David Lawson, Kesson Magid and I have just published On Sex and Suicide Bombing: An evaluation of Kanazawa’s ‘Evolutionary Psychological Imagination’. This is a critique of Satoshi Kanazawa’s 2007 paper: “The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim.”

Many objections to evolutionary psychology are ideological or political. This is not the case in our paper: nothing makes me (and my co-authors) froth at the mouth more than bad science. We say:

The beauty of the scientific method is that it allows us to ask, and sometimes answer, tough questions.
Addressing the tough questions without the transparency afforded by the scientific method is not brave: it is simply cavalier.

Kanazawa’s paper is full of bad science. We are not the first to criticise him on such grounds, but it bears repeating that when there are controversial and sensitive issues at stake, we beholden to demand a high standard of scholarship and science.

The blue-beats-white winning bias in judo as reported in 2006 appears to have been confounded by a number of factors, and there is no bias after all. So say Dijkstra & Preenen in Proceedings B:

A study by Rowe et al. reported a winning bias for judo athletes wearing a blue outfit relative to those wearing a white one during the 2004 Olympics. It was suggested that blue is associated with a higher likelihood of winning through differential effects of colour on opponent visibility and/or an intimidating effect on the opponent. However, we argue that there is no colour effect on winning in judo. We show that alternative factors, namely allocation biases, asymmetries in prior experience and differences in recovery time are possible confounding factors in the analysis of Rowe et al. After controlling for these factors, we found no difference in blue and white wins. We further analysed contest outcomes of 71 other major judo tournaments and also found no winning bias. Our findings have implications for sports policy makers: they suggest that a white–blue outfit pairing ensures an equal level of play.

I love negative results. They’re a complete bummer if it was your darling positive result in the first place, but they provide the clearest demonstration of how science works. The red-wins bias reported in 2006 appears to be still (pardon the pun) in play!

From the realms of philosophy of biology, an interesting article by Bjorn Brunnander about intentional language in evolutionary discourse. Is the trade-off between the efficiency-and-power of metaphorical shorthand, and the misconceptions it produces (the never-ending of conflation of proximate and ultimate), actually producing more problems than it solves?

Many evolutionists today argue for the need to make evolutionary theory an integrated part of psychology and the social sciences. If this is the agenda it should be in the interests of these thinkers to worry about factors that affect the probability of successful communication across boundaries. The track record of communication of evolutionary thinking is not altogether impressive. This is commonly recognised by evolutionists themselves, as shown by presentations of ‘popular misunderstandings’. The fact that some recurring misconceptions are clearly what we would expect to find if processing of the intentional shorthand was unreliable should make us lift questions about efficiency of exposition above the realm of rather effortless rationalisation.

Is the language of intentional psychology an efficient tool for evolutionists?(doi)

Backlash isn’t really the right word.

Evolutionary Psychology Bingo.

I fully expect to see this linked-to, emailed, and generally be the object of a bit of discussion online. On the one hand, I’m all for the satirisation of poor science (a more biting example appeared last week), especially poor science that uses the tools (evolutionary thinking) that I do. We must, after all, stringently promote the self-correcting aspect of the scientific method. And there is some poor “evolutionary psychology” research around.

On the other hand: seeing that bingo card just makes my stomach sink into the floor.

There are plenty of people who are attempting to rehabilitate the term “evolutionary psychology” into an umbrella concept covering all research in the human evolutionary behavioural sciences (EP is much shorter and catchier, for one thing). This encompasses things like evolutionary economics, behavioural ecology, cultural evolution, evolutionary archaeology, etc, i.e. things that I do.

I am not actually in favour of this rehabilitation anymore. A couple of years ago I was, but I do think that the public perception of evolutionary psychology as catastrophically simplistic, sexist, privileged and daft is (sadly) firmly entrenched. We (the academic we) might be able to rehabilitate it within academic circles, but it is badly damaged in public discourse.

I’m not wanting to discuss in detail why EP has a bad name, as that’s a really nuanced and important set of problems that I can’t do justice to today. Part of it is poor science, sure. But there is poor science everywhere, just like there is poor customer service, poor computer hardware, and poor music in the Top 40: all examples where is supposedly a quality filter somewhere along the line. Part of it is bad science reporting. Evolution is a technical subject, and terms such as “nature”, “culture”, and “development” do not have the same meanings to people reading a news report as they do to people writing a research paper. It is also a subject dealing with trends and probabilities and on-averages: not with predictions about individual behaviour.

That last point cannot be stressed enough, as some of the cells in the bingo card seem to stem from a mis-reading from the population level to the individual. For example:

“I can rotate three-dimensional objects in my mind and you can’t.”

If I remember second-year perceptual psychology well enough, men are, on average, better at mental rotation tasks than women are. There are population bell-curves of ability, and they overlap a lot, but the mean of men’s mental rotation ability is some value higher than the mean value of women’s. This does not mean men can and women can’t. This does not mean an individual man will always do better than a woman.

These subtleties are really. Really. Important. And seeing the bingo card does not give me hope that these subtleties have been or can be communicated easily. I think it is the responsibility of scientists to communicate the exact nature of those important messages to journalists and the public. I also think that journalists and the public have a responsibility to want to hear them and not dismiss them as “quibbles” or “difficult statistics”, and simply latch on to the sensational. Especially if it is controversial, as is the case with gender issues.

I can’t cover everything in one blog post, but the other thing that saddens me about the bingo card is the conflation of “evolutionary” with “natural”, “genetic”, “permanent”, and “unchangeable”. A lot of very smart people (Patrick Bateson springs to mind) have written about how this conflation is central to the wearisome “nature-nurture debate”, but this has also not been communicated well beyond academic journals.

I’m not sure how to remedy this. I don’t feel I have any new insights, but perhaps I should start on a couple of posts detailing the ways in which the term “human nature” should be employed with utmost caution. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because we all need to know what exactly we’re referring to.

Anyhow, satire is always useful for stimulating debate. At the very least it’s a clever discussion aid for a seminar on evolutionary psychology.

Radio silence for the last couple of weeks as I was in New Zealand at the Evolution 2007 meeting. Yes, there is internet access on my small island home, but I’m not one of those superstars who can multitask a big conference and blogging. So before it all dribbles out of my brain, here’s a brief rundown. [link to program pdf]

Russell Gray and I organised a symposium on Cultural Phylogenetics. There are pictures, but they will have to wait another day.

Our speakers (Mark Pagel, Michael Dunn, Simon Greenhill, Quentin Atkinson, Russell, and myself) spoke on different aspects of applying phylogenetic and comparative methods to interesting and cool questions in linguistics and anthropology. Click on the picture for an overview of the talks.

Given that it was early on a Sunday morning we had a great turnout (80-120 people) over the three hours. Really fabulous to have the hardcore evolutionary biologists come along to see some novel applications of “their” methods, and it seemed to be well-received!

The conference had about 900 people in attendance with up to eight simultaneous sessions going on for the four full days, so it was hectic running about from room to room to catch talks. Luckily most of what I wanted to hear was fairly systematically (haha) grouped, so I got to attend a number of talks on phylogenetic theory and methods, behavioural/social evolution, sexual selection, coevolution, and teaching evolution. The last day also had a great session on molecular anthropology, most of which was concentrated on questions about Pacific dispersals and human migrations.

Conferences really are great for making your brain swim 24/7 in a soup of ideas, whether they’re directly related to your work or not. It’s simply stimulating being around loads of other people who like to ask questions and think of clever ways to answer them.

While I was away I read Evolutionary Pathways in Nature: A Phylogenetic Approach by John Avise. It’s a collection of short essays that tackle questions about different critters, from spider-web building to the tracking of the AIDS virus in humans. What they have in common is that moledular phylogenies have been used to help with the detective work. It was a fun book to dip into (it’s the book the ultra-geeky biologist has in the loo), but the theme was only a thin thread on which to peg the various stories. Although the Introduction and Appendix gave a little background to phylogenetics and molecular systematics, a complete newcomer would no doubt be confused. Sadly (or perhaps not…) I think the popular science book on phylogenetics remains to be written.

A short while ago I attended one of a series of talks set up to create some dialogue between evolutionary and interpretive approaches in archaeology. I was only able to attend the last of the series, but others who attended earlier talks reported that the presentations themselves (one from each of the two “styles”) were interesting and informative, but that the discussions that took place afterwards, where, ostensibly, the dialogue was to get into full swing, were quite fraught, full of misunderstandings and tense “science versus post-modernism” exchanges.

Which is, as always, a shame. I think to most scientifically-minded archaeologists and anthropologists–indeed anyone in the social sciences who appreciates the scientific method–the lack of useful dialogue, collaboration, and proper communication with our colleagues who have other approaches is felt as a keen deficit. From afar, we can observe the wealth of rich material (dare I say “data”?) collected by social anthropologists (for instance). More importantly, we can observe their ability to contextualise, interpret and suggest new or alternative hypotheses for what we, with the necessity of abstract or simple models, are sometimes missing in our approaches.

However, after attending the last talk, I don’t think that they (“they” being in this case those in the social sciences who probably prefer the term humanities) really feel any keen need for such dialogue in the other direction. I could be (and would be delighted to be) very wrong about this. I got the sense of a lamentable misunderstanding how science as applied to human affairs. Misunderstanding the scientific method is of course a more general malady, from the sub-editors at the Evening Standard right on through to nutritionists with dodgy qualifications.

But at this talk there were some SHOCKERS.

During the post-presentation discussion, I jotted down some of the comments that really encapsulated this misunderstanding from the audience, who were, bear in mind, staff and students from the relevant departments.

One of the speakers had mentioned Boyd and Richerson’s concept of “content bias” as a way of explaining why some cultural proclivities are inherently appealing. To take a trivial example, a preference for orange juice might be more widespread than a preference for lemon juice, because humans, like other primates, like sweet foods rather than bitter. A comment from the audience was so plaintive that the impulse to say “there, there” was very strong:

“But, if I’m explaining X, I don’t want X to be just ‘content bias’”

The commenter then went on to say that her alternative explanation for X would take into the rich context of the cultural experience into account. My reaction to these sorts of objections to science are never very patient, because they seem to derive from the “special snowflake” school of thought, where all experience is unique, meaningful, and if at all possible, pretty. The objection seems to be that “your generalisation holds no individual significance for me/my subject matter, therefore I reject your method of reaching your generalisation”, or, more simply, “don’t like it, don’t want it.”

In a similar vein, another person stated that:

“Evolutionary accounts don’t take “what it means to be human” into consideration”

This is a combination of special snowflake thinking combined with the mistaken belief that evolutionary thinking necessarily entails some sort of determinism and rigid homogeneity. This is difficult. This is why popular evolutionary psychology (and human genetics) falls over, because it doesn’t explicitly show how evolution involves variation and flexibility and is not all about genetic determinism. Oh nature/nurture debate, you always rear your misshapen head.

And anyhow, what is this “what it means to be human” thing? It’s not like we all wake up each morning and have a little fret about whether that’s a human being staring back from the bathroom mirror.

Er, most of us.

Personally I find debates about human uniqueness really boring and think they smack of a sort of Great Chain of Being thinking. Leave it to artists and writers, they’re much better at capturing the human experience.

And then, the misunderstanding that science is systematic, demonstrate by this gem in response to a perfectly reasonable graph of measurements:

“How can you be sure you’ve got the numbers right? That’s just as interpretive! (as interpretive archaeology)”

Um. Sadly, no-one administered the simple slap-down of handing the commenter a ruler and suggesting that if the numbers were wrong there was an instant paper in a respectable journal waiting to be written. But is it seriously so difficult to understand that science is self-correcting, and that is its beauty? But it is more likely that such comments come from a place of deep suspicion and derision, as well as ignorance, exemplified by:

“Well, it is all just scientifying and mystifying and it all just goes over the top of my head”

I must confess that I find some post-modernist writing mystifying, but I attribute that to different academic styles, and attempt to wrestle the meaning out of it rather than throw my hands up and damn the whole enterprise.

There were very few comments that questioned the interpretive approach, except on points of clarification. I leave the reasons for that to the reader as an exercise in the social niceties of academia.

Relatedly (yes, this is the post that never ends) I had an illuminating conversation a number of months ago, when I was writing up. I shared an office with another PhD student whose thesis was on material culture, loosely described as the anthropology of “things”. We were talking about the feeling that no matter what your topic, it always feels never-ending. For me, the never-ending feeling comes from two sources

(1) I could do this analysis better/add more data/run another test, or
(2) a new question arises from the results

For her, the never-ending feeling comes from

(1) not having a question to ask of the “data” in the first place, and
(2) even with a question, the mulitiplicity of theoretical approaches one can take in social anthropology means that none of them have any priority over the others… and so there is never a (valid) answer to the question anyhow.

I asked if that were not inherently frustrating. She replied that it isn’t – it is fun, but it is not satisfying. And I think in that answer lies much of the tension between different approaches in the social sciences, because science is nothing if not satisfying, even when it is decidedly not fun.

I will write about the concept of “fun” in academic work at some other point in time.

Geoffrey Miller writes in SEED Magazine about Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens.

Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.

According to GM, the best and brightest minds get seduced by fancy entertainment technologies that mimic our evolutionary go-to impulses: fast-food, porn, iPods. There'll be no-one left to run NASA, and maybe–like the aliens–there'll just be no-one left.

Uh, I don't think so. As a bright spark in our discussion group said, Miller deflates his own argument later on:

Some individuals and families may start with an "irrational" Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism.

That is, natural variation will contain strategies that will outcompete the Sims-addicted entertainment-happy phenotypes. This happens to me all the time because other people read journal articles when I read Batman. 

It's provoking, this piece, and I suspect not entirely serious–although the last remarks concerning the rise of  fundamentalism(s) need to be unpacked with respect to evolutionary motivations ALSO. I do like the term "creative class", but it irks me because it comes from a place of privilege. Someone's gotta be out there running the hamster wheel that makes the internet go. Someone's soldering the chip in your VR goggles. And that someone will quite likely be more than motivated to take your place in the great quest for knowledge if you're just slouched on the couch.