Hard wired 8: The evolutionary environment

What do we mean by EEA?

The acronym ‘EEA’ stands for the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation/Adaptiveness’, otherwise known as the ‘Evolutionary Environment’ or the ‘Ancestral Environment’. Originally coined by John Bowlby it has come to mean the conditions in which a species adapts because of strong naturally selective pressures. (schore 2012)

Badcock (2000) estimates that for around 99% of its existence the human species lived in small groups of hunter gatherers. The bulk of human adaptation took place during the pleistocene (beginning around 1.8 million years ago) and continuing until around 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE). The first human (homo) species arrived on the scene around 2.5 million years ago.

Our adaptation during that time, whilst well-suited to primitive societies, isn’t always helpful in the modern world of the last 10,000 years or so.

The figure of 10,000 years isn’t arbitrary by the way. That’s the time when humans first began to form larger societies – a change that our evolved psychology still seems to struggle with. We know that middle-eastern cities such as Jericho were founded around 7,000 years ago and that other cities such as Ur were founded sometime earlier. The fact is humans didn’t evolve to live in large towns and cities with national identities and we certainly didn’t adapt through the ages to spend our lives surrounded by strangers. But why not?

To answer this we need to consider a few fundamental points:

Evolution is slow;
Evolution occurs on ‘islands’;
Evolution isn’t concerned with individual comfort unless it aids procreation.

Evolution is slow

Although 10,000 years seems like an almost unimaginably long time for humans it’s actually a very short period in evolutionary terms. The process of evolution by natural selection, even in ideal conditions takes millions of years. For example a recent article estimates that the most recent common ancestor linking all the great apes lived some 11.9 million years ago.

The process relies more on numbers of generations than years passed & we’re really only talking about around 2000 generations over that time. So one answer to the question ‘why not’ is simply that our species hasn’t had enough time to evolve past hunter-gatherer societies.

Evolution occurs on ‘islands’

Evolution by means of natural selection happens most rapidly when survival pressures are most prevalent and life is so hard that new adaptations create genuine procreative advantages. It’s also important that any new adaptation isn’t ‘swamped’ by too much competition as it (and the human being that carries it) competes for survival/procreative advantage. In short natural selection works best when life is short and the breeding population is small. Otherwise genetic changes get lost before they can establish a foothold.

This is what we mean by ‘islands’. An evolutionary island doesn’t need to be surrounded by water but it should be isolated. This isolation could be the result of a natural barrier (a desert or mountain range, for example) or just the result of a small population, rarely coming into contact with other human groups. In these circumstances small, adaptive genetic variations can take hold and thrive. In large, modern, industrial societies adaptive mutations (for example keener eyesight) have much less impact on the population as a whole. My own short-sightedness is easily corrected by my glasses in modern UK whereas in the EEA of a million years ago it would have been a major handicap that may well have resulted in death long before I had a chance to breed.

At this point it’s worth pre-empting one of the more superficial and tiresome objections regularly raised by creationists. We’ve already covered the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ but I want to restate the point:

The fact that natural selection callously lets the weakest die doesn’t mean that it is right.

The ancient evolutionary environment was hard and ruthless, in one sense that was because early humans lacked the technology we have today to make things better. Acknowledging that life was cheap ‘back then’ doesn’t mean we think that’s how it should be. But let’s be clear:

Natural selection doesn’t care what you or I might think. Natural selection doesn’t care about anything.

Evolution isn’t concerned with individual comfort unless it aids procreation

As we will see throughout this series evolution isn’t the result of any grand design to ensure human happiness. It’s simply a mechanism’ a process by which different organisms compete with each other to survive.

Personally I wish it was different. I wish there was a plan. Perhaps a divine creator would have designed a world without so much pain and suffering. But that’s not how it is – unless you believe that starvation, disease and ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ are somehow the hallmarks of a benign, intelligent designer.

Evolution has no plan, no compassion and no interest in ‘right and wrong’. Those concerns are solely human. To shirk our responsibility for creating our own moral code (whether we take our morality from nature or from Divinity) seems to me to be nothing more than intellectual and moral cowardice. If we can learn anything from either religion or the evolved natural world it’s that both are capable of creating almost unimaginable catastrophe. We accept uncritically either of these at our peril. So let’s stop pretending that Darwinism has anything to teach us about how things ‘ought to be’. Darwin’s great gift was to provide us with a way to understand how we evolved in the past. What we do with that knowledge is another question entirely.

REFERENCES

Badcock, C. (2000). Evolutionary psychology: A critical introduction. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press.

Schore (2012) http://www.lifespanlearn.org/documents/Schore%20Slides2012.pdf

Hard wired 4: The naturalistic fallacy

The Western world is awash with people claiming that their product or service is ‘healthy’ because it’s ‘natural’. From beauty and skin care products to healthy eating and a range of alternative therapies we are sold the message that natural is somehow ‘better’. Often these advertisements are dressed up in ‘sciencey’ language to add credibility but still the basic message is that natural is best. More significantly for this post the idea is that ‘natural’ is the same as ‘how it ought to be’.

This idea that ‘natural’ is the same as ‘ought to be’ is the essence of the naturalistic fallacy. It has dogged our understanding of the world and spawned entire political movements simply because people haven’t quite grasped the simple truth that describing something isn’t the same as supporting it.

Of course natural isn’t necessarily best at all. It’s not that simple. There are many natural poisons and a number of naturally occurring bacteria that will happily kill you given half a chance. There is much more to the equation than that. But that’s only one part of the naturalistic fallacy. The really dangerous one is the idea that natural shows us how things should be – that it can inform our ideologies.

That’s the fallacy that has created the biggest problems in our society.

In the context of evolution let’s consider Social Darwinism – a bastardisation of Darwin’s theory of ‘Evolution by means of natural selection’ that brought nothing but confusion, misery and death to mankind.

Charles Darwin brought us the theory of evolution in the mid nineteenth century and demonstrated how via the mechanism of survival of the fittest our species (along with every other modern species) evolved and outlived weaker competitors over unimaginably long periods of time. That’s why human beings exist at all – because the Australopithecines were good at escaping from predators and because Homo habilis learned how to be a little more creative than the next guy.

But Darwin didn’t make any sort of moral or ethical judgement about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. He merely described the reality. Nature doesn’t care about our sensibilities. It doesn’t care about anything. Nature just is. Natural selection doesn’t give two hoots about our happiness either – it can’t – it’s an unconscious, inanimate process that has nothing to do with right and wrong, individual contentment or anything else except getting genetic material (DNA) into the next generation.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection has a great deal to do with our sense of morality (as we shall see later) but that most certainly doesn’t mean that our morality is particularly moral. In fact – in many instances it’s easy to see how, from a moral perspective, human evolution has left us sadly lacking. There is no benefit at all in assuming that the way we evolved in the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation’ (EEA) or ‘Ancestral Environment’ for short will be effective or even desirable today.

When we follow the evidence of natural history we can understand what has happened and even how it happened but we cannot draw any conclusions about what ought to happen. We particularly can’t use nature as a justification for what we’d like to do next. And yet that is precisely what the social Darwinists did. They took the knowledge of natural history and natural selection and confused it with the ideal of creating a master race. In its most extreme form it spawned the eugenics movement and inspired much of the thinking behind the holocaust in World War 2. And yet it is profoundly ill-informed and ridiculous.

Just because something is a particular way does not mean that it ought to be that way.

The naturalistic fallacy confuses reality with ideology and the results are not only foolish – they’re also extremely dangerous. The idea that if it’s natural it’s also how it ought to be has been used as a justification for social Darwinism and also by creationists to oppose evolution:

“It can’t be right if it’s not what God said!”

Both of these ridiculous assumptions are as bad as each other. They’re two sides of the same coin. Just as we can’t use the naturalistic fallacy to decide upon right action we can’t use ‘The Agency Fallacy’ either. Substitute the term ‘Natural selection’ for ‘God’ in any statement about how things ought to be and you have an equally silly proposition. In each case you have rules (conscious or unconscious) that suited a different time, place and culture but that have little or no real relevance here and now.

Evolution by natural selection is the mechanism that brought us to where we are now. But it has nothing to do with right and wrong and it has nothing to do with God or Gods (except that it can explain how we evolved the tendency to believe in Gods in the first place).

Of course many people will disagree vehemently with this assertion and in fairness, there’s no reason why they should believe me just because I said so. The next post will outline the evidence for evolution by natural selection, building upon the idea of ‘falsifiability’ described in part 2.

Debates 9: winning versus growing

As we know an increasing number of people think of debate as though it were a competitive sport with winners and losers, where the objective is to ‘beat’ the ‘opponent’ at all costs. This leads them to employ a range of underhand, manipulative and ultimately futile strategies to ‘advance their cause’. Unfortunately however the result is precisely the opposite. Here’s why…

‘Checkmating’ the opposition

To ‘win’ a debate is to beat the other person into submission, to expose them as a fool (or worse) and to rise victorious as the other person lays bloodied at your feet (metaphorically speaking, of course).

For some people that’s all they wanted to achieve and so they consider the humiliation of their opponent to be a job well done and move on. They’re the lucky ones. They have achieved their desired result and can now forget all about it. But their hapless opponent won’t.

When we humiliate the other person (or worse, when we grind them down with the deceitful tactics described earlier) we create a sense of injustice and resentment that is hard for them to let go. Sometimes it festers and smoulders within them for years, decades even before returning to bite us and our cause just when we are at our most vulnerable.

Checkmating tactics create enemies

Never insist that the other person acknowledge your position or apologise unless you already believe that the situation is irredeemable and need others to understand the reality. I did this myself recently by repeatedly demanding an apology that I clearly was never going to get from a group of radicals on the social media site, Twitter.

The reason for asking was not to get the apology – that would have been meaningless even if it had been forthcoming. The reason was to goad them into showing their hand in front of all my followers who had seen me accused of sexism and bigotry. By insisting that they either ‘put up or shut up’ I ensured that they eventually felt obliged to find some evidence – and what they produced was so transparently weak that their accusations were exposed as the nonsense they really were. That in no way helped my case in the ongoing argument but it did save my reputation from the worst effects of their collective slander. Sometimes – just occasionally checkmating the opposition might be worth it – but it’s never a good debating strategy – more a form of ‘damage limitation’.

Never pretend that one injustice justifies another

This tactic is also depressingly common (and equally futile). I remember that when I was involved in a campaign to push the American ‘charity’, Project Prevention out of UK, this tactic was extremely prevalent in their strategy to discredit the opposition.

This group had decided that women who used drugs were not fit to bear children and so, having failed to get enforced sterilisation passed into law in their native USA they had begun a campaign of coercion in which addicted women were bribed to undergo sterilisation ‘voluntarily’.

My perspective was that all women have the right to choose what happens to their bodies and to make their own reproductive choices without the interference of right wing ideological groups like this encouraging them to give up long-term rights for short-term benefits. Project Prevention is the group who also targeted Haitian women for being ‘too poor to breed’ and Kenyan women because of the prevalence of HIV.

Because I was one of the most vociferous critics of Project Prevention I came under a lot of personal ‘fire’ from the charity’s founder, Barbara Harris and her family who essentially claimed that…

1. Since some children are damaged by in-utero addiction then Project Prevention’s abuse of women by removing their right to bear children is justified.
2. Anyone who disagrees with them is a child abuser by default.

This is a clear attempt to pretend that ‘two wrongs make a right’ or that one injustice justifies another. Fortunately the people of UK saw right through the strategy and kicked them out (as did the people of Eire, South Africa, Haiti and a host of other nations). Nevertheless this is a perfect example of the fallacy that one injustice justifies another.

You can download a free PDF of this entire blog series here

Debates 4: Differing opinions

The right to disagree

You have a perfect right to your opinion. So have I.

I suspect that we’d all prefer it if people thought a little before deciding just what their opinion might be, especially relating to issues that are close to our hearts, but that’s not how the world works. Nonetheless we all have a right to our values, our beliefs and our points of view.

I remember an old schoolteacher of mine, a biology teacher called Ian Davidson who announced regularly that he always held the best opinions. At the time my classmates and I thought that arrogant but in the light of maturity I can see that it was actually the reverse.

Mr. Davidson was the consummate scientist and as such he was always prepared to let go of any belief or opinion, no matter how ‘treasured’ it may be if new evidence showed that he was wrong. Far from being arrogant he was, in fact quite the opposite. Mr. Davidson was both humble enough to acknowledge that he could be mistaken and intellectually honest enough to be persuaded by a good argument. And Mr. Davidson wasn’t the only one. There was Miss McMurtry, our history teacher who gave me a love of social heritage and justice whilst retaining the ability to listen to the immature, dichotomous thinking of teenagers in her class and, of course, Anne North, my first ward manager who took the mantras I’d learned at university and helped me to make sense of them in the real world. They were all great influences in my life and they all were open to the persuasion that comes from a good argument.

But there’s the rub – it had to be a good argument.

One of my favourite quotes (those who know me are well aware of my love of quotations) comes from Oliver Cromwell who, whilst addressing the elders of the Episcopalean Church of Scotland said:

“I beseech you in the bowels of Christ,

Think it possible that you may be wrong.”

We can all be wrong and a genuine debater is always aware of the need to admit good arguments and reasonable persuasion – but it really does have to be a good argument and the persuasion really does have to be reasonable.

Not agreeing does not equal not listening

So Mr. Davidson would listen to our points of view in the classroom and he would consider what we had to say. But that doesn’t mean that he was always persuaded. After all, we were naïve teenagers with only a very basic grounding in science. He was an experienced teacher with the benefit of years of study and a lifelong interest in the topic he taught. So we rarely (if ever) changed his mind – but he did listen.

If Mr. Davidson taught us anything at all (actually he taught us a great deal) it was that listening doesn’t equate to agreement. If it had then he would have been far less effective because through listening (which he was very good at) he would have left himself open to the very same vagaries of irrationality that plagued the adolescents in his classroom. You see it’s not enough to speak to a good listener – you also have to have a decent argument if you want to convince them.

It is interesting how many people, especially on social media but also in the real world, think that if they have failed to persuade the other person it’s OK to claim that they’re just ‘not listening’. That’s rarely the case in my experience. It’s not that I haven’t listened – it’s simply that the other person hasn’t persuaded me. Their arguments have been too full of holes, of fallacies and unanswered questions or merely a set of dogmatic statements with little or no actual substance to support them.

If you believe that the person you’re debating with isn’t listening, that may be true but it’s at least as possible that you simply haven’t said anything convincing. Try asking them to recap your position. If they can do that, then they were listening after all – you need to reconsider your approach.

Nobody cares what you think so much as they care about what they think

It’s not enough to assume that the other person will be interested in your opinion so much that they will give up their own just because you’ve stated your position or given them ‘a piece of your mind’. As a rule people will be about as interested in your opinion as you are in theirs. You see you have to be a good listener too if you want the other person to hear and consider your point of view. I have come across so many people who expect the other person to hear, to listen, without once taking the trouble to listen back. Such is the arrogance of the zealot, the fanatic, the radical.

You must listen if you expect to be heard and you must consider if you hope to be taken seriously.

Unless you can genuinely give the other person a reason to change their view you won’t get anywhere. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not listening. It’s just as likely to mean that you have nothing to say that they consider to be worth changing their mind for.

You can download a free PDF of this entire series here