A few years ago, I was your typical office-worker: stressed out, uneven energy, overweight, and inconsistent complexion. Now I'm just your typical 28-year old urban hunter-gatherer on a quest to be healthy, and having a few adventures along the way. See my full bio.
This post started as discussion of evolutionary psychology, but I somehow got talking about my college thesis. So way down below is a brief introduction to evolutionary psychology by two pioneers of the field: John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Evolutionary psychology examines the mind as a series of evolutionary adaptations. For example, people who were afraid of snakes and spiders left more offspring than people who begged for a pet tarantula. Toobey and Cosmides focus on mind and behavior, not nutrition -- but you'll hear the same line of thinking from them, that our mental software evolved for hunter-gatherer living and is poorly adapted to this world. It's a basic intro, but at 6:45, they start to discuss economics. Our minds are better adapted for sharing between a small group of known people, in more of a zero-sum world -- but poorly adapted for explicit exchanges with strangers in a non-zero-sum world, where wealth can be created.
This is a fun area for me, since it's the subject of my college thesis. I wrote about how age-old debates over free trade and protectionism reveal the imprint of in-group / out-group psychology. When we make exchanges within a psychological in-group, we are more likely to view exchanges as mutually beneficial. Think trade between Michigan and Ohio -- we don't ask whether Michigan is getting the upper hand versus Ohio or vice versa. But when we make exchanges across psychological boundaries, with an out-group, we are more likely to view exchanges in relative terms. Think trade between the United States and China.
Throughout history, we find the exact same arguments re-appearing in debates over free trade and protectionism for as long as we've been arguing about trade policy. From Ross Perot and NAFTA to the Brits in the 1840s with the Corn Laws, and to mercantilism before then. You could probably go all the way back to cities, extended families and clans, immediate kin, the division of labor and exchange between a pair-bonded man and woman, and cells within an organism (as Robert Wright wrote about in the excellent book, Non-Zero).
Zero-sum / relative advantage arguments:
Positive-sum / mutual benefit arguments:
Note that these arguments use different reference points to measure benefit. In a zero-sum frame, you measure benefit by comparing yourself to someone else at a given point in time. In a positive sum-frame, you measure benefit by comparing yourself now to yourself at a prior or alternate point in time. They're fundamentally different frames.
A few interesting historical insights:
The reason why free trade is emotionally charged is because that is where the strongest psychological in-group / out-group boundary lies these days: the nation-state. Trade internal to the nation-state is unremarkable, and the benefits are a no-brainer. The point of the paper was not to argue in favor of free trade or protectionism. Rather, it was to point that we've all got a free trader and a protectionist inside of us, but the boundary where one turns to the other may simply lie in a different place.
Let's just say the Harvard History Department was less than supportive of the project. They encouraged me to do an independent study when I was halfway into it. ~"This is very interesting, but it's not a history paper." Steven Pinker was advising me across departments (in addition to someone from History), and I'm indebted to him for attending multiple meetings with administrators to get this topic and approach accepted as a legitimate avenue of inquiry for an undergraduate History thesis.
Okay, here's the video that inspired the post.
Comments
Hello! cedgebk interesting
Hello! cedgebk interesting cedgebk site!
I'm afraid Evolutionary
I'm afraid Evolutionary Psychology is where I get off the Paleo bandwagon. The Paleo diet is rational because rigorous science applied to the question of human nutrition leads to the conclusion that carbs are bad. But note that the argument for a low-carb diet isn't evolutionary. Rather, the fact of our evolving for most of our history without carbs is something that slots into place given what we can independently verify about the effects of different kinds of diets on our health (note that there's very little reference to evolutionary considerations in Taubes' book).When thinking about the non-psychological, evolutionary biologists find adaptations independently of thinking about evolutionary history. Evolutionary theory is an explanatory science, not a predictive one (roughly speaking; if I was being precise I'd have to add all sorts of caveats). So biologists identify adaptive structures and then try to reconstruct plausible theories as to how they evolved. The mistake Evolutionary Psychologists make is to reverse this: they speculate as to what the early environment was like, hypothesise as to what sorts of mental structures would have been adaptive, and then go looking for them. They want EP to be predictive, but this is not the way that respectable evolutionary biology works and people like Cosmides and Tooby make much of the claim that cognitive psychology should be a branch of biology. For a really nice explanation of this, see Todd Grantham and Shaun Nichols (1999) "Evolutionary Psychology: Ultimate Explanations and Panglossian Predictions", in Valerie Gray Hardcastle ed., Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 46-66. There's also a great discussion of some of the difficulties involved in adaptationist thinking in Chapter 10 of Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths (1999) Sex and Death. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.To be clear, I'm not against applying evolutionary thinking to human beings. There's a reading of the project according to which it just has to be true. What I object to is the particular form that project takes in the work of the majority of evolutionary psychologists (with Cosmides and Tooby as figureheads of that movement).Apologies if the above seems like a rant. Keep up the posts on the conceptual underpinnings of the Paleo approach. It's fun to think about this stuf!
I find this oblique sort of
I find this oblique sort of philosophy of science line of argument to be an increasingly vapid distraction. It serves the dual purpose of sounding loftily poignant to laymen while sufficiently obfuscating its disconnect from even a single scientific claim actually made by any evolutionary psychologist. Thus, it too often serves the intended purpose of thwarting discussion; without being bound by accuracy.Granted, it's much easier to cast aspersion with abstract philozophizing than to mount successful attacks against Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory, Trivers' parental investment theory, and the error management theory of Haselton & Buss. It's much easier to pejoratively preclude ideologically inconvenient science from "respectability" by ad hoc declarations lobbed at some fantastical monolith. It's certainly easier to parry specifics than consider the empirical support for the descent illusion hypothesis, auditory looming bias, or commitment skepticism bias.Perhaps the best part about this program of meta criticism is that one doesn't even have to read any literature in the field to employ it. {insert Sokal Hoax joke here}"When thinking about the non-psychological, evolutionary biologists find adaptations independently of thinking about evolutionary history. Evolutionary theory is an explanatory science, not a predictive one (roughly speaking; if I was being precise I'd have to add all sorts of caveats)."Rough indeed... but such is the way of neck-down Darwinism.
I'm not sure what in the
I'm not sure what in the objection counts as oblique. And I'm not sure what in it suggests that it isn't based on a reading of the literature. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for a science of the mind. I'm not one of those people who thinks some things are too mysterious for science and I'm not against evolutionary theory either. As I explicitly said, our minds obviously evolved and that has got to have implications for its study. But if evolutionary psychologists routinely make the same methodological errors, then they make those errors. You label the argument a "philosophy of science" argument and bemoan the lack of engagement with the empirical literature. I'm assuming then that you've engaged with the literature I cited and can provide a principled reason for saying that the argument mentioned is philosophical as opposed to empirical. Given the discussions between evolutionary psychologists about the proper way to understand the concepts of adaptation, selection, function, and debates about the appropriate level of selection (to pick just some of the debates where philosophers and scientists have productively and happily engaged with one another), I'm surprised anyone would claim that conceptual issues have no role to play in these debates, whether they are conducted by psychologists, biologists or philosophers. Trust me, we're not all like the charlatans rightly mocked by Sokal. Contemporary philosophy of science is deeply engaged with actual empirical work. I would have thought a comment on a blog post wasn't the appropriate forum for me to go through specific empirical proposals and critique them. I just wanted to point out one argument against the particular way that evolutionary psychology is practiced and provide a follow-up reference to those who might be interested. Try reading the piece before deciding that it doesn't engage with any of the actual literature. Here are two recent pieces critiquing EP that are clearly based on engagement with the field: http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/research/tics.pdfhttp://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm
First, I didn't say your
First, I didn't say your references don't purport to engage and address the literature by actual evolutionary psychologists. I said the Anonymous commenter didn't... and I further implied that Anonymous wouldn't even have to read a single word written by any evolutionary psychologist in order to write what's been written thus far. More importantly: Philosophy of science arguments critical of evolutionary psychology (as a conveniently constructed monolith) go on ad infinitum about how evolutionary psychology just "can't" (ostensibly pronounced 'Kant') make any tenable claims, while casting vague aspersions by notions of what's "respectable" or epistemologically certain. They scream (by verbosity, if not volume) from their ivory rooftops how they've done all the thinking for us and their verdict is that it just can't be. But this propaganda amounts to little more than a collection of "just ain't so stories." And all the while, evolutionary psychologists continue to make hypotheses which are interesting and yield fruit. For the other side of the story:Confer, J. C., Easton, J. A., Fleischman, D. S., Goetz, C. D., Lewis, D. M. G., Perilloux, C., et al. (2010). Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations. The American psychologist, 65(2), 110-26.
I have a bachelors in
I have a bachelors in Sociology but we never studied Socio Biology. I'm glad thinking like this is entering academia. I will have to take the time to read your thesis. One thing I would like to see is an attempt to explain why, considering that human actions are preprogrammed in this way, do we have the world we have. For example, new DNA research indicated that in Europe hunter-gatherer people were replaced by farming people from Asia Minor. The hunter-gatherer people did not integrate as was previously thought. So knowing farming and being part of the farming culture was a huge advantage in passing one's DNA on to subsequent generations. The same type of thing has been found in the two populations of people that developed adulthood lactose tolerance. They found that once that mutation occurred then those with it were 100 times more likely to pass on their genes than those that did not have the gene. So my question would be is the modern human competitive psychology a mutation that is proving to be advantageous over the previous nature of cooperation?
That is a very good question.
That is a very good question. Some economists have started running economic games and experiments with actual hunter-gatherers, and they get different results. Forget where I read this. In the 10,000 Year Explosion, they also argue that peoples that have been farming for the longest period of time (which requires consistent conscientious effort) have best adapted to a modern industrial economy (which often requires consistent conscientious effort).
love your post brought me
love your post brought me back to why I chose psych major over biology while trying to also get into med school. I'm really jealous that steven pinker was one of your advisors. I stumbled upon your site from webpage for the book "born to run" by chris mcdougal. At first I was put off by your paleodiet ideas as just some sort of fad diet similar to what I had read in the book "the zone" years before, that is absurdly low carb, avoid grains since farming is recent ivention evolutionsrily speaking etc. However, after reading this post I will dig a bit deeper into your caveman lifestyle ideas. I also agree 100% with your point about farmers being well suited to todays living in industrial society. Farmers plod along and generally play it safe. I read several books on ADHD and one idea really struck home that people with ADHD have misfit brain style not an impaired brain. They are the "hunters" among us trying to cope in a farmers world. they are the adrenaline junkies, the explorers, the risk takers, tool inventors. Farming would not reward risky behavior so a farmer willing to gamble their whole years production on new crop or techinque would get lucky sometimes but if they were wrong even once they would not pass their genes along. there is also good evidence for ADHD being heavily influenced by genes. A passage about the mathematician who was curious about evolution amd animal teacking ended up living with masai warrior tribe seemed to echo much of what I learned about ADHD the persistence hunter had to be able to empathize or rhink like thier prey to anticipate their next move. He described the ability to get so engrossed in the hunt the hunter was sometimes in danger of neglecting their own body's warning signs of fatigue or dehydration etc. this almost perfectly describes ADHD tendency for hyperfocus where they lose sense of time or duration of activity, so they might forget they started running down the antelope 6 hrs ago and need to maybe rest a bit because to them while hyperfocused and engaging all their senses it feels like they just started 1 hr ago. Now I also want to read your thesis! and will research sime of the theories you pointed out above. or at least look them up on wikipedia. Maybe you should get a book deal that would hopefully shame the history profs if you could write a scholarly book that sold 10,000 copies even then they'd have to concede they were wrong. I mean history profs books don't generally sell thousands of copies I wpuld wager.
Really interesting post, and
Really interesting post, and thesis John. Thanks for sharing!
John, Great post.You're
John, Great post.You're getting dangerously close to using neo-paleo arguments against libertarianism. How do you resolve the inequality: human digestive systems are not built for food from the modern economy, therefore we should adapt what we eat to what we're programmed for AND human brains/emotions are not built for the structure of the modern economy, therefore we should modify our brains to try to become homo economus. One says modify the world to fit the paleo self, the other says modify the paleo self to fit the world.Ted
I'd say that market and legal
I'd say that market and legal institutions are the mechanism that has allowed us to adapt to modern society as much as we have. Hayek wrote about "the intimate order", or small scale society, to which we are well-adapted, and the "extended order", or a large scale society, to which we are poorly adapted. It's exactly legal and market institutions that allow a large scale society to function smoothly and not have us all kill each other or all die in poverty. It's not a perfect process, but cultures have evolved ways to coordinate at larger and larger scales
I wonder if imtamate order of
I wonder if imtamate order of hayek is related to Dunbar's number which is 150, that groups when they grow beyond beyond 150 units or people require more rules and restrictions because there is a cognitive limit to how many people one individual can know or keep straight before relationships become more impersonal. I wonder how evolution plays into Dunbar's number that is did paleoman's tribes or family groups conform to 150 people or less?
I could see evolutionary value in ones genes not predisposing you to work well on groups of 10000 people. By having a sort of narural point where group strife encourages a larger group to fracture into two or more separate groups could prevent disease or wars from wiping out a much larger number of people. Would ensure sustainable hunting etc.
If ghosts don't cross
If ghosts don't cross borders, machines will. :) Chris
This may seem a moot point,
This may seem a moot point, but war is often a non-zero sum game. Think Global Thermal Nuclear war as an obvious example. Every side would LOSE far more than any one side gains.