Richard Dawkins... an Enemy of Reason?

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Originally posted by Stephen Brown
Well I'm familiar with Harry Potter, but it doesn't make me an expert in Wichcraft.

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Maybe you're right, I dunno. My point was not to prove some truth about gender roles. If those behind the genome project can crack this problem then good on 'em. I'm not out to rain on anyone's parade, but I do worry about zealots of whatever persuasion.

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There are religious zealots and political zealots and maybe some of Dawkins supporers are zealots as well. The way some people idolise him does remind me of the way some looked to, for example, Marx as someone who has provided the ultimate answer.

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Also, there is no single unified social scientific method that Adama speaks of. There are several mutually incompatible methods w ithin sociology that are different from those of psychology, which in turn differs from an thropology.

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The point is Adama is that you're not the only one who seeks the truth, I just think you might be wrong. But by making yourself out to have some priviliged position with regard 'the truth' because you've read all of Dawkins' books is unconvincing, as is the assertion that you are familiar with social sciences before attributing propositions to them that are patantly untrue.

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The Standard Social Science Model's Treatment of Culture
This logic has critically shaped how nearly every issue has been approached and debated in the social sciences. What we are concerned with here, however, is the impact of the Standard Social Science Model on the development of modern conceptions of culture, its causal role in human life, and its relationship to psychology. Briefly, standard views of culture are organized according to the following propositions (see also D. E. Brown, 1991, p. 146; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989a):

I. Particular human groups are properly characterized typologically as having "a" culture, which consists of widely distributed, or nearly group-universal behavioral practices, beliefs, ideational systems, systems of significant symbols, or informational substance of some kind. Cultures are more or less bounded entities, although cultural elements may diffuse across boundaries.
2. These common elements are maintained and transmitted "by the group," an entity that has cross-generational continuity.

3. The existence of separate streams of this informational substance, culture, transmitted from generation to generation, is the explanation for human within-group similarities and between-group differences. In fact, all between- group differences in thought and behavior are referred to as cultural differences and all within-group similarities are regarded as the expressions of a particular culture. Since these similarities are considered to be "cultural," they are, either implicitly or explicitly, considered to be the consequence of informational substance inherited jointly from the preceding generation by all who display the similarity.

4. Unless other factors intervene, the culture (like the gene pool) is accurately replicated from generation to generation.

5. This process is maintained through learning, a well-understood and unitary process that acts to make the child like the adult of her culture.

6. This process of learning can be seen, from the point of view of the group, as a group-organized process called socialization, imposed by the group on the child.

7. The individual is the more or less passive recipient of her culture and is the product of that culture.

8. What is organized and contentful in the minds of individuals comes from culture and is socially constructed. The evolved mechanisms of the human mind are themselves content-independent and content-free and, therefore, what- ever content exists in human minds originally derives from the social or (sometimes) nonsocial environment.

9. The features of a particular culture are the result of emergent group-level processes, whose determinants arise at the group level and whose outcome is not given specific shape or content by human biology, human nature, or any inherited psychological design. These emergent processes, operating at the sociocultural level, are the ultimate generator of the significant organization, both mental and social, that is found in human affairs.

10. In discussing culture, one can safely neglect a consideration of psychology as anything other than the nondescript "black box" of learning, which provides the capacity for culture. Learning is a sufficiently specified and powerful explanation for how any behavior acquires its distinct structure and must be the explanation for any aspect of organized human life that varies from individual to individual and from group to group.

11. Evolved, "biological," or "innate" aspects of human behavior or psychological organization are negligible, having been superseded by the capacity for culture. The evolution of the capacity for culture has led to a flexibility in human behavior that belies any significant "instinctual" or innate component (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Montagu, 1968, p. II; Sahlins, 1976a &b), which, if it existed, would have to reveal itself as robot like rigid behavioral universals. To the extent that there may be any complex biological textures to individual psychology, these are nevertheless organized and given form and direction by culture and, hence, do not impart any substantial character or content to culture.



On the Reasonableness of the Standard Social Science Model
There are, of course, many important elements of truth in the tenets of the SSSM, both in its core logic and in its treatment of culture. The SSSM would not have become as decisively influential if it did not have a strong surface validity, anchored in important realities. For example: It is true that infants are everywhere the same. Genetic differences are superficial. There is within-group similarity of behavior and there are between-group differences, and these persist across generations, but also change over historical time. Highly organized socially communicated information exists outside of any particular individual at anyone time (in the cognitive mechanisms of other individuals), and over time this information can be internalized by the specific individual in question. And so on.

Nevertheless, the Standard Social Science Model contains a series of major defects that act to make it, as a framework for the social sciences, deeply misleading. As a result, it has had the effect of stunting the social sciences, making them seem falsely autonomous from the rest of science (i.e., from the "natural sciences") and precluding work on answering questions that need to be answered if the social sciences are to make meaningful progress as sciences. After a century, it is time to reconsider this model in the light of the new knowledge and new understanding that has been achieved in evolutionary biology, development, and cognitive science since it was first formulated.. These defects cluster into several major categories, but we will limit our discussion to the following three:

I. The central logic of the SSSM rests on naive and erroneous concepts drawn from outmoded theories of development. For example, the fact that some aspect of adult mental organization is absent at birth has no bearing on whether it is part of our evolved architecture. Just as teeth' or breasts are absent at birth, and yet appear through maturation, evolved psychological mechanisms or modules (complex structures that are functionally organized for processing information) could develop at any point in the life cycle. For this reason, the many features of adult mental organization absent at birth need not be attributed to exposure to transmitted culture, but may come about through a large number of causal avenues not considered in traditional analyses.

2. More generally, the SSSM rests on a faulty analysis of nature-nurture issues, stemming from a failure to appreciate the role that the evolutionary process plays in organizing the relationship between our species-universal genetic endowment, our evolved developmental processes, and the recurring features of developmental environments. To pick one misunderstanding out of a multitude, the idea that the phenotype can be partitioned dichotomously into genetically determined and environmentally determined traits is deeply ill-formed, as is the notion that traits can be arrayed along a spectrum according to the degree that they are genetically versus environmentally caused. The critique of the SSSM that has been emerging from the cognitive and evolutionary communities is not that traditional accounts have underestimated the importance of biological factors relative to environmental factors in human life. Instead, the target is the whole framework that assumes that "biological factors" and "environmental factors" refer to mutually exclusive sets of causes that exist in some kind of explanatory zero-sum relationship, so that the more one explains "bio- logically" the less there is to explain "socially" or "environmentally. " On the contrary, as we will discuss, environmentalist claims necessarily require the existence of a rich, evolved cognitive architecture.

3. The Standard Social Science Model requires an impossible psychology. Results out of cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, linguistics, and philosophy converge on the same conclusion: A psychological architecture that consisted of nothing but equipotential, general-purpose, content-independent, or content-free mechanisms could not successfully perform the tasks the human mind is known to perform or solve the adaptive problems humans evolved to solve-from seeing, to learning a language, to recognizing an emotional expression, to selecting a mate, to the many disparate activities aggregated under the term "learning culture" (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989a). It cannot account for the behavior observed, and it is not a type of design that could have evolved.

The alternative view is that the human psychological architecture contains many evolved mechanisms that are specialized for solving evolutionarily Iong-enduring adaptive problems and that these mechanisms content-specialized representational formats, procedures, cues, and so on. These richly content-sensitive evolved mechanisms tend to impose certain types of content and conceptual organization on human mental life and, hence, strongly shape the nature of human social life and what is culturally transmitted across generations. Indeed, a post-Standard Model psychology is rapidly coalescing, giving a rapidly expanding empirical foundation to this new framework. In fact, historically, most of the data already gathered by psychologists supports such a view. It required a strongly canalized interpretative apparatus to reconcile the raw data of psychology with the central theoretical tenets of SSSM psychology.

Before examining in detail what is wrong with the SSSM and why the recognition of these defects leads to the formulation of anew model with greater explanatory power, it is necessary first to alleviate the fears of what would happen if one "falls off the edge" of the intellectual world created by the SSSM. These fears have dominated how alternative approaches to the SSSM have been treated in the past and, unless addressed, will prevent alternatives from being fairly evaluated now. Moreover, the Standard Model has become so well-internalized and has so strongly shaped how we now experience and interpret social science phenomena that it will be difficult to free ourselves of the preconceptions that the Standard Model imposes until its Procrustean operations on psychology and anthropology are examined.

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Progress has been severely limited because the Standard Social Science Model mischaracterizes important avenues of causation, induces researchers to study complexly chaotic and unordered phenomena, and misdirects study away from areas where rich principled phenomena are to be found. In place of the Standard Social Science Model, there is emerging a new framework that we will call the Integrated Causal Model. This alternative framework makes progress possible by accepting and exploiting the natural connections that exist among all the branches of science, using them to construct careful analyses of the causal interplay among all the factors that bear on a phenomenon. In this alternative framework, nothing is autonomous and all the components of the model must mesh.

In this chapter, we argue the following points:

I. There is a set of assumptions and inferences about humans, their minds, and their collective interaction-the Standard Social Science Model-that has pro- vided the conceptual foundations of the social sciences for nearly a century and has served as the intellectual warrant for the isolationism of the social sciences.

2. Although certain assumptions of this model are true, it suffers from a series of major defects that make it a profoundly misleading framework. These defects have been responsible for the chronic difficulties encountered by the social sciences.

3. Advances in recent decades in a number of different disciplines, including evolutionary biology, cognitive science, behavioral ecology, psychology, hunter- gatherer studies, social anthropology, biological anthropology, primatology, and neurobiology have made clear for the first time the nature of the phenomena studied by social scientists and the connections of those phenomena to the principles and findings in the rest of science. This allows anew model to be constructed-the Integrated Causal Model-to replace the Standard Social Science Model.

4. Briefly, the ICM connects the social sciences to the rest of science by recognizing that:

a. the human mind consists of a set of evolved information-processing mechanisms instantiated in the human nervous system;

b. these mechanisms, and the developmental programs that produce them, are adaptations, produced by natural selection over evolutionary time in ancestral environments;

c. many of these mechanisms are functionally specialized to produce behavior that solves particular adaptive problems, such as mate selection, language acquisition, family relations, and cooperation;

d. to be functionally specialized, many of these mechanisms must be richly structured in a content-specific way;

e. content-specific information-processing mechanisms generate some of the particular content of human culture, including certain behaviors, artifacts, and linguistically transmitted representations;

f. the cultural content generated by these and other mechanisms is then present to be adopted or modified by psychological mechanisms situated in other members of the population;

g. this sets up epidemiological and historical population-level processes; and

h. these processes are located in particular ecological, economic, demographic, and intergroup social contexts or environments.

On this view, culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. Culture and human social behavior is complexly variable, but not because the human mind is a social product, a blank slate, or an externally programmed general-purpose computer, lacking a richly defined evolved structure. Instead, human culture and social behavior is richly variable because it is generated by an incredibly intricate, contingent set of functional programs that use and process information from the world, including information that is pro- vided both intentionally and unintentionally by other human beings.

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Yes, the social science evidence might be wrong, course it might, but your assertion that there isn't a lot of it is ludicrous. Have you been in a library recently? You can't shift for this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I have a problem with much of it, but I can't make it go away by pretending it doesn't exist!

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Now maybe she didn't know Dawkins as well as she might, but I suspect what you think is a matter of refutation is really simply opposing one theory with another. Or maybe I'm wrong.

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Vigilae - I agree with you. One of the big criticisms of Dawkins is that his work is full of non sequitors as he moves from science to politics in a populist simplistic manner. "The Selfish Gene" is full of this stuff. And to be honest, his attack on religion is cheap. Saying religion is irrational would have been startling and original in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now its just banal. Religion is a matter of faith not science, and by criticising religion for not being science is a category error.

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The social science tradition of categorizing everything that varies as "nonbiological" fails to identify much that is "biological." This is because anthropologists have chosen ill-suited frames of reference (such as those based on surface "behavior" or reflective "meaning") that accentuate variability and obscure the underlying level of universal evolved architecture. There may be good reasons to doubt that the "behavior" of marriage is a cross-cultural universal or that the articulated "meaning" , of gender is the same across all cultures, but there is every reason to think that every human ( of a given sex) comes equipped with the same basic evolved design (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a). The critical question is not, for example, whether every human male in every culture engages in jealous behaviors or whether mental representations attached to situations of extra-pair mating are the same in every culture; instead, the most illuminating question is whether every human male comes endowed with developmental programs that are designed to assemble (either conditionally or regardless of normal environmental variation) evolutionarily designed sexual jealousy mechanisms that are then present to be activated by appropriate cues. To discern and rescue this underlying universal design out of the booming, buzzing confusion of observable human phenomena requires selecting appropriate analytical tools and frames of reference.

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