Work in this field began with Aleksandr Oparin (1894-1980), a renowned Soviet biochemist who postulated that a young and cooling earth possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. Oparin asserted that these were the raw materials for the evolution of “life” (like many biochemists, Oparin rejected any strict separation between life and non-life). Over time, and with energy inputs from lightning, magma, and radiation, chemicals can combine in ways that led to colloidal enlargement, stability, and perhaps even replication.

Although Oparin never conducted experiments along the lines he suggested in Origin of Life (1938), his ideas were championed by Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winning chemist at the University of Chicago. In 1952, Urey published “On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life,” in which he offered explanations for the initial formation of organic compounds and suggested experiments involving methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and an electrical charge (simulating lightning).

It was not long before one of Urey’s graduate students, Stanley Miller, conducted an experiment mimicking the hypothesized conditions of early earth. Miller built a laboratory apparatus containing a mixture of water, hydrogen, ammonia and methane, all of which were early earth ingredients. He then introduced electricity (“lightning”) in the form of 60,000 volt sparks, and trapped the resulting gases in a filter. When he analyzed the contents, Miller found that the molecules had combined into new and larger configurations. Four such configurations were amino acids, which are constituent components of proteins.  The Miller-Urey experiments were widely accepted as a model of prebiotic synthesis.

Subsequent electrical-discharge experiments by prebiotic researchers have produced additional amino acids, and remarkably, the constituent elements of both RNA and DNA. Oro and Kimball synthesized adenine from hydrogen cyanide and ammonia. Sanchez and colleagues synthesized cyanoacetylene, a source for the pyrimidine bases uracil and cytosine, from a mixture of methane and nitrogen. Research into prebiotic chemistry continues unabated, with an ever increasing variety of precursor organics being produced in the laboratory, and multiple pathways to the formation of RNA and DNA being suggested. The long and short of all this research is that there are many plausible chemical paths to the formation of things that contain RNA/DNA and which produce proteins.

Plausible is not, however, either probable or provable and the gap from there to here is, even today, immense. This gap is fraught with difficulty, perhaps none more so than the issue of replication. Two of the primary issues surrounding replication are metabolism and autcatalysis. Self-sustaining chemical reactions are unusual, requiring both energy sources and catalytic enzymes. When all prebiotic combinations and conditions are considered together, the emerging consensus revolves around three scenarios: (1) synthesis in a reducing atmosphere; (2) organic inputs from meteorites or comets; and (3) synthesis of metal sulfides in deep sea vents.

What all these hypotheses all have in common is a strictly material, physical and chemical cause resulting in a molecule that replicates itself. This replicating molecule,  composed of sugar, phosphate and five acid bases, is uniquely vital: “A fundamental property of living systems is that they have a chemical basis for storage of genetic information. RNA, DNA and other nucleic-acid-like compounds are informational macromolecules that have inherent template properties and so lend themselves in a straightforward way to both storing information and replicating it.”

Given the pace and innovation of research into origins, it seems just a matter of time before life is produced in a laboratory. When that happens, the Designer will be pushed back even further in time, with the Big Bang being the obvious point of retreat.

Reference:

Urey, Harold. (1952). On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 38 (4), 351-363 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.38.4.351

Peretó J (2005). Controversies on the origin of life. International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, 8 (1), 23-31 PMID: 15906258

Joyce, G. (1989). RNA evolution and the origins of life Nature, 338 (6212), 217-224 DOI: 10.1038/338217a0

Orgel LE (1998). The origin of life–a review of facts and speculations. Trends in biochemical sciences, 23 (12), 491-5 PMID: 9868373

Philosophy and cosmology have long been linked and in some ways are the same subject. Knowing this, it is slightly odd to see a piece over at the Atlantic subtitled “The New Philosophy of Cosmology.” Because philosophy has been doing cosmology for a long time, this implies that it is now doing it some new kind of way. Perhaps. It could be that theoretical physics has run up against a wall and philosophy is required to re-think foundations and ask fresh questions.

Several such questions were posed to NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, who had some interesting things to say. I encourage you to read the entire interview but want to extract these nuggets for brief comment:

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.

This has long been one of my pet peeves: just because mathematics can accurately describe and predict certain things, it doesn’t mean that the universe or reality is itself nothing more than the unfolding of some quantitative essence. In fact there many things that math can’t describe or predict. Math is an incredibly useful and revealing technique for describing certain aspects of the universe; it does not constitute reality. Math is not a metaphorical god, though the theologically inclined often fall into this kind of tautological thinking.

In another portion of the interview, Maudlin comments on evolutionary process:

When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you’ll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value.

We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

Here Maudlin describes another error often made by the theologically inclined. An anthropocentric view which places humans at the center of everything creates the illusion that evolution is directed toward some goal. It isn’t. Life began on earth some 3 billion years ago and after 3 billion years of evolution, the vast majority of life forms remains simple. We live in a microbial world, not an intelligent one.

If microbes could write evolutionary history, things would look much different. In the absence of such a history the next best thing is Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House (1997), which shatters the illusion that evolution is progressive. The greatest frequency of life on earth, in terms of biomass and diversity, remains firmly against the left wall of minimal complexity, close to where it began:

Graph Depicts Mode or Frequency of Both Past and Present Life Forms on Earth

The preceding post prompted this observation from my blogging friend Tom Rees: “The graph does show that evolution is directional. Complex brains have to build on less complex brains.” Without the accompanying text from Gould’s Full House, I see how it could be interpreted this way. So let me summarize and gloss the arguments which explain the graph:

Directional evolution is in the eye of the human (or primate or mammal) beholder. The mode of life — its greatest frequency, biomass, and diversity — is up against (or near) the left wall of non-complexity. It started there, and after evolving for over 3 billion years, it has remained there. This doesn’t look very directional.

Toward the left side of non-complexity and non-intelligence, we have microbes and, moving toward the right, we have insects. In terms of numbers, species, biomass, and diversity, these are the dominant forms of life on earth. These forms are still evolving, but they aren’t evolving towards complexity or intelligence.

Our multicellular prejudice — our love for big things that we can easily observe — causes us to focus on the right side of complexity and intelligence, and then claim that these relatively few and non-diverse species indicate evolution is directional. I don’t see how we can justify this argument.

Isolating a single and uncommon strand of evolution, such as the right tail of complexity or intelligence, doesn’t make evolution directional to the right. The fact remains that the isolated right tail of evolution is dwarfed by the diversity and mass of life to the left, which is non-complex and non-intelligent. This mass of life to the left has not been static either; it too has evolved — it just hasn’t evolved towards complexity or intelligence.

I’m not sure what the rationale or argument would be for mono-focusing on the right tail, which is an evolutionary outlier, and not considering everything to the left. If we look at the whole or entire picture of evolutionary life, it is non-directional. If evolution were directional, then all forms of life would show movement toward the right or towards multi-cellularity, complexity, sentience, and intelligence. That hasn’t happened and isn’t happening.

Have complexity and intelligence evolved? Yes. Does this mean evolution is directional? No.

The authors investigated infant sensitivity to fairness and willingness to share using two experiments. In the first, infants watched a film showing someone dispensing milk and crackers to two people sitting at a table. In one scene there was a fair or equal distribution and in another the distribution was unfair or unequal. This is a standard “violation of expectations” or VOE paradigm in which infants look significantly longer at something that surprises them. The second experiment was a straightforward sharing task in infants were given two toys so they could express a preference for one. They were then asked to share a toy. The infants could choose to share the preferred toy, the other toy, or none.

In the first test, the infants looked significantly longer at the lopsided outcome. This suggests that the unfair distribution sequence violated their expectations of third-party fairness. In the second test, 68% of the infants shared at least one toy. Of these sharers, 32% shared the preferred toy and 37% shared the other toy. Remarkably, the altruistic sharers also looked at the unfair film longer than their non-sharing counterparts. Natural sharers appear to expect fairness in others and are surprised when it isn’t forthcoming.

The authors were testing the hypothesis that fairness and sharing appear early (and reliably) in development as a result of selection: “At an evolutionary level such preferences may have been crucial for our hominin ancestors to enable and maintain cooperation in small groups, and later, in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, to introduce norms (e.g., how to share spoils after a group hunt) that fostered group cohesion, and to motivate group members to enforce those norms.” These traits, in other words, would have been adaptive in both ancestral and later environments.

These findings support the hypothesis. By 15 months of age, infants have at least a rudimentary sense of fairness and expect resources to be shared equally. A basic sense of altruism is already prevalent at this early stage of development. This suggests to the authors that “infants evaluate events along morally relevant dimensions” before they receive cultural training reinforcing these tendencies.

Infants are not little devils and indeed appear to be part angel. But as all parents know, they can be a bit of both at times. Because neither purity nor impurity accurately describes infants, the best representation might be this:

Reference:

Schmidt, Marco, & Sommerville, Jessica (2011). Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants PLoS ONE, 6 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023223

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

From war, famine, and death, we get exaltation and grandeur? This has always been a bit much for those who don’t have Richard Dawkins’ nerves of steel. And for religious evolutionists, it raises the vexing issue of theodicy. Why would Omnibenevolence create through overproduction, struggle, suffering, and destruction?

"Nature Red in Tooth and Claw" by Nigel Fletcher-Jones

These are troubling questions for those who seriously contemplate the Janus-face of evolution. The dialectic of creation and destruction can be disturbing. Look at one face and see joyous creation. Look at the other and see harrowing destruction. It is all matter of perspective and focus. I suspect that constitutional optimists fixate on creation and constitutional pessimists on destruction.

One of the great 19th century pessimists was German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who wrote before Darwin published the Origin but seems to have anticipated one possible reaction to an evolutionary view of life:

Schopenhauer had concluded that existence is utterly unjustifiable and valueless, except in the negative sense that the inevitable preponderance of suffering endows it with an actual disvalue; and that, for anyone who considers the matter soberly and clearsightedly, oblivion must be acknowledged to be preferable to life.

Schopenhauer’s reason for taking this darkly pessimistic position was that in his view existence in general and life in particular are characterized by ceaseless struggle and striving, inevitably resulting in destruction (among sentient forms of life) involving incessant suffering of one sort or another. The whole affair, as he saw it, is quite pointless, since nothing of any value is thereby attained (the perpetuation of life merely continuing the striving and suffering).

No transcendent purposes are thereby served; no pleasures, enjoyments, or satisfactions attainable can suffice to overbalance the sufferings life involves…and so life stands condemned at the bar of evaluative judgment. It is, in a word, absurd. (Schacht 1995:130).

After reading Darwin and recognizing that this view of life cannot simply or glibly be dismissed, Nietzsche was galvanized. He spent the better part of his productive life grappling with these issues, which aren’t so easily resolved as some would like to suppose.

Reference:

Schacht, Richard. 1995. Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

CONAN: In particular, I was fascinated to read that some genetic evidence, DNA, was investigated by some of these Christian scholars and say, wait a minute, there’s no way you can have the diversity of human beings we have on the planet if you start with two people.

HAGERTY: Yeah, that’s right. They say now that we’ve mapped the human genome, it is clear that modern humans emerged from other primates way before the timeframe of Genesis, you know, like 100,000 years ago. And they say given the genetic variation, we can’t possibly get the original population to below about 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

While it is nice to know that some Christian scholars are finally acknowledging the genetic evidence which makes the Adam and Eve origins story impossible, the relatively recent mapping of the human genome did not demonstrate that modern humans “emerged from other primates way before the timeframe of Genesis…like 100,000 years ago.”

Human are primates with a long evolutionary history; our lineage separated from our closest relative primate lineage some 5-6 million years ago. The genus Homo is approximately 2 million years old. We have known these things for quite a long time. Fossils are amazing that way.

This quibble aside, Christian literalists and progressives have been arguing about Genesis and evolution for well over a hundred years. If the testy exchanges between Harlow and Mohler are any indication, they aren’t any closer to resolution. For those who are required by their Christian faith to make a decision, I can see the difficulties.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

There is something weirdly compelling about Mohler’s argument that if Christians jettison a literal Genesis because science compels it, then a bunch of other important biblical stuff — like the resurrection and miracles — have to go too. The slope can get slippery in a hurry once you start deciding that some supernatural things happened but others didn’t. But then Harlow’s rejoinder, which is ably stated in his article “After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science,” is compelling too.

Fortunately, I don’t have to make these kinds of decisions.

I remember thinking the book would appeal primarily to those who were vaguely hostile to religion, but didn’t know why. In Breaking the Spell (“BS”), they would find professional confirmation that their hostility was justified. But they still wouldn’t know why. At least they would be able to say that some really smart guy, a philosophy professor at Tufts, had somehow confirmed their suspicions.

During the ensuing years, I haven’t given the book much thought. I neither recommended it nor loaned my copy. Recently, however, I stumbled across Armin Geertz’s extraordinary review of BS: “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Geertz, professor of religious history and cognition at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, rips Dennett using language not often seen in academic journals:

A recent book by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) is a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious! Dennett seems to be hellishly bent on turning his readers off.

I used to think that philosophers by definition are sophisticated thinkers, gifted in the art of persuasive argument, valiantly exposing hidden assumptions and opaque meanings. But I am wrong. What Dennett has done is a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.

Geertz’s trashing made me wonder: What did others say about BS? They were not kind.

In The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Dennett to task for not distinguishing between the past and present: “And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins?  “Breaking the Spell” is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism.” This is a poignant question, one not contemplated by evolutionary scholars of religion who (mistakenly) believe that the current functions of religion explain past origins.

Dennett’s problem is he believes everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Like David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, Dennett thinks evolution is a unified meta-theory. It isn’t, for one simple reason: cultures are not organisms. While Darwinian monism may be simple and satisfying, it is wrong.

In another harsh review of BS (Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark), Daniel Hart explains why:

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative.

This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the presupposition that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer is of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect.

When evolutionary theory is applied to culture change, we are dealing in metaphors and analogues. Societies do not evolve; they have histories. The sooner we stop talking about memes and “cultural evolution” the better. Time to break the spell.

Reference:

Geertz, A. (2008). How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260232

These mistakes are the result of methodological ignorance or carelessness. In an ideal world, anyone who writes on the evolution of religion would be required to read Michael Ghiselin’s The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969). Many errors could thus be avoided.

“Good scientific investigations employ critical tests of hypotheses by serious attempts to refute them. They do not involve simply amassing data consistent with a particular interpretation, oblivious to whether or not the facts are equally consistent another hypothesis.” (239)

“It is easy to see how a psychologist, attempting to give evolutionary meaning to his data, would tend to use habits of thought quite different from those employed by Darwin. The natural inclination would be to impose an oversimplified evolutionary rationalization upon the observations. The evolutionary theorist, on the other hand, would look at the facts in order to confirm or refute the predictions of his hypothesis.” (210)

Those who do not follow this method (hypothesize, predict, confirm-refute) “completely miss the point of Darwin’s argument: behavioral properties may be mixtures of adaptations and historical accidents.” (211)

“Darwin thought that many behavioral phenomena have resulted through accidents of history comparable to the pleiotropic effects which he discoursed upon at such great length. He did not believe, as many have believed, that all behavior patterns have some adaptive significance, say, as directly serviceable or communicative.” (205)

“It is perfectly true that if a group of organisms had some property, the survival of that group would be favored once the property had been evolved; but this does not explain how that property might have originated.” (57)

The failure to take these ideas seriously has led to a great deal of unrestrained and imaginative storytelling about the “evolution of religion,” unencumbered by more compelling and parsimonious hypotheses that have non-speculative support in the historical record.

One might think that after decades of well-deserved criticism, overly enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists had learned some restraint. While most have, some stalwarts persist. Super-freak Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, recently caused an uproar by claiming that “black” women are less attractive than other women. He posted this drivel over at Psychology Today, which removed the offending article and belatedly terminated Kanazawa’s blog.

Fearing that Kanazawa was further sullying evolutionary psychology’s (EP) already dim reputation, 68 researchers who use evolutionary approaches to human behavior published an open letter criticizing Kanazawa. The letter, which astutely states that Kanazawa’s “work demonstrates a poor understanding of evolutionary theory, a disregard for data quality, and inappropriate interpretation of statistical techniques,” is posted over at Evolutionary Psychology (a peer reviewed journal) and it says this about peer review:

The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa’s poor quality work. Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals.

This is an interesting statement signed by editors of the journal that on May 10, 2011, published Jared Reser’s article “Conceptualizing the Autism Spectrum in Terms of Natural Selection and Behavioral Ecology: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis.” Reser hypothesizes that the “genes contributing to autism were selected and maintained because they facilitated solitary subsistence.” What follows is so bizarre and flawed it is hard to know where to begin.

Although Reser pays brief homage to parsimony and observes that autism “may appear” to be maladaptive, he never addresses the parsimonious possibility that autism is in fact maladaptive. Reser apparently is unfamiliar with antagonistic pleiotropy, a basic concept in evolutionary biology whereby selection on a single gene influences multiple phenotypic traits, some beneficial and others harmful. Autism, like senescence and cancer, seems like a good candidate for such an effect.

But EP’s a priori commitment to the Panglossian Paradigm — “If It Exists It Must Be Adaptive” — prevents Reser from considering pleiotropy or, horror of horrors, spandrels. Instead he rushes in to consider far more outlandish scenarios, all based in an imaginary and non-existent ancestral past. You know the one: “At some time and some place during the last 6 million years of hominin evolution, there must have been selection pressure for [insert modern trait].” Followed by the ineluctable just-so story: “This explains [insert modern trait].”

The imaginary past Reser postulates for this particular story is the one where difficult conditions during the Plio-Pleistocene forced social hominins to split up, living and foraging all by their lonesomes. Because they are asocial, Reser imagines that autistics would have been better adapted for this kind of solitary existence. Or as Reser puts it:

Individuals on the autism spectrum are described here as having had the potential to be self-sufficient and capable foragers in scenarios marked by diminished social contact. In other words, these individuals, unlike neurotypical humans, would not have been obligately social and may have been predisposed toward taking up a relatively solitary lifestyle.

Here, we have to suspend disbelief and ignore several inconvenient facts. There is no physiological, archaeological, or ethnographic evidence suggesting that human ancestors or humans have ever lived and foraged independently. Indeed, precisely the opposite is true and hominin evolutionary success is usually attributed to extraordinary sociality. Although Reser’s vision of solitary foraging is essentially Hobbesian, at least Hobbes understood the unfit consequences: “no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Reser will have none of this and imagines the “natural” past as being superior to the “artificial” present, at least for autistics:

In a natural environment though, it is likely that hunger would have motivated [autistics] to redirect their obsessive tendencies toward food procurement. Today, their hunger for food does not drive them to refine food procurement techniques because their parents feed them every time they are hungry….Because the compelling and coercing natural instinct of hunger does not actuate or motivate modern individuals with autism, their efforts and skills are misplaced onto irrelevant stimuli….Perhaps, when children with autism ignore their parent’s examples of social behavior today, it is because these examples seem uninteresting and meaningless, whereas in the ancestral past they would have been inspired by their parent’s hunting and gathering activities.

Oh, how we long for the ancestral past when hunger pangs and the food quest made everything so stimulating and relevant! Warming to his theme, Reser suggests that autistic children in modern society are placed in “unnatural or confining environments” and thus behave like caged animals. The shocking conclusion Reser draws from this is one for the ages:

This may indicate that the living conditions that many young individuals with autism experience are artificial, and possibly inhumane, as they are not as stimulating or motivating as the wild environment that they are born expecting.

Read that again; I am not making it up. First, Reser insults parents of autistic children and suggests their living conditions are stultifying and “inhumane.” Second, he claims that unborn autistic children expect to be delivered into a “wild environment” and are bewildered when they find themselves plopped into “artificial” modern environments.

I wish I could report that Reser’s article gets better but it doesn’t. He suggests that autistics are like orangutans in their penchant for being alone (supposedly evidence of a similar “adaptation”), claims that social skills are maladaptive in solitary settings, and speculates that “higher testosterone levels in autistic males may have increased their sexual aggressiveness as well as their sexual attractiveness.” This is just the tip of the iceberg and it only gets worse (never mind the grammar and spelling errors such as “moray” instead of “more” for social conventions). The strings of unsupported conjecture and disconnected speculation are truly jaw dropping.

Presumably, Reser’s therapeutic recommendation for parents of children with autism would be to send the kids to foraging camp, making sure they are hungry upon arrival. There, they can direct their energies and attention toward productive and stimulating things, like food, water, and shelter. They might even get lucky.

In the end, Reser’s article provides another example of everything that is wrong with certain kinds of evolutionary psychology. It is almost as if he deliberately decided to ignore all critiques of EP and write something outrageous. If so, he succeeded. So much for peer review.

Reference:

Reser, Jared E. (2011). Conceptualizing the Autism Spectrum in Terms of Natural Selection and Behavioral Ecology: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (2), 207-238.

When it comes to some versions of evolutionary psychology, everything seems to fit and make perfect adaptive sense. This has caused many scholars to dismiss evolutionary psychologists as “just so” storytellers. While a wholesale dismissal of evolutionary psychology is too extreme, we would do well to recall precisely what it is about the discipline that lends itself so readily to the spinning of elaborate yarns.

In 2000, neuroscientists Jaak and Jules Panksepp published “The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology” in Evolution and Cognition. Although several prominent evolutionary psychologists were asked to comment on the article, all declined. What were the alleged sins leading to this demurral?

1. The Sin of Time Travel: Evolutionary psychologists engage in “creative speculations” about Plio-Pleistocene environments and selection pressures that may or may not have any relevance to current human social adaptations.

2. The Sin of Species Centrism: Because evolutionary psychologists focus on humans and ignore features of brain-mind that we share with all mammals and primates, they “construct intellectual houses of cards” that appear to be (but which are not) uniquely human.

3. The Sin of Adaptationism: Although most scientists have become sensitized to the perils of Panglossian thinking, evolutionary psychologists ignore the neuroscientific evidence for massive, general purpose cortical tissue and the “exaptations and spandrels” that are the result.

4. The Sin of Massive Modularity: While it is obvious that humans have innate faculties or “modules” for basic sensory perceptions and motor functions, there is little to no evidence that additional, highly specialized modules for cognitive functions such as “social reciprocity” exist.

5. The Sin of Conflating Emotion with Cognition: Although neuroscience has long distinguished between subcortical emotions and cortical cognition, evolutionary psychologists erroneously conflate the two when they speculate about complex, interwoven feelings such as “guilt” and “shame.”

6. The Sin of Brain-Neuron Ignorance: Despite major advances in our understanding of brain anatomy and neural function over the past several decades, evolutionary psychology ignores biology and relies instead on dubious computer-based metaphors to describe the mind.

7. The Sin of Equating Brains with Computers: While there are superficial similarities between brains and computers, evolutionary psychologists mistakenly think that because some brain functions can be simulated with computers, the brain is nothing than a “computational device” that processes algorithms.

Despite these sins, the Panksepps have high hopes for an evolutionary psychology that is constrained by empiricism and tethered by neuroscience. Indeed, this kind of evolutionary psychology can be quite robust when applied to specialized and unique human brain-mind functions such as language:

What makes humans unique, perhaps more than anything else, is that we are a linguistically adept story-telling species. That is why so many different forms of mythology have captivated our cultural imaginations since the dawn of recorded history.

Evolutionary psychologists also have many intriguing stories to tell, but if we are committed to a deep evolutionary view, their current speculations should not be accepted as credible foundations for our fundamental nature.

The danger, of course, is that language is linked to — and surely enables — an imagination that knows no bounds. If we are going to tell stories that are not myths masquerading as science, we must first acknowledge that wishing something to be true does not make it so.

Reference:

Panksepp, Jaak, & Panksepp, Jules (2000). The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology Evolution and Cognition, 6 (2), 108-131

In a series of foundational papers and books, George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith, William D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and Richard Dawkins explained how altruism and cooperation could have evolved through the combined operations of inclusive fitness and kin selection. The upshot of all this is that what looks like altruistic behavior is actually self interested behavior, when viewed from the perspective of an individual organism and its genes. There is, in other words, no such thing as “pure” altruism.

A small number of scholars have never been able to stomach the notion that what appears to be altruism is rooted in selfishness. Many, I suspect, are metaphysically troubled by the idea and simply cannot accept that “pure goodness” does not exist. In an effort to carve out conceptual space for unadulterated kindness, they have championed the idea of group level selection. They are the Kantians (or perhaps deists) of evolutionary biology. This group includes George R. Price, David Sloan Wilson, Elliot Sober, E.O. Wilson, and Oren Harman.

As some may know, Wilson recently co-authored an already notorious (and as Jerry Coyne explains, certainly dubious) paper in Nature asserting that kin selection is a chimera. Harman, for his part, recently published The Price of Altruism, which is part biography of George Price and part sermon extolling group level selection. Harman’s book was revealing in more ways than one: it exposed the metaphysics that I suspect motivates more than a few group level selectionists. George Price was an ecstatic (and eccentric) Christian.

This longish preface brings me to the point of this post: the “Trickster” figure who is found in the oral traditions of nearly all hunting and gathering peoples. Although this figure has been especially well documented among Native Americans, the trickster appears in nearly all world mythologies in one guise or another (e.g., Prometheus and Loki). After reading Paul Radin’s The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology and Mac Linscott Ricketts’ “The North American Indian Trickster,” I came across this astonishing explanation of the ancient and archetypal Trickster myths:

It is [Franz] Boas’s contention that a sense of altruism is not likely to be very well developed in simpler societies, and so the members of such societies w0uld find it difficult to understand why a culture hero [i.e., the trickster] would want to benefit mankind.

The problem of motivation is solved, however, if the “benefits to mankind” are the accidental by-products of actions which the culture hero [or trickster] undertakes for purely selfish reasons. (Carroll 1984:110-111).

Boas offered this assessment in 1898 — long before anyone had considered the apparent contradiction of altruism in evolutionary terms. If Boas is correct, our ancestors had already considered the issue and resolved it without benefit of arcane equations or recourse to metaphysics: altruism is a byproduct of selfishness.

References:

Ricketts, M. (1966). The North American Indian Trickster. History of Religions, 5 (2) DOI: 10.1086/462529

Carroll, M. (1984). The Trickster as Selfish-Buffoon and Culture Hero. Ethos, 12 (2), 105-131 DOI: 10.1525/eth.1984.12.2.02a00020