Why Don’t We Carve Pumpkins Into the Shape of Trans Fats?
Arthur Allen wrote a just-in-time-for-Halloween piece about, among other things, why we’re afraid of things that don’t actually harm us in modern environments – snakes, spiders, and so on – so much so that when we want to decorate for the holiday, we put up images of these creepy crawlies, rather than adorning our houses with images of the real dangers. I mean, you never see a house peppered with stuffed cigarettes, plastic pistols, or pumpkins carved into the shape of a – gasp! – trans fatty acid.
Correctly, Allen identifies the origin of these fears in terms of evolved function – people who tried to pet snakes rather than run from them left fewer offspring and all that – but, inevitably, he goes awry. Holding aside the usual remarks about “hard wiring” and “instincts” – and I’m more or less willing to hold those aside – he can’t help adding that: “Much of evolutionary psychology is based on hard-to-test hypotheses about the past, which led the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to dismiss the entire field of study as ” ‘just so’ stories.””
(Pauses to pull hair out). Having just completed a sexual harassment tutorial – a requirement for all Chapman University employees; nothing to do with me in particular – I think working through such a tutorial should be required for journalists writing about evolutionary psychology. I mean, the rest of the article isn’t actually all that bad – more on that in a second – but a lot of good would be done if journalists had to pass even a one-item true false test that read, “Hypotheses in evolutionary psychology are about the past.” (Hint: false.) Throw in an item or two about nature/nurture, the ultimate/proximate distinction, and a few others, and, presto, we could head off a lot of rookie errors before they see their way into print. (In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t think that only journalists should take this little quiz. I think I speak for many in my discipline when I say that it would be sort of nice if journal editors and referees understood some of these key distinctions. But I ask for the moon…)
As an aside, the other candidate for an entry today I considered was a paper just published in Psych Science that tests the hypothesis that people will pay attention to animate motion – things that move by themselves and stuff. The hypothesis is based on an evolutionary argument, and the authors seemed to have no trouble testing it – the value of doing so is another matter, and possibly another post – so one wonders what Gould and Allen would say about it…
Anyway, back to Allen’s piece. He makes a few more points. First, he suggests that some “new thinking” is replacing the evolutionary psychology view that our fears were “hard wired” during the Stone Age. Ready for it? He points to a paper by Bracha that suggests that some “adaptations might date back before the Stone Age, and some, perhaps, to more recent times.” So, evolutionary psychologists, he’s saying, think that no adaptations pre-date the Stone Age, and the suggestion that some do is “new thinking.”Hm. I think we need to add another quiz question… Question 2: Evolutionary psychologists think that all adaptations evolved during the Stone Age, not before. (Hint: False. Example: eyes.) Second, Allen talks about some individual differences in thrill seeking, and I think that’s all sort of interesting. Third, and related, he points to the fact that people seem to like horror movies, and I think that’s actually a pretty good question. Another good question is whether science journalists will manage to portray evolutionary psychology correctly. (Hint: probably not.)
Ok, one parting point. Allen reports Bracha’s suggestion that because humans raided one another, there might be a (relatively) recent adaptation in females to cope with this problem. Before you read his suggestion, consider what would be the best – and worst – sort of response to armed humans coming to kill you. Ready? Here’s the idea:
“You might have been less likely to be murdered if you fainted at the sight of a sharp stick.”
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