God Fearing Atheist

Oolon,

That thread can be found on the link in my OP.

Of course, pz was mistaken, as my quotes clearly show...and *thats* what im arguing against.

Im trying to correct yet another Gouldian misrepresentation.

-GFA

pz

By making a straw man of Gould? That doesn't seem to be a very clever strategy.

As I pointed out before, Gould did not paint his critics as drooling, single-minded slaves to the altar of adaptationism. He acknowledged their good and worthy contributions, and he himself wrote at length on selection as a central mechanism of evolution. At the heart, we also know that all of these people, Gould, Lewontin, Maynard Smith, Dawkins, etc., are largely in agreement about the fact of evolution.

However, a curious thing happens in these discussions. Gould considered himself a pluralist, and wrote extensively on alternative mechanisms to selection...not to deny adaptation, but to bring to our attention the richness and complexity of evolution. The response from many of the people you cite was to revile him. Out of one side of their mouth they would say that his ideas were trifling, unimportant, and muddled; out of the other side they would agree with him, and claim that they already incorporated all of his thought into their research, and had done so long ago. Their defenders do as you have done, and find passages where these authors pay lip service to non-adaptationist ideas, and make this peculiar claim that there is no substantive difference between the views of a Pinker and of a Lewontin...other than the fact that Lewontin is a lying marxist, of course.

This is the real misrepresentation, unfortunately. There are important differences in structuralist vs. functionalist explanations, for instance, and it's bad enough that the differences are blithely swept under the rug, but even worse, the ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy then claims that they are structuralists, too. They aren't. I'm sorry, but John Maynard Smith is not Brian Goodwin. We see the same thing with anti-reductionists and reductionists; try as some might to pretend so, Lewontin's ideas are not a subset of Dawkins'.

It requires an ignorance of a large body of opposing literature to argue otherwise, and it's hard not to be amused when someone tries to critique Gould by claiming that scientists like Dawkins and Pinker are not overwhelmingly adaptationist in their perspective. It's like someone trying to argue that Michael Jordan wasn't a great basketball player because he tried his hand at baseball once.

It's even more amusing when the critique parrots a title by Arthur Jensen, of all people. Whatever were you thinking? Why would anyone start off a discussion with a reference that immediately discredits his opinion?

pz

Actually, it doesn't sting much at all. It's a dreadful little piece, full of unintentional humor and the occasional outright lie.

I mean, I laughed out loud at this line...
...since Mayr is a man with an amazing record of egotism and subsumption of other people's ideas, no matter how inconsistent they are with his previously expressed opinions.

Or this:
Sweet jebus, what are those guys smoking? It's tunnel vision -- they have such a narrow vision of the field that they can't even see the mob of dissenters.

And this:
That's just bad. Anyone familiar with Gould has suffered with his painfully thorough efforts to sympathize with those who hold different ideas. That quote is actually a spot-on assessment of Dawkins. Dawkins is a wonderfully lucid writer, and it's hard to see how anyone could find fault with that brief summary of his position; Dawkins himself called organisms "lumbering robots" serving the needs of genes. Here's a longer quote, from the pen of Dawkins himself:
People may disagree that that is logically flawed and foolish (although time is showing Gould to be right), but the people who disagree all seem to be unaware of the case against Dawkins and seem convinced that he is "the brilliant and authentic native voice of modern evolutionary biology".

It really is a pretty funny article.

God Fearing Atheist

As I lack any mystical intuitive sense that you may have, pz, im unfortunately unable to know what Gould meant independent of what Gould said. The quotes I posted on the other thread were quite explicit (and there are some others in Tooby & Cosmides response).

I am willing to believe that Gould's affinity for hyperbole made him misstep, and that he meant to say what you think he said. My point is that he didnt actually say that "adaptationists" were simply overemphasizing selection over neutral mechanisms and by-products.

I, nor the authors I cited, I believe, intend "muddled" as anything more than a description of his views on "adaptationists" and other "ultra-Darwinians" (with a few exceptions, of course). They are "muddled" in the sense that they are obviously untrue; that no evolutionary psychologist believes what Gould suggests they believe.

The point, pz, is not that certain psychologists/biologists, for empirical reasons, believe more aspects of human biology are shaped by adaptation than some others do. Rather, its that these "adaptationists" 1) use neutral theories, 2) test neutral theories in their work, 3) and accept neutral theories as explanations of a host of phenomenon.

This nonsense is not worth commenting on. I can only suggest making an attempt to study modern psychometrics before saying things like this.

Lastly, I just had to chuckle at the bit about Mayr having a record of “subsumption of other people's ideas”...in a thread about Gould! Oh, I love irony!

God Fearing Atheist

Let me just restate my point a bit more clearly:

1) Gould has said "adaptationists" only consider adaptive hypotheses.

2) Pz, despite the obvious meaning of the words, thinks Gould is saying that "adaptationists" focus primarily on adaptation, and/or only find adaptive explanations "significant or interesting".

Both 1 and 2 are unambiguously false, both in theory (illustrated by the explicit disavowal of that approach by leading scholars) and in practice (illustrated by a cursory glance at the primary literature, where you find neutral theories tested and accepted).

This is Gould's "muddle". Where there are real disagreements (like theories involving higher-level selection), I, for one, would extend the term. But this is not the purpose of the thread.

-GFA

Doubting Didymus

Regarding Dawkins specifically, I am beginning to suspect that this allegation has some substance to it. I've been reading A Devils Chaplain just recently, in which he is heard to remark quite bluntly, words to the effect that adaptations are the only interesting part of evolutionary theory. I'll dig up the quote tonight. However, just as interesting, and contributing to some small confusion on my part, is the fact that he also devoted significant chunks of the very same essay to discussing the interesting things about neutral mutations, as well as human neoteny. Another quote, loosely taken from my memory: "There is no reason to think that all, or even most features of organisms are the result of adaptations".

I still agree with him about gene - level selection. But quite frankly, I don't know exactly what Dawkins thinks about adaptation"ism".

pz

I have not seen evidence that Gould has claimed this. See below.No, I know that this is what Gould says. See below.The neutral theory had quite a struggle before it was accepted, if you look into the history of the science. It still has little place in evolutionary psychology; while it is recognized that neutral changes occur with high frequency, they are regarded as background noise -- an uninteresting null hypothesis.If you are going to complain about Gould's "muddle", you might try actually reading what he has written. This is a subject which he has pursued in great depth, and with far more breadth than you seem able to acknowledge.

I recommend The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. In particular, read Chapter 7: "The Modern Synthesis as a Limited Consensus", pp. 503-591. Nowhere in that long chapter does he make the assertion that you claim (although I wouldn't be horribly surprised if at some time in his career he had brashly said something along those lines -- he wasn't one to waffle). It's actually a nuanced discussion of the hardening of the neo-Darwinian synthesis from an early pluralism to an emphasis on adaptation, which better represents his position than your misrepresentation.

For instance, of Wright he says:Note that he is not claiming that Sewall Wright did not accept drift (which would be about as silly a statement as anyone could make), but is demonstrating that he was minimizing its significance in deference to the all-important subject of adaptation.

Gould similarly documents Dobzhansky's increasing emphasis on adaptation in succeeding editions of Genetics and the Origin of Species, and a similar shift in Simpson's work. He dissects Mayr in detail; you must be aware of Mayr's comment that "Neutral polymorphism is an infinitesimal percentage of all evolutionary phenomena."

It is inarguable that there is a strongly adaptationist bias in most contemporary evolutionary biology, and nowhere is it more evident than in evolutionary psychology. I can sympathize with someone who defends that bias, but it is extremely peculiar to see people, especially evolutionary psychologists, deny that it exists.

God Fearing Atheist

*Bump*

I'll respond as soon as I get back from vacation.

-GFA

ps418

If the charge is only that there is a focus on adaptation in evolutionary biology, I think many people would say unrepentently, 'guilty as charged!' Nonadaptive features are interesting, and like I've said before, for any phenotype, you have to consider both adaptationist and nonadaptationist hypotheses. Assuming that something is a spandrel is no less an assumption than assuming something is an adaptation. However, I see nothing at all wrong with a biased research focus on adaptive evolution. Who wants to spend their career demonstrating that the nose really is not an adaptation for holding glasses?

Regarding Gould, and what he said or did not say, I'll say this. I read Gould long before I read anything by any evolutionary psychologist, and the impression I got was that evoutionary psychologists and indeed many other evolutionary biologists, were indeed pursuing a Pandaptationist, Panglossian, paradigm, who thought that all phenotypes and behaviors were adaptations, who simply ignored or ruled out a priori the existence of spandrels, and who were in general totally ignorant of the role of contingency in evolution. Oh, and these people were also genetic determinists who were either ignorant or ignoring the role of environmental influences on phenotypes, assumed that there were genes for nearly every behavior, and that those genes were both necessary and sufficient to produce the behavior. Perhaps I wasn't reading carefully enough, but then maybe he wasn't speaking carefully enough. For instance, in a 1984 essay, he wrote:

Quoted in Alcock, 2000.

Certainly many people would infer from this statement that there are some scientists out there who are not merely placing an emphasis on adaptation (which not even Gould challenges), but who are arguing that virtually every form and behavior is an adaptation.

Patrick

Oolon Colluphid

The converse was how I came to it. In my early days of non-fiction reading, I read Desmond Morris, then Nick Humphrey (The Inner Eye), then Selfish Gene, then John Gribbin (& Cherfas, eg The Monkey Puzzle), then Blind Watchmaker, before finally encountering Gould. And what I’ve read of his has been filled with fascinating historical-contextualisations and background... and has elsewhere irritated the crap out of me.

At least, to begin with, I was just plain confused. I hadn’t realised Dawkins and co were such genetic determinists. It didn’t chime with what I remembered, didn’t feel right. So I went back to Dawkins again. On returning to Gould since, I find myself too often muttering ‘but that’s not what was intended / said’, ‘but so-and-so acknowledged this, so why are you arguing about it as if they hadn’t?!’, and so on. Dawkins for one has certainly emphasised other factors in evolution, while making no bones about what the interesting stuff is. As I’ve said before, impacts and extinctions, drift, spandrels and whatever are all very well, but can they make an eye?

The problem is, I’m now reluctant, given the shelf-fulls I’ve still to read, to bother with Gould. I’m sure I’m missing out on some great stuff (I’ll never forget the story of the statue of someone which fell and embedded itself in the ground, about which the statue-person’s rival commented that he’d always preferred him in the concrete rather than the abstract (or similar... actually, I’ve done a good job of forgetting it ), and a chapter about working out the total number of species from how many fall out of a tree when you spray it with something deadly), but I just don’t have time to be sent off in wrong-headed directions any more. He was a good writer (though outclassed by Dawkins for clarity), but I just can’t see myself ever recommending him.

Cheers, Oolon