A Robust Paradigm

Steve points to the New Scientist:

Stone Age toe could redraw human family tree

Um . . .

I don’t want to make any dogmatic statements about the merit of this research, given the sorry state of most scientific reporting in general.  But I do want to point out that, to a layman, the news that a single toe is cause to “redraw the human family tree” suggests that the paradigm underlying the “scientific consensus” on human evolution is pretty dang fragile.  What happens when, next week, they find another toe?

Imagine if an undergraduate, performing a lab in CHEM 100, reports unexpected results.  Is the professor’s reaction to exclaim, “Omigod, you’ve just revolutionized the field!  We’ll have to redraw the periodic table stat!”  No.  Rather, he assumes the student did the experiment wrong.  I’m not sure if this assumption is really the best way of nurturing a scientific mind among undergraduates, but it is assuredly correct.  Such is the stability of the principles of chemistry.

Spent

I've been working my way through Spent, Geoffrey Miller's application of evolutionary psychology to consumerism.

Miller has written an outstanding pop-science book on an important subject, and when I have more time I would like to quote from it more extensively. But for now, I want to address myself to its most irritating feature: the author's snide leftism.

Stuff like this:

In traditional symmetric warfare both sides play be certain tacit rules of engagement. You line up your phalanxes, musketmen, or tanks, and we line up ours, and both sides fight it out until one concedes or flees, and the other declares victory. In asymmetric warfare, the side that is weaker by traditional criteria seeks victory by using new tactics or technology. The British longbowmen defeated the French knights at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 by firing volleys of arrows from absurd distances, rather than waiting honorably to be squashed by the cavalry charge . . . . Al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 infuriated the Pentagon by hijacking our airplanes, rather than buying their own from our arms dealers.

That's pretty typical.

Miller perhaps has his own reasons for wishing to buttress his left-wing credentials:

One of the most frustrating experiences in human life is to adopt an unfashionable new worldview after much evidence-based research, rational consideration of alternatives, and ethical soul-searching, only to have one's peers misconstrue that worldview as a personality signal that conveys the opposite of one's true traits and intentions. This is a common experience among evolutionary psychologists, and it nicely illustrates the way that ideology signals can fail under certain conditions.

Critics such as Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Rose, and Richard Lewontin have convinced a substantial portion of the educated public that evolutionary psychology is a pernicious right-wing conspiracy, with the hidden ideological agenda of reviving biological determinism, sexism, racism, and elitism. They conflate the worst excesses of 1860s social Darwinism, 1890s union-busting capitalism, 1930s Nazi eugenics, and 1970s sociobiology with the twenty-first-century science of human nature.

What the critics fail to explain, however, is why evolutionary psychology has attracted the support of so many socially conscious progressive thinkers, ranging from the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer to the economist Robert Frank, the archcritic of runaway consumerism. They likewise fail to explain why so many prominent evolutionists (E. O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith) have had strong ties to left-wing politics in their private lives. And they fail to explain why right=wing American fundamentalists see evolutionary psychology as an ultraliberal attack on family values and religion.

For the most part, the leftism is just background noise that doesn't really have much affect on his thesis. But the one exception to this is his confounding of the personality trait "openness" with political liberalism.

Now at one level, openness -- "curiosity, novelty seeking, broad-mindedness, interest in culture, ideas, and aesthetics" -- doesn't sound like a salient feature of the conservative temperament, given our stated preference for stability, practicality, and the tried-and-true. So his assertion that it correlates positively with "social tolerance" and political liberalism is certainly plausible. The problems start when he gets down to specifics.

For instance, he gives some examples of bumper stickers that he claims advertise levels of openness:

High Openness

• Question reality
• Legalize freedom
• My karma ran over your dogma
• Sorry I missed church. I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.
• Reality is where the pizza delivery guy comes from

Low Openness

• Live it up, sinner
• Shut up, hippie
• Welcome to America. We speak English. Learn it or leave
• Stereotypes make life easier
• If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat
• Gun control means using both hands

Let's take look at these in detail.

"Legalize Freedom", has been the conservative rallying cry for nigh 30 years, especially among "low-openness" religious people who want the federal government to leave them alone.

"Karma . . . dogma": so, are you Hindu? No? Then the bumper sticker doesn't really signal openness to Eastern religions, does it. It just indicates hostility towards Catholicism, a religion to which you are dogmatic in your lack of openness.

Are you a witch? A lesbian? No? See above.

Do you eat pizza? Yes? Then other than showing contempt for the people who work for low pay making your life easier, what's your point, exactly?

Among the "low openness" stickers, granted that the first four show "low openness" and appear to indicate conservatism. But what does eating meat and gun ownership have to do with openness? He could have made a more plausible assertion (that I would nonetheless dispute) that they indicate low agreeableness. But why should people who want to restrict the firearms and food of other people get credit for openness?

Miller repeated claims to be an individual of exceptional openness; however, in Miller's telling, being "open" only means buying in to ideas he already likes. It never means buying in to ideas he doesn't like. For instance:

Conspicuously displayed aesthetic taste is a convenient, visible way for people to display their deeper personality traits. For example, if I were rich, I would collect paintings by the contemporary artist Fred Tomaselli, rather than the usual Post-Impressionists or Abstract Expressionists collected by Upper East Side hedge-fund mangers. Why? Because I find Tomaselli's work visually and intellectually richer, and I appreciate the biological materials, compositional skills, and psychedelic themes. In other words, I would want my art collection to reflect my personal taste, meaning in this case I would (unconsciously) want it to proclaim my openness (to wierd hallucinogen-inspired art) . . . .

Personal taste should not just attract like-minded individuals; it should also repulse differently minded ones. To be effective, in must be a high--risk, high-gain form of taste signaling, rather than a meek nod to the least common denominator. The Tomaselli paintings would be effective for my social-screening purposes because few people of low openness could bear to sit through a dinner party with such disorienting works on the walls. They would feel existential nausea and never come back. On the other hand, visitors who admired the work articulately, without gagging, would reliably signal their higher openness. Conversely, Christians can repulse atheist intellectuals like me by hanging black-velvet Jesus paintings on their walls, just as Van Helsing repelled vampires with garlic.

Leaving aside the relative artistic merits of Tomaselli and Jesus paintings, on what grounds can Miller claim high openness (as opposed to, say, low agreeableness) by displaying artwork he hopes will gag people he doesn't like, but his repulsion at images of Jesus does not indicate a similar hole in his own much-heralded openness?

To his credit, Miller identifies "openness" as conspicuous among the "Central Six" (intelligence, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability, and extraversion) as being dangerously maladaptive when taken to extremes, and he is at his funniest when he describes where the combination of high openness and low intelligence will take you. But the over-identification of openness with hostility to religious conservatism is the book's biggest failing.

Still, though, it's a good read.

Who killed the Dinosaurs?

If you said, "The asteroids dun it," you just revealed yourself to be so 2008:

The dinosaurs were wiped out by volcanoes that erupted in India about sixty five million years ago, according to new research.

For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of species, including T Rex and its cousins.

But now Professor Gerta Keller says fossilized traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeastern Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared.

Here is the abstract of her paper. Or at least I think so; I can't make head or tail of it.

I don't have a scientific axe to grind on this question one way or the other. But VoxDay calls it exactly right:

The relevant point is that what scientists were previously telling us that we were stupid and ignorant to doubt was, in fact, false.

. . .

[W]hether one has doubts about a particular theory or not, there's simply no cause or excuse for the attempted intellectual bullying to which so many scientists and science fetishists are prone, and such behavior does nothing but increase the rational observer's doubts about the theories they are advocating.

Quite so. I would put it this way: science, broadly speaking, is contingent. Scientists look at the data and say one thing today. Tomorrow they get more data and say something else. All this is entirely appropriate. But we should recognize that very little science is appropriate for the catechistic way in which its findings are often presented. And most particularly, the demands made by "science fetishists" that we discard long-standing theological and moral truths in the face of today's pronouncement strike me a poor guide to living our lives.

Evolution Sucks

Fred Reed takes on the Just-So stories told by evolutionists:

I once asked a list of ardent evolutionists why humans, in evolving from lower primates, had largely lost their sense of smell. Their answer was in two parts.

First, men evolved an upright posture, and evolved it in the savanna, where the comparatively unobstructed terrain allowed them to see all around them. They therefore did not need a sense of smell. This makes no sense. At night it obviously would be useful to know when predators were about. Lions are astute at using cover to approach their prey, and are the color of dirt. Horses, which have eyes at about the height of a man’s, and have good eyesight, also have an acute sense of smell. The upright-posture stuff is sheer story-telling.

Second, I was told that brain tissue uses a great deal of energy, and that having olfactory lobes to allow a good sense of smell would require humans to find more food, causing a grave selective disadvantage.

Let’s think about this. How much of an energy drain would a good olfactory lobe cause? A quick web search pulls up the assertion that rats have quite good olfaction, and use it extensively to find what they regard as food. Another quick search reveals that a rat’s entire brain occupies two cubic centimeters. A man’s brain is some 1350 cc. Let us assume that the rat’s brain consists entirely of olfactory tissue, which of course it doesn’t.

So 2/1350 x 100 reveals that the rat brain is .148% of the human. Since according to [Michael Hart, author of Understanding Human History] the brain uses twenty percent of the resting energy expenditure of a man, adding the additional two cc of olfactory tissue would increase the body’s energy demands by.148 % / 5, or .03%. This minute sum, we are to believe, is so draining as to overcome the advantage of detecting predators at night or in brush.

I have heard of suspension of disbelief, but I am too weak a cord by which to suspend that much disbelief. What astounds me is that evolutionists believe it without effort. I encounter the Argument from Metabolic Burden repeatedly. Its virtue is that of being superficially plausible but not verifiable.

And much more in like vein.

It occurred to me, reading this, how natural selection, however it manifests itself, really bites for those unfortunate enough to go through it. Let's consider human intelligence, the nominal topic of Reed's essay. We happy progeny of Northern Europeans may wish to take pride in the superior intelligence we evolved over less cognitively endowed peoples, although, per Mr. Reed, we should not assume that we know very much about why such evolution took place. But whatever the reason, of one thing we can be mathematically certain: this evolution required that a great many of our number in ages past either: (a) were eaten by predators, or otherwise came to violent and untimely ends; or (b) never got a chance to breed (which, let's face it, from a guy's perspective is almost as bad). Either way, they led Hobbesian lives that were truly "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Our ancestors -- as in the physical antecedents of those of us currently alive -- were the ones that spent every waking hour avoiding this fate, leaving them little time for fun stuff, like blogging.

Our present technological prowess and the lives of ease and comfort it allows are thus in debt to the lives (and, more importantly, the deaths) of suffering and hardship led by those who came before us.

But what of the future? In the recently-published book A Farewell to Alms, economist Gregory Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution, inter alia, dramatically improved the likelihood that most individuals would have surviving offspring, thereby dramatically slowing natural selection for cognitive ability. (It should be duly noted that his thesis has been controversial, even among people without ideological objections.) Will the widespread distribution our present wealth allow us to be overtaken, evolutionarily speaking, by other peoples in which selection remains operative? Consider China and its looming demographic imbalance. If, as appears certain, 1/3 of the coming generation of Chinamen leave no offspring, what kind of a people will emerge on the other side?

Americans should realize that we are probably living at the apex of our civilization.

Sex Selection and Evolution

From an interview in Wired Science regarding the new PNAS paper on the rate of evolution:

"Asked about James Watson's controversial claims that intelligence evolved less effectively in people of African descent, Harpending said the study wasn't designed to test such characteristics. He also cautioned against interpreting the findings as suggesting that people are becoming fundamentally better...

"Evolution is a double-edged sword," he said. "What evolution cares about is that I have more offspring. If you can do it by charming and manipulating, and I'm a hardworking farmer that's going to feed the kids ten years down the road, then you're going to win. Hit-and-run, irresponsible males are reproducing more. That isn't good for anyone except those males, but that's evolution."

Stoopid farmer. Doesn't he know that women are never wrong about their mate selection?