I'll start with a silly and seemingly trivial observation. Munecat is a woman and it is nice to follow a very clever woman sometimes. I say this because almost all of the people I watch on Youtube are men: Sam Harris and Alex O'Conner and Bart Ehrman and Neil Degrasse Tyson and all the people they interview. It's a bit of a boys' club. It seems partly a result of the algorithm and partly because, in the world we live in today, men still end up being the principal communicators with respect to science, philosophy, and politics, that men float to the top of the list Youtube recommends. All the late night hosts I watch are men and this seems to reflect the opinion that people held a few decades ago that men were just naturally better at comedy than women. Of course, there are exceptions. The algorithm recommended Sabine Hossenfelder to me and I like Desi Lydic for instance. But you can still get the impression that we live in sexist societies, although this impressions seems to be diminishing. Historically, philosophy and physics have always been dominated by men but this is not, I believe, because men are any better at philosophising and mathematising than women but because of cultural factors that Munecat herself is well aware of. However, and I think this is an interesting thing to note, literature, my first and main love, has for a long time been very well balanced between men and women. Starting perhaps with pioneers like George Eliot, Jane Austen, Mary Shelly, and the Brontes, women have made a strong impression in the creative fields, in fiction and poetry as well as the visual arts, and if women can write stories as well as or better than men then there is no reason to suppose that they can not be equally good or better at science and metaphysics. Recently I have read a couple of fantastic books by women, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke. The latter I cannot recommend more highly.
The picture of the methodology behind evolutionary psychology that Munecat depicts is, I'm sure, accurate; before diving into the rest of the essay, I want to try to summarise it. The way evolutionary psychology tends to operate is that on that on the basis of a study on a few WEIRD psych students or of some informal observations of friends, family, and colleagues, evolutionary psychologists posit the existence of some contemporary universal psychological feature and then go on to propose some just-so-story that supposedly explains why this psychological feature appeared in prehistory, how it helped our ancestors survive and procreate during the Pleistocene. They often focus on sex differences. For instance, it was hypothesised in 1993 by Devendra Singh that a low waist-to-hip ratio makes women more attractive to men, that this attraction is a universal male psychological trait, a hypothesis that seems to have been bourn out by studies carried out since. Evolutionary psychologists then went on to propose multiple competing speculative explanations for why men had evolved to possess this attraction when they were still hunter-gatherers living in caves and hunting mastodons. One is that women with low waist-to-hip ratios were more likely to survive giving birth and thus more likely to produce progeny for the lusty cavemen who had impregnated them. A second is that a low waist-to-hip ratio is an indicator of health and fecundity. A third is that a low waist-to-hip ratio is one of a number of signifiers of femininity that enabled our male ancestors to distinguish between men and women. Consider another instance of evolutionary psychology hypothesising. Supposedly a universal difference between men and women is that men are naturally better at spatially rotating mental representations than women while women are better at remembering where stuff is and at systematising social relations. The just-so-story I have heard invented to explain this 'finding' is that during the Pleistocene men were out and about on the savannah throwing spears at megafauna while women were collecting berries and fruit and staying at home in the cave looking after the infants and each other. The implicit assumption made by evolutionary psychologists is that psychological traits like male attraction to wide hipped women and a superior male ability to rotate shapes in one's mind appeared during the Pleistocene or some other time in prehistory and have been passed down to all men today. The assumption seems to be that these traits are genetic, either carried on the Y chromosome or, if carried on some other chromosome, are activated by genes carried on the Y chromosome.
"I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology" is well researched and engaging but it faces a serious methodological problem. Wolfgang Pauli is credited with saying of a theory "It is not even wrong". (I had thought this was Karl Popper's appraisal of Freudian psychology but I suppose I should defer to the Internet.) The issue for Munecat is that even if evolutionary psychologists have failed to satisfactorily prove any of the hypotheses they regularly come up with, it is just as difficult to disprove them – we actually can't, given the current state of evolutionary science, either defend them or debunk them. There are two ways to critique the 'science' of evolutionary psychology. First we could show that there are problems with the studies, that evolutionary psychologists are basing their hypotheses on bad science, on studies that are flawed and which have failed to be replicated. Munecat often gives examples of such flawed and debunked studies. But showing that the science has failed to prove the claims of evolutionary psychologists concerning the existence of particular contemporary universal psychological traits is not the same as saying that these claims are wrong, that these traits don't exist. The second way to criticise evolutionary psychology would be to question the other parts of the theory, the just-so-stories and the presumption that psychological traits are genetically inherited. To defend their hypotheses robustly, evolutionary psychologists really need a detailed understanding of the way our ancestors lived during the period when something known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness obtained and, even if the notion of the EEA is plausible and they did have such an understanding, they would need to show that the psychological traits that appeared during this period are coded into all our DNA and have thus been inherited by all humans alive today. Currently however we lack any detailed understanding of the EEA, if it ever existed. For instance the assumption that men did all the hunting and the women did all the gathering during this period, an assumption informing many of the hypotheses, has been questioned. And I don't think there is any science that has either confirmed or disconfirmed the core tenet of evolutionary psychology that many psychological traits are genetic. (It is possible that a psychological trait could be hereditable without being genetic: I shall explore this idea later in the essay.) Munecat's second and better line of attack would be to show that these other pillars of the theory are wrong but I don't think she successfully undercuts them. Too often in criticising evolutionary psychologists she resorts to sarcasm and ad hominem attacks. I really enjoyed the video and I agree with her that evolutionary psychology is stupid but I don't think she has categorically debunked it.
It seems to me that in order to really mount an assault on evolutionary psychology we need an alternative theory of human psychology. But Munecat does not present any real alternative. She often relies on her audience implicitly sharing her view of how real men and women today actually behave but her view is never explicitly stated or theoretically grounded. Often she stresses the importance of culture – she adduces examples of how standards of female attractiveness have changed over time, how the ancient Romans understood homosexuality differently than people today do, and how Medieval Europeans had a different attitude to female sexuality than people today do. Towards the end of the video though she adopts a quite different tactic. She seems to cede to the evolutionary psychologists the claim that many psychological traits are genetic but stresses the apparent fact that there is considerable psychological variation between people. The picture she sketches is one in which a species like the human species, as a result of natural disasters like disease outbreaks, occasionally in history has been reduced to a small number of survivors, creating a genetic bottle neck, then subsequently balloons out in population size and in genetic diversity, presumably as a result of random mutations, until the next disaster occurs. This genetic diversity means that when the next natural disaster occurs there will be at least a few who will survive it because these few will have the necessary genes to cope with it. She seems to be suggesting that evolution deliberately increases variation within a species to ensure that the species will survive if something terrible happens to it. This picture seems peculiar to me and I do not think it is correct. Humans share 98.8 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and so it must surely be the case that a woman in the UK is almost exactly genetically identical with a woman in Taiwan. Munecat overemphasises the genetic variation among humans. It may be that even though she does actually believe that psychological traits are the result of nurture rather than nature, she is saying that even if we were to assume that psychological traits are genetic, it would still not follow that all men and all women are psychologically identical to each other, as evolutionary psychologists seem to suggest. We should still assume that considerable variation exists.
Munecat's animus against evolutionary psychology is of course inspired by politics as well as reasoning. Evolutionary psychology, with its focus on sex differences, can easily be deployed to reinforce conservative stereotypes about male and female roles and psyches. It is often a reactionary ideology promulgated by men. The position that the differences between men and women is the result of culture rather than nature is core to Feminism just as the idea that sex differences are the result of nature rather than culture is core to evolutionary psychology. And Munecat is obviously critiquing evolutionary psychology from a Feminist position.
Any discussion of evolutionary psychology presupposes a theory of evolution more generally and this is what I want to turn to now. The notion I want to focus on first is that of random genetic mutations. Darwin originally proposed the theory of Natural Selection in 1859 and his basic idea is very simple: members of a species are almost exactly identical but some variation between individuals exist; individuals that are 'fitter' will tend to live to live longer and have more offspring than those that are less fit, meaning that over time the species as a whole will change, evolve. The whole species will become ever more suited to its ecological niche. Although Darwin himself toyed with the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics might be transmitted to offspring, Darwin generally left the question of where the variation came from open, didn't really explain where it came from. Soon after Darwin published his theory, people realised it had a hole: if suboptimal variants tend to be weeded out, over time we would expect the variation within a species to become smaller and smaller until it has reduced to nothing. Perhaps in the distant past there was considerable variation within a species but over time this variation would decrease until eventually evolution would just stop because there would no longer be any fitter variants for nature to select. The discovery of the structure of DNA, usually attributed to Watson and Crick, didn't happen until the 1950s and presumably it was not until soon after, although I am not sure when, that scientists decided that they had an explanation for the origin of variation: it came from random genetic mutations. As I think I understand it, when gametes are created through meiosis, occasionally a mistranscription occurs – a single nucleotide is changed which means either that the gene the nucleotide is a component of now codes for a slightly different protein or that this gene now affects other genes slightly differently. According to neo-Darwinists, these mutations are random. This is why Richard Dawkins called one of his books The Blind Watchmaker. This seems to resolve the paradox of how evolution continues. On the one hand, natural selection is constantly working to reduce the variation within a species but random genetic mutations are constantly replenishing the amount of variation. Evolution involves a tug-of-war between natural selection, which is constantly eliminating suboptimal genetic variants, and random genetic mutation, which is constantly creating new variants.
I have presented the basic idea of Neo-Darwinism before and, whenever I do, I feel that simply clearly stating it shows that it doesn't quite make sense. Richard Dawkins would hate me saying this but it involves several leaps of faith. First, I don't believe that the science around random mutations is at all well worked out. I think we know very little about why they happen, when they happen, where they happen, and how often they happen. It seems to me though that they must be very rare. Second, for evolution to occur, it requires the occurrence of a mutation that is beneficial to the organism born with it, that improves its fitness. Modern genetics has now established that a significant amount of the DNA in the human genome is what we call 'junk DNA'. It doesn't do anything. This means that often mutations have no phenotypic effect on an organism. Because we are concerned with evolution, we are only interested in mutations that have a phenotypic effect. It stands to reason that because a species such as, for instance, a goldfinch is already very well adapted to its ecological niche, if a random mutation occurs that does have a phenotypic effect, this effect is far more likely to be detrimental than beneficial. Evolution requires an enormous number of incremental changes, a enormous sequence of beneficial chance mutations, and the probabilities of such sequences appearing by chance is tiny.
So there is a problem with the idea of random genetic mutations as being key to evolution, a problem I will spell out more clearly in a moment. But, and this may surprise the reader, there is also a problem with natural selection. Consider the following little story which I think will illustrate the problem. Suppose a pigeon is born with a random mutation which makes it ever so slightly better at flying than its compatriots. Neo-Darwinists will say that this should make it slightly fitter than other members of its species and therefore, almost as a matter of necessity, it will survive longer and have more offspring than other pigeons in its environment. But what if it is eaten by a cat before it can leave the nest? What if dies from some disease or is infested by a tapeworm or is swept out to sea by a freak storm before it can mate? What if it mates with a pigeon that is barren? What if it is born with other genes that are disadvantageous, washing away the benefit of the better-flying gene? Alternatively we might consider a pigeon that is born with a slightly detrimental mutation to its flying genes but which is lucky enough to live near plentiful food sources and amenable mates. It may seem that I am being persnickety but the point I am getting at here is that even if an organism is born with a random mutation that is ever so slightly beneficial to it, there are an enormous number of chance events that might occur to it which will stop it breeding and thus impede the evolutionary process; similarly a slightly inferior individual might end up with good luck and so easily introduce inferior genes into the gene pool. Look at the world and consider the number of random disasters that can occur to an individual and it seems obvious that the very very slight advantage of having a very very small beneficial genetic mutation can easily overwhelmed by bad luck. Boethius was a fan of Providence and Hamlet says, "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow" but Neo-Darwinists such as, for instance, Richard Dawkins are committed to the idea that all creatures are subject to the vicissitudes of chance, that randomness plays an enormous role in the world, that no design is at work. Yet they still seem to treat Evolution as a kind of Transcendental Signifier, a mystical force that will always produce the best possible result, always ensure the Survival of the Fittest. I think that if evolutionary biologists like Dawkins want to be consistent, they should either admit some other mechanism must be at work or replace the slogan "Survival of the Fittest" with the slogan "Survival of the Luckiest".
Let us consider some sort of significant adaption that a species might possess, like having nostrils at the end of its beak as a kiwi does or the mostly green colouration of kea. Traditional evolutionary biologists argue that such a significant adaptation is the result of an enormous number of very small genetic alterations. What is the probability that such an adaption could evolve as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations? We would need to multiply the probability of a mutation occurring by the probability of this mutation being beneficial and contributing towards the establishment of the adaption and then multiply this product by the probability of the organism possessing the mutation avoiding any unwanted disasters and propagating its genes with such success that the whole species evolves. We would need to perform this calculation for every one of the small genetic alterations needed for the finished adaption to appear and then multiply all the results together. I do not know how to carry out this calculation or even if such a calculation is practicable but it seems likely to me that the probability of such an adaption appearing is absolutely tiny. Furthermore such calculations are complicated by the fact that not only do species change over time but so do the ecological niches they inhabit; the fitness of an organism is contingent on the environment it happens to find itself in at some time. Evolutionary biology requires an assumption that species are ever better adapting themselves to environments that remain static, stable, but in fact the environments are also usually evolving. Insects in the Amazon have evolved to pollinate orchids but orchids have also evolved to be pollinated by insects.
When faced with the extraordinary improbabilities involved in evolution, evolutionary biologists tend to argue that, yes, evolution involves the occurrence of extremely unlikely events, but because evolution occurs over billions of years, extremely unlikely events should be expected to occur frequently enough for evolution to happen. This is the idea behind Dawkins' book Climbing Mount Improbable. My feeling is that the improbabilities involved are so great that billions of years are not long enough. Furthermore we might consider that throughout Earth's history there have often been total environmental resets: the dinosaurs, apart from the ancestors of today's birds, were wiped out by an asteroid or comet and all of today's mammals descend from creatures that were then apparently a bit like squirrels. The natural history of life on Earth seems to involve distinct phases rather than being an orderly, linear process of development. (Something worth mentioning here is the theory of punctuated equilibrium but I won't explore it in this essay.) We cannot explain human evolution by appealing to billions of years of evolution but only to millions of years of evolution. Let's return to evolutionary psychology. Let us consider again the traits mentioned above that are supposed to be genetic, such as male attraction to wide hipped women or the supposed mental ability of men to rotate objects in their minds better than women. These traits are supposed to have appeared, as a result of random mutations, during the period when our ancestors lived in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness. How long was this period? Was it long enough for such significant evolution to occur, for an enormous number of chance mutations to arise for nature to then successfully select? Furthermore we also seem to require an additional assumption – that the natural and cultural environment humans inhabited during this period, their niche, remained mostly static for the whole time; this assumption also seems implausible. If this period of some static Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness did occur but only lasted a couple of hundred thousand years, and perhaps a lot less, as seems realistic, this does not seem to be long enough for modern human nature to evolve.
The arguments I am making are far from ironclad but I believe they are strong enough to buttress my main claim. When mutations occur they do not occur at random and must occur to a number of individuals in a species at the same time. The traditional alternative is too improbable to be credible. And if mutations occur to a number of individuals at the same time and are in some sense purposive it seems that in order to explain evolution we need to invoke something supernatural or immaterial. In making this claim, a claim I will come back to later, I am still conceding to evolutionary biologists their doctrine that genotype determines phenotype. But in the next part of the essay I shall present an argument suggesting that this too is wrong.
Scientists and laypeople alike often tend to imagine that the genome of an organism is a kind of blueprint for the organism. However recent research suggests that the human genome contains less than 20,000 protein-coding genes. (I am not getting this number from Munecat's video because I wasn't able to locate the moment when she mentions it but rather from what I can find online.) Not all genes are protein-coding – some affect how other genes are expressed. A gene can be defined as a sequence of DNA building blocks that performs some function and different people can possess different versions of a gene, known as alleles. For instance, humans all possess a gene for eye-colour but one person can have the blue-eyes allele and another the hazel-eyes allele. (This is a bit of an oversimplification but it conveys the basic idea.) Now consider the following observation about humans. Human beings are constituted by an enormous number of different types of cell: kidney cells, neurones, two types of blood cell, marrow cells, muscle cells, etc. Every cell contains the exact same DNA (except gametes). The DNA in the nucleus of every individual cell would then have to contain instructions for the creation and functioning of every single other type of cell in the body as well as itself. Furthermore it would have to contain instructions for how all these cells fit together so that each of us has two arms, two legs, a liver in the appropriate place, and so on. It would need to contain instructions for all the different parts of the human brain such as the hypothalamus, visual cortex, frontal cortex, and so on, and how they all fit together. Furthermore the more microbiologists investigate individual cells, the more complexity they find even within any one single cell. What I would like to claim here is that 20,000 is not a sufficiently high enough number of protein-coding genes to explain the complexity of a particular human, to be the blueprint for that person.
Let's return to evolutionary psychology. Recall that evolutionary psychologists often operate by noting some apparently universal feature of contemporary human psychology and then seek to explain it by inventing a just-so story of how it was beneficial to our Pleistocene ancestors. What they never do is describe the mechanism by which such a feature has been inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If evolutionary psychologists were really serious, they would try to identify the gene or genes that code for, e.g, sexual attraction and then show how men today generally possess alleles that makes them prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio. They would need to show how some gene codes for some protein that somehow affects the wiring of the brain that somehow makes men find wide-hipped women alluring. They haven't done this. I think that an attraction to wide-hipped women is far too complex to be coded for by DNA sequences, even if we assume that it somehow arises from the combined effect of many genes. It requires a level of complexity that the genome apparently lacks. Even if this mechanism does indeed exist, the science needed to prove that it exists is currently out of reach: we would need some grand synthesis of genetics, psychology, and neuroscience. This failure to describe the genetic mechanism through which psychological traits are transmitted intergenerationally and expressed is the fatal flaw in evolutionary psychology. Munecat does not point out this fatal defect, perhaps because it had simply not occurred to her – it is a pity she omits the objection.
Let us suppose for the sake of the argument that we do resemble our hunter-gatherer ancestors psychologically as well as physically. If the genome is not complex enough to explain the emergence of psychological traits but we have indeed inherited psychological traits from our cavemen ancestors, then logically it must be through some means other than DNA. Perhaps there is some kind of cultural transmission – perhaps boys are subliminally encouraged to prefer wide-hipped women by their parents and peers who were similarly inculcated with this preference by their parents and peers in a chain that can be traced back to the Pleistocene. This would be to assume again, though, that men have always preferred wide-hipped women. Or perhaps there is some kind of immaterial formative influence. This immaterial formative influence would affect the development of organisms physically as well as mentally. Perhaps the blueprint of a human, body and mind, is not to be found in chromosomes but somehow somewhere else. This blueprint would be analogous to a soul. Thinking like this is what led Rupert Sheldrake to come up with his theory of Morphic Resonance and it is helpful to remember that Sheldrake was inspired to arrive at his theory partly by thinking a lot about ontogenesis – it seemed to him, as it seems to me, that the development of an animal from zygote to adult is too complex to be explained simply through orthodox genetics. In this essay I have confined myself almost entirely to humans but these arguments can also be applied to other animals. Weaver birds construct elaborate nests to attract their mates and male birds-of-paradise perform elaborate dances when wooing females. Evolutionary psychologists need to persuade us that these characteristic behaviours are genetically determined somehow – but again in order to properly justify this claim they would need to identify the genes responsible and explain the mechanism that leads to the behaviour as they would need to do for humans. Similarly, they would need to show that the behaviours of dogs, such as guarding properties and wagging their tails when happy, are genetically determined, that the behaviours of cats, such as purring when happy and leaving dead birds on their owners' doorsteps, are genetically determined, and that the behaviour of chimpanzees when making nests is genetically determined. To explain behaviours in terms of DNA is, to put it mildly, challenging, and might be impossible.
Earlier I proposed that when a mutation occurs, it occurs to a number of individuals within a species at the same time and that it is not random but purposive. In this part of the essay, I still conceded to the evolutionary biologists that mutations might be alterations in DNA but in the next part I argued that phenotype can only be partially explained by genotype. This leads me to suggest that we can regard evolution as involving small changes in the phenotype of the whole species that occur almost all at once rather than as resulting from changes in genotype that occur to individuals and then gradually disperse through the whole population. In this spirit we could redefine the term 'mutation' as being some small purposive change in the phenotype of the whole species rather than being a small random change in genotype of an individual. This idea is obviously fairly radical and I am sure that it may annoy and exasperate some of my readers. If Richard Dawkins or Robert Sapolsky were to read this essay, they would probably say that I simply don't understand the science.
I turn now to the next part of the essay, a part concerned more with philosophy than with evolutionary biology. However, as you'll see, the ideas I want to present closely align with the arguments I have made concerning evolution and tend toward a kind of synthesis.
Living organisms are made entirely of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other trace elements. Going deeper, all the stuff we care about, all the material stuff, is made fundamentally of protons, neutrons, and electrons. However, when we look at the world we see natural kinds of things everywhere – we see cats and dogs and pigeons and apple trees and so on. A cat is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons like all other material things but when we look at it we see a cat. Furthermore there is not just one cat in the world but many cats. Although any one cat is at least a little different from any other cat, there are far more resemblances between them than differences. Cats constitute a natural kind. Philosophers describe the fact that a cat seems to have this property, cat-ness, over and above its constituent components as emergence, and there is considerable debate about whether this emergent property exists somehow independently of its substrata or not. I would prefer to say about emergence that we perceive this property, cat-ness, of some things in the world and not of others regardless of whether or not this property is truly emergent. However evolution actually works, it has furnished us with a world of innumerable distinct species and although a horse can breed with a donkey and produce a (sterile) mule, for instance, each distinct species tends to keep to itself reproductively. Cats don't mate with dogs and different species of frogs don't mate with each other or with toads. This brute fact about the natural world, that natural kinds exist, is helpful to humans because it means that our words for different species, words like 'cat' and 'dog', latch onto types of things that we actually observe in the world. The instrumental pragmatic utilisation of language relies on the actual existence of different kinds of thing. Not only are there natural kinds in the world, there are also artifactual kinds, types of things made by people, such as knives and forks and tables and chairs and ovens, and so on. When manufacturing tools and technologies, humans have always found it practically desirable to manufacture distinct types of tool and technology, each of which has a distinct purpose. Again the fact that we craft distinct types of artifact is helpful to humans linguistically; it means the words in our language that denote various artifactual kinds such as 'knife' and 'fork' latch onto types of things that we actually make and find in our world. The languages we created with all their common nouns would be practically useless unless different kinds of things actually existed in the world.
To me there seems a profound mystery about the existence of natural and artifactual kinds of these sorts but when I try to discuss this with people they don't really get why I find it so puzzling. I am not sure if this puzzle should be resolved philosophically or scientifically. One way to make the mystery involved more apparent is to contrast this view with the philosophical position known as mereological nihilism (a position that fascinates Alex O'Conner). Adherents to this view think that tables don't exist – all that exist are arrangements of protons, electrons, and neutrons that taken together give the false impression to human observers that they are looking at tables. The reason I think this view is wrong is that even if you and I disagree about many things, I think we should agree that there are actually cats and dogs and tables in the world. Mereological nihilism involves a rejection of our shared reality, a rejection of common sense. Philosophers sometimes get swept away by bad ideas. A few decades ago, when Postmodernism was more in vogue than it is now, it was common for philosophers and theorists to claim that reality is wholly a linguistic construction but it has for a long time seemed to me that this view involves a denial of the brute observable fact that very many of our words denote natural and artifactual kinds that genuinely do exist. The Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides argued that the world is a single unchanging unity, that plurality and change are illusions, and that we should put all our faith in pure reason rather than sense data – but it seems to me that it would be bad advice to tell someone crossing the street that she should regard the cars driving along it as illusory. Quantum physicists like David Deutsch who favour the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics fail to account for the brute observable fact that we only observe one world rather than an infinite number of all possible worlds all at once. I am certainly not trying to suggest that all received wisdom is correct but in order to get anywhere we need some shared understanding of the world, an understanding based on perception and on the confidence we place in those we trust that they will provide us with accurate information. And this shared understanding should surely involve beliefs in the existence of cats and dogs and tables.
Plato famously proposed that all horses in the world are imperfect copies of an archetypal ideal Horse that exists in some mystical realm of Ideas or Forms. (In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus memorably says: "Horseness is the Whatness of Allhorse.") It is worth remembering that for Plato the world was eternal and unchanging, not in the strong sense defended by Parmenides but rather in a weaker sense – Plato thought that horses had always existed and would always exist in pretty much the same form that they had when he was alive. Plato didn't know about evolution. When we consider that when a craftsman creates an artifactual kind such as a knife or fork or table, he or she has an idea of what he or she is going to make before making it, an abstract generic conception in his or her mind, and so it does not seem wholly irrational to suppose by analogy that the Ideas of the archetypal Cat and Dog and Pigeon and Horse exist first in the mind of some transcendental entity that we can call God. This is one reason why the early Christian theologians liked Plato so much. I certainly don't want to push a Christian metaphysics on people in this essay. However I do want to propose a few speculations concerning a supernatural or mystical explanation for the existence of natural kinds.
What I would like to suggest is that there is some kind of unifying Idea informing or influencing or subsuming every particular natural kind, kinds such as cats and dogs and humans. This Idea has causal power – it influences the development of organisms belonging to the group from conception on and ensures that members of a natural kind more closely resemble each other than members of other species. It can also influence the development of the whole species and even cause one species to evolve into another or into multiple different species. My proposal is not dissimilar to Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance but Sheldrake's theory, as he has admitted himself, does not account for why species change, how novelty or what he calls creativity arises. I would like to suggest that a natural kind such as the cat-kind or dog-kind or human-kind might possess a sort of collective mind or soul or agency that not only produces conformity among members of the species but also directs the evolution of the species in a purposive way. It might also be that the minds or souls of others not included in the species might also affect the Idea of that species: during domestication, humans might have affected or created the Idea of Dog and the Idea of Dog may also have affected the Idea of Human. To reiterate what I said above, when a mutation occurs it must occur to a number of individuals at the same time and for a reason. This may seem an extraordinary proposal to readers because we tend to regard ourselves as independent individuals whereas I am suggesting that humanity has a sort of collective soul that influences the human community mentally and over the long term physically, a sort of hivemind or group intelligence that affects an individual's actions and cognitions and even physical development without the individual person necessarily being consciously aware of it. It is difficult to find the right words to describe this concept but Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious comes close to capturing it. A change in one member of a species instantaneously affects other members of the species. This proposal requires us to accept two notions that scientists and philosophers have tended to find objectionable: top-down-causation and action at a distance. Even though Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation seemed to involve action at a distance, this implication of his theory didn't sit well with him and he said about it, in Principia, "Hypotheses non fingo". Einstein didn't like the notion of action at a distance either and his theory of General Relativity is a theory of gravity that does away with it; as readers remember of course, the main reason Einstein didn't like the direction quantum physics had taken during his lifetime is that it seemed to him to entail "spooky action at a distance". However I have never understood why rational people have found the notion of action at a distance so repugnant. Newton himself was a devout Christian and so presumably believed in an omnipotent and omnipresent God. And today the phenomenon of quantum entanglement has convinced many physicists that some form of action at a distance must indeed exist. (I won't talk about quantum physics again in this essay because I have written about it so many times before except to say, as I have said before, that quantum physics allows for the possibility of top-down causation and action at a distance.)
This theory does indeed hypothesise an almost mystical relationship between language and the world, and there is an notion in linguistics that, whatever your views on evolution, is profoundly relevant to evolution. Saussure distinguished between synchronic and diachronic perspectives on language. The first involves looking at a language at a particular time and is analogous to looking at the natural world now and identifying and cataloguing all the different distinct species in it; the second involves looking at how language changes over time and is analogous to the paleontological perspective in which we seek to describe how one species gradually changes into another or ramifies into more than one species. The synchronic perspective involves looking at the natural world and dividing it into multiple distinct different natural kinds and from this perspective the Platonic conception of multiple natural kinds each ruled by a particular Platonic Idea seems reasonable; from the diachronic perspective however, we cannot draw a sharp line between one Idea and another. This complicates my theory but I shall not attempt to untangle this puzzle here.
It may seem, perversely, that the theory I have proposed could be used to defend something akin to evolutionary psychology and that I have contradicted myself. Even if evolutionary psychologists were to accept that psychological traits do not arise originally from random genetic mutations, they could still argue that modern men and women are influenced by the Idea of Man and the Idea of Woman, the idea of Human generally, and that these Ideas haven't altered significantly since the Pleistocene: the methods of evolutionary psychologists, identifying some supposedly universal modern human psychological trait and then inventing just-so stories about cavemen and cavewomen to explain it, would then still be justified. In my theory however, the Ideas associated with natural kinds can change over time, were not set in stone during some period in prehistory. It may be that some collective soul affects the evolution of a species, as I have suggested, or it may be that not only does the Idea associated with a particular natural kind influence the individuals included within the grouping but that individuals within the group can also influence the Idea, not through being born with random genetic mutations that then gradually disperse through the whole population out but through their actions and intentions. The fact that I alluded to in the first part of the essay, that more and more women are getting into STEM fields, could of course be explained as resulting from the waning power of the patriarchy but it might also be explained by supposing that, partly because of the work of female pioneers, the Idea of Woman has changed and is continuing to change, that it is broadening to allow women to also be good at mathematics and physics. The word "schizophrenic" is almost always considered to denote some sort of natural kind by people and it seems to me that this (false) idea of 'schizophrenic' in the collective imagination actually has a malign influence on people who have been unlucky enough to be labelled with the word, that it affects their behaviours and cognitions – this is because ordinary people generally have a very imprecise and usually inaccurate understanding of the meaning of the word 'schizophrenic' that they almost never explicitly articulate but still indirectly communicate, as Munecat herself does in the part of the video in which she discusses schizophrenia, and this somehow affects 'schizophrenics'. Yet it might be possible to change the meaning of the word or even, as I want to do, get rid of the term 'schizophrenic' entirely. We could start by trying to convince the community that, whatever we might want to agree that it means, the word 'schizophrenic' does not denote a fixed congenital and irremediable natural kind. Perhaps our understanding of words should sometimes yield to ethical considerations.
I'll conclude the essay by saying something about the essay itself. I am well aware that readers who are already sympathetic to the types of argument I have advanced will find it more persuasive than people who have already made up their minds before they read it that Neo-Darwinism is absolutely correct. I am unlikely to change anyone's mind with this essay even though I would like to. My methodology may seem odd – I am using some parts of science, such as the finding that there are less than 20,000 protein-coding genes, to criticise other parts of science, in particular the Modern Synthesis. But any rhetorical argument depends on such cherry picking. If I were to simply reproduce the scientific consensus, assuming such consensus existed, I would be saying nothing new; but nor can I make my argument entirely out of whole cloth. On the one hand I seemed to criticise the Postmodern claim that reality is wholly a linguistic construction by asserting that this claim involves a denial of common sense and then almost immediately pivoted to a position that is arguably quite close to Postmodernism, the claim that our beliefs about the world can affect the world. It would take too long to clarify my position concerning this here in this essay. Relatedly, my use of the Platonic term "Idea" is somewhat ambiguous but I think this ambiguity is productive rather than destructive. Finally it may seem that my general thesis in this essay contradicts the theory I elaborated in a recent essay, "The Meaning of Meaning". That earlier essay was far more cynical, far more materialist than this one. It possessed a kind of nihilistic sensibility we associate with Nietzsche and the Postmodern theorists he influenced. However it has seemed to me for a long time that the natural successor to Postmodernism is some sort of mysticism, that this is the next natural development in this line of thought. Although my thesis is in some sense mystical, it is not religious; generally the reason religious people embrace theism is that they hope religious faith will guarantee them personal immortality and my thesis doesn't imply anything about personal immortality at all. It may be that I will be able to reconcile the thesis of this essay and the theory I proposed in "The Meaning of Meaning" in a later essay.
One final thing, something to do with my life which should be not taken as part of the essay but which I am mentioning just in case some readers might be interested. Just over a fortnight ago I had an appointment with my psychiatrist. For some time I have been on the lowest possible dosage of Olanzapine offered, 210mgs a month. At this appointment, my psychiatrist was willing to let me go off medication entirely but, partly because my parents are chary about complete discontinuation, I have arranged to take 210mgs every six weeks for the next several months. This apparently means I have gone "off label". I don't mind this too much. I believe I have "recovered", in fact believe that I recovered a long time ago, but the issue here is that because it is almost impossible to define the term "schizophrenia", it is consequently almost impossible to define the term "recovery". My psychiatrist wants to describe me as a "high functioning schizophrenic" I think because psychiatrists are generally unwilling to admit that it might be possible to recover from schizophrenia. If they did, the whole of psychiatry would fall apart. The psychiatrists themselves lack an adequate definition for the word "schizophrenic" and even less of a definition for the term "high functioning schizophrenic" but still this is the term my psychiatrist wants to attach to me. I feel slightly uneasy that I may have to live with the label "high functioning schizophrenic" for the rest of my life even when I am no longer taking medication but I may have no other option. It may be that I should write a post sometime soon concerning the term "recovery" and how and when it happened to me, to help others and to influence psychiatry generally, If I feel comfortable enough to write about this, I may make it the subject of the next post.
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