EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

Fri, 24 Jul 1998 15:42:01 -1000
Jay Hanson (j@qmail.com)

Alan Spector: Why am I bothering to respond to this foolishness? Because
sociobiology and other forms of biological determinism are not "bad
science." Worse, they are theology, posing as science. They play fast and
loose with the data, relying on

--

It's tough for many people to accept the fact that humans are just a bunch of animals, but they are. In fact, humans are the chimp's closest relative with only a 1.6% DNA difference.

EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE Evolution is the complex of processes by which living organisms originated on earth and have been diversified and modified through sustained changes in form and function. The earliest known fossil organisms are single-celled forms resembling modern bacteria; they date from about 3.4 billion years ago. Many of the evolving organisms have become extinct (e.g., the dinosaurs), but some have developed into the present fauna and flora of the world. Extinction and diversification continue today.

Charles Darwin's ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES (1859), is a landmark in human understanding of nature. Darwin noted that while offspring inherit a resemblance to their parents, they are not identical to them. He further noted that some of the differences between offspring and parents were not due solely to the environment but were themselves often inheritable.

The new and emerging field of "evolutionary psychology" looks at the mind as "it," asks "how does it work?", and discovers organic design and functional purpose. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand the human mind by understanding the evolutionary process that designed it. To do this, they engage in a kind of reverse-engineering, trying to piece together how the minds we have today evolved little by little through the process of natural selection. They are not interested in the competition between species, but rather the competition between genes within the human species.

Natural selection creates new traits and adaptations in a species by putting genes through a process of trial and error. New genes arise in an individual organism by chance mutation. If a new gene produces a trait that decreases the organism's chances of reproduction, that gene, and the trait it produces, will not be passed on. This is the fate of the vast majority of genetic mutations.

However, if a new gene produces a trait that makes the host organism more effective in reproduction, this gene will be "selected," that is, passed on to the next generation. In this manner, highly successful genes and traits spread throughout the species, gradually overtaking "competing" genes and eventually becoming "species-typical" traits.

The fundamental theorem upon which evolutionary psychology is based is that behavior (just like anatomy and physiology) is in large part inherited and that every organism acts (consciously or not) to enhance its inclusive fitness -- to increase the frequency and distribution of its selfish genes in future generations. And those genes exist not only in the individual but also in his or her identical twin (100%), siblings (on average, 50%), and cousins (on average, 25%) and so on down the kinship line. (Thus, aid to and feelings for relatives makes evolutionary sense.)

One of the most important points to keep in mind in thinking about evolutionary psychology is that all mental mechanisms were evolved in and designed for a specific social and environmental setting -- small bands of hunter-gatherer families who roamed the savanna planes of the Pleistocene era, 2 million to 10,000 years ago. The mental mechanisms we inherit from our ancestors are therefore not necessarily adaptive to today's environment.

The modern two-year-old who recoils in fear from a moth will blindly run into on-coming traffic. Fear of insects is automatic, but parents have to work hard to teach their children to avoid speeding cars because that threat didn't exist in our evolutionary past.

This revision and extension of Darwinian evolution, from "survival of the fittest" to inclusive fitness, was worked out primarily by George Williams (in the US) and by William Hamilton and John Maynard Smith (in the UK) in the 1960s, with some clever twists added by Robert Trivers (in the US) in the 1970s.

[ Much of the foregoing was just cut and paste from: http://www.skeptic.com/04.1.miele-immoral.html http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dlane/evomed.html ]

People, like all animals, were optimized by evolution to put their genes into the next generation. Those strains of humans that were not so optimized are no longer here.

Three of the most important social characteristics that allow people to put their genes into the next generation are exploitation (making the best use of something -- including other people), lying (I love you, so let's go to bed), and self-deception. Exploitation and lying contributed to human survival for millions of years, self-deception for at least 40,000 years.

"Humans have existed as a separate evolutionary line for some five million years... biologically modern humans did not appear until sometime in the last 120,000 years... behaviorally modern humans probably appeared sometime in the last 120,000, and certainly by 40,000 years ago." [ p. 355, Kelly, 1995 ]

Self-deception contributes to survival by making us better liars! In love, business, and politics, sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

[ http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.htm http://www.clark.net/pub/wright/toc.htm http://www.a3.com/myself/ravenpap.htm ]

OUR ANIMAL NATURE For millions of years, humans LIVED the Tragedy of the Commons. Hunter gatherers exploited an area -- literally ATE themselves out of an area -- and then moved to a new one. That's just the kind animal they were -- that's just what they did.

Modern hunter gatherers, such as the !Kung bushmen, still do:

"As one might expect, the bushmen prefer to collect the desirable foods that are closest to the water supply. They occupy a camp for a period of weeks and literally eat their way out of it. For example, they often camp in the nut forests and exhaust the nuts within a 1.6 km radius during the first week of occupation, within a 3.2 km radius the second week, and within a 4.8 km radius the third week." [ Lee, 1969, cited in Pimentel, 1996 ]

Humans adopted settled agriculture ONLY about 12,000 years ago. In other words, humans are still evolved and optimized as hunter gatherers and have simply not had enough time to evolve and adapt for survival at present (and expected) population densities like, say, termites.

Jay