Why I hate evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology. It is one of the most fascinating fields in science right now. I love it. I also hate it because it lends itself to terrible articles like “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Allan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today. I know, I know. It’s only Psychology Today, not a proper journal. Psychology Today is to research psychology what Model Aircraft Monthly is to aerodynamic engineering. But, you know, it presents itself like a journal for professionals, and this particular article managed to get itself listed on the estimable Arts & Letters Daily with the promise that it reveals “strange truths of human nature…” which would be wonderful if only it contained a high proportion of either strangeness or truth.
Discussing the “age-genius curve”, the well-known link between youth and the output of genius, the authors tell us that “Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer a computer whiz kid.” This line is destined to send most IT professionals into fits of giggles. Leaving aside the respectability of Mr Gates’s business practices, a descriptor that the US Justice Department would possibly not use, the fact is that Gates was never really a computer whiz. He was a talented computer programmer for sure, but no more so than thousands of other bright young West Coasters in the late 1960s and early 70s. What set Bill Gates and Microsoft on the path of the Global Rich List was a business deal. IBM needed an operating system for its new personal computers and did not have the resources to develop it in-house. Bill Gates signed a deal to provide the operating system to IBM — and then handed them one he had bought from another software company. He was the middle man without letting the fact out to either end of the deal. Bill Gates’s genius has always been for business and there is no evidence that his skills have diminished. He is a counter-example to the age-genius curve.
As is Orson Welles, who is also claimed for the age-genius curve despite the fact that he was making great movies his entire life. Welles started the Mercury Theatre and made Citizen Kane in his twenties, made The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man in his thirties, A Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight in his forties, F for Fake in his fifties, won a Grammy and a Golden Globe (for different performances) in his sixties, and when he died at the age of seventy he had several projects on the go. Welles is hardly an example of a genius who burned out young. I don’t know what word to apply to this fervency of scholarship, but it wouldn’t be “research.”
The segment that really ought to get the authors dragged over the coals is the one about how polygyny is natural to humans. (Polygyny is when a man has several wives, and is the technical term anthropologists prefer to the more imprecise polygamy.)
We know that humans have been polygynous throughout most of history because men are taller than women.
Among primate and nonprimate species, the degree of polygyny highly correlates with the degree to which males of a species are larger than females. The more polygynous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. Typically, human males are 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than females. This suggests that, throughout history, humans have been mildly polygynous.
We know that humans are naturally polygynous?…We don’t just hypothesize or suspect, we know?
The available research on the subject has been mischaracterised by the authors. There are several factors that contribute to sexual dimorphism, that is the differences between men and women, in primates. Polygyny as a social structure is certainly one of those factors, but so is body size (the heavier the primate, the greater the difference between males and females), whether the primate lives in trees or on the ground (terrestrial primates have more dimorphism, especially savannah primates), the level of competition between males for sexual partners (more competition leads to bigger differences), and the primate’s diet (fruit-eating primates are more dimorphic than those with a broader diet).
To make matters more complicated, different authors use different measures: difference in height, difference in weight, the cube root of the difference in weight, the logarithm of height difference, not to mention the difference in canine tooth lengths. Amongst this tangle of variables, there are some correlations to be found, but for every correlation there are outliers that don’t fit the pattern, and there is confounding with other variables.
And then, of course, comes the matter of where humans belong on the spectrum of sexual dimorphism. The Psychology Today article would have the reader believe that humans are strongly dimorphic, but that depends on what measure is used. The measures quoted in PT give the greatest estimate of dimorphism in humans, but when canine tooth size is used, humans have very low dimorphism and when the cube-root of weight is used, the dimorphic difference is only 2 percent. And on whatever scale is used, humans rank quite low on dimorphism among primates, especially when compared to gorillas, orangutans, and baboons, where males are twice as heavy as females.
Most of this uncertainty is well known; it’s been described in the key research papers for thirty years. Recent studies have not clarified the matter. If anything, the waters have become murkier. In 2005, Satoshi Kanazawa and Deanna Novak found evidence that sexual dimorphism in humans becomes more pronounced when societies become more polygynous because women in these societies become sexually mature earlier, and this turns off their pubertal growth earlier. If this finding is correct, then sexual dimorphism in humans varies according to the degree of polygyny, changes from generation to generation, and is not a fixed natural trait in humans.
Sexual dimorphism in fossils has been used to make informed guesses about the social structure of extinct primates, but the fact that no two paleontologists can agree on their inferences suggests that we should be very cautious about claiming to know the truth about human social mores based on as crude a measure as dimorphism.
And were you paying attention? The same Satoshi Kanazawa who co-wrote the 2005 paper in the Journal of Biosocial Sciences is one of the co-authors of the Psychology Today farrago. To which we may well say, WTF?
Articles like this contain a lot of tripe, but by proudly claiming to be Politically Incorrect, they reach out to many who would like to believe the tripe is true. The original PC movement, egregious as it was, died over a decade ago. Meanwhile the backlash lives on, lashing back against an enemy that doesn’t exist anymore. “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About…” most certainly does not belong in the title of any article in any magazine with pretensions to intellectual integrity. What PC means now is “likely to irritate people of certain liberal-ish political persuasions” and what was once a mockery of one sort of cant has become a rallying cry for another. The idea that natural polygyny is politically incorrect doesn’t really apply to most of Subsaharan Africa, or indeed, to parts of Utah.
A closing snipe at Psychology Today: Of the editorial staff with available biographies, only one has a psychology degree and that’s a mere bachelors. The Editor in Chief claims that “my lifelong curiosity about human behavior is ample training”; the News Editor has a BSc in cognitive neuroscience, but feels obliged to top it up with “nearly 30 years of studying human behavior for zero course credit”; at the very least, this extensive experience observing human behaviour makes the two editors more qualified than, oh, anyone who has been in a coma for thirty years; and the Editor at Large (a title which suggests she escaped from her cubicle and is now on a wild editing spree through the badlands of Manhattan) uses her magazine biography to advertise her services as a therapist despite apparently not having any qualification to practice in her state (”Note: Not a Therapist New York”). I wouldn’t like to claim that all of Psychology Today’s contents are as poor as this article, but judging by the website’s marketing targets, PT aims for alternative therapists and New Age ruminants who want the answers to all life’s complexities delivered on glossy two-page spreads. If you like that sort of thing, subscribe.
7 People have left comments on this post
As a journo that works in a scientific field that he isn’t qualified in and (hopefully) does a pretty good job, can I say that it isn’t completely necessary to have the specific scientific training in the discipline.
You can replace a lack of training with hard work and good ethics, on a story by story basis.
Get a trustworthy source, check your source, double check your source and then check what you’ve written with your source to make sure you’ve written what they think they’ve said.
And then you need to avoid giving in to temptation to duchess the story to sex it up - well written science stories are interesting to a broader audience anyway, but if you’re lazy and lack ethics it’s an easy thing to cut corners.
(Although, in defence of some of my colleagues who are neither lazy nor unethical, I should also point out that writing good science stories takes time, and some publications simply don’t give their science and medicine journos the resources they need to do a proper job. Having had to say: ‘Fuck it, it’ll have to do’ a couple of times as deadlines loom myself, I know how easy it is to be in that position.)
I think there is a place for magazines and news services that interpret what the research community is doing for the general community - it’s just that Pschology Today appears to be doing a particularly execrable job of it.
For my money the silliest bit is the part about explaining Muslim suicide bombers in terms of being enabled by polygyny leading to unmarried men. So, how does that fit with suicide bombing being invented by the Tamil Tigers (a secular terrorist organisation), who often use women as suicide bombers?
I agree that evolutionary biology is a fascinating field that lends itself to misinterpretation by idiots.
No, I take it back, I hadn’t read the last few items when I claimed the suicide bomber part was the silliest. It gets sillier. The idiotic stuff about sexual harrassment, for example.
There are many publications (not journals) that boast many experienced people, and there is no real way to assuage this. I’m always amused when evolutionary psychologists proclaim that men always practiced polygamy, the need to impregnate so many women and so on always screeches inside my head. No one can truly know. all the innuendo leads to the other offshoot, pop psychology and self help books written by people with questionable qualifications (ie John Gray). It’s not surprising why humans still argue, and create wars, with all the suppositions that linger. At uni, I’d never really known a practicing academic to have, what others call, a real life outside of their lab rat trials. Many became animated when they discussed their precious rodents (what a lot of psychology is based on, only because it’s unethical to use humans). I’m always wary when any article is titled ‘Politically Incorrect,’ only because it’s usually written by a fence sitter, one who is afraid to tread into darker waters.
Mind you, many of the societies that are discussed (polygamous, polygynous - every single polyunsaturated idea on sexuality) have died out or have assimiliated into the typical nuclear family unit (on the outside, for appearances sake) those that survive aren’t based on western notions (of sexuality) or as sexuality is viewed today.
Why didn’t the article tie in the connection between misogyny and polygyny? The rape rates in Utah are higher than the rest of the US because the polygynist culture doesn’t allow women to voice their opinions and sees women as incubators with little else to contribute. Surely, the misogyny in Muslim polygynist cultures plays into the higher levels of aggression. When you grow up being able to kill your sister for her being raped, you pretty much can kill yourself and hundreds of others without a thought.
I used to enjoy evolutionary psychology, but now as a woman I just find it depressing and ominous. It makes me never want to get married or give birth feeling that men are opportunists. Why are there no articles on women’s biological desire to become prostitutes to get men to question everything good and decent?
Nick: While I don’t think a journalist has to have formal qualifications in a subject to write about it, I do think that a journal called Psychology Today might find it useful to have some qualified people on their editorial staff. But that wasn’t the big point. I was really drawing attention to the “life of hard knocks” special pleading, which to my cynical mind is a telltale sign that the persons themselves feel their background is inadequate to the task.
Anastasia: I’m surprised you can’t recall any academic with an active outside life. Most academics I know have as broad a set of interests as anyone else and are just as likely to hold forth on the weekend’s footy results or the latest movies as they are to talk about their work. Also, the Skinner school of psychology dealt largely with rats and the “black box” model of mind, but it’s not true of psychology in general. I’d point anyone who thinks psychology is an academic wasteland to two of the most important scientific studies ever undertaken: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s studies of authority — both undertaken on human subjects. If the US military had taken the effort to understand these studies, there would have been no Abu Ghraib scandal.
Olivia: IMHO the problem with evolutionary psychology is the ease with which people incorporate shaky hypotheses as self-evident explanations of human behaviour, usually with a large degree of wish fulfilment. I was particularly taken by this exemplary quote from the introduction to Tooby and Cosmides’s 2005 Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology: “The programs comprising the human mind were designed by natural selection … Knowing this allows evolutionary psychologists to approach the study of the mind like an engineer.” Now, it seems to me that the history of psychology has been terribly unkind to people who tried to co-opt engineering principles to the subject, and so has evolutionary theory (imagined engineering is the fallacy at the root of intelligent design). I guess that Tooby and Cosmides want to believe that evolutionary approaches to psychology bring nice reductive tools to the scientist’s kit. They seem to be unaware of the difficulty that evolutionary theorists have in deciding the adaptive qualities of many anatomical and molecular features of simpler creatures than humans. I believe that any given hypothesis in evolutionary psychology, no matter how ingenious and seductive, has an awful lot of uphill trudging to be accepted as an established explanation.
There’s a fairly extensive demolition of the article over at Salon today.
Highlights include:
One of the authors has been dead for 4 years, and the other one got in the shit last year for publishing an article that rather charmingly suggested that Africans are poor because they’re stupid.
I prefer the dead one, personally.
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