Yummy!

After encountering a hefty dose of Pinker-bashing at this year's Anglistentag, I thought it a lovely bit of irony to stumble over this at the station bookshop in Paderborn on my way home:

I simply had to buy it.

Changing perspectives on the history of violence

One shouldn't, perhaps, take such things too seriously, but I was interested to see the results of Prospect magazine's 'World Thinkers' list last week.

More specifically, I was pleased to find a few of my own favourite authors placing highly and equally glad to have some potential new favourites brought to my attention who are now on my -- sadly ever-expanding -- to-read list.

There they are, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and a few others: people who, while I might not agree with everything they've argued or written, have nevertheless positively influenced how I see the world.

They're people with whom I find it's even worthwhile disagreeing, and you can't say that about everyone.

(There are some people on the list for whom that doesn't apply...but I've been trying to focus on the positive recently, so I won't go into that.) 

Coming in at number three is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, whose most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, surely needs little introduction, seeing that it was both a bestseller and generated a substantial amount of debate and discussion.

I'm particularly pleased about that, for a few reasons. 

His earlier book The Blank Slate was one of those works that began shifting my views on violence from being more or less at home within 'cultural theory' toward trying to integrate cultural history with what might be called 'biological', 'evolutionary' or 'behavioural science' perspectives. (The others being works by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Robert Wright and Frans de Waal.) 

An early version of that shift can be glimpsed in a 2007 essay that I wrote on violence and cultural change; the most recent culmination of my thinking on the matter was in an article that appeared as part of a special issue in the British Journal of Criminology in 2011.   

Steve and I engaged in several mutually rewarding email discussions of violence, psychology and history while Better Angels was taking shape (it is humbling to find myself in the book's acknowledgements), an exchange that we were finally able to take up in person a couple of times in recent years in Bern and London.

Bern, Switzerland, September 2011

We also exchanged our most recent books as gifts. Going by weight and page length, I fear that Steve might feel he got the worse of this deal, but it was very nice to find him recommending my new(ish) book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, on Twitter as 'A fascinating real-life murder story.'

So, for all these reasons -- and like some other people -- I feel inspired to add my personal congratulations on yet another public recognition.

Then, relatedly and coincidentally, last week I received (from the author) a copy of a review essay in the current issue of the English Historical Review that that considers Better Angels together with some other recent works on violence history.

In the article, Gregory Hanlon -- author of the pioneering Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History -- offers some constructive criticism of Better Angels from the perspective of an early modern historian; however, he argues that historians will 'learn a great deal' from the book's analysis of the psychological abilities that encourage and restrain violence.

He then critically considers some recent broad-scale analyses of long-term changes in European which have emerged from a more traditional social/cultural history perspective and concludes by pointing out a few more recent contributions to the debate that have begun (whether on a more theoretical or empirical level) to seek some degree of methodological integration.

For those historians interested in (though even for those perhaps sceptical about) behavioural-science approaches to violence history, this essay should certainly be on your reading lists.

And it occurs to me, once again, that I am very fortunate to know such fascinating people. 

Congratulations, Steve!

Well done, Greg!

Danger: Unreadable Flying Objects

We've had a rather nice, quiet time here in the OD household over the holidays so far (though it's been a bit too drearily rainy outside).

It's been good to withdraw from the world a bit, perhaps except for catching up on the latest terrorist panic: is it just me, or is it a particularly sad comment on the state of the world when one of ABC News's biggest recent scoops seems to be publicising pictures of 'a singed pair of underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch'?

Our retreat into the domestic cave has been accompanied by trying to focus on some of the real-world writing we need to do, hence the relative hiatus in any light blogging recently.

Which may continue; we'll see.

But I felt the urge to break radio silence tonight while reading Steven Shapin's lengthy LRB article on Darwin Year 2009.

Not after reading the article, I stress, since I haven't finished it yet.

I may not ever, in fact.

An distant early warning blip sounded in my mind when visitors to the Galapagos were referred to as 'tourists making scientific haj'; a few more followed when Shapin recounts the majority of Darwin Year events in a tone of condescending mockery.

The alarms rang a bit more loudly when Shapin--apparently approvingly--offers another quote:

‘Every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist,’ Philip Ball noted in the Observer. ‘In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.’

Beyond question, the first part is generally right, and, indeed, Darwinism has been misused in all kinds of ways.

Still, the sweeping reference to 'bleak' views of humanity and the 'selfish' imperatives of DNA caused me to nearly throw the paper across the room. I'm used to people making this reference who haven't managed to get past the title of Dawkins's 1976 book, but Shapin is a historian of science, so I'm assuming he has.

But one of the underlying aims of Shapin's article is to reveal the shocking true agenda of many of the Darwin enthusiasts over the last year--Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominent among them--i.e., to promote atheism.

Which Shapin apparently thinks is foolish, judging by his sarcasm:

The International Darwin Day Foundation, acting as publicist and clearing house for hundreds of the year’s global events, is administered by the American Humanist Association, a secularist pressure group which defends the civil liberties of the endangered species of the American godless, and hands out annual awards to its chosen ‘Humanist of the Year’ (past winners include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker). For the Darwin Day Foundation (whose advisory board includes Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker), as for other sponsors, Darwin Day is less about a historical figure than an occasion for extending versions of scientific materialism and rationalism to ever new cultural domains, encouraging an appreciation of ‘science and the role of humans in developing the Scientific Method that permitted the acquisition of an enormous amount of verifiable scientific knowledge, that is now available to modern humans’.

One can almost hear the phrase 'militant atheist' echoing in the background.

Shapin raises the the hoary old straw-man 'panadaptationist' critique (originating with Stephen Jay Gould) of Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker which verges into his letting us know that he Disapproves Strongly of evolutionary psychology (EP); unfortunately, he demonstrates as much subtle knowledge of that as he does of The Selfish Gene, summed up by his quip that it basically means 'Nature beats up nurture all the time.'

I know that EP's not everybody's thing; it's a wide-ranging field, most of it quite interesting and sensible, some of it a bit batty.

But I happen to be reading a fair amount of EP and EP-related material at the moment while preparing for an article that The Wife and I are working on, and--as is all too often the case--it bears little resemblance to the caricatured intellectual Gleichschaltung Shapin (like others) depicts.

(I may be feeling a bit touchy on this point, as I found out only yesterday about the death a few months ago of Margo Wilson, who, with her husband Martin Daly, was a pioneer in EP perspectives, especially on homicide. Her work has been important and inspirational to me over the last decade or so, and it is careful, subtle and methodologically rigorous...like most of the serious academic work in EP that I've read, in fact.)

At about this point, Steven Pinker is referred to as 'EP Thought Leader'.

At about this point, I could not resist throwing the paper across the room.

I don't have the energy to deal with this at any further length. I'm used to reading (or rather avoiding) this kind of crap at Comment is Futile, but I hold the LRB (perhaps naively) to a higher standard.

I'm almost tempted to make a new year's resolution: only to read and comment on things in my personal life that make me happy.

Judging by recent experience this would, however, mean that I would mostly be writing about The Wife, horror films, heavy metal and handguns.

And I'm not sure how much of that you all could all stand.

Quote for the day

At a conference I attended earlier this year, a Lacanian from Norway told me with a dismissive little smirk (quote): "I don't buy the whole evolutionary psychology thing."

Of course she "bought" the whole mirror stage thing - just like I had done (silly me!) when I was younger (though said Lacanian was much more mature than I was then and the mother of several children - who apparently had all successfully mastered their mirror stage and the accompanying trauma).

I don't get it - what in the following quotes makes it so preposterous and provocative that it would deserve the scorn of the ignorant (for surely the Scandinavian Lacanian had never read any of the evolutionary psychology that she discounted so flippantly)?

… all normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain-specific. These circuits organise the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits.

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer

Sounds perfectly sane to me.

Maybe they don't have evolved rational capacities in Norway (or sanity, for that matter). That's what a national diet of liquorice and akvavit does to your brain. Which is why that woman and I would never be able to understand each other, but can only serve as one another's objects of desire/knowledge, caught in the self-constituting gaze of the distant/masterful anthropologist.

Why.Do.People.Think.That.Way?

Still keeping an eye on an eye for an eye

Having commented on Jared Diamond's New Yorker article on New Guinea tribal vengeance, I note the lawsuit it has apparently inspired with interest.

Not that the general conclusions about vengeance will be affected if it turns out that there are some inaccuracies here (similar patterns are well documented all over: I am currently reviewing a book on homicide in Europe over the last half-millennia that contains countless versions of the same thing); nonetheless, the truth needs to be either unearthed or defended in this case.

Any further insight/sources you might have, would be very welcome.

Ménage à trois muscial

"P. J. Harvey - never got into her", says John. And I sort of agree: I find her to be one of those whimpering, simpering girls carrying the woes of the world on their bony shoulders (when they're not masochistically chasing some abusive Byronic Hero) - like Tori Amos.

So I'm not likely to find this new track as "hypnotising" as all the frenzied fans who have left their comments on YouTube:



P.J. Harvey, Black Hearted Lover

But what bothers me most about this song is that it sounds like stuff I've heard before. Don't you agree that towards the end (as from 2:40) it is a bit like a cross between this and this:



Franz Ferdinand, Take Me Out

NB: This is probably the only blog that boldly, indeed unflinchingly, dares to fuse Keane and Franz.

Having said that, from an evolutionary perspective my discovery of derivativeness of any kind is really a cognitive pleasure tickling my brain's instinctive need to make out patterns and find resemblances in the informative chaos around me.

Casting the first stone

A chimpanzee in Sweden has exhibited what is perhaps the first known example of non-human foresight and planning.

His apparent purpose: to wage war.

Cue music...



And we know what this might lead to:

From Jacques Demy to Charles Darwin in nine paragraphs

After the drama and violence of yesterday's post, here's something more soothingly emotional to celebrate the end of the old, as well as the beginning of the new year. We all deserve it, for 365 days is a long time and not all of those days were happy. Still, all told, 2008 was a good 'un for us (which is why we are in absolute agreement with Harald Martenstein, who is reluctant to let the old year go over at Die Zeit).

One of the several movies that we managed to watch during and after the holidays was Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I think that there is nothing in the history of cinema comparable to Demy's "films in song", which differ from the characteristic climactic musical outbursts of your ordinary (Hollywood) musical in so far as in them all dialogue is sung.

Les Parapluies is unashamedly bittersweet, as this crucial encounter between Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) -- who works in her widowed mother's twee umbrella shop -- and her boyfriend Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) -- a car mechanic who has just received his draft notice -- documents:



Now, that draft notice is nothing to joke about, as the film is set during the Algerian War, and indeed Guy later on ends up in North Africa, where he witnesses the death of his comrades and is wounded himself. The lovers' apparently vehement reaction is therefore not entirely inappropriate.

What follows, however, is not so much tragic (in a Romeo and Juliet kind of way) as sobering, in fact almost banal: while Guy is in Algeria the lovers drift apart, even though Geneviève is pregnant with his child. Her matchmaking mother, acting on the principle that time is a great healer, exploits the growing distance between the lovers (which is not least due to Guy's perfunctory correspondence). She encourages her daughter to marry a wealthy diamond merchant who, earlier in the film, fell for Geneviève at first sight. His virtue and devotion is signalled by his willingness to marry the pregnant girl despite her predicament. Guy returns from the war, briefly sinks into deepest despair but is jolted from this period of drunken debauchery by the death of his aunt (who conveniently leaves him all her belongings). He comes to terms with his loss of Geneviève, marries Madeleine, a young, sensible (though pretty) woman who has been adoring him quietly for a long time, and uses his inheritance to set up his own business.

Years later, Guy and Geneviève have a chance encounter at his petrol station:



The film is fantastically colourful and charmingly camp, but far from a poorly developed sentimental tear-jerker, as has been claimed. There is something uncannily true about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, all technicolor frivolity notwithstanding. Yes, this is a silly boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl story but, hey, don't we all know that song?

What is most striking, however, is the calculating ruthlessness with which nearly all characters act in the film -- in a way that reminded me of far more naturalistic literary contexts, novels by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing, for example. Upward mobility is a major theme for Demy, in whose candy-coloured universe of cooing and crooning love is a very fragile thing indeed, always overshadowed by the powerful influence of human self-interest. Don't be fooled by Geneviève's pastel-coloured twinsets and ballet flats -- in evolutionary terms, the woman is a doe-eyed predator not unlike Elfride Swancourt in Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. The mild-mannered Madeleine, too, follows a successful mating pattern of her own, unconsciously turning her passive self-abandonment into a costly signal of her general worthiness. Guy's love for her, finally, seems to be determined by a -- ultimately, I guess, reproductive -- pragmatism that is no less self-interested than his previous despondency.

Which all makes Les Parapluies of Cherbourg the perfect film to ring in the Darwin Year (and I don't mean this in a spiteful way at all). I'm convinced that it's healthy and sobering to remind ourselves at every opportunity that our grand gestures, noble emotions and high-falutin' ideals typically have very humble roots: the very basic needs and interests of the human animal, of which we, sadly, often fail to render ourselves aware.

To quote the man himself:

[W]e must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man [1871]).

On that note: have a good Hogmanay, ye animals. May your 2009 be happy, healthy and humble!

Splinter removal, part 1

It's funny when people with whom you generally agree suddenly say things that are not only wrong, but wrong in a special kind of nagging way that gets under your skin and prevents you from focusing on anything else. I've had this experience a couple of times in the last few days or so and thought that a quiet Sunday evening might be as good a time as any to finally dig these little intellectual splinters out of my finger before they get infected.

But they're on different topics, so I thought I'd split them up into two posts.

Who knows, I might even get to the second one sometime.

The most recent was just today, in fact, in the form of Nick Cohen's column 'Darwin's no help on the origin of greed'.

It's partly built around a visit to the Natural History Museum's Darwin exhibit, and about the first half of it is fine enough. But then it turns into an attack on evolutionary psychology, which is about the point where that nagging splinter broke the skin.

Look, I don't think that evolutionary psychology (or sociobiology, or behavioural ecology, or Darwinian psychology, or any other name for or variation of the field) has all the answers, and I'm well aware that there are many examples of sloppy, silly, pseudo-scientific evolutionary reasoning out there.

The thing is, most serious people who advocate some version of evolutionary thinking about human thought and behaviour would probably say the same thing.

To spare a much longer post that I'm really not up to tonight, let me just address three problems with Nick's essay. (Leaving aside the silly title, which I'm not going to blame him for, since I know that sub-editors are often to blame for such things.) Partly what's disappointing about them is that they're not even original problems, but rather pretty much smell like the usual poo flung at evolutionary psychology (EP).

First, he creates a strange straw man in which EP is portrayed as a band of mad scientists who claimed they could explain everything with a few handy theories, thereby making all other forms of knowledge obsolete. Now, while it wouldn't be hard to find a few overly enthusiastic proclamations about the potential of the field, if you've spent much time actually reading EP articles or books on specific topics, you will, actually, find a lot of fairly sober-minded and well-balanced efforts to contribute usefully to whatever topic is under study.

I know the literature on violence better than other areas of EP, and I just can't say that I've seen anything like the hubris that Cohen alleges. What I have seen a fair amount of, on the other hand, are polemics by humanities scholars and social scientists responding to EP who manage to mis-read assertions such as 'biology plays an important role in behaviour X' as something like 'biology is the only factor in behaviour X'. For some such scholars (The Wife and I have each had personal encounters of this kind), even the suggestion that something other than 'culture' (often ill-defined) or 'society' (sometimes ditto) plays any kind of significant role in making us who we are (or shapes our interaction with culture and society) is anathema.

If there's any hubris to be found, I think Nick's looking in the wrong place. He should hang out with cultural studies people more often.

Second, Cohen revives the 'just-so stories' slander against EP: i.e., the notion that evolutionary psychologists simply spin random myths about evolutionary adaptations that cannot be evaluated or weighed against other, competing theories. This is a long-standing accusation that has been addressed several times. The best refutation, however, is to actually read some serious EP writing. Like that from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who have mainly worked on homicide and whose carefully argued, logically thought-out, theoretically consistent and relentlessly evidenced work inspires me every time I return to it.

Daly and Wilson bring me to my third problem: Cohen argues that even if EP claims are true, they are simply trite . He cites, among other things, a claim he heard an evolutionary psychologist make at some public get-together once, that 'step-parents were more likely to murder children than natural parents who shared a child's DNA' .

Clearly, what he said about comparative murder rates was right. Equally clearly, the overwhelming majority of step-parents do not murder their stepchildren. His sociobiological truth is thus no help to social workers trying to save the life of the next Baby P.

Daly and Wilson are in fact the originators of the work that Cohen's referring to. It is absolutely true that step-parental murder of children is rare (something that Daly and Wilson acknowledge); however, their findings have suggested that the per capita rate of killing of children by stepfathers is likely to be more than 100 times greater than by genetic fathers.

Is this finding 'no help' in understanding the risk factors in child muder? Really?

As to 'Baby P': there is no general theory of human behaviour that is going to allow any bureaucratic agency to always prevent whatever Bad Thing they are tasked with preventing. This is a terrible argument against pursuing further understanding of human psychology: by Cohen's standard, any knowledge which doesn't provide a foolproof solution in every situation is deemed useless.

And that doesn't make any sense to me.

Moreover, I strongly think that Cohen underestimates how even some solid, scientifically grounded banality might be a useful thing. There are some truly kooky theories out there in the humanities about what makes people think and act the way they do. Many of these are rooted in a fairly radical (though often not explicit or even conscious) cultural-constructionist paradigm.

The reassertion of a meaningful human nature is gaining traction in the humanities and social sciences (at least so far as I can judge from here, partly from the mostly open-minded responses I've received to my own contributions to the debate), and I think it has the potential to have a lot of beneficial effects. Some of them might just sound a bit like common sense. Maybe there's something...unspectacular?... about this, but given lack of earth-bound logic and abundance of exciting-but-wacky theory lurking around in some of the more esoteric regions of academia, unspectacular will do just nicely, thank you.

In short: I find that there's good and there's bad evolutionary psychology out there, but I think as carried out by its actual practitioners (none of whom actually seem to have been consulted in Cohen's essay) it is far more humble, rigorous and relevant to understanding human life than Cohen's--surprisingly slapdash--column suggests.

I'd be plenty happy for him to disagree. But only if he demonstrates that he's read some of it.

OK, that other splinter will have to stay embedded till tomorrow. G'night.

[UPDATE]: Part 2 now available.

Evolutionary literary criticism

One of the research interests that I have been pursuing over the past year (time and energy permitting) is what might broadly be called "evolutionary literary criticism".

In other words, what I'm interested in is the question of whether and how insights from the sciences - notably the field of evolutionary psychology - can be fruitfully applied to literary scholarship. Still being a novice in this field - which is not quite as recent a phenomenon as the heated debate currently taking place in the American academic context in particular may suggest - I haven't really produced anything concrete yet. But I'm working on it.

The scope and state of the debate around evo-lit-crit is documented by a Symposium on the topic, to be published in the next issue of the journal Style. PDF's of all articles in this issue can be found at the website of one of the contributor's to this collection: Joseph Carroll, Professor of English Literature at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and one of the famous names associated with this field.

Trouvailles

We do not migrate from biology to culture like settlers moving into a land of opportunity, nor do we shuttle backwards and forwards between the two provinces. We live in both at the same time. This is a complicated state of affairs. The options are to try to understand it better, to maintain the fiction of simplicity, or to declare that the situation is too complicated to analyse.

Marek Kohn, As We Know It: Coming To Terms With An Evolved Mind (1999)

Just a shot away

Chris Dillow points us to Arnold Kling's statement that his most 'absurd belief' is:

that human nature has changed in the last few hundred years. If you could go back to 1708 and replace all of the babies at conception with babies conceived today, my prediction is that the alternative history from 1708 to 2008 would have less violence, more economic growth, and faster scientific progress. Conversely, if you were to replace babies being conceived today with babies conceived in 1708, they would grow up to produce staggering increases in crime and violence.

Dillow follows up by suggesting that Kling's belief might not be so absurd. He cites the alacrity with which early 19th century gentlemen entered into deadly duels with each other over trivial matters, and he points to Steven Pinker's claim that violence has declined in the last few centuries. (I'm confining my brief comments here to Western Europe, since that's the context I know best, even if the tendency is also visible elsewhere.)

There is nothing absurd about noting the decline in violence in modern history, as this is now a fairly well-established consensus among historians, based upon several decades of empirical work in various countries. (I discussed this briefly in relation to Pinker's essay last year.)

The criminologist Manuel Eisner, having surveyed nearly 80 quantitative histories of homicide rates has concluded:

the data confirm the notion, now hardly controversial among historians of crime, that homicide rates have declined in Europe over several centuries. Typical estimates referring to the late Middle Ages range between 20 and 40 homicides per 100,000, while respective data for the mid twentieth century are between 0.5 and 1 per 100,000. The notorious imprecision of population data, deficiencies of the sources, shifts in the legal definition of homicide, changes in the age structure as well as improved medical possibilities, surely have to be accounted for. But the evidence is so consistent, the secular decline so regular, and the differences in levels so large, that it seems difficult to refute the the conclusion of a real and notable decline. (Manuel Eisner, 'Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective', British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001): 618-638, 628)

It's important to note that this discussion of violence is based on homicide rates. While they are our most reliable measure of serious violence, they do not say everything there is to know about all of the violence going on in a particular society. Personally, I think there is likely to be a meaningful relationship between the prevalence of violence more generally and the homicide rate, but it's not a simple one and this issue is somewhat controversial. (I.e., it's possible for a society to be relatively violent but not particularly homicidal.)

Also, one should keep in mind that the decline in violence occurred at very different rates with somewhat different patterns and various ups and downs depending on which region you look at.

The English decline, for example, appears to have been a relatively smooth one, going from the 13th/14th centuries (c. 24 homicides per 100,000) to the late Middle Ages (3-9 per 100,000) to the mid-19th century (c. 1.8 per 100,000) to the early 1960s (0.6 per 100,000) (Eisner, 622-23). As Eisner points out, there was a similar pattern for the Netherlands. However, things look very different in Scandinavian countries. In Sweden, for instance, Eisner finds that the data 'suggest a spectacular decline of lethal personal violence by a factor of at least 10:1 within a period of only 150 years' (624) from the beginning of the 17th century (10-25 per 100,000) to the mid 18th (below 1 per 100,000); afterwards, there was a rise in the rate and then another fall beginning by the mid 19th century.

But taking into account all these caveats, the decline of violence in Western Europe -- overall -- seems have been a fact. (As does the rise in violence since the 1950s or 1960s depending on where you are in Europe, followed, again, by a decline in many places. However significant these have been, by longer-term historical standards, the 20th century variations in Western European homicide rates -- excluding war -- have been very small scale.)

The 'decline in violence' thesis seems counter-intuitive, obviously, considering that there still seems to be so much violence about in European countries. And perhaps there is: but not by historical standards (or by comparisons with many other regions of the world). Even admitting that our perceptions of violence are partly exaggerated by the media, one might however point out that the 20th century was an exceptionally bloody one (and the next one maybe isn't shaping up to be much better).

Taking war and genocide into account complicates the above picture of increasing civility, certainly. And in terms of raw numbers, the last century can likely not be beat. (So far...)

But Lawrence Keeley, in his excellent book War Before Civilization, points out that many low-technology tribal societies achieved rates of killing that dwarfed those in the last century. The tactic of utterly wiping out an opposing tribe (so, genocide on a small scale) was also not unusual. Keeley's book is fascinating and full of details worth discussing...but that is for another time perhaps.

In short, there's nothing absurd about saying that violence has declined, even if the issue is complicated.

However, what I do find a bit absurd (or at least questionable) about Kling's statement is the idea that this (decidedly non-absurd) decline in violence has been caused by (or caused) a fundamental change in 'human nature'.

This is a complicated issue obviously, and I'm not really up for a mammoth post today (I'm heading off for a crime conference and long research trip the day after tomorrow), so this is all rather off the cuff.

However, in other contexts -- primarily in reaction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms -- I have taken a sceptical look at the idea of rapid genetic change shaping our behaviour. While a firm believer in a meaningful human nature (and advocate of the idea that historians and other humanities scholars should take it seriously) I would align myself with those who have argued that it is a rather less malleable thing than Kling and others suggest.

Put quickly, there is no reason to think that a stable set of average innate psychological attributes (or potentialities) across a given population and over time could not generate widely differing behaviours as a result of changing conditions. If Scandinavians can reduce their homicide rates at least 10 fold in a century-and-a-half, this suggests that changing social relationships can have a powerful effect on this behaviour without there having been any kind of plausible underlying genetic shift.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have usefully examined how different kinds of social cues can have a strong influence on variations in risk-taking and social competition (especially among men, and the general decline in violence noted above is primarily the result of the pacification of males), and they have connected these to homicide rates. Furthermore, we can see the ways that previously pacified societies can become aggressive again, when the social factors that seem to have driven the decline in violence in the first place (increasing social exchange, more effective 'state' policing, the social encouragement of self-discipline, the provision of relative material security) are withdrawn.

Clearly, people in Western Europe seem to be behaving in a very different way than they did centuries ago. (Or even less than a century ago: in Germany the ritualised duel known as the Mensur lasted into the twentieth century.)

But you can see relevant changes on a smaller time-scale.

In my book on nineteenth-century violence (parts of which can be viewed via Google Books), I took a more qualitative look at the issue, examining the values and norms that surrounded that behaviour in England.

What you see during that time is a shift from a relatively shared culture of violence in the 18th century: violence was -- compared to later times -- far more acceptable, and social class was not so decisive in determining what you thought about it. This began changing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when some people (predominantly some parts of the upper and middle-classes and many of them religious) and the state started taking a much less sanguine view of disorder and interpersonal violence. 'Violence' itself was -- rather quickly -- identified as a 'social problem' in a way that was new and that has since remained important to British culture. It also became increasingly something that 'respectable' people did not engage in, and became associated with the lower classes. By the end of the century, even the 'respectable' working class were distancing themselves from behaviour that only a generation or two earlier would have been normal.

So, on the level of attitudes (admittedly somewhat less solid than that of statistics) there seems to have been a meaningful change in values in England over a century or less. (There were many continuities, and this was an ambiguous process in many ways, but I believe the general outline holds.)

I find it difficult (and unnecessary) to credit this change to genetics (other than the obvious fact that genes serve to shape the common human psychological structure that allows us to think, feel or recognise social cues, or provides us with various innate motivations).

In any case, there is no inherent contradiction between being a highly enlightened or intelligent person and engaging in violence.

Kling's claim, though, seems to rest on the idea that violence is something that only less-intelligent and less-rational people enjoy or might potentially engage in. However, there is no reason to think that violence is merely some sort of atavistic survival of primitive times indulged in by social failures. As Daly and Wilson have succinctly observe in their book Homicide, 'poor young men with dismal prospects for the future have good reason to escalate their tactics of social competition and become violent' (287). In a different context, Elijah Anderson made a similar point in his book The Code of the Street, arguing ‘a cultural adaptation to a profound lack of faith in the police and the judicial system – and in others who would champion one’s personal security’ (34).

For the vast majority of human history and prehistory, being good at violence (or at least suggesting to others that you were) was a factor in heightened rather than lowered social status.

And I think Kling is being a bit optimistic in suggesting that that is no longer the case.

Kling's formulation also makes the implied assertion, it seems, that, in a sense, we (however defined) are now much better people than we were, that, in fact, we could loosen up the very dense network of social controls, material prosperity, economic interaction and psychological training developed in, say, Europe over the last four hundred years and everything would still just fine...because of something to do with our genes.

This is not an experiment I'd like to see undertaken, to be honest. Most of Europe has indeed become a quite pacified place, and has been so for some time now. But I think we should be anything but complacent about that. Things, as we know, do fall apart.

(Moreover: why send twins back from 2008? The British homicide rate reached its nadir in the early 1960s. It's now about twice as high. If we're going to dream social science fiction dreams, why not go all the way?)

Speculations about genetics and human nature and behaviour are certainly worthwhile. And Kling's comment was offhand -- and he did self-label it 'absurd' -- so I don't want to go on about this too much ('too late!' came the voice from off-stage...). However, as my discussion, linked to above, of Gregory Clark's book suggests, these kinds of explanations seem to be becoming more popular. And I don't know why, because even a rather quick closer look seems to show how shaky they are.

Sadly, without access to a time machine and a lot of twins, it would seem to be impossible to design a test that could clearly disentangle the issues of nature and nurture across historical time.

(Moreover consider the Swedish example noted above: presumably Kling would have to argue that the same now-and-then relationship would also apply when exchanging babies born in Stockholm in 1600 and 1740? Remember, there appears to have been at least a 10-fold decline in violence in the intervening time. Were those in 1600 at least ten times more genetically bad-ass?)

But given the speed with which we have seen the prevalence of serious violence change in Western Europe (along with a set of quite reasonable if incomplete or still controversial explanations for why that was so), it would seem to me that the reach to genetics to explain complex behavioural changes is not only often implausible (and often made without seriously demonstrating how particular behaviours are genetically generated) but also unnecessary.

They may turn out to be relevant in some way at some point.

But I remain unconvinced.

Of Babies and Bathwater

Francis Sedgemore quotes the following passage from a New Scientist article by Lawrence Krauss, in which the physicist at Case Western Reserve University tackles contemporary anti-scientism:

If this poetry of nature does not change the way we view our place in the universe, providing not mere facts but new meaning, then we are truly spiritually bereft. Yet too many people feel that they must invent alternative realities to justify human existence.

As a literary scholar - i.e. a person who makes a living from "alternative realities" - I find the latter statement not only bewilderingly naïve, but also fundamentally offputting. Krauss may make this point in the context of a more general critique of religious thinking, but, as Francis rightly points out, by extending a critique of religion to an attack on myth (i.e. the literary imagination) as a whole, Krauss fails to acknowledge the more general cognitive significance of our ability to create alternative realities.

I find this surprising, as I have been under the impression that the human mind’s fiction-making abilities have been one of the pet interests in the cognitive sciences in recent years – giving an entirely new (and timely) meaning to the term “constructionism”. Take the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, for instance, who has long emphasised the (unconscious) constructive and interpretive processes of the brain that allow humans to successfully navigate the world.

Furthermore, it seems plausible that our more conscious engagement in fiction-making may have cognitive and hence evolutionary significance, too. Storymaking and -telling are cross-cultural universals, a fact that has led evolutionary psychologists and humanities scholars influenced by evolutionary psychology to speculate on their adaptive significance. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, for instance, suggests that (in our ancestral past) selection might have favoured groups in which vital information could be exchanged in particularly effective ways, notably in the form of stories.

Our storytelling ability seems to be related to the human brain's cognitive specificity. The cognitive psychologist Alan Leslie and the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have explored the implications of our brain's apparent and reliable ability to distinguish between fact and fiction - what is known as "decoupled cognition". Cosmides and Tooby have used this capacity as their point of departure to argue that our ability to create fictional realities is crucial to the ongoing (and pleasure-inducing) training of the human brain’s evolved architecture. We are not only able to create and enter fictional worlds, we have evolved to do so - and get a kick out of it to boot (see their essay "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?").

As the narratologist H. Porter Abbott put it in an essay on the evolutionary basis of the human capacity for storytelling (in Narrative 8/2000), this evolved capacity has helped shape human consciousness, developing not only our ability to represent lived experience, but also to imagine that which we have not yet experienced (and maybe never will):

Historical narrative, by its nature, extends away from what we are empirically aware of in the present; it goes back into the past where we cannot see or touch things yet still affirm them as true. It is a habit of mind that allows us to do what no other animal would think of doing – construct the truth. And it is also, of course, only a short remove from the fashioning of the immense analepsis which we call history to extend a world of time proleptically into the future, often with the same remarkable ability to make it true, despite a complete absence of empirical verifiability.

Religion, too, takes place on the level of narrative prolepsis; in that sense, it is intrinsically related to literature - and ought to be seen in this light. It is a fallacious argumentative leap to conclude (as Krauss seems to be doing) that all alternative worlds inevitably lead to dangerous scientific naivety. To the contrary (and that is the anti-ideology message that I torture my poor students with), the engagement with fictional worlds may actually train our critical abilities, asking us to explore the sources and intentions of ideas put forward within alternative worlds - however pleasant and comfortable we might find them.

The brain, the Buddha, and the ever-baffling David Brooks

It is hard to describe the true awfulness of David Brooks's current column in The New York Times, other than to say that it fleetingly inspired the wish that I had never learned to read. For all the problems that might have brought with it, I would at least have been spared his tortured logic, torrential non sequiturs and curious talent for combining smugness with ignorance.

It's unclear what Brooks is trying to achieve in 'The Neural Buddhists': he starts out by launching an attack on the 'militant materialism' of some 'self-confident researchers' in the natural sciences and then ends his essay by stating that he's not taking sides but merely trying to anticipate where 'the debate is headed'. In between, he doesn't actually say very much that makes sense.

Brooks kicks off his anti-materialist meanderings with references to a...novelist. I admit that I never read the Tom Wolfe essay he cites, 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'. (I enjoyed The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...reading it, I mean...but haven't read anything else.)

I still haven't given it sustained attention; however, even a quick glance through it has lowered my expectations almost exponentially. Wolfe, you see, is fond of depicting scientists' views as comparable to religious dogma. Certain notions, he claims, are 'devoutly believed' by neuroscientists. Of E. O. Wilson, (or, as he dubs him, 'the new Darwin') he quips: 'no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin I than he does.'

I am not fond of such arguments.

It goes downhill from there, as Wolfe mixes real science with pseudoscience and can't even seem to keep his sciences straight. (Although he correctly notes that E.O. Wilson is a zoologist, he then identifies him as a key figure in neuroscience, and then--later--points out again that he is not a neuroscientist, as if this were some kind of revelation of a sinister scientific fraud.)

And when I see the glib association of the term 'evolutionary psychology' with the phrases 'genetic determinism' and 'hardwired to be polygamous' then I switch off pretty much immediately, as it is then apparent that the person who floats these accusations hasn't actually read much (if any) evolutionary psychology.

He even cites renowned nut-bag Michael Behe as a serious scientific critic.

Although I'm not impressed with Wolfe's knowledge about science, at least he sometimes has a way with words. The same cannot be said of Brooks's clunky prose, but that's not something I want to go into now.

No. What bothers me is that Brooks has apparently no idea what he's talking about and nonetheless gets to flaunt his ignorance in the pages of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers. (He's not the only problem on that score, obviously: why anyone wants to know what Maureen Dowd thinks about politics is beyond me.)

A favourite Brooks tactic seems to be assembling lists in which the first few items are halfway plausible but then--somewhere in the middle--he crosses the line into assertions of a very different character. It would appear that Brooks would like to think that the credit won through making a few comments that are not completely bonkers will carry him through to the end of the paragraph.

Consider his description of what he takes to be the materialist world-view (or, perhaps, just that of 'hard-core' materialism, which may or may not be Brooks's real target, it's hard to tell):

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness.

So far, not so bad, actually, even if the 'arises from' doesn't quite sound so right when it comes to atoms ('is composed of' sounds better to me, but I'll leave that one to the physicists in the audience). However, what immediately follows is this:

Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

Keep in mind, Brooks is here essentially summarising a 12-year-old essay by a novelist to describe scientific materialism.

Apart from that, all three of the last three assertions demonstrate a serious misunderstanding of materialist views that, at least as far as I can tell, are pretty mainstream.

The status and functioning of 'free will' is a vexed issue, true; however at least one fairly well-known hard-core materialist has written a whole book about its evolutionary (and very material) basis.

In any case, whatever capability we have to decide and act wilfully is going to be material in the end. (Though many people seem to have a hard time understanding this, as has been pointed out in these pages before.) This kind of free will is going to be a different one than anything based on the notion of a supernatural 'soul'--and, yes, it might be far more limited than we might hope--but to claim that materialists simply think it an 'illusion' is facile. (Of course, it is in generating clever-sounding shallowness that Brooks's true talent lies.)

Once again, the 'hard-wiring' bit is a non-starter: all serious neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is essentially interactionist, taking into account innate predispositions that can be profoundly influenced by the environment.

By stating that 'religion is an accident', Brooks hauls out that old misunderstanding that evolution is a 'random' process. Which it is not.

But he compounds the incoherence of his argument by--in the very next sentence--arguing that the 'materialist view' is that 'people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.' (Emphasis added.)

You can't have it both ways David: either something is 'accidental' or 'evolved'.

Furthermore, there is no single materialist view of the origins of religion. Indeed, much of the debate among 'materialists' about the origins of religion is to try to comprehend whether it provided some kind of evolutionary advantage (say, to groups) or whether it is essentially a side-effect of other evolutionarily shaped capabilities and predispositions (e.g., the tendency to imbue inanimate objects with agency).

But here we see the seeds of another Brooks tactic that, over the course of his essay, grows into a big ugly weed: the creation of a strange and non-existent division between 'hard-core materialists' and some putative other group that Brooks never names. (We might call their world-view 'soft-core materialism': materialism without the naughty bits, perhaps.)

In any case, although there is disagreement among scientists about the reasons for religion, what all materialists would tend to argue, David, is that many of the core claims of religion are not true. And this is a point to which we'll have to return.

Channelling Wolfe, again, Brooks says that the central 'assertion' of what he's challenging is this: 'everything is material and "the soul is dead"'.

The various scientific research that Brooks comments on, however, is not merely based on an 'assertion': an 'assertion' is a more like a statement that starts out 'god wants us to...' or ends with '...because God/Jesus/Allah/Zeus tells me so'. The notion that the universe--and all our mental activity and experiences--is fundamentally material has rather more evidence behind it than mere assertion. (See several centuries of materialist inquiry.)

I would like to think that Brooks understands this. And indeed, he then moves on in his column to cite some empirical neurological work that, he thinks, challenges 'hard-core materialism'.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.

[Brief note to Brooks: materialism does not require thinking people are machines, 'mysterious' is not a synonym for 'supernatural' and neurons are...you guessed it...material. OK, back to the babbling.]

Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Groovy.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

OK, the amount of Pure Stupid piled up here poses a serious danger of collapsing in on itself and causing injury, so be careful.

It's not that each of Brooks's statements is all wrong; however, gathered together into an argument that supposedly challenges materialism, they suggest strongly that Brooks doesn't understand the term he's critiquing or the science that he's citing.

I will pass quickly over the comment about 'selfish genes' and the fact that it reveals that Brooks hasn't actually read the book that it is not-so-subtly referring to. I have commented on this mistake before. Quite recently, in fact. (For his part, Dale has already taken a textual baseball bat to Brooks on this point. For that and for the reference to Brooks's wisdom, I am grateful.)

Let's keep this simple: if there are 'universal moral intuitions' and 'deep instincts' that are shared among all representatives of Homo sapiens (and I think there are many good reasons to think so), then this can only be the product of a common psychology that is fundamentally material.

Certainly, they are experienced and developed according to environmental circumstances (um...which are also material), social relationships and inherited accumulations of culture. But, David, your evil 'materialists' have been talking about this for decades.

Finally, Brooks wanders into some very strange territory and turns all spiritualist. This is never a good sign. Observing that 'Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states' (whatever the fuck that means), he points to (um, materialist) research that shows how 'transcendent experiences' can be measured.

That is true, and that research sounds very interesting.

However, see if you can make any sense of the following sentence:

The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

Consider this carefully: does the ability of the brain to generate feelings mean--in any way--that it has the ability to 'transcend itself'? What does this mean?! And what of the 'larger presence' (nice word that, 'presence'...mmm...so vague, so yummy...so meaningless) that 'feels more real'.

It seems quite clear what all that research points to: the powers of the imagination.

Brooks, however, seems to forget that talking about the mental states that the brain can generate does not say anything--nope, not a damned thing--about any phenomenon outside of the brain.

This would be, you would think, be easy. A no-brainer even.

But Brooks thinks that this 'new wave of research' will not comfort 'militant atheism'. (Ah, 'militant atheism'. Another lovely term. Have we heard it before? I believe we have.)

No:

Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

It was at this point that my own brain nearly caused me to spit out my coffee this morning.

What does this mean? What does this mean? What, David, does this fucking mean?!

I'm at a loss, as 'the literature' that Brooks recommends people read ('if you want to get up to speed', he blithely and somewhat condescendingly says...David, some of us are already up to speed thank you and waving fondly to you from the passing lane) seems to have very little to do with 'neural Buddhism' and everything to do with the materialism that Brooks began his essay condemning.

Apparently based on these authors, he observes that 'certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion', namely:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.

With certain qualifications, the first point is unobjectionable (but also not incompatible with materialism). The second point also seems sensible: and, again, appears a thoroughly materialist statement.

The third point, however, is reminiscent of Brooks's comment above about transcendence:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.

The first half is mostly fine (though 'sacred' is a terribly vague word): we are, obviously 'equipped' to be capable of having certain mental experiences that are emotionally power. (If we weren't, we wouldn't have them and we would not be having this discussion.)

But what does he mean when he says that these experiences lead us to 'transcend boundaries'? Which ones? How? Is he talking about connecting with a 'presence' outside the mind again? If so, what is this presence? Can he provide any proof of it?

No, outside of his own mental ouija board obviously he can't. Which leaves us in the realm of feelings, which leaves us--however flooded and drenched with love we might be--stuck in our embodied brains.

Maybe this is, you know, kind of a drag (though I'm OK with it, actually), but it seems to be reality.

And then there's this:

Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Which is all nice and inclusive and everything, but it kind of reminds me of the things I've heard stoned people say, usually at about 3 a.m. Other than that, I can only ask: if you're going to be this vague about 'God', why use that term if what you're actually talking about is the universe.

I'm baffled, moreover, about how Brooks arrived at these conclusions based on the authors he recommends.

OK, Jonathan Haidt, as I've discussed, has some questionable ideas about religion and group selection, even while he has some very interesting (and thoroughly materialistic) ones about moral psychology. (Marc Hauser--one of those on Brooks's list--has criticised Haidt for 'bad evolutionary reasoning' with regard to the former, though praises his work on the latter.) I can't imagine Brooks getting much reassurance from someone like Michael Gazzaniga, who has emphasised how much of our thought and action is automatic: the mental 'interpreter' module he posits is one that often is devoted to developing rationalisations for actions we have already taken.

Furthermore, like the others on his list, Gazzaniga and Hauser are both dyed-in-the-wool materialists when it comes to the question of where our mental processes come from. All of them, I think, would immediately note Brooks's sloppy sleight-of-hand rhetorical trick, shifting between noting feelings of transcendence and claiming some kind of factual transcendence.

Of course, those feelings of transcendence can be quite powerful.

As evidence, just look at how successfully Brooks transcends logic and sense:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

'That was the easy debate'? Is Brooks convinced that 'the faithful' have won that debate? Easily?

Again, it is worthwhile drawing attention to a fundamentally wrong-headed tactic used here, where Brooks refers to 'people who feel the existence of the sacred'.

Feelings are one thing, and if you want to define 'sacred' as meaning something like 'the experience of awe or joy' or 'the feeling of being at one with the universe', then, yes, that is very possible and interesting and might be achieved via many routes (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll being just three of them).

But note the tricky insertion of 'existence of' in there, which makes Brooks at least sound like he's suggesting some actual connection with something outside of our skulls.

Having not defined at all the points at which he suspects science and Buddhism 'overlap', I've no idea what he's on about at this point.

But I do know that his conclusion is, by turns, both batty and bathetic:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.

Oh, man: joining hands!? Is Brooks gunning for a Templeton Foundation grant or what?

As to the 'new movements', he may be on to something. There just might be a series of movements emphasising self-transcendence (whatever that means). Maybe. Sometime in the future. Maybe they'll refer to themselves by some trendy label such as...oh,...I don't know...'New Age'. Yeah, that's a good one.

Keep your eyes open in case such a movement might arise. Sometime.

David Brooks certainly has his finger on the pulse of our times, I tell you.

Nonetheless, he seems to have overlooked the fact that a great deal of present-day religious movements do, in fact, put a great deal of stock in divine law and revelation. They might pose, I think, far more of a 'real challenge' to our world than the 'hard-core materialists' Brooks warns us about.

Perhaps I have been too harsh on Brooks. He does, as I've pointed out, say a few things that are not completely dumb. And he comes up with a few profound things at the very end of his column:

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Oh yeah. Big effects, I tell you. Well spotted, David.

And he's certainly right about one thing:

I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me.

Truer words, better evidenced, were rarely spoken.

What the hell am I doing?

One of the questions that Norm asks contributors to his profile series is 'What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?' Like many of the other questions, that's a tough one all right.

The answer I gave -- 'To promote both the use of rational thought and the awareness that people are not fundamentally rational' -- is far from perfect (or even profound) perhaps, but it does more-or-less express what has become a guiding principle of mine.

It has at least the benefit of being both parsimonious and symmetrical, as each side of this particular outlook has a single source:

Do we need to promote rational thought? Yes, why, just look at all the crazy shit people do?!

Are we, deep down, fundamentally rational beings? No, why, just look at all the crazy shit people do?!

What is more, given the sheer volume of said crazy shit, I get to see my beliefs confirmed on a daily basis.

That is nice.

It's helpful now and then, though, to discover that at least some of the views I hold have a more firm grounding in what has succinctly and pithily described as 'earth-logic', something from which all too many people's thinking achieves escape velocity.

Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert had an interesting article in the New Yorker on a related point. In 'What was I thinking?', she looks at a couple of books on research being done on the irrational bases of behaviour. She focuses on 'behavioural economics' in the form of Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.

I've not read it, but I like the gist of his arguments.

He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic. “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic,” he writes. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors.

With regard to a somewhat different sphere, 'The Moral Instinct', by Steven Pinker, appeared at the New York Times, summarising a variety of work on the issue of where people's moral beliefs come from. Confronting the assumption that morality is (simply) imposed through learning and imitation, he points to research suggesting a far more intuitive understanding of moral concepts that underlies a large part evaluating right and wrong.

At least a certain portion of culture, then, appears as a result of the effort to find post-hoc rationalisations for what we think anyway. (That certainly explains a lot of blogging...)

Like a lot of Pinker's writing, the article is a mixture of effective summary, brilliant insight and sometimes careless quips. (For instance: I'm not convinced that arguments about the environmental impact of, say, S.U.V.s are necessarily based on personal moral abhorrence about 'over-indulgence'. One does not need moral priggishness to critique personal wastefulness, merely an understanding that individual behaviour multiplied by hundreds of millions of individuals can have an enormous impact.)

Also like a lot of Pinker's writing, it is enormously compelling. He observes:

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

One of the researchers mentioned by Pinker is Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a curious article at Edge: 'Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion'. I say 'curious', because its first part (up to about page six on the printed version) is a fascinating and convincing look at the intuitive nature of moral judgements and the unconscious causation of most behaviour whereas its second half is a much less convincing critique of 'New Atheism' .

This is one of the best bits, at least with regard to the topic I'm discussing here:

Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week. And I do agree with Marc Hauser that these moral intuitions require a lot of computation, which he is unpacking.

Hauser and I mostly disagree on a definitional question: whether this means that "cognition" precedes "emotion." I try never to contrast those terms, because it's all cognition. I think the crucial contrast is between two kinds of cognition: intuitions (which are fast and usually affectively laden) and reasoning (which is slow, cool, and less motivating).

And there's another conclusion that is also important:

The basic idea is that we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation. (Emphasis added)

And this, I think is a key point: our psychologies are about use, not truth.

Haidt's article is fairly lengthy, as are the responses to it by David Sloan Wilson, Michael Sherman, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and Marc Hauser. So, this posting is an entirely too brief summary of what that discussion is all about.

Much of that discussion focuses on the much weaker part of Haidt's paper, where he tries to apply his empirical conclusions to the 'New Atheism'.

I'll simply direct you to the responses by Myers and Harris on that topic.

But I also think that Haidt's efforts to link religiosity to the current effort by some people to rehabilitate 'group selection' are unconvincing.

Hauser makes a very good point about this:

This is bad evolutionary reasoning, and the kind of speculation that ultimately led Gould and Lewontin to have a field day with loose just-so stories. But there is more. Just because there is variation doesn’t mean it will be selected. It has to be heritable variation. One has to show that the belief systems are genetically passed on in some way, or one has to argue for cultural selection, which is an entirely different affair, at least at the level of mechanism and timing of change. I don’t see any evidence that the observed variation in beliefs is heritable in a genetic sense. (Emphasis added)

Neither do I, and there are other problems with group selection in the sense that Wilson and others seem to be trying to revive. This is not a new spat: Geoff made some good observations about another Dawkins-Wilson tiff on a similar topic last year.

(Hauser's point about heritability is also germane, of course, to Gregory Clark's recent speculations about the genetic basis of capitalism. I commented here, here, and here.)

It seems clear to me that while Haidt is right to point out the benefits that might accrue to those who are well integrated into their communities, he is mistaking those benefits as being purely religious in nature. (This is partly what Myers rebukes him for.)

Moreover (and this comes out in Sam Harris's response), Haidt seems to be basing his view of religion largely (or maybe even exclusively, as far as his empirical evidence goes) on the relatively contained, civilised, reformed -- in short, tamed -- version that you find in some parts of the modern world and not the less cheerful versions of it so common in much of the past and present.

Finally, I think the issue of 'benefit' (are religious people 'happier') is a different -- and far less interesting -- one than that of 'truth' (do gods exist). It's mainly the latter question that the recent best-selling atheist authors have confronted; however, even on the issue of the former one, Haidt's view of religion seems oddly one-sided.

Anyway, the topic of intuitive judgements seems difficult to escape these days.

Just this morning I ran across Momus using Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink to think about the great deal of information we can gain from the briefest of impressions:

Gladwell calls this "thin-slicing" and explains that "as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience". This might sound lazy, but there's something rather elegant -- and sometimes startlingly acute -- about it. "In a psychological experiment, normal people given fifteen minutes to examine a student's college dormitory can describe the subject's personality more accurately than his or her own friends." It's why I always scribble down my first impressions of a new city within minutes of arriving. It's not just that first impressions are lasting, they're also some of the most penetrating thin-slices you'll ever get. "Reality", said Willem de Kooning, "is a slipping glimpse".

And our minds present us a view of that reality (in most cases) that is useful rather than truthful.

Finally: Some digging around has brought up a couple of very interesting-looking articles on this topic by John Bargh -- whom Haidt mentions -- that I've not managed to read yet: 'The Unbearable Automaticity of Being' (pdf) and 'What Have We Been Priming All these Years?' (pdf).

What all of these insights mean for topics of interest at this blog -- namely, the study of history and literature -- is a challenging question.

Last year, in 'The Limits of Culture?', I at least tried to make a start on thinking about how evolutionary psychology might be integrated into historical studies with regard to the topic of violence. (The article, by the way, is FREE for download. I mention this only because articles in most academic journals are not...and also because, as Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the opening paragraphs of her New Yorker article, the word 'free' has a profound affect on the human psyche. I'm trying to start a stampede... Also note: occasionally, the IngentaConnect site seems to pitch a fit and either never load or tell you that the content is not there. It is. Just keep trying. Or get in touch if you can't.)

Responses to the article can be found here and here; my response to the responses here. Access to these latter bits, however, will require either that you be affiliated with some kind of institution that subscribes to such online content or that you cough up some bucks first. Sorry. As in so many things, as the man said, TANSTAAFL.

Ain't it the truth.

Pedal to the metal

The last few days have seen quite a flurry of attention to the issues of genes and evolutionary change, issues with great relevance for providing at least some answer to the question of 'who we are'.

This struck me first on Tuesday, while I was perusing a copy of the Times that someone had abandoned in the Eurostar. Strikingly titled 'Why the human race is growing apart', it quotes one of the researchers:

“Human races are evolving away from each other,” said Henry Harpending, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, who led the study.

“Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.

“Our study denies the widely held assumption that modern humans appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.”

Hmm, I thought.

Having spent a fair amount of effort trying to come to grips with the connections among evolution, psychology and history, this gave me much to think about. This is particularly so as I have been largely convinced by the argument of evolutionary psychologists that human nature -- while not completely unchanged in the last dozen millennia -- remains shared enough to speak of the 'psychic unity' of Homo sapiens.

(I discussed this in an article published earlier this year. There were two responses -- by Martin J. Wiener and Barbara H. Rosenwein -- to that essay, and they, along with my response-to-the-responses has just appeared in Cultural and Social History.)

In any case, over the next couple of days, I received a few helpful e-mails from friends who know about my interest in such things, pointing me to other stories on the study. One of them came from a fellow historian who has become quite enthusiastic about the notion of 'recent' biological change influencing behaviour. He sent me a link to the Los Angeles Times report on the study, which opens:

The pace of human evolution has been increasing at a stunning rate since our ancestors began spreading through Europe, Asia and Africa 40,000 years ago, quickening to 100 times historical levels after agriculture became widespread, according to a study published today.

Hmm, I thought again, sitting in a London internet café and having relatively little time to do any follow-up.

I finally had a chance today to examine another story on the study, in the New York Times.

It opens with this...

The finding contradicts a widely held assumption that human evolution came to a halt 10,000 years ago or even 50,000 years ago. Some evolutionary psychologists, for example, assume that the mind has not evolved since the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago.

...which is a rather curious statement, since I can't think of any reputable biologically-aware researcher in any field who thought that 'human evolution came to a halt' at some point in the past.

The argument evolutionary psychologists make tends to be one that -- while there has undoubtedly been 'recent' genetic change (lactose tolerance and disease resistance being prime examples) -- the relative influence of these changes compared to those during the much longer Pleistocene is probably minimal.

The breathless quality of the reporting on this is also somewhat odd, as the 'acceleration' doesn't seem all that surprising: since human populations became significantly larger, there will be more mutations on which natural selection can operate; as human populations were also inhabiting more diverse environments, this could have subjected some populations to new selective pressures. As the LA Times piece notes,

the research team was able to conclude that infectious diseases and the introduction of new foods were the primary reasons that some genes swept through populations with such speed.

I might be missing something, but even my non-expert understanding of evolution would lead me to expect exactly this result.

So, in some way, I'm not so sure what the fuss is about.

But while it is clear that different environments' variations (in plant-life, sunlight, disease prevalence) might lead quite directly to 'rapid' change (remember, we're still talking vast amounts of time here), it is not clear to me why psychological change would be quite so rapid. The key 'environment' in terms of psychologically-relevant genetic change would be other people, and, by and large, it seems that on this point, the differences among different regional populations would not necessarily push human development consistently enough in one direction or another.

Most of the articles I've seen on the 'accelerating evolution' issue haven't really discussed a psychological angle on this, but it certainly is lurking there, particularly in the wake of James Watson's comments regarding intelligence and Africa. Harpending, moreover, was also co-author of a study claiming a recently-acquired genetic basis for high levels of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.

The New York Times raises cautions that some other articles missed in their apparent enthusiasm to proclaim significant genetic change in recent historical eras:

David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said the new report was “a very interesting and exciting hypothesis” but that the authors had not ruled out other explanations of the data. The power of their test for selected genes falls off in looking both at more ancient and more recent events, he said, so the overall picture might not be correct.

Similar reservations were expressed by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.

“My feeling is that they haven’t been cautious enough,” he said. “This paper will probably stimulate others to study this question.”

As it should. But as the NYT piece also points out, the methodology used cannot firmly establish what happened in the last 10,000 years or so.

The high rate of selection has probably continued to the present day, Dr. Moyzis said, but current data are not adequate to pick up recent selection.

(This point is also made by the graph included with the article.) Which makes all of the speculation about changes within the last thousand years or so a bit more...well, speculative than they sounded in the other articles.

This whole discussion inspired me to revisit Gregory Clark's argument in A Farewell to Alms, which I commented upon at length a while ago. (Part one. Part two.)

One of Clark's key arguments (simplifying somewhat) suggests (though rather vaguely) that rapid economic development in England in the early modern period was significantly influenced by genetic predispositions toward bourgeois values that were transmitted through English society by the fact that the wealthy out-bred the poor.

Via Clark's website, I found a couple of very readable critiques of his work. (There are a wide range of opinions on his work on offer there, and Clark deserves some credit for bringing them together. Of course, no publicity is bad publicity...)

In 'The Son Also Rises' (pdf) at Evolutionary Psychology Laura Betzig points out the weakness in Clark's argument that enhanced reproductive success by wealthy English led to an economic advantage due to the spread of middle-class values. First, the English rich were far from unique in this regard:

Clark knows that civilization began thousands of years ago, somewhere around Babylon; and he devotes a full chapter to the question, “Why England? Why not China, India, or Japan?” Why weren’t the Near East and Far East the best candidates for the natural selection of a hard-working middle-class? Because, he says, civilization in and around Babylon was more “unstable” than in Britain; and because in China and Japan—it pains me even to type these words—“the demographic system in both these societies gave less reproductive advantage to the wealthy than in England.” Clark cites evidence that Qing emperors fathered only as many children as average Englishmen living at around the same time (pp. 89, 209, 271, Figure 13.4). But of course for Qing emperors, as for any other emperors, legitimate fertility was low: Chinese emperors, like Assyrian emperors, like all other emperors got heirs on just one empress at a time, their legitimate wives; but they got bastards on scores, or hundreds, of consorts. Who should have transmitted, if not the high ethical standards of their bastards’ fathers, at least their hard-working genes. So much for the evidence in A Farewell to Alms.

Wealth, status and reproductive success may -- unsurprisingly -- correlate, but the extent to which the 'values' associated with that success can be passed on genetically is another matter, as Betzig points out:

There are other gaps in the logic. I am aware of dozens of studies that show a relationship between reproductive success and wealth or rank...; but I’m aware of no study that shows a correlation between reproductive success and the “middle-class values” of patience, nonviolence, literacy, thoughtfulness, or hard work.

And, it goes without saying, for those values to provide any benefit, they have to be possessed in a society that rewards them, turning us to various 'institutional' factors (from cultural assumptions, religious beliefs, social organisation, political structures, etc.) that Clark so blithely dismisses.

It is also worth pointing out that even in relatively recent history, those 'values' have not been the only routes to success. As I commented before on an earlier paper by Clark, concerning the period 1250-1800 with regard to the available means of getting ahead in life:

One might be granted a peerage, for instance, for reasons that had little to do with capitalist success and rather more to do with simply being on the right side of a political squabble, making a good marriage or having success in war. (Just as losing one's wealth might have had to do with contingencies related to the above factors.)

'Wealth' and 'success' were being amassed in England in a variety of ways: slave trading, tobacco planting, empire building, monarch-bribing, textile weaving and goods trading (not to mention, at least in the earlier period, being good with a sword).

Which gene is it, precisely, that is going to promote success in all these different ways of getting ahead in life?

In her detailed critique of A Farewell to Alms, Dierdre McCloskey, I see, makes a similar observation. She divides Clark's argument into various elements and 'links', and as part of that discussion notes:

In light of Clark’s methodological convictions...the most embarrassing broken link is A, between “Rich breed more” and “Rich people’s values spread.” Nowhere in the book does Clark calculate what higher breeding rates could have accomplished by way of rhetorical change. It could easily be done, at any rate under his mechanical assumption about how the social construction of values works. Clark assumes that the children of rich people are by that fact carriers of the sort of bourgeois values that make for an Industrial Revolution.

To be sure, this is an odd characterization of the medieval or early modern relatively rich. A rich bourgeois of London in 1400 devoted most of his effort to arranging special protection for his wool-trading monopoly. His younger sons might well have taken away the lesson, repeated again and again down to Elizabethan England and Lou Dobbs, that it’s a good idea to regulate everything you can, and quite a bad thing to let people freely make the deals they wish to make. And a Brave Sir Botany who had stolen his riches, say, or was a successful courtier who had received them from Henry VIII dissolving monasteries, say, would not automatically, one would think, transmit sober bourgeois values to younger sons. A society that extravagantly admired aristocratic or Christian virtues could corrupt even a Medici banker into thinking of himself as quite the lord and yet also a godly son of the Church. In a similar way nowadays an extravagant admiration for the neo-aristocratic values of the clerisy corrupts the bourgeois daughter into scorning her father’s bourgeois occupation.

McCloskey's critique is worth reading, even if it's flawed. (She doesn't seem to know what a 'meme' is, for example: she sees Clark as promoting a 'meme' theory, but memetics actually tends to separate biological and cultural development. Also, she curiously lumps Clark in with Steven Pinker whose arguments tend to be both much better and much different than Clark's.)

To be honest, I'm not really sure what to make of all this. It's not my field, and I'm in the position of anyone who wants to make use of the insights from another field: you can educate yourself on it to the extent that your time and interest allows, but in the end, you depend on particular experts who are able to translate those findings in a language that is generally comprehensible. Unfortunately, those experts always seem to be at war with other experts in their fields.

But language and the history of human behaviour are two things I know a little bit about, which is perhaps why I don't like so much the leap from the molecular level to vast statements about how 'human races' are 'evolving away from one another'. (In particular when they get picked up in the press, where they are presented far less carefully than they should be.)

What does this mean? How relevant are these differences to determining what makes us human?

I have the sense that the overwhelming amount of what we share is being drowned out in the emphasis to focus on difference, as interesting as those might be. Both perspectives are not, of course inherently mutually exclusive: evolutionary psychology's emphasis on a common human nature would seem to admit some variation, and the differences found by population genetics are only meaningful in relation to that commonality.

At a certain level of specificity, the genetic differences seem vast, but step back a bit and they're relatively less so. People in different regions might tend to have different levels of disease resistance, say, but their immune systems all work the same way. Which of these observations is more important in understanding what makes us human? I would say the latter (while admitting that understanding the former is important for many reasons).

When Harpending (quoted above) says that 'we' are 'not the same' as people even 1,000 years ago, what does that mean? I am, for instance, not the same as you (whoever you -- dear reader -- might be). But that appears to be a pretty meaningless statement on the face of it. Were people 1,000 years ago different in any fundamental way than today? If so, what? It seems rather premature to make claims like that based only on counting changes in particular allelles without actually knowing -- in nearly all those cases -- what effect those changes have (on, for instance, behaviour).

But perhaps more significantly, it's unfortunate to see what could be a subtle and complex synthesis of different perspectives and levels of analysis of our humanness (shared across many fields) being shunted aside by a set of competing one-dimensional, either-or answers to why things work the way they do: institutions vs. genes, materialism vs. culturalism, similarity vs. difference, universality vs. particularity.

Maybe this is because academic work is partly driven by the very normal (indeed, human) cravings for attention and status (and maybe our innate tendency toward tribalism) which seem to affect every other human enterprise

I just don't think that's necessary a good thing.

***

A draft of the original paper (which is very technical) is available here.

Discussion and criticism of the article (also quite technical) can be found at Gene Expression.

There is also a long article from the Economist on the study is also freely available.