Here an interview with Satoshi Kanazawa, one of the authors of
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, an introduction to evolutionary psychology.
SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.
One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
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This looks like it was made with Wired's Big-Idea Book Generator.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-10/st_bigidea
I remember reading about Dr. Kanazawa's thesis in Psychology Today some months ago. I couldn't quite put my opinion of his work into words at the time, but fortune smiled on me just now when I glanced down the BoingBoing page and saw this "older" link:
FLOATING TOXIC PLASTIC GARBAGE ISLAND TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS.
That's about right.
That's funny, Tomrigid!
I can't really beat comment #2, but no link to Kanazawa is complete unless it's accompanied by a link to Echidne's four-part epic critique of his, um, work:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html#8291138433810237995
This is totally bogus. The evolutionary biology is all wrong.
SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations,
This is simply not true. There is no part of this that is true. Some types of adaptation don't work well in rapidly changing environments, but evolution doesn't "freeze" and overall carries on just fine.
so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not.
This isn't how evolution works. This is sort of how Intelligent Design is taught, but it is not biology. There is no "evolution" that decides that a trait would be worthwhile or not. Things either stick around or they don't. Period. The end.
When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more,
Some aspects of the environment have been changing and others haven't. Is the author waiting for an environment that doesn't change in any way, shape or form for millennia? Good luck. That doesn't happen. And guess what? It doesn't matter.
then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate.
Ok, now Mother Nature is the intelligent designer trying to figure out what would be good to keep. Still no.
So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.
We're evolving just fine. Our bodies are changing, our responses to diseases are changing, our nutritional needs are changing. If a hack evolutionary psychologist can't find changes in our brains, too, it's because he or she is a hack, not because they're not changing.
I'd have to agree with AP. The author displays a rather unsophisticated understanding of how evolution works for someone who has written a book on the subject. There is an interesting point hidden in there although it is unfortunately expressed.
Evolution in the way it is discussed in the quote, always 'works'. It merely describes a process of change/stability that is inevitably taking place on a genetic level.
I see the interesting point as this. Evolutionary change that we would see as positive adaptation tends takes place on a very slow time scale. Our environment when viewed technologically and socially is changing at a far more rapid pace than our biology. This idea has a great deal of explanatory power when you start to look at some of the more absurd aspects of modern human behaviour. We have a biology/psychology that was forged on the 'savanahs of Africa'. As a result many of the hardwired assumptions that our nervous system makes can lead to innacurrate models of the world to often tragicomic effect. Is human psychology well adapted to living in modern cities, To fast food, etc.
Now the extent to which our social technological environment can be considered in any way separate from our biology is a deeper question. Interested readers might peruse 'The Extended Phenotype' by Richard Dawkins for some sensible ideas on this topic.
Another caveat I feel forced to mention is that Evolutionary change is not necessarily slow. For instance if there were some sort of calamity that wiped out everyone except people with red hair then the next generation would be made up entirely of people with red hair. Massive evolutionary change would have taken place very quickly. One also notes that red hair is not really a positive adaptation in the way that we might naively associate with the word evolution. Its really just a process of genetic change.
Not to to toot Dawkin's horn too much but I like a definition of his that I will paraphrase here.
"Evolution is the non-random selection of randomly varying replicators."
Nothing more. Nothing less.
As I think about it now, interestingly, the underlying anthropomorphic assumption that evolution is a purposeful agent intentionally producing positive change is an excellent example of the sort of odd assumptions our primevally forged nervous system makes when interpreting the world.
SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.
One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
I'd have to agree with AP. The author displays a rather unsophisticated understanding of how evolution works for someone who has written a book on the subject. There is an interesting point hidden in there although it is unfortunately expressed.
Evolution in the way it is discussed in the quote, always 'works'. It merely describes a process of change/stability that is inevitably taking place on a genetic level.
I see the interesting point as this. Evolutionary change that we would see as positive adaptation tends to take place on a very slow time scale. Our environment when viewed technologically and socially is changing at a far more rapid pace than our biology. This idea has a great deal of explanatory power when you start to look at some of the more absurd aspects of modern human behaviour. We have a biology/psychology that was forged on the 'savanahs of Africa'. As a result many of the hardwired assumptions that our nervous system makes can lead to innacurrate models of the world to often tragicomic effect. Is human psychology well adapted to living in modern cities, To fast food, etc.
Now the extent to which our social technological environment can be considered in any way separate from our biology is a deeper question. Interested readers might peruse 'The Extended Phenotype' by Richard Dawkins for some sensible ideas on this topic.
Another caveat I feel forced to mention is that Evolutionary change is not necessarily slow. For instance if there were some sort of calamity that wiped out everyone except people with red hair then the next generation would be made up entirely of people with red hair. Massive evolutionary change would have taken place very quickly. One also notes that red hair is not really a positive adaptation in the way that we might naively associate with the word evolution. Its really just a process of genetic change.
Not to to toot Dawkin's horn too much but I like a definition of his that I will paraphrase here.
"Evolution is the non-random selection of randomly varying replicators."
Nothing more. Nothing less.
As I think about it now, interestingly, the underlying anthropomorphic assumption that evolution is a purposeful agent intentionally producing positive change is an excellent example of the sort of odd assumptions our primevally forged nervous system makes when interpreting the world.
Just as an fyi, this is the question that SK is responding to:
DC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a species?
I agree with most of the comments. It seems to me that SK has a couple of interesting speculation but doesn't seem to recognize the fact that humans are under the operation of multifarious influences besides evolution.
I also think that evolution and contemporary psychology, while they may have roots in the limbic lizard brain, do not in fact have a direct causal relation in the comlexity of the human mind coming out of the caves.
You clamor for the future as if you'll ever see it. As if it is something anyone wants. All we really want is today.
The assertion that we cower/cry/are aroused by fictional situations due to a deep-seated inability to discern fantasy from reality seems to be a shallow plumbing of what the mind actually does when exposed to these media.
Not that I claim any expertise in this area, but I can at least say from my own experience that the most moving things in film are such to me because I make the connection between them and their real-world counterparts. Isn't plausibility what
we crave in entertainment anyway?
I have little to add to that said by AP, other than I hope I have misunderstood the quotes in the interview and that the book is actually based on sound science. The idea that the environment must remain static for evolution to take place is completely fallacious. Creatures co-evolve on a constantly varying landscape, shaped by the other organisms in their food web and other environmental factors.
Experiments by Hillis (and many others since) have shown the power of co-evolution as a driving force for change. Kauffman's work on NK landscapes also gives fascinating insights into the complexity and intricacy that can be seen in co-evolutionary systems (Red Queen, etc.).
A rapidly changing environment almost always drives similarly rapid evolution - species are forced to adapt or die. Consider the Cambrian explosion and the Permian extinction as examples of this, presumably the result of significant extrinsic or intrinsic pressures. Kanazawa may have confused a rapidly changing environment with a random environment, in which a random walk (though not standing still) is the best survival strategy.
It's probably true that our rapidly changing environment has (perhaps uniquely) reduced selective pressure on us as a species, but this is because we have adapted the environment, and in such a way as to increase our chances of survival (e.g. by allowing those with certain genetic defects to survive and reproduce). We do get scared by films and turned on by porn, but this is not because we cannot change, it is because it (essentially) doesn't matter. If our environment starts to exert pressure (perhaps through increasing numbers of obese people dying young and childless), selection will kick in. There may also be an argument here re. adaptation rate and population size in an increasingly connected world (cf. genetic drift, etc.), but I'm not really qualified to comment on that.
The thesis alluded to in the book's title seems suspect too. We know from recent history (e.g. Rubens, fashion today) that what are considered to be attractive female characteristics have varied quite substantially over time. The idea that our stone age ancestors presciently selected offspring to meet Vogue magazine's paradigm of beauty today seems suspect to say the least. There is more comment on this (and the subjectivity of beauty) in the Freakonomics post on the book.
I'm certainly a dabbler in this area so perhaps I'm missing some hidden subtlety, but it's completely baffling to me that anyone that professes even a rudimentary understanding of evolution could posit a thesis that seems to assert that change leads to evolutionary stagnation and that stagnation leads to evolutionary change. change necessitates adaptation, change DRIVES evolution.
also, how can he POSSIBLY find a control to validate his unfounded assertion that evolution is at a standstill?
About these "anthropomorphism" criticisms started by AP: That's more an illusion created by the way he phrased his sentences than it is the concrete meaning of what he's saying. I don't like what he's saying either, but I think a lot of the complaints arise more from that overall distaste than from what he actually meant (or "could have meant"--since the language was not clear).
When we dislike an argument, we tend to demand an irrational degree of rationality.
Now, this talk of nature "wanting" to evolve does merit criticism. I remember believing that a bird who wants a long neck will get one, and I think bad science education was to blame for that belief. People don't always think about the way language can send mixed messages. I just don't think that's the most important issue here.
Maybe the way he writes in his book is completely different from the way talks in this interview.
Because that if beautiful women don't have daughters,then there are no beautiful girls in world.:)
wow gold
There are lots of things wrong with saying that "we are stuck" on some evolutionary plateau. I think he is saying we are stuck with respect to brain chemistry, but this is a purely psycho-centric perspective - like there are traits that need to be introduced or promoted to cope with modern life. Horsefeathers.
Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
For evolutionary change to happen, there needs to be an event that causes a big chunk of the population to die, leaving those that happened to have the trait to allow them to survive to repopulate.
And then consider what Darwin said to begin with: "Evolution happens on an individual basis"
We (as a species) are not conforming to our environment, unless the environment forces a change in sexual strategies or our ability to pass on traits. The authors are talking about how a species acts upon itself (sexual behavior), but not how outside forces act upon it. And this is a significant part of the story leading up to the Savannah-era brain they say we still use.
One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
Clay@11:
The assertion that we cower/cry/are aroused by fictional situations due to a deep-seated inability to discern fantasy from reality seems to be a shallow plumbing of what the mind actually does when exposed to these media.
To which I must point out that media that genuinely simulates the sound and motion of real life has only existed for about 100 years. Not many movies were released into the Neolithic trade culture, but I think the human imagination was flourishing just fine with orally-copied stories, which allowed the hearers to hack the feelings of being scared or romantic without actually believing they were about to get eaten or laid that very second.
Perhaps the authors feel that evolution can only take place when everything stands still, because the only times they have observed reproductive stimuli is in cases where the desired female is a lifeless photograph. To which I and Mr. Darwin wish them many happy returns.
"Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real"
What a generalised and unthought out statement. Just because we emotively react to something doesn’t mean our brains can’t “tell the difference” between it and reality…
The excerpt there seems pretty well flawed to me, as discussed in the comments above, but I'm no more than an amateur enthusiast about these things. A more serious problem is the title. Beautiful people have more daughters, eh? The author has obviously never been to Glasgow, or the UK in general...
I am happy to see that most people have as much use for evolutionary psychology as I do. It's sad that there is so much good work going on out there, and these guys write a popular science book that is going to get a lot of press and which most people will not question the veracity of. Very frustrating.
It's good to see so many sound critiques of such nonsense, but there's one point I haven't seen mentioned: the author's ramblings aren't even self-consistent. Vis: For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations... When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more...
So what the author is saying is that the rate of environmental upheaval has been constant for many generations, but nothing about the environment has been constant for many generations. So we can see they are talking nonsense even before we get to the fact that it's completely false that environmental constancy is required for evolution through variation and natural selection to take place.
Self-consistency: it's not just for philosophers any more!
1) Of course we can evolve even if the environment is changing. We evolve for a changing environment.
2) Yes, there was a distinction between the simulated and real in the Stone Age. No, the cave painters didn't think they were painting actual animals on their cave walls.
Here is a scientific critique of Kanazawa's work, from a statistical point of view:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf
My favorite take on evolutionary psychology.
Yes, evolution is not an active force in the sense that language seems to suggest. Fish didn't just bear down and push lungs out. Still, some evolved lungs. Evolution is a passive phenomenon that can be analyzed as an active one in retrospect. And, evolution is always happening.
To say that a rapidly changing environment halts evolution is so wrong. Neoteny--the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood--among other "strategies," seems to arise in populations subjected to rapidly changing environments. One psychological domain that is evolving a tendency towards neoteny is pop culture in technologically mature populations.
Ours is a culture of adolescence: hungry and ever open to the new and ruthless towards senescence. Perhaps as a result, our phenotypes are increasingly being engineered to skew juvenile, proximately to drive consumer-driven economies, and increasingly so are our genotypes.
Theories can only be disproved. Evolutionary psychology is the fragile child of evolutionary biology because it's so much harder to definitively disprove some of its more controversial hypotheses.
Well in the stone age people still told stories around the fire and the people hearing those would get emotional about them. Just like we do when we read a book, watch a movie, even if we know that it is only an story that has never happened.
This is actually good, since if we "live" a story, it has a larger influence in what we'll do next. For instance if we were a stone age hunter tribe and we were around the fire, if I were to tell you never get near a tiger you would listen and forget in about two seconds. But if I told you a long tale on how a sacred tiger lead a good hunter to his death while he was trying to meet the daughter of the sun, moon, who now wonders after the gallant hunter illuminating the night so other hunter would fall under the trap of the evil tiger. Now this would be much more effective.
The title aroused my curiosity, as it is widely established that children (which includes daughters) more closely resemble their father. The proposed mechanism to perpetuate by producing attractive daughters does not therefore require two beautiful people, only an attractive father.
(Which rather reminds me of Winston Churchill's retort to the actress, "Yes, but what if our children had my looks and your brains?")
And stuck? A mere 100 years of mobility and dissolving ethnic boundaries is turning some recessive characteristics into endangered species. For instance, the 20th century saw a dramatic reduction in the proportion of blonds.
Evolution is not intelligent design; it is actually dumber than Darwinism and the Cosmic Watchmaker is a vain projection. Evolution is simply that which survives and no amount of anthropomorphizing an agenda will make it stick. Survival of the Fittest is entirely misleading when it is really Survival of the Survivors.
Makes me wonder if Kanazawa has had his Fusiform Gyrus measured...