds” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2008). The conditions that must be in place in order for the skills and dispositions we call “mental” to work are not confined to “our modern skulls”. We use all sorts of cognitive technologies that are outside the skull to “supersize” our minds (Clark, 2008). We use tools to modify our environments, notes to enhance our memory, glasses to improve our eyesight, computers to write texts and pocket calculators to perform arithmetic, and these objects outside the skull are part of our collective inheritance that make complex forms of mental life possible. As “natural born cyborgs” (to borrow an expression from Clark), we are born into a techno-scientific culture that affords certain mental operations from infancy, just like earthworms are born into mold that has been cultivated by earlier generations of earthworms. Being a developing organism means living in such a cultivated world, where it makes little sense to seek sharp distinctions between what is “housed within the skull” and what has evolved “outside the skull” as aspects of organisms’ behaviors-in-environments.
We need a much more dynamic picture of life processes unfolding in relational, mutualist fields, where the “ecological bodies” (Johnson, 2007) of organisms are deeply intertwined with their environments. We must think of organism/body and environment, argues Mark Johnson, “in the same way that we must think of mind and body, as aspects of one continuous process.” (p. 276). And this “one process” is surely not housed within the skull, but demands that we look at the organism “not as a discrete, pre-specified entity but as a particular locus of growth and development within a continuous field of relationships. It is a field that unfolds in the life activities of organisms and that is enfolded in their specific morphologies, powers of movement and capacities of awareness and response” (Ingold, 2004, p. 219). My brief remarks below on Dewey’s transactional pragmatism hopefully serve as an indication that such a dynamic perspective on the organism was once articulated within psychology.
In closing my critique of the main principles of evolutionary psychology, I should say that there are additional problems in the evolutionary perspective that I have not addressed in this context such as: (1) The tendency toward circular (and thus unscientific) explanations of the type: Humans display a certain form of behavior, we want to know why, evolutionary psychologists answer “because it
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has been selected for”, and if we raise the question about how we know this, the answer is that it would not exist unless it had been adaptive (see Rose’s critique (2000) of Daly and Wilson and also Pinker on these grounds, for example). (2) Evolutionary psychological accounts often involve quite dramatic reductions of psychological phenomena (e.g. love, beauty, aggression) to something else, which is not without problems (see Brinkmann, 2011a). And finally (3), evolutionary psychology risks undermining itself if it argues that human normative capacities (such as our powers of reasoning, judgment and morality) are what they are, only because they have been selected for. As Nagel (1997) points out, such reductive strategies collapse if the claim is made that whatever we have reason to believe (morally, logically etc.) is the result of our psychological apparatus as a response to evolutionary adaptation. For if the evolutionary reductionists want to remain consistent, this must also apply to the theory itself! On this evolutionary account, therefore, the only reason I could have to believe this account itself would be grounded in natural selection. Thus, if the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, and if reason is a product of natural selection, then the hypothesis is self-undermining. There must be something more than simply being a product of natural selection to human perception, thinking, and reasoning if we are to trust these capacities. As Nagel says: “I can have no justification for trusting a reason- ing capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself – that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers.” (p. 136) (see also the extended discussion of the problems of reducing normativity in Brinkmann, 2011a).
Towards a new beginning for Darwinian psychology? After tackling each of the fundamental principles of evolutionary psychology and presenting some additional problems inherent in the paradigm, I shall sketch the contours of an alternative Darwinian psychology, based on Dewey’s pragmatism. There are quite a few Darwinian alternatives appearing these years in ecological psychology, mutualism and dynamical systems theory, but pragmatism deserves to be mentioned since it is a classic approach to psychology based on Darwin’s ideas that has been sadly neglected. Pragmatism was the distinct American brand of philosophy and science that developed on Darwinian grounds roughly from 1880, originally by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Dewey himself was born in 1859, the year of the publication of Darwin’s revo- lutionary book, and the pragmatist line of thinking, not just in philosophy but also in psychology and the social sciences, built on the premise that humans construct knowledge like they construct buildings, irrigation and technologies: To cope with the dangerous and changing world in which they live. The fundamental
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pragmatist idea, then, is an idea about ideas: “ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves” (Menand, 2002, p. xi). In many ways, this pragmatist idea about ideas was, and is, a revolutionary proposal that turns Western thought on its head. Ideas are not representations or copies of how the world is, but are tools, with which we transform, engage with, and cope with the world (Brinkmann & Tanggaard, 2010). In a Darwinian universe, it is no good having fixed, Platonic representations of the world, or universal “mental modules”, sine the world is in flux (see Brinkmann, 2011b).
Through his long career, Dewey developed a dynamic ontology that culmi- nated in the last book he wrote with Arthur Bentley entitled Knowing and the Known. It was inspired not just by Darwin, but also by the new physics of Einstein and Bohr. Dewey wanted to say that reality is not made up of metaphorical bil- liard balls that collide without changing in other respects. This is mere interaction, which invites a causal understanding of reality in accordance with Newton’s classical physics, where the goal is to map the natural laws that are at work in nature. A transactional description instead concerns events and actions without giving any underlying elements any independent causal power (Dewey & Bentley, 1949, p. 108). It is the process itself that is primary, and not causal powers belong- ing to separate entities that can be disconnected from the event as a whole (like the contribution of genes and culture as distinct factors). While an interactional understanding begins with objects and asks how these interact (according to which laws?), a transactional understanding begins with the dynamical process itself and considers objects as functional distinctions within the larger whole (Biesta & Burbules, 2003, p. 26). We can say that I eat, because I am hungry, but, according to the transactional viewpoint, it is misleading to say that there is some object – hunger – that causes me to eat. Hunger, rather, is a name for the organism’s tendency to seek food and eat as an entire event (Garrison, 2001, p. 284). Similarly, the transactional perspective will reject the idea that there are entities such as ‘genes’ that lie behind events and can be invoked to explain behavior causally.
In order to explain the transactional perspective, Dewey presented a historical narrative running from the Greek philosophers, through modern science, culmi- nating with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum physics. The Greeks based their metaphysics on an idea of self-action, believing that objects move and develop in accordance with inner natures. The capable scientist was said to be able to observe how the essences of things unfolded. This idea is still prevalent in some of the formulations of evolutionary psychology, but it was overthrown by modern, mechanical science, represented by Galileo and Newton, when the practice of experimenting arose. The scientist should now interact with nature
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– rather than observe it at a distance – but scientific practice was still seen as separate from, and in principle unable to affect, the processes observed. A picture of inter-action in an orderly, mechanical universe was the result (Dewey, 1929, p. 186).
Finally, we have transaction, where the life process or activity of knowing itself is primary. The concept of transaction is meant to designate the fluidity of nature and to break down any absolute distinctions between mind and matter, inner and outer, nature and culture:
Transaction is the procedure which observes men talking and writing, with their word-behaviors and other representational activities connected with their thing-perceivings and manipulations, and which permits a full treat- ment, descriptive and functional, of the whole process, inclusive of all its ‘contents’, whether called ‘inners’ or ‘outers’, in whatever way the advancing techniques of inquiry require. (Dewey & Bentley, 1949, p. 123).
Transaction is rather complex and difficult to grasp. For it builds both on the premise that the best understanding of nature is one that sees it as consisting of events that are becoming in constant transaction, where one cannot separate out causal agents working “behind the scenes” (such as genes) and on the related premise that any study of nature, such as in scientific practice, is itself an event through which nature is affected and developed. Dewey defines scientific trans- actional observation as:
an insistence upon the right to proceed in freedom to select and view all sub- ject matters in whatever way seems desirable under reasonable hypothesis, and regardless of ancient claims on behalf of either minds or material mecha- nisms, or any of the surrogates of either. (Dewey & Bentley, 1949, p. 124).
There is no spiritual/mental/social reality opposed to a material reality. There is just one evolving reality, which consists of numerous transactional events with many kinds of qualities that have complex relations to other events. Describing these relations is what Dewey calls transactional observation.
Several interpretations of Dewey (e.g. Burke, 1994; Manicas, 2002) see his dynamic, transactional view as having paved the way for an ecological tradition within psychology. This also goes for pragmatism more broadly (Heft, 2001). Like Dewey, ecological psychology as conceived by Gibson (1986) claims that our perception of the world is mediated by functional activity, and that it is because of activity (rather than “mental modules”) that we can understand the affordances of things without having to postulate the existence of inner mental
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modules or representations. Likewise, Dewey’s ecological approach implies that “things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized.” (Dewey, 1925, p. 21). We discover the properties of things by actively manipulating them on the background of evolved habits – things are first and foremost what we can do with them as we live and actively construct our environments.
The perception of affordances happens as part of an organism’s ongoing inquiry (Dewey, 1938), where certain habitual patterns are formed that enable the organ- ism to perceive properties of the world. Withagen and van Wermeskerken (2010) have employed the notion of affordance in a critique of the kind of selectionist thinking that lies behind evolutionary psychology, and I have already referred to the dynamic alternative as mutualism (which, in many ways, corresponds to Dewey’s transactional ideas). Some ecological psychologists have formulated their position as mutualism (Costall, 2004; Still & Good, 1992, 1998), and this is a form of ecological thinking that has many similarities to Dewey’s transactional understanding of organisms and environment – where this very distinction itself is seen as problematic, and where much of what we commonly conceive of as belonging to the environment (gravity, tools etc.) in a functional sense must be understood as belonging to the organism (see also Burke, 1994, for a general ecological reading of Dewey). A transactional psychology would agree with Ingold that “the forms of organisms are not genetically preconfigured but continu- ally emerge as developmental outcomes within matrices comprised of mutually conditioning relations.” (2011, p. 9). The development of humans is, from this perspective, first and foremost a development of life-processes and practices, transcending the borders of what we have been used to call nature and culture. There is just human becoming as one, continuous process (p. 9).
Conclusions I hope to have indicated in this article why evolutionary psychology is both empirically unsupported in certain respects and conceptually incoherent in oth- ers. It is to a large extent a task for sociologists of knowledge to explain why the paradigm has received such popularity, not least in the public media (see also Hamilton, 2008). The problems of evolutionary psychology, however, should not tempt us to discard a general Darwinian orientation in the study of human beings. Many psychologists and students of psychology today seem to think that evolutionary psychology is a form of Darwinism (perhaps even the only one in psychology), but I have tried to show that this is misguided, and that there are promising alternatives. It may be wise to bear in mind that Darwin, as Ingold has
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put it, was no Darwinist, let alone a neo-Darwinist, in the sense invoked by evo- lutionary psychologists (Ingold, 1998, p. 97). Ingold’s own “relational thinking” in anthropology, along with Dewey’s transactional approach and also ecological psychology, may form the basis of a dynamic alternative to evolutionary psychol- ogy. This is an alternative that does not seek to invoke mental modules, conceived as having evolved in the Stone Age and transmitted genetically, as an explanation of human doings and sufferings.
We should stop “essentializing” biology and psychology. We should stop seeing biology as a constant of human beings and culture as its variable (Ingold, 2004, p. 217). We should leave theories of self-action (that refer to the unfolding of purely genetic potentials) behind and also theories of inter-action that are concerned with an alleged (and deeply simplified) interaction between nature (genes) and culture, for there is no such “interaction” between different spheres. There is just one transactional-developmental process of organisms-in-environments. I have advocated the use of Dewey’s more subtle vocabulary as one way of articulating such a transactional perspective, but this is just one suggestion. In any case, we need in psychology “nothing less than a new approach to evolution, one that sets out to explore not the variation and selection of intergenerationally transmit- ted attributes, but the self-organising dynamics and form-generating potentials of relational fields” (Ingold, 2004, p. 218). A genuine transactional Darwinism could be one place to start.
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