Tonight's post will be very short. In it, I'm going to present a simple argument exposing an error made by many prominent thinkers today, an error they would not make if they thought critically about the world in which they live. The error I wish to discuss is very common – Tim Poole makes it as does Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Haying. So, I believe, do Sam Harris and Steven Pinker. The error, a result of a dogmatic adherence to evolutionary psychology, has developed into a myth, a myth that arose with evolutionary biologists but which has promulgated from them to the general populace. Although the argument I will present exposing this error is simple, I believe it is compelling. An argument doesn't need to be long and laboured to persuade others of a simple, obvious truth.
The error, the myth, runs as follows. Human beings are the products of millions of years of evolution. Evolutionary pressures shaped not only our bodies but our brains (and minds). For most of that time humans were hunter gatherers. In the last, say, 150 years we have experienced massive technological changes, such as the introduction of electricity, the use of automobiles, computers, cell phones, contraception, and so on, as well as massive societal changes. Therefore, because evolution designed humans to be hunter gatherers, we are maladapted to the modern world.
The power of this myth can be adduced from many examples in the culture today – for example, the popularity of the 'Palaeolithic diet' rests on the supposed fact that it is the diet our caveman ancestors maintained of necessity and is the diet evolution shaped us to adopt. (Humans did not historically eat sugars or processed foods and so these are bad for us and should be excluded.) One reason the myth has captured the public imagination so, why it appeals to people as strongly as it does, is that many people feel a kind of malaise, a dissatisfaction with modern life, and they feel they can explain this unhappiness by taking the view that they are really cavemen and cavewomen living in the wrong era.
The argument behind this myth can be expressed schematically as follows:
P1. Evolutionary psychology is true.
P2. If evolutionary psychology is true, we were designed by evolution to live in small hunter gatherer communities.
P3. Modern societies are no longer hunter gather societies but are technologically and societally very different from the communities humans lived in during prehistory.
C. Therefore, humans are maladapted to modern life.
Let us assume that P2 and P3 are true. It seems then that we can express the the argument as a simple conditional: "If evolutionary psychology is true, humans are maladapted to modern life". Many, many intellectuals these days just assume that evolutionary psychology is true (although this is a relatively recent fashion). It is kind of dogma, a religious tenet – it might offend Richard Dawkins to say that he helped found a religion but it is true. Many intellectuals accept this creed on blind faith and ignore all the empirical evidence presented by the world that they live in that shows that it must be false. According to simple logic, when we have a conditional 'if A, then B' and we also we have 'not-B' we must conclude 'not-A'. If humans are not maladapted to modern life, then evolutionary psychology must be false. This is what I shall try to briefly show.
Consider driving ability. When I was a teenager, I had driving lessons and failed my first driving test. These days however I am a very competent driver – it is second nature to me now as it is to most people. When you think about it, driving a car is a very complex skill. One needs to know how to steer a car using the steering wheel and synchronise this with the brake and accelerator pedals, constantly monitor one's environment using mirrors, and obey all the laws of the road. Incredibly, drivers seem to have a very good sense of where the corners of the car are, enabling them to parallel park and manoeuvre through small gaps. This complex capability, a capability that people take for granted, could, obviously, not be evolutionarily endowed because automobiles have only been in use for a hundred years. Driving is a learned ability. If all our abilities were the result of evolutionary pressures, if they were all genetic, we could not explain why modern humans are so good at driving. Even though evolution didn't select for those humans who could drive and weed out those who it couldn't, it seems that, with respect to driving cars, humans are not maladapted but extraordinarily well-adapted.
At this moment, I am writing a short essay. Many intellectuals, such as Steven Pinker, posit a 'language instinct' that has evolved over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years as an explanation for how I can use language in this essay to communicate my point. However we cannot suppose that the ability to write, or even more than this, to spell words, is an evolutionary adaption because writing and spelling are too recent to have been subject to adaptive pressures. I can touch-type, an ability I am exercising now; obviously I could not have inherited this capability from my caveman ancestors because they didn't have keyboards. I can operate my computer and know how to browse the Internet if I need to look something up. A critic might say, "You can use a computer but you don't know how it works!" Of course, this is true but it is a very weak argument. Our prehistoric ancestors, who presumably knew which fungi were edible and which were poisonous, didn't know why some fungi were edible and others poisonous. For that, they would have needed knowledge of chemistry and biology that obviously they didn't possess.
We seem to have many capabilities that are not traceable back to DNA, a fact that gives us reason to doubt evolutionary psychology. If we reject evolutionary psychology, what can we put in its place? It seems that human brains are extraordinarily plastic, meaning that rather than being born with what evolutionary psychologists call modules, modules that are genetic and have arisen (originally through chance mutation) during prehistory, that are innate, the brains of humans adapt to the environments in which these humans find themselves. Because you were born into a world of cars and computers, cell phones and contraception, your brain developed in ways that allowed you to interact with and manipulate these technologies perfectly competently. Rather than being maladapted to the modern world, humans are supremely well-adapted to it. Thus, according to the argument I advanced above, evolutionary psychology must be wrong.
I have criticised evolutionary psychology in the past, most recently in the post "Threading the Needle", but the argument I have presented above may be the strongest I have put forward. In this argument I am presenting evolutionary psychology and neuroplasticity, nature and nurture, as though they are mutually exclusive, stark alternatives. A critic may say that any reasonable understanding of human nature involves both. According to this view, it may be possible for human beings to be, in some ways and to some extent, maladapted to the modern world without being in all ways maladapted – such a critic may say that that the picture I hinted at above in which cavemen and cavewomen are thrown into a world of cars and computers and contraception is a straw man. Some capabilities, it could be argued, are innate and some are learned. I accept that such a mixed picture is possible. The reason I have presented my argument so strongly is that theories about human nature derived from evolutionary psychology have become extremely popular in recent decades, and this straw man argument is pretty much the picture put forward. I believe the popularity of these theories quite unjustified.
Although the argument I have presented above was the main point of this essay, I wish to finish by briefly discussing another topic. The catalyst for this post was a recent interview between Sam Harris and Tim Poole. In this and recent podcasts, Harris has taken to talking darkly and disparagingly about mental illness, something Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert used to but no longer do. I would like to pretend for a moment that Sam Harris reads this blog and speak to him directly. Sam, many of your listeners may have experienced mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, or even psychosis. They may listen to you because they regard you as a sane voice in an insane world (even if some of them sometimes disagree with you). To talk about mental illness in such a stigmatising way may distress such listeners. Additionally, the way you talk about mental illness suggests that you do not really understand what this term means. This seems a gross oversight by someone who prides himself on using language precisely. I am not suggesting that you censor yourself, nor am I arguing that you should be cancelled for this insensitivity. I am not calling for another twitter mob to descend on you. Rather I am suggesting that you bear in mind the possibility that people who have experienced mental illness might number among your fans. Yes, you may be wrong about evolutionary psychology, but you still have a voice worth listening to. All I am suggesting is that you take a more considered and considerate approach rather than simply blaming everything you dislike about the actions of others in the world on 'mental illness'. It is the most humane attitude to take. This is all I want to say in this post.
