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Jim McGinn
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 Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2003 5:59 am Post subject: The Origins of Community |
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"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a9fia9$pda$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
[quote]All behavioral phenomena are related in some way to
natural selection. This is trivial. The problem, IMO,
with evolutionary psychology is that it seems to make
no room for what might be called a "generalized
learning mechanism." I find this rather astounding
and silly.
Jim: Yes. I know what you are talking about. And I agree.
I even go so far as to agree that it>s silly. What>s even
more silly is that more often than not the scenarios
that evolutionary psychologists propose have
themselves assumed the existence (preexistence?)
of a rather well developed GLM (generalized learning
mechanism) in our ancestors.
Glen: I>m interested in the last bit of the above. I would
be interested if it could be shown that their position
logically (or otherwise) entails a "GLM."
[/quote]
I wonder if anybody could come up with some
examples of EP hypothetical thinking that supposedly
doesn>t assume the preexistence of a "GLM."
[quote]Certainly, they acknowledge the role of "learning,"
but strongly suggest that the specifics of "what is
learned" is rooted in the types of environments in
which the species evolved. Here it seems that
some internal inconsistency may be noted. That is,
it makes good sense for there to be a GLM since
organisms that "possessed" such a mechanism
would be able to survive in environments quite
different from those in which they evolved.
[/quote]
This comment here reminded me of something I>d
read a few days ago on sci.bio.paleontology. I>ll cut
and paste parts of it below:
In message 1 of a thread entitled, Climate change
over the last 10mln yrs, Yousuf Khan states:
***** begin cut and paste *****
<snip>
. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip>
<snip>
. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and
more inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of
man, so we shouldn>t complain too loudly about how
cold it is outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet,
then we>d just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures
who would just eat easy-to-find plants all day long --
doesn>t require the development of much intelligence.
<snip>
***** end cut and paste *****
What I gather from this statement is that the change
in environment that has been taking place over the
last 10 million years has introduced two new
elements in the environment that previously had
been largely nonexistent on this planet. The first was
(is) temporal variation in climate (more temperature
variation between night and day, more variation
between seasons, more variations in terms of
"sudden" shifts in climate). The second was (is)
spatial variation in habitat (habitats that are suitable
one part of the year [or day] and unsuitable to a
species at another part of the year [or day]) and more
variable distribution of habitats such that there is a lot
more distance between suitable locations. So as our
planet shifted from a climate that was always and
everywhere (even at the polar extremities) rainy,
warm, and cloudy (relatively lacking in climatic
variation over time and space) to a climate that is
drier, colder, and clearer skied (relatively variable
in climatic variation over time and space climate)
the prevaling nature of the earth>s biota (biological
organisms) has also shifted (evolved as a result
of the process of natural selection) to animals
that are smaller, more mobile, and larger brained.
So, I suspect that more variable environments that
required constant movement, migration, and constant
decisions with respect to finding resources may be
the evolutionary causes of brain growth in mammals
in general. But can we directly extend this thinking
to hominid/human evolution? I think we have to be
careful about this. (More on this in my
CONCLUSION below.)
[quote]Such pressure would not, of course, mean that such
a mechanism (GLM) would have to have evolved.
[/quote]
I agree.
[quote]I would add here that one of the things that seems
to have happened to a bunch of organisms -
especially mammals - is the emergence of a "pool
of behavior" that is largely not "committed" to
eliciting stimuli as in the reflex. This is part and
parcel of the emergence of operant conditioning,
the most important "mechanism of learning."
Jim: If human evolution is about anything it has to
be about finding the origins of the generalized
learning mechanism (including culture).
Glen: We>re probably mostly in agreement here.
Jim: But evolutionary psychologist are so lost in the
confusion that is created by the implications of their
poorly examined assumptions that there isn>t much
anybody can do for them. (IMO the problems with
EP also run a lot deeper. Maybe its biggest
problem is that it has swallowed the misthinking of
neoDarwinism unexamined.)
Glen: I>m not sure what you>re driving at concerning
neoDarwinism.
[/quote]
NeoDarwinism (which comprises the undisputed
prevailing paradigm of evolutionary theory) has some
strangely nonscientific aspects to it that renders its
adherents blind to its inherent shortcomings. For
example, it>s not unusual for a neoDarwinists to state
that they believe in multiple units of selection (or even
my more radical stipulation that any and all units of
selection are artifice and therefore there is no one
real unit of selection since selection actually happens
on all levels simultaneously) but then in the next
sentence state (or imply) that fitness is fully
measurable with respect to differential reproduction
of individual organisms over the span of a
generation. They seem unable to comprehend the
contradictory nature of these two suppositions and,
as a result, they are dismissive of group selectionist
scenarios.
More to the point, neoDarwinism carries the illusion
of scientific conciseness at the expense of
dismissing very important aspects of the process of
natural selection, namely selection that happens on
levels other than the individual.
[quote]My opinion is that EP suffers from the same
conceptual confusion that characterizes most of
psychology and has all but crippled every field
interested in behavior - human or otherwise.
This includes behavioral neurobiology.
[/quote]
I>d be interested in more details about the source of
this conceptual confusion.
[quote]Anyway, despite the fact that all behavioral
phenomena are related in some way to natural
selection, selection operates on other units.
Much of the behavior of individuals is selected
by its consequences (operant behavior), and the
emergence of culture ushers in other relevant
units. That the organisms are products of natural
selection does not mean that all behavior can be
explained by natural selection.
Jim: Notwithstanding the philosophical musings of a
philosophically ignorant but otherwise popular
scientist, Steven J. Gould, all behavior is potentially
explicable through natural selection. Even Gould>s
"spandrels" are explicable through natural selection.
(Gould>s spandrels argument amounts to little more
than an intellectual trick.)
Glen: I>m no expert on Gould, but I tend to be in
agreement with much of what he says. I>m not
familiar with "spandrels." Also, I>m not sure what
you are driving at. There is an important sense in
which it is false that "...all behavior is potentially
explicable through natural selection..." One
cannot explain the form and frequency of certain
responses without pointing to the ontogenic
environment, even if one can say why, from the
standpoint of natural selection, such ontogenic
environments produce such responses.
[/quote]
Okay, I know what you mean. And I agree. But I think
this kind of thinking inadvertently opens the door to
the conceptual misthinking that Gould proposes.
Let me explain. AFAIC the fact that organism>s
reactions to current events is largely unpredictable
(which is due not only to the fact that an organism>s
ontogenenic environment is largely unpredictable to
us, but also because the complexity of lifeform>s and
their evolutionary history is so great as to render them
largely unknowable to us) does not mean that their
behavior is not POTENTIALLY explicable through
natural selection. What>s so silly about Gould is that
when he points out that biological phenomena is partly
the result of "contingency" he really isn>t telling us
anything that isn>t already obvious. Nobody proposes
that the process of natural selection is not largely the
result of events that, from our perspective, are
"random" or "unpredictable." Darwin himself made
this perfectly clear. What>s bad about Gould>s
supposition is that it provides the illusion of scientific
credibility for excusing the fact that we currently have
a hard time explaining many adaptations: "Human
intellect? Well we can>t explain its selective benefits
in the earliest years of hominid evolution, so it must
have been some kind of spandrel, the result of
contingency and not natural selection." (Strangely
enough, there are some who have adopted this
approach literally. In fact, recently an anthropologists
published a book in which contingency [genetic drift]
is purported to be one of the major selective causes
of human adaptations.)
All in all, when it comes to Gould>s notion of
"contingency" as an explanatory tool for understanding
biological origins the best thing we can say about it is
that, depending on how we interpret it, Gould is telling
us something that is already so obvious (or should be
so obvious) as to not even be worth mentioning. The
worst thing we can say is that it gives us the false
illusion that some adaptations cannot be explained by
NS. Nevertheless, in all fairness, I should also mention
that when it comes to filling out the details of
evolutionary explanations nobody does a better job
than S. J. Gould. He>s one hell of a good story teller.
<snip>
CONCLUSION
As I stated above, I suspect that more variable
environments that required constant movement,
migration, may be the evolutionary causes of brain
growth in mammals in general. But, as I also
indicated above, I think we have to be very careful
not to blindly extend this thinking to arrive at
conclusions about the nature of hominid/human
evolution?
There would be many problems if we did. Firstly
hominid brain growth over the last 5 to 8 million years is
something like three times that of any other mammal.
From this observation we might assume that our
ancestors had three times as much enviromental
variablity and three times as much migrational
behaviors in comparison to the other mammals that also
evolved in our vicinity. Obviously this makes no sense.
And it really makes no sense when we consider the fact
that when it comes to mobility bipedalism is a lousy
adaptation (not the least of the problems is the fact that
in a savanna habitat an erect posture would have made
our ancestors more obvious to predators). Also fossil
evidence (tree climbing adaptations in A>piths) of early
hominids indicates that they continued to reside in and
amongst trees for upwards of a million of years after
they had adopted bipedalism.
So, not only would the relative lack of mobility of
our earliest hominid ancestors have made us really
ineffective at being the small band-size roaming
hunter-gatherers that prevailing theory currently
stipulates but if they had adopted this lifestyle then we
would hardly expect the three fold increase in brain
size that characterizes hominid/human
evolution--chimps are hunter-gatherers and they
haven>t experiences this increase in brain size.
Now we can bring this discussion full circle back to
Evolutionary Psychology and the importance of finding
a scenario that will indicate the evolution of a general
learning mechanism (GLM).
Evolutionary psychology does come up with a lot of
interesting scenarios for the earliest years of hominid
evolution. But their problem is that they are impusively
compelled to conform these scenarios to the above
mentioned assumptions: 1) the neoDarwinistic based
assumption that selection only happens to individuals;
and 2) the anthropology based assumption that human
evolution happened in the context of small bands of
wandering hunter-gatherers. I contend that within the
context of these two simpleminded assumptions it will
prove to be impossible to find a selective scenario that
indicates the evolution of a GLM. Therefore, in my
opinion evolutionary psychology is feckless in that they
have blindly carried over assumptions from two other
disciplines that make it impossible for them to discover
the selective origins of the one thing that might make
some of their many scenarios make sense, a GLM.
I contend that human evolution, even in earliest years,
involves the emergence of a new group, the human
(hominid) community. It is the human (hominid)
community that was (is) the unit of human (hominid)
selection, not individuals, not hunter-gatherer groups.
The how and why of this new group was dictated by
environmental factors that presently are not well
understood (these factors involve the introduction of
a new climatic element, seasonal dessication, a
habitat that was halfway between a rainforest and a
savanna, and other ensuing implications which I will
save for a later post). Moreover, I contend, it is only
in the context of such a scenario (a community
selectionist scenario) that it is possible to theorize
the selective emergence of a GLM.
Regards,
Jim
jimmcginn@yahoo.com |
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Jim McGinn
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 10:03 am Post subject: Re: The Origins of Community |
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jimmcginn@yahoo.com (Jim McGinn) wrote in message news:<ac6a5059.0308101659.74c27357@posting.google.com>...
[quote]"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a9fia9$pda$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
All behavioral phenomena are related in some way to
natural selection. This is trivial. The problem, IMO,
with evolutionary psychology is that it seems to make
no room for what might be called a "generalized
learning mechanism." I find this rather astounding
and silly.
Jim: Yes. I know what you are talking about. And I agree.
I even go so far as to agree that it>s silly. What>s even
more silly is that more often than not the scenarios
that evolutionary psychologists propose have
themselves assumed the existence (preexistence?)
of a rather well developed GLM (generalized learning
mechanism) in our ancestors.
Glen: I>m interested in the last bit of the above. I would
be interested if it could be shown that their position
logically (or otherwise) entails a "GLM."
I wonder if anybody could come up with some
examples of EP hypothetical thinking that supposedly
doesn>t assume the preexistence of a "GLM."
Certainly, they acknowledge the role of "learning,"
but strongly suggest that the specifics of "what is
learned" is rooted in the types of environments in
which the species evolved. Here it seems that
some internal inconsistency may be noted. That is,
it makes good sense for there to be a GLM since
organisms that "possessed" such a mechanism
would be able to survive in environments quite
different from those in which they evolved.
This comment here reminded me of something I>d
read a few days ago on sci.bio.paleontology. I>ll cut
and paste parts of it below:
In message 1 of a thread entitled, Climate change
over the last 10mln yrs, Yousuf Khan states:
***** begin cut and paste *****
snip
. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip
snip
. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and
more inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of
man, so we shouldn>t complain too loudly about how
cold it is outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet,
then we>d just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures
who would just eat easy-to-find plants all day long --
doesn>t require the development of much intelligence.
snip
***** end cut and paste *****
What I gather from this statement is that the change
in environment that has been taking place over the
last 10 million years has introduced two new
elements in the environment that previously had
been largely nonexistent on this planet. The first was
(is) temporal variation in climate (more temperature
variation between night and day, more variation
between seasons, more variations in terms of
"sudden" shifts in climate). The second was (is)
spatial variation in habitat (habitats that are suitable
one part of the year [or day] and unsuitable to a
species at another part of the year [or day]) and more
variable distribution of habitats such that there is a lot
more distance between suitable locations. So as our
planet shifted from a climate that was always and
everywhere (even at the polar extremities) rainy,
warm, and cloudy (relatively lacking in climatic
variation over time and space) to a climate that is
drier, colder, and clearer skied (relatively variable
in climatic variation over time and space climate)
the prevaling nature of the earth>s biota (biological
organisms) has also shifted (evolved as a result
of the process of natural selection) to animals
that are smaller, more mobile, and larger brained.
So, I suspect that more variable environments that
required constant movement, migration, and constant
decisions with respect to finding resources may be
the evolutionary causes of brain growth in mammals
in general. But can we directly extend this thinking
to hominid/human evolution? I think we have to be
careful about this. (More on this in my
CONCLUSION below.)
Such pressure would not, of course, mean that such
a mechanism (GLM) would have to have evolved.
I agree.
I would add here that one of the things that seems
to have happened to a bunch of organisms -
especially mammals - is the emergence of a "pool
of behavior" that is largely not "committed" to
eliciting stimuli as in the reflex. This is part and
parcel of the emergence of operant conditioning,
the most important "mechanism of learning."
Jim: If human evolution is about anything it has to
be about finding the origins of the generalized
learning mechanism (including culture).
Glen: We>re probably mostly in agreement here.
Jim: But evolutionary psychologist are so lost in the
confusion that is created by the implications of their
poorly examined assumptions that there isn>t much
anybody can do for them. (IMO the problems with
EP also run a lot deeper. Maybe its biggest
problem is that it has swallowed the misthinking of
neoDarwinism unexamined.)
Glen: I>m not sure what you>re driving at concerning
neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism (which comprises the undisputed
prevailing paradigm of evolutionary theory) has some
strangely nonscientific aspects to it that renders its
adherents blind to its inherent shortcomings. For
example, it>s not unusual for a neoDarwinists to state
that they believe in multiple units of selection (or even
my more radical stipulation that any and all units of
selection are artifice and therefore there is no one
real unit of selection since selection actually happens
on all levels simultaneously) but then in the next
sentence state (or imply) that fitness is fully
measurable with respect to differential reproduction
of individual organisms over the span of a
generation. They seem unable to comprehend the
contradictory nature of these two suppositions and,
as a result, they are dismissive of group selectionist
scenarios.
More to the point, neoDarwinism carries the illusion
of scientific conciseness at the expense of
dismissing very important aspects of the process of
natural selection, namely selection that happens on
levels other than the individual.
My opinion is that EP suffers from the same
conceptual confusion that characterizes most of
psychology and has all but crippled every field
interested in behavior - human or otherwise.
This includes behavioral neurobiology.
I>d be interested in more details about the source of
this conceptual confusion.
Anyway, despite the fact that all behavioral
phenomena are related in some way to natural
selection, selection operates on other units.
Much of the behavior of individuals is selected
by its consequences (operant behavior), and the
emergence of culture ushers in other relevant
units. That the organisms are products of natural
selection does not mean that all behavior can be
explained by natural selection.
Jim: Notwithstanding the philosophical musings of a
philosophically ignorant but otherwise popular
scientist, Steven J. Gould, all behavior is potentially
explicable through natural selection. Even Gould>s
"spandrels" are explicable through natural selection.
(Gould>s spandrels argument amounts to little more
than an intellectual trick.)
Glen: I>m no expert on Gould, but I tend to be in
agreement with much of what he says. I>m not
familiar with "spandrels." Also, I>m not sure what
you are driving at. There is an important sense in
which it is false that "...all behavior is potentially
explicable through natural selection..." One
cannot explain the form and frequency of certain
responses without pointing to the ontogenic
environment, even if one can say why, from the
standpoint of natural selection, such ontogenic
environments produce such responses.
Okay, I know what you mean. And I agree. But I think
this kind of thinking inadvertently opens the door to
the conceptual misthinking that Gould proposes.
Let me explain. AFAIC the fact that organism>s
reactions to current events is largely unpredictable
(which is due not only to the fact that an organism>s
ontogenenic environment is largely unpredictable to
us, but also because the complexity of lifeform>s and
their evolutionary history is so great as to render them
largely unknowable to us) does not mean that their
behavior is not POTENTIALLY explicable through
natural selection. What>s so silly about Gould is that
when he points out that biological phenomena is partly
the result of "contingency" he really isn>t telling us
anything that isn>t already obvious. Nobody proposes
that the process of natural selection is not largely the
result of events that, from our perspective, are
"random" or "unpredictable." Darwin himself made
this perfectly clear. What>s bad about Gould>s
supposition is that it provides the illusion of scientific
credibility for excusing the fact that we currently have
a hard time explaining many adaptations: "Human
intellect? Well we can>t explain its selective benefits
in the earliest years of hominid evolution, so it must
have been some kind of spandrel, the result of
contingency and not natural selection." (Strangely
enough, there are some who have adopted this
approach literally. In fact, recently an anthropologists
published a book in which contingency [genetic drift]
is purported to be one of the major selective causes
of human adaptations.)
All in all, when it comes to Gould>s notion of
"contingency" as an explanatory tool for understanding
biological origins the best thing we can say about it is
that, depending on how we interpret it, Gould is telling
us something that is already so obvious (or should be
so obvious) as to not even be worth mentioning. The
worst thing we can say is that it gives us the false
illusion that some adaptations cannot be explained by
NS. Nevertheless, in all fairness, I should also mention
that when it comes to filling out the details of
evolutionary explanations nobody does a better job
than S. J. Gould. He>s one hell of a good story teller.
snip
CONCLUSION
As I stated above, I suspect that more variable
environments that required constant movement,
migration, may be the evolutionary causes of brain
growth in mammals in general. But, as I also
indicated above, I think we have to be very careful
not to blindly extend this thinking to arrive at
conclusions about the nature of hominid/human
evolution?
There would be many problems if we did. Firstly
hominid brain growth over the last 5 to 8 million years is
something like three times that of any other mammal.
From this observation we might assume that our
ancestors had three times as much enviromental
variablity and three times as much migrational
behaviors in comparison to the other mammals that also
evolved in our vicinity. Obviously this makes no sense.
And it really makes no sense when we consider the fact
that when it comes to mobility bipedalism is a lousy
adaptation (not the least of the problems is the fact that
in a savanna habitat an erect posture would have made
our ancestors more obvious to predators). Also fossil
evidence (tree climbing adaptations in A>piths) of early
hominids indicates that they continued to reside in and
amongst trees for upwards of a million of years after
they had adopted bipedalism.
So, not only would the relative lack of mobility of
our earliest hominid ancestors have made us really
ineffective at being the small band-size roaming
hunter-gatherers that prevailing theory currently
stipulates but if they had adopted this lifestyle then we
would hardly expect the three fold increase in brain
size that characterizes hominid/human
evolution--chimps are hunter-gatherers and they
haven>t experiences this increase in brain size.
Now we can bring this discussion full circle back to
Evolutionary Psychology and the importance of finding
a scenario that will indicate the evolution of a general
learning mechanism (GLM).
Evolutionary psychology does come up with a lot of
interesting scenarios for the earliest years of hominid
evolution. But their problem is that they are impusively
compelled to conform these scenarios to the above
mentioned assumptions: 1) the neoDarwinistic based
assumption that selection only happens to individuals;
and 2) the anthropology based assumption that human
evolution happened in the context of small bands of
wandering hunter-gatherers. I contend that within the
context of these two simpleminded assumptions it will
prove to be impossible to find a selective scenario that
indicates the evolution of a GLM. Therefore, in my
opinion evolutionary psychology is feckless in that they
have blindly carried over assumptions from two other
disciplines that make it impossible for them to discover
the selective origins of the one thing that might make
some of their many scenarios make sense, a GLM.
I contend that human evolution, even in earliest years,
involves the emergence of a new group, the human
(hominid) community. It is the human (hominid)
community that was (is) the unit of human (hominid)
selection, not individuals, not hunter-gatherer groups.
The how and why of this new group was dictated by
environmental factors that presently are not well
understood (these factors involve the introduction of
a new climatic element, seasonal dessication, a
habitat that was halfway between a rainforest and a
savanna, and other ensuing implications which I will
save for a later post). Moreover, I contend, it is only
in the context of such a scenario (a community
selectionist scenario) that it is possible to theorize
the selective emergence of a GLM.
Regards,
Jim
jimmcginn@yahoo.com
[/quote]
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