Customer Reviews

Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)

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David Buller, a philosopher, has written a book critiquing the scientific work of a subgroup of evolutionary psychologists who adhere to a doctrine first clearly articulated in a series of brilliant articles and books by D. Symons, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby. Their work was immeasurably enhanced by its uptake by popular science writers R. Wright and S. Pinker.

I think the philosophy of science is quite important, but I cannot think of a case where philosophers, qua philosophers, have added anything substantive to the critique of a scientific theory. I read this book only because of the extravagant praise afforded it by prominent behavioral scientists, including David Sloan Wilson, Linnda Caporeal, and Kim Sterelny. While I think this book does have a lot to offer the interested lay reader, it certainly does not violate my generalization about the worthlessness of philosophers criticizing scientific theories.

The author is clear in stating that his contribution is not a critique of evolutionary psychology in general, but only of this particular subgroup, which he distinguishes by capitalizing the name. For a general description of evolutionary psychology and Evolutionary Psychology (which I call EvPsych), please see my review of Scher and Rauscher, Evolutionary Psychology.

Much of Buller's effort goes to criticizing a few prominent examples of the empirical research of EvPsychers, including D. Buss's analysis of mate preference, M. Daly and M. Wilson's analysis of parenting vs. step-parenting, and C. Cosmides and J. Tooby's analysis of cheater detection modules. I think this was an unfortunate choice because the general EvPsych approach does not stand or fall on these examples in any way. Despite Buller's strong critique of Daly and Wilson, I suspect that their data analysis will emerge superior to Buller's, if only because they are consummate professionals in the area and he is a rank amateur. But, either way, their predictions do not depend in any way on the particular doctrines of EvPsych, but are broadly based on the evolutionary psychology paradigm. Buss's analysis of mate choice is impressively broad-based and thorough, but he has not been able to show that his results are due to EEA adaptations as opposed to strong cultural uniformities across societies, based on male dominance of modern political and economic hierarchies. Cosmides and Tooby's analysis of cheater detection modules is directly related to a major EvPsych proposition (the modularity of mind), but the only people convinced by their cheater detection argument are themselves and their disciples.

In dealing with the theoretical basis of EvPsych, Buller is very successful only one point, albeit a major one: the existence and nature of mental modules. His success is based on a highly cogent critique of the EvPsych position that the human mind is composed of a set of distinct, complexly organized and independent modules, each of which evolved as a solution to a particular evolutionary challenge to our species. The critique, however, is not philosophical but scientific, based on the work of contemporary developmental neurobiologists. This is perhaps the best part of the book.

Buller also critiques somewhat effectively the notion that there has been little development in the human gene pool, vis-à-vis mental development, in the past 50,000 years, and hence that we possess "stone-age minds." The arguments Buller uses are plausible, and take the form of noting that genetic change is much faster in many cases than assumed by the EvPsychers. Nevertheless, this point has not been nailed down by population biologists or quantitative geneticists, as far as I know.

Buller also deploys the argument that there was no single EEA, and hence there is no basis for the notion that human nature is homogeneous. This is a correct, but well-known argument. Only the EvPsychers themselves stick adamantly to the Orthodoxy on this point.

Doubtless the least effect part of this book is Buller's extended attempt to deny that there is a such thing as "human nature." Borrowing an argument from Hull, he asserts that species are "individuals" rather than "natural kinds" and only "natural kinds" have the sort of being that allows us to discuss their "nature." This, to my mind, is exactly the type of philosophizing that renders the philosophical critique of science so bizarre and ineffective. Ducks have duck nature. It is what we learn when we study the character and behavior of ducks. Mosquitoes similarly have mosquito nature. Humans being are no different. The philosopher is not allowed to define the terms of science in his own bizarre way and then claim to have detected a synthetic a priori inconsistency in the scientific use of the term.

In short, I do not believe this book is an important contribution to the development of evolutionary psychology or to the critique of EvPsych, although it is a great introduction to the literature for an interested lay person, since Buller develops his themes carefully and lucidly, never leaving even the most uninstructed reader behind.

This is not a book attempting to debunk evolutionary psychology, broadly speaking. It is a book that attempts to debunk a number of ev psych's specific theses about human psychology, for example, the existence of a cheater-detection module. Buller's critique of the latter is quite good, though the chapter on mate preferences I didn't find as convincing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the philosopher Buller relys more on empirical studies than airy philosophical argument to create doubts about the veracity of ev psych's claims. He is best when building cases for alternate explanations of the experimental results prominant evolutionary psychologists claim support theirs.

Buller does not deny that the evolutionary perspective is the correct one through which to view human psychology. He simply argues that the conclusions drawn by many prominent evolutionary psychologists have reached too far and are without sufficient evidentiary support. Those who, from a visceral feeling of repulsion at the thought that humans are evolved animals whose minds are products of natural processes, simply loathe the evolutionary perspective of human psychology, will not find this book comforting.

Author David Buller was initially attracted to evolutionary psychology. The field attempts to explain the basic mechanisms of the human mind by extrapolating from the kinds of problems that our human ancestors faced. Unfortunately, the field is riven with conceptual and empirical problems, and Buller was ultimately forced to write this book as a critique.

Unlike most attacks on the field, this book is based on an examination of the theoretical principles and empirical data used to bolster the theory. He does not reject the idea that one might use evolutionary theory to understand human psychology, or worry at all about the possible ethical, moral, or political implications that such a theory would generate. Rather, he asks what evidence there is for the currently accepted hypotheses in the field. On this score, Buller finds numerous faults with the approach.

Evolutionarly psychologists use three lines of evidence: present adaptations, data on past environments, and data from other, related primates.

Present adaptations, however, are a product of recent selection, past selection, and individual differences in experience, and thus do not reliably tell us anything about our ancient past, even if we can find them.

With regard to past environments, Buller makes what is perhaps his strongest argument: there was no stable environment in human evolution to which the human organism could become progressively adapted. At every stage, the problems faced by animals changed. This was true when primitive hominids began to construct tools, use language, farm, and so on. For example, Buller shows that hunter man must kill or scavenge an animal to find food, but the specifics of this problem change when he makes tools like spears, and again when he domesticates animals. If there was no long period of stability in the past, then our minds are constantly changing to cope with ongoing problems.

Inferences from the lives of other primates are also of limited value, since the closest ones, chimps, diverged from us over 1 million years ago, and have lived in different environments ever since. If we could identify the environment in which we evolved, we could identify primates that currently inhabit similar niches, but such overlapping ecology is hard to find.

After dealing with these three conceptual problems with evolutionary psychology, Buller attacks the data for such things as massive mental modularity, cheater detection, and mate choice theory head on. At every point, the data are impressive, and can be interpreted as vaguely in support of some evolutionary psychological principles. However, as Buller shows, this is not the only possible interpretation of these data. Since both the theoretical arguments and the empirical data are only weakly in support of the theory, Buller argues that the theory ought to be much more limited in its scope and claims. It is refreshing to see such an honest appraisal of the primary theory and evidence, and see it discussed warts and all.

My only complaint about the book is that Buller too easily concedes the idea that language is modular and requires some kind of innate knowledge at birth. This idea was made popular by Chomsky, but modern linguists and neuroscientists have shown that these claims suffer from the same problems Buller finds for modularity, cheater detection, and so on. For example, very simple neural networks are capable of abstracting grammatical rules and word use heuristics, very rapidly, without any innate knowledge or pre-programmed modularity. Given that the bulk of evolutionary psychology is reasoned by analogy to language, I would have thought Buller would seek out and exploit these more recent findings that make Chomsky's claims obsolete. Perhaps in the sequel we will see this.

The book is well written and designed for the lay public and interested undergraduates. No background in genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, or anthropology is necessary. Some knowledge of philosophy of science, notably Popper, Kuhn, and Laudan, would be helpful but not necessary. Those who have read and enjoyed Gould's salvos against evolutionary psychology will enjoy this book even more. Acolytes of Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides, et al. would do well to read and heed the advice in this book.

This book makes a strong case that there are problems with claims put forth by leading Evolutionary Psychologists, but the problems are somewhat less important than the book tries to imply.
This is the most serious and careful attack on Evolutionary Psychologists so far. But it is often hard to tell to what extent the theoretical claims he attacks are reflect bad theories or whether some of them are just careless misstatements by people who are too focused on attacking the tabula rasa worldview to worry about criticisms from other viewpoints. For instance, it's hard to believe that the Evolutionary Psychologists mean the word "universal" in the phrase universal human nature as literally as Buller takes it.
He presents strong arguments that Evolutionary Psychologists have overstated the extent to which dna encodes specialized mental modules, and presents detailed arguments that their empirical results have been sloppy and at least slightly biased against the idea of a general-purpose mind. But if Evolutionary Psychologists are willing to modify their theory to refer to somewhat less specialized modules whose features are influenced by dna in less direct and more subtle ways, then the features of their theories that they seem to consider most important will survive.
His analogy with the immune system illustrates how a system that looks at first glance like it requires some fairly detailed genetic blueprints can actually be caused by a general purpose system that learns most of its specializations by reacting to the environment.
This is not in any way an attack on the idea of using evolutionary theory to understand the mind. In fact, he even points out that Evolutionary Psychologists have been overly interested in questions asked by creationists rather than those that evolutionary theory suggests are important.
Ironically for a philosophy professor, his weakest arguments are the most philosophical ones. He correctly points out the problems with using an essentialist notion of species that is based on universal phenotypic characteristics, but then proposes a definition of species based on continuity and spatiotemporal localization that seems as essentialist and as far from what people actually mean by the word as the definition he criticizes. If I understand his definition correctly, it implies that recreating a Dodo from dna would produce a new species. He should study the philosophy of concepts a bit more (e.g. Lakoff or the neural net literature) and decide that the concept of species doesn't need either type of essence, but can instead be a more probabilistic combination of several kinds of attributes.

I read Robert Wright's celebrated "Moral Animal" some 10 years ago, and was thoroughly impressed. Finally I had found a theory of human nature and psychology I could wholeheartedly believe in. Now along comes David Buller and says it's not so? Well, not so fast. This book is not so much a dismantling of the theory of evolutionary psychology as it is an assertion that the original evidence used in forming evo/psych (EP) - may have been overinterpreted.

Disclaimer: For those who were offended by the very suggestion that our behavior is just a more sophisticated version of similar behavior by our primate ancestors - you won't like this book, either.

Buller's complaints about EP:

EP theory is off-base in considering the brain to consist of thousands of evolved "modules." Instead, in his version, the mind is "adapted to adapt" to highly variable and rapidly changing environments.

He differs from EP thought, also, in that he thinks we are not psychological relics of our stone age ancestors - we have continued to evolve. Buller cites studies suggesting that N/S can overhaul species adaptations in 18 generations (450 years for humans) - concentrating on "cortical plasticity," thus his title "Adapting Minds."

He questions (among other things) the evidence for EP's conclusions about the human sexual behaviors of infidelity and jealousy, and the different (male vs female) manifestations of these traits.

He questions statistics that suggest step-children are frequently and almost predictably mistreated (compared to genetic children) by step-parents. EP absorbed completely the step-parent/step-children studies of Daly and Wilson, and Buller is particularly critical here.

He is negative about the EP advocacy of the "cheater-detection" module, an important section of EP studies.

I am not an expert in this field, but my feeling is that EP will weather this tropical disturbance. Psychology in general is a difficult field for data analysis - the same data in psychology can easily be logically interpreted in several different ways - much more so than data in, say, chemistry or physics.

I realize the following assessment of mine is anecdotal, but here goes: I have seen step-children treated differently than genetic children. I have seen how men and women pair off in society according to commonly accepted determinants of status, differing depending on sex. I have read about and subsequently observed how people (unconsciously?) score each other during their social interactions, rating relationship values for the future. I have observed how cheating (generic sense) is more rampant in very large groups where peer-pressure ceases to be such an important deterrent. Finally, game theory concepts utilized in EP are widely adapted and used in self-help books. In short, I'm a sucker for EP.

At the same time, if some of the conclusions of EP are not right on target, books like Buller's can be valuable in order to stimulate more finely-tuned studies and to verify those conclusions that are valid. Nobody in science would suggest that every discipline always gets all the nuances just right the first time around. Perhaps this is the take-home message of Buller's book.

I shall go directly into what I think is problematic in the book:
(1) The empirical survey carried on by Buller on the evidence for the claims treated in specific chapters (e.g., the Cinderella Effect hypothesis) is extremely scanty, at least relative to the available publications, experiments and studies. This point is made explicit by evo-psys reponses to Buller`s book (cf. Trends in Cognitive Science, with responses by David Buller, M. Daly, M. Wilson etc.)
(2) His analogies at particular points, with Game Theoretical concepts and results, seem as weak as out of context.
(3) The case from neural selectionism against massive modularity seems to be extremely muddy, obscure and at best, extremely indirect (although I think, for independent reasons that there`s something wrong with the justification for the Massive Modularity Hypothesis)
(4) Well, I read the book some time ago, but I remember that his comments towards how features of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness are estimated from comparative data is much like straw man fighting. No one builds direct inferences from Bonobo behavior to the behavior of some ancestral hominid state; there are a number of complex statistical, heuristic and algorithmic techniques for this sort of estimation, data analysis and data crossing.And for that matter, we all know that the members of the genus Pan have followed their own evolutionary path since the "split" relative to the hominid line of descent. In second, and very much important, tentative sets of hypothesis concerning these selective pressures can be more or less well decided on by empirical evidence on current behavior and cognition, as mentioned in Toooby and Cosmides 1990 paper (selectivity, as we should expect, demanded the exclusion of the quotes pointing this out...).
(5) I was not convinced by his semantic contrivances on the impossibility of there being something like "human nature".

=)

An excellent book in which David Buller (a philosopher of biology at NIU) considers in detail some of the strongest claims made by Evolutionary Psychologists (the likes of Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides, etc.) for a "universal human nature" arising from psychological adaptations of the human mind during the Pleistocene. Beware that the writing is dense and you will need to concentrate to follow all the arguments; the book is long and not an easy read. As a scientist I have always been skeptical of the second part of the saying, "philosophy without science is empty, science without philosophy is blind" (of which Buller's web page reminded me), but Buller's book gives a very convincing example of science (a specific type of "Evolutionary Psychology") which, in its eagerness to explain human nature, seems to have taken some dangerous "leaps of faith".

Buller's book could be easily dismissed as a simple criticism of Evolutionary Psychology, but the detailed test of some well publicized ideas is only part of the work. Buller starts with an engaging four-chapter introduction, considering in detail the concepts of evolution (1), mind (2), adaptation (3), and modularity (4). These, together with the last chapter on "human nature", contain the basis of his understanding of evolution and its implications for the evolution of human behavior. The remaining three chapters consider in excruciating detail the specific arguments for and against some of the central tenets of Evolutionary Psychology -- on human mating preferences, marriage, and parenthood. Buller argues that evolution is a process, not a framework which uses natural selection to explain finished products. He argues that Homo Sapiens and all species are "individuals" (spaciotemporally localized, continuous and cohesive) in view of evolution and not "natural kinds" (defined by an essential characteristic), that human psychological mechanisms are homologies (unified by common descent) and will not follow simple laws of nature that pertain exclusively to the human mind (although they will follow laws that pertain to all evolved minds). He suggests that the human universals that we observe today are not necessarily evidence of physiological universals evolved as adaptations when humans were hunter-gatherers. Some observed "cultural universals" could be a result of frequency-dependent selection within populations that has succeeded in maintaining similar balanced polymorphisms of psychological phenotypes in most cultures. He cites epidemiological culture as another possibility.

This is easily the most thought provoking book I have read on "human nature" for a variety of reasons. First, Buller never simply criticizes other people's ideas by criticizing their proponents and/or changing the subject and criticizing other aspects of their work. He is content to criticize the ideas themselves based on their contextual frame and existing empirical support. Moreover he is always careful to define precisely the aspect of the idea he will explain and criticize, as well as to present alternative hypotheses, if he believes the data was misunderstood or misinterpreted. Second, he is never condescending toward his readers by suggesting they trust him that the Evolutionary Psychologists' theory on "human nature" or the details of specific claim on evolved modules in the mind are misconceived or plain wrong. Buller takes the time to explain precisely how he reached each conclusion, allowing the reader to follow his logic, see some of the data, and judge for her/him-self. This is quite admirable considering that most authors write books either for academics (where, as in Buller's "Adapting Mind", the devil is in the details) or for popular readers (who often stand to be entertained rather that taken seriously and lead through an argument).

I believe this book is for amateurs and academics alike. It will provide a thoughtful commentary on the subject of human nature for the former and a thought provoking criticism of a field of research with far too many loose ends for the later.

Buller's fair-minded and generally gentle critique of evolutionary psychology is well considered and strong. One almost wishes, however, that he had not occasionally chosen to thumb his nose at EvPsych orthodoxy, for example by choosing a title so close to that of Tooley and Cosmides' own 1992 polemic "Adapted Minds".

Buller's grasp of evolutionary theory is strong, and his application of it responsible -- he cogently pinpoints the faults of previous critiques of evolutionary psychology, for example that of Leontin and Gould. He also applies a philosopher's grasp of logic to the notoriously problematic Wason task that unfortunately lies at the heart of the EvPsych "social exchange" theory. Problems with the Wason task, both within and between studies, are rampant, and hardly limited to its use by Cosmides and her collaborators; but this does not mean that Buller is in any way wrong to point out that the use of the task in key EvPsych studies displays problems both of experimental design and interpretation of results. Handwaving about how cheater detection and deontic logic are coextensive mental capacities aside (ironic because Cosmides herself has published papers claiming the opposite), one needs only the appreciation of translation difficulties granted by an elementary course in formal logic to realize that claims about "switched" sentence structures giving "switched" logical forms, independent of context, are extremely questionable; claims about the representative ability of logic that restrict themselves to the propositional calculus (ignoring even first-order logic, much less modal logic) are embarassing.

What is more noteworthy is that despite claims about mate selection and child abuse based essentially on the mining of public data of questionable reliability, the cheater-detection result is one of the only EvPsych results claiming to demonstrate a domain-specific improvement in performance over general reasoning processes on a concrete, repeatable cognitive task. We should certainly be excited about the potential of evolutionary psychology to deliver genuine explanations about the nature of human cognition, particularly in the social domain, where diverse results from other areas of work (e.g. motivated reasoning research) make it clear that there is _something_ beyond simple logical processing going on. But it is unfair to take Buller to task simply because he -- correctly, in my opinion -- points out that, thus far, the enthusiastic and broad theories of evolutionary psychology are a check that the basic experimental results cannot cash.

After 20 years of work, it is fair to ask whether evolutionary psychology has in fact earned the great excitement generated by the bold theoretical pronouncements and initial experimental successes of its early days. This is an important book because it casts a critical, but not rancorous, eye over the playing field and asks where, thus far, the pieces have landed. As another reviewer suggested, if taken as constructive scientific criticism rather than as blasphemous assault on dogma, it will do much to clear the way for future work. Whatever one's present opinion of evolutionary psychology, this book deserves a careful reading simply because of the intellectual honesty of the task it sets itself, whether it succeeds or fails.

Unlike reviewers of mystery novels, commentators on this book need not hesitate to reveal the ending. The author thinks evolution teaches us 'human nature' is a superstition, and that generalizations in human psychology do not attain the status of "laws of nature".

In fact, pace those who consider themselves familiar with "duck nature," Buller thinks that there are NO biological species that have the logical status we ordinarily accord to those mathematical (or physical, or chemical) kinds which can be understood as classes each of whose members are definitionally required to exhibit a set of separately necessary and jointly sufficient properties. Ducks are not typed in the way that equilateral triangles are typed.

This will not surprise a careful reader of the magisterial work of the late great zoologist Ernst Mayr, who repeatedly reminded us that species are polymorphic, related not by class membership but by lineage or descent. To put it more simply and from a different perspective, a fundamental requirement of Darwin's theory is the occurrence of significant individual variability within species. We know that not all natural selection is "canalizing selection" funnelling all variation toward an optimal type. "Frequency dependent" selection is alive and well, and the world is full of hawks and doves, to say nothing of the bourgeoisie.

To put it colloquially, not all of us search "for a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad." When my old dog had pups, some of them were good hunters, some were suitable for nothing but footstool warmers; when raising hens, farmers' wives cook the poor layers for dinner.

It is important to emphasize that Buller seeks to defend evolutionary psychology by criticizing the excesses of Evolutionary Psychology, rightly considered as a the product of a collective, or tribe, of investigators (Cosmides & Tooby, David Buss, Steven Pinker) and journalists (Nicholas Wade, Robert Wright, Matt Ridley) sharing a common set of presumptions about evolution (adaptationist), about cognitive science (massive modularity), and about the nature of culture (reducible to individual psychology).

Robin Dunbar makes a similar point in noting the guerilla warfare waged by proponents of Evolutionary Psychology against dissidents who might be considered behavioral ecologists, because they don't subscribe 100% to the major tenets of Evo Psycho: e.g., because they study the contributions made by behaviors currently observable to the biological fitness of organisms currently alive.

It won't do to label Buller a philosopher and not a working scientist. Perhaps philosophers are a dying breed, but they have time to read a great many books, and erudition matters when the issue is the comparative evaluation of diverse and competing scientific research programs. Historians and philosophers of science are like the prairie dogs who understand that sometime it's a good idea to quit eating and survey the neighborhood.

One final metaphor: this book is polymorphic in that some of its chapters are spell-binding and some are tedious and too long. Buller tries so hard to be fair to Evo Psycho that he strings out indefinitely large sequences of hypotheticals testing the various interpretations under which the paradigm might be favorably construed. This makes the chapters on mating, marriage and parenthood a little mind numbing. I suggest judicious skimming as a tactic for getting through those bits.

Some time ago Robert Wright ("The Moral Animal") after following the Evo Psycho paradigm to the letter for most of the book, was puzzled to note that, from that perspective, we are living in the "worst of all possible worlds." Then he had to conduct a rather fruitless search for an ethic that might save the world. Buller's book blazes a path around Wright's weltschmerz.

The field formerly known as Sociobiology has reinvented itself under the name Evolutionary Psychology, though with more of a focus on internal psychological mechanisms. The premise remains the same: current human behaviors or tendencies can be explained as adaptive mechanisms implanted in us by our evolutionary past. The field has gained tremendous attention in the popular media; you can hardly read an issue of Science Times without seeing an example of it. We are barraged with new hypotheses, such as the claim that our preference for green lawns is due to the fact that we evolved on the African savanna (perhaps our love of TiVo is because it allows us to hunt wildebeests during prime time?). But as David Buller demonstrates in his brilliant book, the emperor still has no clothes. Though Buller is a philosopher, he presents an internal critique of the field, that is a demonstration that EvoPsych is wrong on biological and evolutionary grounds. Buller is especially strong in his critique of the assumption of the "modularity" of mind (that the mind is a collection of separate modules for different function), a virtual article of faith in EvoPsych. This book is simply a must-read for those interested in this topic or in evolution and human nature. For some reason, some people feel threatened by the fact that it is a philosopher rather than a biologist criticizing EvoPsych. But this is an example of the ad hominem logical fallacy; the question is not what academic department Buller belongs to, but whether his arguments are valid. Whatever your opinions on EvoPsych, you cannot ignore this extremely important book.