Another nail in the ev psych coffin
One of the central claims of evolutionary psychology is that virtually all human behavior was hard-wired into the brain during the “Era of Evolutionary Adaptation,” a mythical time deep in the Stone Age that bore an uncanny resemblance to The Flintstones. According to ev psychos this golden age ended 10,000 years ago, and the human brain hasn’t evolved since, leading to a cottage industry in self-help books and speaking engagements by would-be brain gurus endlessly repeating that “our modern skulls house stone age minds.” It’s a ridiculous concept that has never made a lick of sense, because it was invented by psychologists who know even less about evolution (biological or cultural) than they do about psychology.
I could go into a lengthy discussion here of why it makes no sense, but instead I’ll just point you to this lovely new genetic study (New York Times, Science Daily) showing that human evolution has in fact sped up — enormously so — in the past 40,000 years, and especially in the past 10,000. Those dates line up nicely with two key transitions in our species’ history. The Upper Paleolithic explosion 40,000 years ago marks the point when modern humans started spreading over the planet and creating complex culture: art, jewelry, burial rituals, vastly more complex tools and technology, everything. And 10,000 years ago we had the Neolithic revolution, with the invention of agriculture and all that brought. If this new study is accurate, the rate of genetic change in humans during the past 5,000 years alone has been 100 times higher than in any other period of our evolution.
A caution: some people are already misunderstanding the import of this, thinking it means that biology rules and cultural evolution is unimportant. That couldn’t be more wrong. As powerful as genetic evolution is, it’s still grindingly slow and small compared to the speed and breadth of human cultural change. Culture is what made our genetic evolution speed up and is what’s keeping it on the boil. Our physical evolution for the past 40,000 years has been an interlocking, spiraling dance of cultural change and biological adaptation. And “human nature” — which the ev psychos are so fond of imagining was carved in stone hundreds of thousands of years ago — is a moving target. You cannot talk about the “nature” of women or the “nature” of men or anything else. The human species is in a slipstream of constant flux as our culture and our genes ceaselessly interact.
5 Responses to “Another nail in the ev psych coffin”
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foilwoman says:
I guess I’m slower than the average tortoise. While I knew ev-psycho was a big stinking pile of crap, I hadn’t focussed on the whole “our brains have stopped evolving at a time period we find very convenient” nonsense. Of course, I’m perfectly willing to agree that most ev-psych proponents’ brains stopped evolving at a very early time period — say age 2 or so (my three year old is more evolved). I mean, that makes sense. Thank you for making this all clear. Your visit to a higher plane has clearly resulted in your apotheosis, making this insights clear to us mere mortals. Thank you, Divine Violet.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:18 am EST -
kiuku says:
We’ve got enough nails..will Evo-Psych just die already
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therealuk says:
I must say I’m not entirely sure what this research shows that is that new and/or startling.
Bear in mind:
1)I get the basics of evolutionary theory, but I’m not a biologist, so can’t make much sense of the HapMapSNP LDD jargon in the original paper, so for me not a right lot of help
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDF.....allpdf.pdf
2) the way these things are reported in the popular press can often bear almost no relation at all to the actual research, so not much help there either
3) I’m old and tired
OK, most of us in the reality based community accept evolution as a biological theory. Part of this is that biological organisms, ie us humans, will adapt to our environment as a result of beneficial mutations persisting (and detrimental mutions not)in the organism.
By sheer force of numbers more people means more variation, and a greater variety of environments
(environment = office block, savannah, diet, disease, pollution, whatever) means more differences arise as well. So we’re different “more evolved” (misleading phrase) than we used to be, and more varied, and sometimes that happens quite quickly (the lactose thing is a classic example).Is this really new news ? Or did scientists know it but just not have the experimental measurements ? I’m also a bit lost with the increased variation thing – what are the implications of that ?
So, overall I feel like I’m missing something here ?
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The Ghost of Violet says:
therealuk:
The study is interesting because it looks at our genome to estimate the rate and timing of change, which is new. It’s evidence where we haven’t had any.
There’s been a lot of dispute about how much humans have really evolved in the past 40,000 years. Until now we’ve had to make guesses based on fossils and tools. Anatomically modern humans appeared maybe 100,000 years ago, and by 40,000 years ago we’re definitely seeing modern human behavior (the cave art, etc.). The general conservative view has been that humans have been physically relatively unchanged for most of this time, though there have been a couple of cases that we could point to of recent evolution that we know had to be recent because they’re tied to agriculture (the development of lactase tolerance, development of sickle cell). And it’s been a good guess that humans have become much more gracile since the Upper Paleolithic, at least based on the skulls. But even with things like racial characteristics, it’s been disputed whether those are very recent developments (the modern majority view) or rooted in quite old population separations.
And of course the idiot ev psychs have been pushing their theory that human minds and behavior haven’t changed at all since the Pleistocene, even if their lactase tolerance has.
This new study is evidence where we haven’t had evidence before: it actually looks at the genome and says, holy shit! We’ve been piling up changes like crazy in the past 10000 years! We’ve evolved a LOT very recently! So in that sense, yes it’s an intriguing new piece of information.
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therealUK says:
I’ve been meaning to come back to this.
Somewhere there is a diagram* showing overlapping circles (Venn-like) for the genetic differences across Africans, Asians and Europeans. The Asians and Europeans circles are almost totally on top of one another and both contained almost entirely within the much larger African one.
So I always imagined the overall human dna map to be some sort of circle-blob, which 50-10,000 yrs ago would be much smaller, and which is continuing to move and grow. I imagine it in 3D like a funnel or cone moving out and in and sideways and up** (with time). Which is why I thought this study was not new news, and didn’t realise that any serious science thought evolution had ground to a halt anyway.
I just don’t get the jargon, and am curious about the detail – what exactly do they mean by “different” or “more evolved” and how is it measured and so on ?
* which I can’t find and may have got the details wrong
** I’m sure some whizz-kid with the hapmap knowledge could programme this into a neat 3D demonstration.
