A leading proponent of evolutionary psychology—the phrenology of of modern times—claims Thomas Aquinas as one of their own:
In 1975, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson created a firestorm when, in his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, he argued that human nature might be explainable in evolutionary terms. Centuries earlier, however, a leading Christian scholar was already applying many key evolutionary principles to the understanding of man.
[. . .]
If he were alive today would Aquinas be an evolutionist? His writings suggest a mind already resonating with many evolutionary concepts. My sense is that Aquinas, like Aristotle and Albert before him, was just too curious and too smart not be at the intellectual vanguard wrestling with exciting new knowledge. Limping weakly behind with whiny unimaginative creationists would have been far too boring for a mind such as his.
If he were alive today Aquinas might be an evolutionist. But like most rational people, Aquinas would be skeptical of the idiotic claims of evolutionary psychology. Do we really think he would believe, as some evolutionary psychologists claim, that men tip better in restaurants because we’ve been programmed to show how much surplus wealth we have? Is it possible that the Angelic Doctor could believe anything that dumb?
(Via: Uncommon Descent))
October 20th, 2010 | 9:44 am
That some enthusiasts of evolutionary psychology have engaged in what Dennett calls ‘greedy reductionism’ is clear. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the idea. For a more careful treatment of the idea (among others), take a look at David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolution For Everyone”. Another interesting book that tackles the subject from a different angle is Geoffrey Miller’s “Spent”. You don’t have to agree with everything they say (I certainly don’t) but at least they’ll give you an idea of what proponents of such ideas actually say.
October 20th, 2010 | 10:40 am
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October 20th, 2010 | 11:00 am
I don’t see why evolutionary psychology is idiotic, Joe. Perhaps some of the particular claims of evolutionary psychology are questionable. Certainly many of the particular explanations given by its practitioners are highly speculative. On the other hand, the Darwinian explanation of the sexual “double standard” — (that men tend to be more promiscuous, and that more opprobrium attaches to female sexual promiscuity than male in many cultures) — is so simple and plausible that it seems to me almost obviously true.
What is more reasonable than to suppose that many aspects of human psychology were shaped by the processes that gave rise to our physical forms? Body and mind are intimately related. What shaped our bodies and brains must have shaped much our psychology.
Consider an obvious example: Male animals are sexually attracted to female animals. Do you imagine that the similar attraction of male humans to female humans is somehow unrelated to that? — that our sexual instinct does not have its origin in our biological antecedents? Can you seriously maintain that view, Joe? I doubt you do. I find it hard to imagine that anyone holds that view.
October 20th, 2010 | 11:51 am
Stephen Barr I don’t see why evolutionary psychology is idiotic, Joe.
There are two reasons I make that claim. The first is related to an argument I made a few weeks ago. Behavior is tied, in many instances, to beliefs and convictions. If evolution is a non-teleological process (as all evolutionary psychologists claim), it undercuts our ability to trust that we can form true beliefs and convictions.
To have trustworthy convictions, we have to have properly functioning noetic equipment (i.e., a brain, spinal cord, sensory apparatus, etc., that recognize reality). But in order to accept the naturalistic evolutionary explanation for the development of our noetic equipment we have to be agnostic about its reliability. All we would really know is that it works for evolutionary purposes, not for the purposes of discerning truth from falsehood.
So even if we were able to make claims about what behaviors were influenced by evolution, we would never be able to say that such claims were true.
That reason seems like it should be persuasive, but since secular evolutionists reject it, I’ll only rely on the my second one. Under this view, the biggest problem with evolutionary pscyhology is that it is not rooted in evolutionary biology
As the philosopher of science David Buller says,
What is more reasonable than to suppose that many aspects of human psychology were shaped by the processes that gave rise to our physical forms? Body and mind are intimately related.
Theistic evolutionists might claim that body and mind are intimately related, but that is not a claim that secular evolutionists could/should make. If the popular view of evolution is true, then the mind is merely epiphenomenal and all behavior can be explained by physical processes. I suspect this is the primary reason why many evolutionary biologists think that EP is nonsense.
Can you seriously maintain that view, Joe? I doubt you do. I find it hard to imagine that anyone holds that view.
I don’t dispute that the sexual instinct has its origin in our biological antecedents. But there is a vast difference between claiming that some behaviors have biological antecedents that were influenced by the evolutionary process and the claim, made by EP, that almost all human behavior is generated by psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
October 20th, 2010 | 1:12 pm
“So even if we were able to make claims about what behaviors were influenced by evolution, we would never be able to say that such claims were true. ”
This is what nails it for me. No matter how plausible a theory of causation seems, if there is no way to test the causation as opposed to the correlation, it is folly to hold it up as a scientific theory, and even worse to use it as a basis for taking the next theoretical step.
Some of what evolutionary psych comes up with is not merely plausible, but aligns with divine revelation about the human heart. So it’s not entirely useless as a method of philosophizing about human behavior (though I disagree with the evolutionary premise to begin with) but provides nothing scientific.
October 20th, 2010 | 1:41 pm
Joe, a lot of red herrings here.
First of all, let’s start with the last point. If you define “evolutionary psychology” to include the proposition that ALL, or “almost all”, human behavior can be explained by physical processes — those that go on in the brain and those by which our bodies and brains evolved — then OF COURSE it is incompatible with traditional Christian belief. End of discussion.
But why must it be “all or nothing” that way? Human beings are both physical and spiritual. At least in this life, all our thought processes — even those involving reason and free will — involve our bodies (in particular, our brains) and thus cannot be explained APART from an understanding of how the brain functions and how it evolved. Some of our mental functioning cannot be explained ONLY in those terms, to be sure. But all our mental functioning has a physical dimension and therefore reflects the evolutionary processes that shaped our physical constitutions.
Your point about the adequacy of our noetic equipment is a good one (I have made similar arguments in my book), but what it proves, at most, is that there are aspects of or minds that cannot be explained ENTIRELY in physical/biological terms. But that is a very far cry from saying that physics and biology are not PART of the explanation.
I don’t think it is helpful in science-religion issues to frame them in stark either-or terms (e.g. either evolution explains everything, or it is irrelevant). You may not have intended such a dichotomy, but that is the tenor of your original post. It is exactly that kind of thinking that generates the pseudo-problems that lead many to think there is a contradiction between between science and Christian faith.
In my view, any explanation of the human mind must INCLUDE the insights of evolutionary biology (and evolutionary psychology) and of neuroscience. It must include other things too — hugely important things such as that we have the power of reason and free will, which neither physics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, nor any purely physicalistic view can account for.
If you are merely complaining about EP as it is actually practiced by people, and saying that it as overly reductive — then you may well be right. I suspect you are. But I hope you are not saying that there could not be a reasonable (and from a Christian point of view) quite orthodox way of doing EP that eschews excessive reductionism.
Personally, I think St. Thomas, if he were doing theology and philosophy today, would accept some of the insights of evolutionary psychology without any difficulty.
Just as I think it a gigantic mistake to use the word “darwinism” to mean the most extreme and reductive theories that base themselves on darwinian biology and then announce to the world one’s opposition as a Christian to “darwinism” simpliciter, so I think with the term “evolutionary psychology”. That is to surrender an entire field of thought to the opponents of Christianity.
As far as St. Thomas goes, that was NOT his manner of proceeding. As everyone knows, before St. Thomas many Christians regarded aristotelian thought as extremely dangerous if nit heretical. And for excellent reasons: Aristotelianism as it was practiced by many people was tied up with all sorts of ideas that could not be squared with Christian belief. Aristotle’s “God” was not the Creator of the universe nor a designer and did care about what went on the world. Aristotle’s universe had no beginning. Not without good theological reasons did the bishop of Paris condemn 219 propositions (if memory serves) of “aristotelianism” in the year 1277. Aristotelianism, as practiced by many or most adherents, was grossly incompatible with Christian fundamentals. Did St. Thomas therefore go on a campaign against “aristotelianism”? Quite the reverse: he showed that there was a better way of doing Aristotelianism. He took what was good in Aristotelianism and threw out what was bad. he created a brilliant synthesis.
THAT is what he would now do with evolutionary ideas, I am absolutely convinced.
October 20th, 2010 | 2:53 pm
Stephen Barr First of all, let’s start with the last point. If you define “evolutionary psychology” to include the proposition that ALL, or “almost all”, human behavior can be explained by physical processes — those that go on in the brain and those by which our bodies and brains evolved — then OF COURSE it is incompatible with traditional Christian belief. End of discussion.
But that is how the field is defined. I’m not saying that psychology and evolutionary biology are inherently incompatible. It is quite possible for them to be compatible (all truth is God’s truth). However, the way that field of study is currently defined precludes claims that are compatible with traditional Christian belief.
Human beings are both physical and spiritual. At least in this life, all our thought processes — even those involving reason and free will — involve our bodies (in particular, our brains) and thus cannot be explained APART from an understanding of how the brain functions and how it evolved.
Naturally, I agree. But that is where you and I differ from the EPs. They would claim that there is no such thing as the spiritual and all explanations must be based on physical matter.
But that is a very far cry from saying that physics and biology are not PART of the explanation.
Of course I would never say that physics and biology are not part of the explanation. But accordintg to EP, they are the totality of the explanation. EPs claim that all behaviroal phenonmena can be explained as adaptations, byproducts of adaptations, malfunctions of adaptations, or noise.
It is exactly that kind of thinking that generates the pseudo-problems that lead many to think there is a contradiction between between science and Christian faith.
I certainly never intended to imply that this is faith versus science issue. I believe it is a science versus pseudoscience issue. There is a reason that many evolutionary biologists reject the claims of EP—it is based on unscientic claims.
If you are merely complaining about EP as it is actually practiced by people, and saying that it as overly reductive — then you may well be right. I suspect you are. But I hope you are not saying that there could not be a reasonable (and from a Christian point of view) quite orthodox way of doing EP that eschews excessive reductionism.
Naturally I think EP could be done in a way that is consistent with Christianity (of course it would then be rejected by the mainstream of science, but still. . . ).
That is to surrender an entire field of thought to the opponents of Christianity.
While I think that is true, it is the unfortunate reality of the situation. There is no research being done in the field—at least that I’ve seen—that is compatible with the Christian faith. The field requires presuppositions that are antithetical to what we believe. Ironically, they contain presuppositions that are also antithetical to what many secular evolutionists believe.
October 20th, 2010 | 3:32 pm
The main problem with evolutionary psychology as it is actually practiced (not as Dr. Barr imagines it should be practiced) is that it “explains” everything about human behavior and therefore explains nothing about human behavior.
Evolutionary psychology is built upon a foundation of naturalist metaphysics. All evolutionary psychologists operate on naturalist assumptions, at least on a methodological basis and usually on an ontological basis as well. This necessarily means that evolutionary psychologists believe ALL human behavior is explained solely as the result of physical causes, i.e. all behavior is the product of Darwinian evolution. Pace Dr. Barr, there is no room for consideration of the “spiritual” in the discipline. In other words, the materialist evolutionary psychologist must necessarily believe that behavior is caused solely by electro-chemical reactions in the brain, which are themselves nothing but evolutionary adaptations that arose because they somehow increased the chances of survival of the organism’s ancestors. There is no mind. What we call mind is an illusion, an epiphenomenon of these same electro-chemical brain processes, and the illusion that we have a mind must itself by an evolutionary adaptation. If EP has no room for “mind” in any meaningful sense, certainly there is no room for “spirit” as a cause of behavior.
Accordingly, the evolutionary psychologist must believe that the list of causes of human behavior both begins and ends at “evolutionary adaptation.” This means that every human behavior – and its opposite – is explained by the same reason. Altruism? That’s an evolutionary adaption. Genocide? That’s an evolutionary adaptation too. Rape and murder. Yep, evolutionary adaptations. Love and mercy. Evolutionary adaptations. Etc.
If a given hypothesis can account for a particular phenomenon and the opposite of that phenomenon with equal ease at the same time, on what grounds would we ever hope to falsify it? The answer is that no hypothesis of evolutionary psychology is, even in principle, falsifiable. This means that the entire field can be summarized as the practice of making up just so evolutionary stories to explain behavior and then making up different just so evolutionary stories to explain the opposite of that behavior. It is no wonder that EP is an embarrassment even in the wider field of evolutionary studies.
October 20th, 2010 | 4:54 pm
“Of course I would never say that physics and biology are not part of the explanation. But accordintg to EP, they are the totality of the explanation. EPs claim that all behaviroal phenonmena can be explained as adaptations, byproducts of adaptations, malfunctions of adaptations, or noise. ”
Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, “Evolutionary Social Psychology” (Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th edition):
“An evolutionary perspective rejects any simplistic ‘nature versus nurture’ approach to the causes of social behavior. Rather, it acknowledges, and seeks to unpack, , the fascinating and complex relationships among evolved mechanisms, developmental processes, learning, and culture.” (p. 762)
David Buss and colleagues, in an American Psychologist article published this year:
“The framework of evolutionary psychology dissolves dichotomies such as “nature versus nurture,” “innate versus learned,” and “biological versus cultural.” Instead it offers a truly interactionist framework: Environmental selection pressures shape evolved mechanisms at the phylogenetic level. Environmental input influences their development at the ontogenetic level. And the environment provides cues that activate psychological adaptations at the immediate proximal level.”
Toobey & Cosmides, “Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology” (Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology):
“it would be wrong to exclude the machinery of higher cognition from an evolutionary analysis. The evolved architecture of the mind includes specialized mechanisms that permit offline, decoupled cognition, in which metarepresentations, imagery, and a scope syntax interact with the outputs of domain specific mechanisms to allow the counterfactual and suppositional thinking. Decoupled cognition may have evolved to help calibrate or recalibrate mechanisms through synthesized experience, support planning, infer other people’s mental contents, or imagine solutions to social, tool use, or other ancestral problems. But it seems likely that, whether as by-products or not, decoupled cognition also permits the kind of thinking that underlies scientific discovery, religious ideas, and other uniquely human preoccupations.”
I’m no fan of evolutionary psychology, but are you sure you’re not rejecting a straw man?
You also say that an intimate connection between body and mind would fit within a theistic evolutionary approach, but not a secular evolutionary approach. So is your problem really with evolutionary psychology, or with atheism?
October 20th, 2010 | 5:36 pm
Charles I’m no fan of evolutionary psychology, but are you sure you’re not rejecting a straw man?
It’s always possible that I am not adequately representing the claims of EP. But I think in this particular case I am on sold ground. For example, consider page 16 of the reference you cited:
EPs, as I understand them, are purely physicalists. Here’s an example of what I mean: Imagine that after touching a glowing red spot on an electric stove and burning my hand, I form a belief that touching a stove will burn me. In the future, this belief causes me to pull back my hand when I get close to a hot stove.
What has happened is that a physical event in P (getting burned) causes an event in M (my mind feels pain). M produces an M event (a belief that anytime I touch a hot stove I will get burned) that causes P* (an automatic reaction in which I pull my hand back anytime I get close to a stove).
We can put this in diagram form as follows:
M—>M*
| |
^ v
P P*
The EP advocate will disagree with my claim since, in their view, mental events are the same as physical events in the brain.
Instead my behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs.
Their position could be diagrammed as follows:
M M*
| |
P –> P*
My brain (P) produces my mind (M) but my reaction (P*) is not caused by a non-physical mental event (M*).
So when they are talking about the “mind” they are really talking about a specific type of physical event. That’s not at all what most people think about when they use the term.
You also say that an intimate connection between body and mind would fit within a theistic evolutionary approach, but not a secular evolutionary approach.
True, but I think there is a bit of semantic confusion surrounding the term. I think there is an assumption that “evolutionary psychology” is merely the conjunction of two fields of study. In reality, it is a distinct branch that is related to those two fields, but whose ideas are distinct and novel.
It’s similar to asking if we could develop a theory of Freudianism that did not rely on the id, ego, and superego. We could, but then it would not longer be Freudianism but something entirely different. That is the same with EP. Once you claim that mental states are not coequal with physical states, then you are no longer talking about EP even if you combine aspects of evolution and psychology.
So is your problem really with evolutionary psychology, or with atheism?
Currently, as far as I understand it, EP presupposes atheism. Since I reject the latter, I will naturally have problems with EP. I’m open to a theory of evolutionary psychology that could be compatible with theism. But right now I don’t think one has been developed.
October 20th, 2010 | 5:41 pm
If you want to see a secular critique of much of “EP”, look here:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/10/why_do_women_shop_and_men_hunt.php
There’s a difference between the idea having no validity at all, and the idea being overapplied and undertested (the “greedy reductionism” I alluded to before).
October 20th, 2010 | 6:32 pm
“EPs, as I understand them, are purely physicalists.”
Granted. I have yet to come across a EP who is not a physicalist.
So if the incompatibility that you see arises from physicalism, what would your take be on Christian physicalists (found in books like “Whatever Happened to the Soul” edited by Brown, Murphy, and Malony, “In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem” edited by Green and Palmer, and Malcolm Jeeves’ “From Cells to Souls-and Beyond”)?
As for the development of an EP that would be compatible with theism, I’d recommend looking up Christopher Grace at Biola U. He’s working on something like that.
October 20th, 2010 | 8:26 pm
I infer from what you say, Joe, that you agree with me that we might gain insights about our minds by thinking about how we evolved. What should we call the study of the human mind from an evolutionary standpoint? I venture to suggest that we would call it “evolutionary psychology”. Now it is likely that the overwhelming majority — maybe even all — of the people engaged in that study are physicalists and atheists. That is a terrible shame. But the thing to condemn is atheism and physicalism NOT evolutionary psychology PER SE as an area of study — which is what you seemed to do, Joe, when you said that evolutionary psychology is the new phrenology.
The other day you posted, with approval, some material from a Catholic priest who said that Christians can believe in much of evolutionary theory, but should not uncritically accept all of it. I suggest the same attitude here: Admit that there might be some things of value in EP; but say that it should be approached critically, with many reservations and a great deal of caution.
Let me ask a simple question of you and Barry Arrington. Suppose that religious people stopped going into, say, physics. Suppose it thus came to pass that 100% of physicists were hard-core atheists. Suppose they arrogantly started “defining” their field to be based on atheist assumptions. Would you then dismiss all of physics ideas out of hand? Would you say that Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, Schrodinger’s Equation, Einstein’s theory of gravity, etc. were now “atheist”. I wouldn’t. I would say that these people had hijacked a field. I would say that the discoveries of physics, such as those I mentioned, were true notwithstanding the foolish philosophical opinions that currently prevailed among physicists.
If evolution shaped our brains and minds to a large extent, then Christian thinkers ought to be involved in the study of this. If they are not, and have left the field to the atheists, then Christians (collectively) are partly to blame.
October 21st, 2010 | 1:16 am
Dr. Barr, do you know of any evolutionary psychology that has good scientific credentials? I always thought EP was more Freud than Skinner.
October 21st, 2010 | 2:18 am
Dr. Barr, you compare apples to oranges.
EP is a soft science. Physics is a hard science. As a hard science physics is necessarily more rigorous and self-corrective. Therefore, the metaphysical prejudices of physicists, while they play a role in researchers’ work (how can they not), do not distort the entire enterprise. EP on the other hand is nothing but metaphysical prejudices being fobbed off as scientific conclusions.
So, to answer your question, yes, even if it were proven that all physicists were atheists, the very nature of the enterprise makes the conclusions of the researchers more epistemologically reliable.
Finally, as I hoped I explained above, metaphysical naturalism’s iron grip on EP is not my only objection to the field. I object to EP because its conclusions are trivial (e.g., your example: men are sexually attracted to women because they want to reproduce their DNA), untestable, and contradictory (as I pointed out).
October 21st, 2010 | 3:41 am
What should we call the study of the human mind from an evolutionary standpoint?
That depends. If we are saying that the “mind” is reducible to the physical, then it already fits within the scope of evolutionary psychology. However, if we’re simply saying that the brain developed by evolutionary processes and this has an affect on behavior and the cognitive functions then we already have a field of study that covers that—biological psychology. It would also fit within the major I took in college: behavioral science.
I venture to suggest that we would call it “evolutionary psychology”.
The problem is that once a term is adopted for a common usage, it is difficult to change its connotation. As I said earlier, evolutionary psychology is not merely a conjuction of the terms evolution and psychology. It is a distinct approach that is (mostly?) incompatible with non-reductionist theories of the mind.
It would be like theistic evolutionists deciding that their research program be called “intelligent design.” While the term may be loosely applicable, it would be difficult to change the current connotation.
Admit that there might be some things of value in EP; but say that it should be approached critically, with many reservations and a great deal of caution.
I agree with Barry. Whatever insights that are valuable are either trivial or have nothing to do with the actual research done in EP. Sure, they might stumble upon an insight or two. Most fields of study do. But EP is to “science” what critical theory is to literature. It’s mostly a bunch of nonsense cooked up by academics that has no real connection to reality.
Would you then dismiss all of physics ideas out of hand?
I have to agree with Barry that this is an apples and oranges comparison. Physics is a hard science that resists distortion by metaphysical prejudices. EP is not a science. Just because it has the word “evolution” in its name and claims to have ties to evolutionary biology does not make it a science any more than Freudianism was a science because it had ties to psychiatry.
I would say that these people had hijacked a field.
But EP wasn’t a field that was hijacked. Insights from the study of evolution have always been added to the fields of cognitive science, ethology, etoecology, etc. EP was a field that was created in the 1980s, mostly as a reaction to sociobiology. It’s not a broad-based generic field (like ethology) but a rather narrow and specific research program that is intended to guide other research programs (like cognitive science). In this way, it is much like the Intelligent Design movement.
October 21st, 2010 | 3:55 am
My guess is, based on Aquinas’s remarkable tolerence and openess to many nonchristian thinkers, particularly Aristotle, he would, in a qualified sense, be open to evolutionary psychology. Many thinkers, of his day, such as the Franciscian Bonaventure, were sceptical of Aristotle. But Aquinas wrote many commentaries on Aristotle’s extant works, because he, no doubt, believed that these works contained more than just a little truth.
I think that Aquinas would, in a wonderful scholastic fashion, make subtle distinctions, in evolutionary psychology, that would go completely over the heads of the rest of us. But he would probably accept, in general, its claims, like he in general accepted Aristotle’s claims, and took the truth, as he saw it in Plato, Cicero, and the presocratics.(incidently, a presocratic, Anaximander, proposed the first evolutionary theory).
October 26th, 2010 | 3:16 pm
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