A Critique of Pure Buller, Part I
Speaking of Scientific American… I thought I’d start one of an occasional series taking a look at arguably one of the most high profile critiques of evolutionary psychology, a piece by David Buller published last year called, “Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology.”
I’m going to do this as a series because there are so many errors that documenting all of them in one entry would make for an excessively long post. So, I’m going to break it down, and take little bits at a time, in some cases, as I do here, just critique the material in a couple of paragraphs.
Ok. The first of the four putative fallacies is as follows: “Analysis of Pleistocene Adaptive Problems Yields Clues to the Mind’s Design.” It’s clear from the material in this section that he means this as an in principle claim – you can’t do it, in theory – as opposed to the empirical version – you could try, but so far it hasn’t worked.” Here is the text of the first two paragraphs:
Tooby and Cosmides have argued that because we can be quite certain that our Pleistocene ancestors had to, among other things, “select mates of high reproductive value” and “induce potential mates to choose them,” we can also be sure that psychological adaptations evolved for solving these problems. But efforts to identify the adaptive problems that drove human psychological evolution confront a dilemma.
On the one horn, while it is true that our ancestors had to “induce potential mates to choose them,” for example, such a description is too abstract to provide any clear indication of the nature of human psychological adaptations.
What Buller has done here is provided some examples of adaptive problems and argued, more or less logically, that these problems stated at this level of abstraction can’t guide the search for adaptations. You can think of this like handing out an overly-general assignment: “Students, for your homework, write an essay on a topic, providing evidence.” Or, if you’re taking a computer science course, it could be more like: “Write a subroutine that takes input, and executes some useful operations with it.” Hard to know what to do with that.
This would be a useful criticism if the adaptive problems evolutionary specified were stated this vaguely. In fact, the critique turns on the specificity with which evolutionary psychologists have stated the adaptive problems in question. Certainly “selecting mates” is a problem, but no one searches for evidence of adaption by using this as the candidate problem. He specifically mentions Tooby and Cosmides here, so we can just look to see the level on which they state the adaptive problem at issue. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with their work on social exchange (but if not, relevant papers are available on their list of publications), which spells out in detail the problem of identifying cases in which a benefit is taken without the cost being paid or a requirement being met. Similarly, hypotheses in the mating domain – the example he uses here – are based on a considerably more textured statement of adaptive problems.
At its heart, what Buller has done is bundled something superficially true but very misleading in the expression, “such a description is too abstract.” Yes, such descriptions in themselves are too abstract to point to interesting design features. A reader, unfamiliar with the technical literature in the field – which might be the case for Scientific American readers – would assume by this innocent-looking line that evolutionary psychologists advance such descriptions. By putting these descriptions in our mouths, he can then take us to task for being wrong. The next part of his argument will be about what happens when one states adaptive problems more narrowly, but we’ll hold that for another time. For now, that takes care of the first two paragraphs. More to come…
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