Oolon Colluphid

I know what you mean, but... Clearly, people in a particular culture do inherit the prevalent language. Barrett et al make this point very early on in their Evolutionary Psychology textbook*. If something is inherited, then it is open to Darwinian selection -- inheritance isn’t all genes (Darwin, remember, didn’t know what they even were, yet his theory stood up without them per se). It is as misleading to characterise these things as nothing-but-genes -- which no EP / HBE person I’ve read does -- as it is to suggest genes are irrelevant or only tangentially relevant. But the bigger picture is that the whole lot -- genes and culture -- can be subject to selection, and so can have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms.

* Some time soon I hope to get further than page 25!

Cheers, DT

pangloss

That could very well be, but it does not prevent chimps from pointing.

Tharmas

You want harsh? You shouldn’t read reviews in scientific magazines. If you want “harsh” you see what the literati have to say. Take for example, this review in
The New Yorker. It doesn’t pretend to objectivity. It’s a pure slam. To be fair, last year they did the same kind of hatchet job on SJ Gould.

Oolon Colluphid

Why not harsh enough? You’ve read it then, after all? Because you had said:
Just curious, that you went and read it anyway...?
That sounds too much like one reason you dislike the book is that you dislike the author....?

Cheers, DT

Celsus

Oh well, since so few seem to have read Pinker, here is an excerpt from his book published in Discover, and here are the letters that followed it, with his replies. Judge for yourself.

Joel

Doubting Didymus

From pinkers excerpt:

For those who have read the blank slate, can you tell me what evidence Pinker delivers to support this story? Although it sounds plausible on the surface, it is painfully simplistic and would require some pretty decent evidence.

The reasons pinker suggests that 'explain' the taboo on sex are basically that we are worried about committing to a baby, even if we conciously know that there is no such risk. However, this should apply not only to humans, but to practically every animal species on the planet. Yet there are a multitude of species with no such hang ups, where sex does not elicit rage, jealousy etc. How does pinkers theory explain them?

Much more pressing is the lack of evidence. Surely there is more to this in his book? I certainly hope so, for without evidence his hypothesis should be immediately dismissed.

theyeti

Do you have any specific species in mind? I'm not aware of any animals, except those that are panmictic (such as sesile animals that just dump egg and sperm out into the water) that don't have some hang-ups about sex, so to speak. The attitudes towards sex among various species tend to conform to a certain pattern: the sex that puts the most investment into reproduction tends to be the "choosy" one, whereas the one that puts the least amount of effort is the "eager" one. For most species, it's the female who invests more in reproduction, and is hence choosy while the males fight amonst each other and do elaborate displays for attention. But there are some cases where the male invests more, and just as theory would predict, it's the females that fight for attention in these cases.

theyeti

Doubting Didymus

Quite right, but this is not quite the same thing as the all encompassing 'sexual taboo' that pinker is invoking. I have no doubt that he is at least partly correct, in fact. Its the attempt to stretch the theory over the entire phenomenon of sexual relations that rings warning bells to me.

There is little doubt that choosy females are the result of darwinian ecomomics, and similarly male infighting. But the idea that these premises explain all sexual taboos is obviously oversimplistic. One thing it does not explain, for example, is the great spectrum of sexual attitudes seen in the animal kingdom. Bonobos are not quite the peaceniks they are made out to be, but no-one doubts they are more sexually liberal than say, other chimpanzees or us ourselves. Why? Pinkers theory will not tell you.

I strongly suspect that social structures play a far greater role in the evolution of sexual attitudes than selective economics. Your own point is an example. In species where the social roles of males and females are reversed and males invest more in the children than females (I think there is a prime example in some kind of bird), the male is choosy, the male is smaller, the female tries to get around as much as she can and fight with other females, and she also is more likely to practice other 'male' bahaviours seen in the animal kingdom, such as infanticide. The simplistic theory that "sex is riddled with hangups because of selective economics", is far too simplistic to explain the range of different sexual relations that we see in the animal kingdom.

As an example of pinker taking his theory too far, I direct you to his attempt to use the selection economics hypothesis to explain the lack of casualness in sex. However, (and this was the main focus of my original point) there are countless species that are utterly and totally casual about sex, where sex IS as common as a handshake and elicits no discomfort in those nearby. Even in species where jealousy is common, it is often hard to find a lack of sexual casualness, yet pinkers hypothesis SHOULD apply equally to every animal species equally.

copernicus

DF, I'm not sure what you mean by the word inherit here. People learn the prevalent language(s) in their environment, but they don't inherit them. What they inherit is the language-learning mechanism, and they follow a predictable path of linguistic maturation.

My problem with Pinker is that he is too Chomskyan in his approach to innateness. Chomsky believes that language is a formal object that is somewhat independent of behavioral strategies for interpreting and producing language. Children are supposed to start out with some kind of universal mental "organ" that computes what type of grammar controls the well-formedness of linguistic expressions. I simply do not believe that language is the type of formal object that Chomsky believes in, and I do believe that the linguistic "grammar" is wholly based in behavioral strategies for producing and interpreting linguistic expressions. For me, grammatical intuitions are epiphenomenal--derived from our knowledge of what we can produce when we speak a language.

I apologize for waxing arcane here. Basically, I have some professional nitpicks with Pinker's position on the nature of language, but, if forced to choose between Dupre and Pinker, I'd choose Pinker. He knows the linguistic issues that are driving innateness theory. Dupre appears not to.

theyeti

Well it's certainly true that ev psychology writ large will not tell you why certain species have certain behavioral characteristics. But the same thing can be said about evolution writ large and certain morphological characteristics. There are however hypotheses (developed under an ev psychology framework) that attempt to explain why certain behavioral tendancies are likely to evolve under certain circumstances. For example, since the needs of a human baby are so great, it's advantageous for males to involve themselves in caring for it. Because of this, human beings tend towards monogamy, though of course it's not exclusive. The reason being that a male doesn't want (from a Darwinian point of view) to waste time raising someone else's offspring, so he jealously guards his mate, hence monogamy. In the absence of strong male parental investment, we would likely be either promiscuous (like bonobos), or polygynous (like gorillas). The point isn't that this theory is correct (I think it is) but that there are attempts at explaining the fine details under the framework of the more general and sweeping theory.

Well that's a good point. However, I think that ev psychology (if not Pinker himself) does in many cases predict certain situations where sex is likely to be casual. For example, I would think that it should be found in species where 1) the social structure is matriarchal (i.e. females at the top of the social hierarchy) and 2) males put in relatively little investment in reproduction. In such a situation, the males should always take any opportunity for sex that is offered to them, and the females don't have to concern themselves with jealous males, thus there is no reason to be weirded out by sex. If a female feels like getting laid, she just picks out a male and they do it. The other females aren't losing their caring father-to-be, and the other males aren't being cuckholded, so from a Darwinian standpoint, no one else should care. On the other hand, in a species like humans where there is high male parental investment, males are in constant fear of cuckholdry, and females are in constant fear of abandonment. Hence, sex becomes everybody's business. (Situations where males dominate the social heirarchy are likely to lead to polygyny, I think, where dominant males guard their harem against other males.) I have no idea if these are predictions that the evidence favors, but the point is that one can develop finer predictions and explanations within this framework. But I agree that trying to explain human taboos about sex simply by invoking "ev phychology" is way too simplistic.

At any rate, I haven't endevored to read much of Pinker, so I can't say if he personally is presenting a compelling case or an over-simplified one.

theyeti