Evolutionary Psychology and the English Department
Two items appeared this past weekend caught my attention, both of which related to the interesting and somewhat contentious relationship between evolutionary approaches to human behavior and our colleagues in the humanities.
The first is an article in Science, written by Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon, an excellent account of the periodic table and the scientific history that surrounds it. Kean’s piece is something of a meditation on the field of Literary Darwinism, which is a body of work by scholars who apply principles of evolutionary psychology to one particular product of human brains, literature and the associated arts. He identified a number of people involved in the field, including Joseph Carroll, Lisa Zunshine, Brian Boyd, Jonathan Gottschall, and others. Kean looks over the field, noting the substantial amount of hostility that its practitioners receive from their colleagues. The subtitle of Kean’s article reads as follows:
Upset by the isolation of their field, some critics are trying to bring Darwin’s ideas and recent science to the study of literature. They haven’t been popular
I thought that Kean’s piece was particularly interesting given the posting the same day of a piece by English professor Mari Ruti, writing at Psychology Today, called “Enough with Evolutionary Biology!” (She followed up three days later.) She leads off this way:
Let me tell you what really kills the luster of life for me. It’s the endless stream of evolutionary biological explanations for everything that happens between men and women!
She’s writing about some recent work in the area of mating, particular surrounding “cougars,” older women who date and marry younger men. She is, as illustrated by her title and her remark above, not pleased with work on issues of mating from an evolutionary/biological perspective.
Part of her frustration is quite understandable, given that she doesn’t know much about the discipline; the unknown is always scary. She writes, for example, that “when it comes to modern men and women, suddenly were (sic) are supposed to believe that we are just a couple of short steps from chimps,” which is basically just wrong. She also asks, “How exactly do “scientists” determine these things?” which is a great question for someone in the humanities to inform themselves about before writing critiques of the area. It’s not clear what those quotes around “scientists” is supposed to mean, but I do hope that people in the humanities get curious about how scientists make discoveries and inferences about the natural world. I think that would be just great.
In the narrow context of the phenomenon, she writes, “Older men dating younger women has been the norm for centuries. That women are now turning the tables is due to the fact that some of them finally have enough money, power, and independence to pull it off.” What’s interesting about this is that it’s supposed to be an explanation for something that happens between men and women. Now, it’s not a very satisfying explanation given that it doesn’t actually explain why having power makes women prefer younger men – surely poor women can date younger men, too – but what’s more interesting is that she led off with the idea that explanations kill the luster of life for her, and then she offers one herself. Having said that, it could be that it’s only ultimate explanations that are so murderous to the luster, or perhaps it’s just other people’s explanations. Hard to say.
In her follow up post, Ruti illustrates the point I recently made about the third part of the anti-evolutionary psychology game. It’s a bit unseemly to quote myself, but just as a reminder, I wrote that when attacking evolutionary psychology, people always follow up their attacks on the discipline…
Look, you have to say, I’m not opposed to applying evolutionary ideas to humans in principle….But, you have to add – and writing plaintively, if you can, helps here – I just want things to be done properly.
Ruti writes: “I know there is a lot of high-quality evolutionary biology being produced by scientists. I don’t have a problem with this. What I’m attacking is our general cultural tendency to run wild with evolutionary biological gender models that cannot possibly be proven in any real scientific sense,” adding: “Trust me, I don’t have a problem with real science.”
Hard to ask for better compliance to the anti-EP template than that. She goes on, “what bothers me is that evolutionary biology is being used to “justify” some of the most entrenched gender stereotypes of our culture.” Know what I find odd about this? When I go to a social psychology conference, I find that I can’t swing a dead cat without hitting people working on stereotyping and prejudice. Oddly, social psychologists don’t get wantonly accused of trying to “justify” these stereotypes. To me, it’s a striking double standard.
In any case, I think the key part of the post is a question in her closing paragraph: “What, exactly, is so hard about the idea that older women like to have sex just because they like sex?” It’s striking for someone criticizing a scientific enterprise to advance a logical tautology as a putative explanation. But it seems to me that there’s something beyond simply a misunderstanding about logic and the nature of explanation, a kind of genuine lack of curiosity about the world. Maybe things fall because they fall. Maybe people get sick because they get sick. I myself am grateful that scientists have worked hard to unlock the mysteries around us, instead of worrying that explaining the world will take some of the shine off of their experience of it. How many of us owe our very existence to advances in theories in biology – the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, our understanding of genetics – that in turn played crucial roles in the development of the polio vaccine, the eradication of smallpox, and so on. I don’t deny our friends in the humanities their preference for not having explanations for the natural world. Let them be as free from understanding as they wish. Having said that, if they do wish to wallow in ignorance, I would respectfully ask them that they allow others of us to have our own preferences, including applying our best theories about the natural world to the deepest mysteries of life. For many of us, explanations don’t dull the luster of life; they make it shine.
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