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Philosophy For Our Times
Overcoming evolution | Subrina Smith, Keith Frankish, Simon Baron-Cohen
00:45:23
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- [00:01]
A
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B
One way of making a creature that will replicate well is to give it an awful lot of adaptability, an awful lot of flexibility. And so freedom, our freedom evolved. There's not an opposition between our being autonomous free agents and our being the products of evolution. It's because we're the product of evolution that we have this wonderful freedom. That's what it came from. It wasn't a divine gift. It was a hard won product of billions of years of evolution.
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C
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas.
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D
It's Zeb here and Daniel. Today's episode is a debate between philosopher of biology Sabrina Smith, philosopher of mind Keith Frankish and clinical psychologist Simon Baron Cohen on the topic of evolutionary psychology. Together, they'll question whether explaining modern human behaviour as a product of evolutionary drives is actually useful or merely an excuse for outdated cultural phenomena like violence and patriarchal structures. Whilst we may be genetically predisposed to certain behaviours, does societal progress show that these behaviours can be overcome for the greater good? Essentially trained out of us by the society we grew up in, with their diverse academic backgrounds, the speakers explore how themes as varied as prisons, parenting and speech disorders can help us to understand this relationship between evolution and culture.
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C
That sounds fascinating. Well, let's pass over to Ganesh Taylor, the host of today's debate, Overcoming Evolution.
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E
Thank you so much, everybody. Indeed, we are here today to talk about overcoming evolution. And it is with much sadness, of course, that we must actually start this debate with the acknowledgement of the fact that the great philosopher Daniel Dennett was in fact scheduled to join us on this debate today. And after his sad passing, the panel now also serves to memorialize and celebrate his life and ideas. So, overcoming evolution. As with the animal kingdom, we see human behavior as the product of elemental drives to survive and reproduce Evolutionary psychology has taken this a stage further with claims that killing is fundamentally in our nature and sees violence, social hierarchy, and sexual promiscuity as the product of evolutionary drives. But might this be a misleading and dangerous approach? Murder rates have fallen seventy fold since the Middle Ages, while across the globe birth rates are at a fraction of what they were 100 years ago. Fathers are actively involved in childcare. And we've radically changed our outlook on social issues like gender identity, suggesting ideas and culture drive behavior rather than evolution. So should we conclude that evolutionary psychology is a blind alley with no predictive power? Are we in fact capable of overcoming behavioral traits and therefore wholly responsible for our actions? Or is evolution an inescapable force and behavioral change a result of altered circumstances while our core nature remains identical? To help us dive into these questions, I'm joined by Sabrina Smith, a leading philosopher of biology and associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She has been a critic of evolutionary explanations for human behavior. We're also joined from not so Sunny Greece, a philosopher influenced by Daniel Dennett's work very substantially. Keith Frankish is a philosopher of mind and an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield. An adjunct professor at the University of Crete, he is noted for his controversial stance on consciousness, and we're very grateful to him for being here today. Last, but by no means least, we're also joined by Simon Byron Cohen, who is a renowned clinical psychologist and leading figure in autism research. He's a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and the director of Cambridge's Autism Research Center. That's our panel for today. We know what we're here to discuss this idea of can we overcome our evolutionary psychological roots or not? So the pitch is, is evolutionary psychology a misleading account of culture and human behavior? Keith, could I ask you to open with three minutes on that, please?
- [05:09]
B
Sure. Thanks. First, I'd like to say that I'm delighted to be here, but I'm sorry that it's under these circumstances. My view is aligned with Dan's on in many ways, and I will mention some of his ideas, but of course, I'm not pretending to speak for him or with his knowledge and insight. So is evolutionary psychology a misleading, a kind of culture and human behavior? Well, I think it depends on what we mean by evolutionary psychology. I'll make three quick points. If we mean the study of the human mind, human mind and brain from an evolutionary perspective, then I think that's a huge ongoing field of inquiry, and I think it's essential for understanding ourselves Evolutionary theories is the way we explain design in nature. So if we find that the human brain is specialized for certain tasks, say for language, language production, language comprehension, then we'll turn to evolutionary theory for an explanation of that. Barring intelligent design, that's the only way to explain design. And evolutionary explanations of that kind involve showing how the features we're interested in developed from pre existing ones in ancestral species, like spanning or repurposing mechanisms that were already there. And evolutionary psychology in this sense might go a long way back. Basic forms of perception, purpose of action, simple forms of emotion, even were present in very early forms of life. So it's not really appropriate to ask whether evolutionary psychology in that broad sense is a misleading account of human behavior. It's not really an account of human behavior at all. It's a strategy for explaining aspects of human behavior. Okay, having said that, the term evolutionary psychology, now let's use capital E and capital P. It's also used in a narrower sense for specific research program within the evolutionary study of the mind. It's one that can came into focus in the 1990s. And according to this program, the human mind contains numerous special purpose systems modules which evolved to deal with the challenges of life at the time when our species diverged from other apes. So what's special about our species are these modules. And modules have been proposed for understanding other people's minds. Simon knows a great deal about, for the detection of freeloaders, reason about physical objects, all sorts of things. And now some proponents of this view say that our behavior today is. Well, I think most proponents of this, you would say that our behavior today is still guided by these modules, even though we live in a very different environment and face very different challenges. So this does offer something more like an account of human behavior. It says roughly that our behavior is what you get when you place people with stone age minds in a modern environment. Though I should say I'm not sure many serious evolutionary psychologists even in this sense, would endorse that bleak picture of humans as hierarchical, murderous, promiscuous, and so on, as likely to argue that human brains are adapted for social cooperation. Now, my own position on this is more skeptical. And I think the human mind is much more flexible and adaptable than that approach suggests. Partly because I think it ignores the way in which we've reshaped our minds through culture. And that just. If I've just time, I'll just. That brings me to one other point, which is what I'm sure Dan would have insisted on here. Evolutionary explanations of human behavior don't have to be pitched at the level of genetics. Dan would say, and I agree that human culture itself evolves and does so in a way that's largely independent of genetic evolution. Great ideas that don't just spring into people's minds fully formed the elements of culture, words, skills, techniques, ways of doing things, these spread in human society, colonize human minds, replicate, mutate and combine like genes. Dan called, refer to them as memes, using Richard Dawkins term and these, he thought of these memes as mind tools which reprogram our biological brains and vastly enhance their capacities. And this evolutionary process is continuing and speeding up all the time. So I think evolutionary psychology in a broad sense should include the study of these cultural processes where they are reshaping the mind and human behavior. So in that sense there's no conflict between an evolutionary approach and an approach that stresses culture.
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E
Thank you, thank you so much Keith Simon. I mean I'd like to turn to you next about whether or not this idea of evolutionary psychology as being a misleading account of cultural and human behaviour. What do you think?
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F
Yeah, I want to start first of all by paying my own personal tribute to Dan Dennett. I read Dan Dennett's book in 1978 which was called the Intentional Stance and it strongly influenced my own work in a field that came to be known as theory of mind. Human beings natural propensity to interpret other people's behavior in terms of mental states. So when we look at each other, when we interact with each other, we're constantly monitoring what other people are thinking, what other people know and believe and expect and feel. And Dan's work there, just as in many areas of philosophy of mind, has been hugely influential. Many of you who knew Dan Dennett knew him to be warm hearted, a towering intellect, a philosopher who could write for non philosophers and has influenced many fields. Turning to evolutionary psychology, there's one other person who's passing we should also acknowledge and that's the founder of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby, who also passed away this year. So onto the topic of our debate today. I'm going to argue that evolutionary psychology is a very useful framework for understanding human universals, universal behaviors that transcend culture. And I'm going to give a couple of examples. But also that evolutionary psychology has its limitations because the role of culture is undeniable. So starting off with the value of evolutionary psychology, I'm going to give the example first of all of attachment between an infant and a caregiver. We see the process of attachment in Every culture, wherever there are humans, indeed wherever there are primates, the infant forms an attachment to a caregiver. It could be the mother, could be the father, it could be a grandmother. And we see that irrespective of culture. John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory, was using evolutionary psychology when he made that observation. And he divided attachment into secure attachment. When the infant feels cared for and develops a secure relationship with its caregiver and insecure attachment. One of the values of evolutionary psychology is it makes predictions about what might the outcome be when things go wrong. And it actually gave rise to an adjacent field called evolutionary psychiatry. So when an infant forms an insecure attachment to a parent figure, the extreme case being neglect or abuse, it often results in personality disorders later in adulthood. So from an understanding of human universals and normative behavior to an understanding of medical and psychiatric conditions that can result from being in a maladaptive environment. The other example I would give is about mental health. So evolutionary psychology can tell us things like our mental health will thrive and prosper if we are in a community and if we have supportive relationships. The prediction to evolutionary psychiatry is that if you remove somebody from their community, if you remove somebody from supportive relationships, their mental health will suffer. And the clear natural experiment of that is prisons. If you take somebody from their community, from. From their family and put them into prison, where they lose close relationships, often there are high rates of depression. And that's exactly what's found, high rates of depression in prison communities. But the limits of evolutionary psychology are that we can design any society we like. We do not need to be imprisoned by our genetic heritage, by how natural selection has shaped our minds. We can choose, for example, to create a society that is anti racism. And many people would argue that racism itself is a product of our evolution. Our distrust of people who are not like us, our fear and our judgment of people who do not belong in our in group and our sense of feeling superior over the out group. We can decide to set aside that evolutionary bias to create a society that's free of racism. So I'll give you that example.
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E
Fantastic. I mean, thank you for that. Sabrina, let's turn to you. What do you think about this sort of evolutionary psychological account?
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G
So I start with remembrance of Dan Dennett, a friend to myself and my spouse, a towering intellect, as you all know. If you've read his work, a master of the craft of philosophical writing. It's just ridiculous that this thing, death is with us. It takes down the genuine, warm, kind, magnificent human beings that we need around Us upon Dan's death. The sentiments that were expressed across the board from philosophers and non philosophers was just of a human being who was so wonderful, so kind, so gentle, and it is really sad that he's gone to the matter on the table. Evolutionary psychology Keith really nicely framed the conceptual landscape that we could talk about evolutionary psychology as an approach that we might take very generally to studying human psychology, contemporary human science psychology. We might take an evolutionary approach or we might take a developmentalist approach, which may not require us to say anything about evolution. But usually when the topic of evolutionary psychology is on the table as it is today, the question is not really about a sort of general approach to human beings, human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Rather, it's about the research project that is large E, large P evolutionary psychology. And as Keith tells us, within that framework are some quite specific commitments. Absent the commitments, we should all be on board with evolutionary psychology. Small E, small P. What I take to be contentious, to be profoundly problematic, is that large E, large P research project purports to tell us things about who we are as contemporary beings on account of who our ancestors were. But this is a problem. A very, very cursory understanding of an empirical approach to understanding the world suggests that we need something like evidence. Here's what we know for sure. Our ancestors did do stuff, and the things that they did accounted for us being here. We know this. We are the recipient of their having being successful, so they achieve reproductive success. But how precisely did they achieve that reproductive success? That's really the issue, to my mind. Evolutionary psychology, the research program, is ill equipped, as all evolutionary programs are, to telling us about the past. What precisely were the kinds of behaviors that our ancestors engaged in? It's lost to time, but we can say our ancestors did have sex, that is contentless. And no evolutionary psychologist would believe that to be contentful. Rather, their claims are these modules that were laid down and which we've inherited are still operative, at least for some of the behaviors that we engage in. And those behaviors ought to be understood from the evolutionary vantage point. That is to my mind, an illegitimate move. There is no evidence to support it. And we shouldn't rely on evolutionary considerations, whether they are positive accounts or negative accounts. In fact, as Simon illustrated, with respect to caring other regarding sentiments. When we're talking about children, we don't need an evolutionary account to know this. We have all of the empirical data to handle to tell us what is required to support the developing young to becoming fully developed individuals who are psychologically, well, interesting.
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E
Okay, thank you so much for setting out your positions. I mean, I'm picking up a couple of sort of general themes and directions already, but I guess the starting point here should be. Actually, let's pick up something that you just said, Sabrina. I mean, assume that we all agree that biological evolution exists. Our minds are part of our bodies and therefore by extension presumably are under some form of evolutionary pressure and selection as well. However, the fossil record doesn't tend to fossilize behaviors that much. So I'd be interested in hearing a little bit about sort of how it is that evolutionary psychology with its capital E and P actually makes these claims in the first place. What is the evidence, the starting evidence, that these things are within our evolutionary past, let's say. Keith, I wonder if you could, if you could comment on that.
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B
Right. This is something that Simon is in a much better position to give an account of than I am. But there are certain things that you can look at. One piece of evidence that's sometimes cited is that we have certain patterns of thinking that seem to be irrational. There's a famous test, the waste and selection task, which involves identifying which cards you need to turn over in order to determine the truth of a certain claim about what's on each side of the cards. The details don't matter. It just requires simple logical reasoning and people get it wrong. Even people who have some training in logic get it wrong sometimes because it's sort of instinctively choose the card that matches the one that was mentioned in the question and ignore another one that is equally important. I'd say the details don't matter, but what happens, what's interesting is that if you ask a question that has exactly the same form, but it's concerning whether somebody's breaking a social norm,
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F
who you
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B
would need to ask, who you need to check on in a PAHSA to see if they were breaking the, the rules on underage drinking. And you can set up a question that is exactly the same in its logical form as the waste and selection task, which is more abstract, logical question, and people don't make the mistake on this one. And people get it right. People get the logically correct answer, the normatively correct answer. And so this led some people to speculate that there was some sort of dedicated mechanism that we have being social creatures for detecting cheaters, that we became much more vigilant when it was a matter of whether somebody was breaking a rule. Rather cases where we're just testing an abstract rule so we're not good at the abstract mathematical application of this Rule, but put it in a real world context and we're very good. Now again, of course, there could be a cultural explanation of that. There could be a cultural explanation, all sorts of things. But that's one of the things that prompted people to think that there might be a cheater detection mechanism.
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E
Well, this is something, of course, Simon, that you mentioned. You also said importantly, the theories make predictions. So let's talk to that a little bit.
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F
Okay, so we see attachment at work in humans between a mother or a father and their baby. But we also see it in apes, in chimpanzees, we see it in monkeys, we see it in dogs and cats. It's that kind of cross species observation that raises the question, is this an evolved form of behavior? And what would happen with a very dependent infant if they didn't have that attachment? They'd be highly vulnerable to predators, for example. So the attachment system keeps an immature offspring close to its parent and makes the parent be very vigilant. Where is my baby? And is my baby safe? But we see that across so many species that it raises the question, has this evolved? So it's not just about the empirical data we could collect, it's where did this come from? And I think that's just one example. We could also use the example of language. And I think, Keith, you started off with the example of human language. And in Steve Pinker's book the Language Instinct, one of the observations is that in every culture, children learn to speak. Other animals don't seem to learn to speak. But in the human species, language seems to develop and we see sort of potentially universal milestones in how it develops. But of course, in every specific culture, children learn to speak different languages. So we see the interplay between something that looks strongly biological and the result of evolution. It's only our species, across the 600 odd language groups that exist, that shows language and yet lots of cultural specificity. We need to hear the specific inputs of Danish or Finnish or English or Welsh in order to prime the system to learn that particular language. I think maybe this debate is in danger of reintroducing the nature nurture question. Clearly, we see a bit of nature in allowing the language system to develop, and we see plenty of nurture in shaping the specifics of the language that the child learns or the individual learns. And these two things interact.
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G
Sure.
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E
I mean, if you have something to say, Suzu.
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G
Sure. So to the point of if we look across different, particularly disparate cultures and we see certain common themes in terms of how human beings Behave. The claim is that this might suggest that there is something over and above the cultural properties that produce certain kinds of behaviors that are at work. And really, we need to pop the hood and we will find some evolved mechanism. I really think two points here. First, why do we think that understanding the genetic basis of a particular kind of behavior is of utility to us? That's the first question. It's not clear to me that the ways in which we organize ourselves, the ways in which we live our lives will be augmented or shifted on account of understanding that this particular kind of behavior was under genetic selection. So I'm not quite sure what we gain there. But the second issue is, suppose we find that there are differences in behavioral repertoire amongst different kinds of people. Is that evidence that there's nothing going on that produce the behavior that is biological? No, clearly it doesn't say that the behavior being different across different people, that it isn't a biological. It's not produced by biology. What it's supposed to say from an evolutionary perspective is that the behavior itself is not under a particular modular genetic selection. I don't see any evidence that evolutionary psychologists could appeal to to make that distinction. Right. So here we have a group of people there separated from contemporary British folks, and they behave in a certain kind of way. It's a behavior that's quite entrenched in their community. It's wide across the population, but it's fairly novel to us. We've never seen it. Are we inclined, therefore, to say that this isn't a behavior that somehow should be understood in terms of biology, some way conceive? I prefer to say biology, some way conceive? Or are we inclined to say, well, it's clearly a product of culture because it's not widespread amongst us. It's not clear to me that there is anything that evolutionary psychologists could appeal to, to allow them to come to that kind of come to some conclusion about those two kinds of cases?
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E
I wonder actually if this might be a good moment to bring in my personal favorite subject, which is sex differences, rather than going into different kinds of cultures. Simon, of course, I know that this touches on your work a lot, but one of the things that was said in the opening statement was the fact that the classical example is men don't raise children, they're not fathers, they spread their seed, they leave, and then the mothers do all the work. This is one of those classical evolutionary psychologies type arguments that we've all heard. And yet now we see that men can do this, in fact. So then the question comes down to what you're saying, Sabrina, which is, well, I guess people want to know, is there some kind of biological difference between males and females that maybe means that men are less good at doing parenthood and there's both, like, ways of researching that. But of course, your question is still valid of like, well, oh, so what if there is?
- [28:46]
G
So look, it could be the case that we behave in these disparate ways along gender lines on account of something biological. The question is whether that something biological is to be understood in terms of our ancestors having bequeathed to us a particular suite of genes that govern this way of being. So my position here is not that we should throw out biology. My position is that, first of all, I think the framework of evolution or not is problematic because there's one sense in which we could say everything about us can be understood in terms of evolution, but clearly that would be vacuous. Why they're biological systems and the fact that we do culture the way we do culture. It's precisely the fact that we are biological entities to begin with. But that's not what we mean. We mean to say, is there a way in which we could look at certain kinds of behaviors and see whether they are wholly the purview of biological evolutionary processes or the product of culture? Everybody knows that this dichotomy doesn't work and that we ought not to even appear to be suggesting that's the case. I like to think in terms of the biological entities are involved in this co construction. The resources are given from nature, if you like, and the resources are given from culture. And we make ourselves to some extent into the beings that we are. We can take on behavioral repertoire that become really, really entrenched, such that we are not able in any easy way to say whether it is a fact of our biology or it's a fact of our culture.
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E
Simon, come on.
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F
Okay, so thank you for the opportunity to bring gender into the discussion. Sex and gender. Okay, so. And maybe we'll also connect that to parenting. So I've been looking at gender differences in empathy, and we published a paper just last year looking at whether women on average are better on tests of empathy than men. The two key words there are on average, because obviously these are just bell curves in the population that overlap significantly. What we found was across 57 different countries with 300,000 people taking an empathy test online, women on average scored better than men in the majority of those cultures. So connecting this to fathers taking a role in childcare, you could try to construct some kind of just so evolutionary story saying the reason that women on average have better empathy is because they had greater selection pressure. Being mothers for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions, to read their baby's mind, that part of infant survival is a caregiver being able to pick up on her infant's needs, for example, being thirsty, being in pain, and so forth. But clearly fathers and men have disability too. The fact that we've seen this very welcome cultural shift so that my grandparents, the father, play very little role in childcare. In my generation, fathers play hopefully an equal role in childcare just shows that culture is very malleable. We can decide whatever culture we want. And that both genders in this case, have the ability to use empathy towards an infant just as to use empathy towards a friend or a stranger.
- [32:45]
E
Well, I mean, Keith, I can see you nodding along, but then, I mean, I think you also said this about sort of design to some extent. So let's say, all right, some of our behavior is biological, Some of it is clearly shaped by culture. We can shape culture more mindfully. How do we do that? And is there a limit to how? I mean, I think this is what sits at the heart of this debate. Is there a limit to what culture can encourage us to change about our behavior, or is there no limit to it?
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B
This is a question about freedom, about whether we're constrained by our biology, by our genetics, and by our culture. Well, maybe this is a good point, just to mention. Just to mention one of Dan's books here, which is called this Freedom Evolves now, he thought we had a huge amount of freedom, a huge amount of autonomy, degrees of freedom that no other creature on this planet has. And he thought this was a product of evolution, one of evolution strategies. Evolution has many different strategies for. For getting creatures to survive and flourish. And one of them is to give them a lot of autonomy so that they can be really flexible, really adaptable. They can set their own goals. They can deal with that. Dan has a wonderful thought experiment about trying to preserve your body into the future, freeze your body and preserve it into the future. And in order to do this, you need to build a robot that could look after your frozen body for hundreds of years. And you'd have to give this robot so much autonomy, so much self control to deal with all the changing circumstances that might happen over the next hundred few hundreds of years, that of course, it might then decide that it doesn't want to look after you anymore because you've given it so much freedom, it can stop doing the thing that it was designed to do. And in a way, our genes have done that with us. They've given us so much self control that we can decide not to reproduce. We can decide to do all sorts of things that from the genes point of view don't make any sense at all. But that was, if you like, the risk that the genes took, that one way of making a creature that will replicate well is to give it an awful lot of adaptability, an awful lot of flexibility. And that's what. And so freedom, our freedom evolved. There's not an opposition between our being autonomous free agents and our being the products of evolution. It's because we're the product of evolution that we have this wonderful freedom. That's what it came from. It wasn't a divine gift. It was a hard won product of billions of years of evolution.
- [35:18]
F
Can I pick up? Yeah, Keith, I like your example of the freedom to choose not to reproduce because many people choose not to have children, even though presumably the selection pressure is to have children. So there's the example of, if I can use the words in quotes, free will overriding evolutionary pressures to decide what kind of future do I want as an individual. I also wanted to come back to Sabrina's point about what's the value of talking about an evolutionary or a biological element to human behavior? What benefit does it give us? And if we look at the example of language, I talked about language before because it's another human universal. These days we've got the genetic tools to look at the partly genetic contribution to language by doing genome wide association studies. But we know that no human behavior is 100% genetic. So language is no different to other human behaviors in being partly genetic and partly the result of social factors. But understanding the genetic part may help us understand those children with disabilities specific to language development. There are children with language delay, for example, for partly genetic reasons. But when we look at language, we see biology and social factors interacting very beautifully. So, for example, girls on average talk earlier than boys. This is documented across different human cultures that boys are overrepresented in clinics for language disorders. But you see the role of environment very clearly too, because firstborn children speak earlier than later born children, presumably because firstborn children are getting more parental attention than later born children who are struggling to get any attention at all.
- [37:22]
E
I always knew I was better than my brother. This is what I've just taken away from this. Sorry, Simon. Fantastic. I mean, Sabrina, what do you think?
- [37:31]
G
So I'm wondering if, Simon, if you know of cases where children are presented with language impairment and the practitioner decides that the course of action we ought to engage first is to sequence their genome to find out what's going on.
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F
Yeah, I mean, this is the difference between science and clinical practice. So in the hospital that we're building in Cambridge, it's a new children's hospital, the intention is that every child that comes into the hospital will have whole genome sequencing to understand the role of DNA in whatever symptoms they're showing. But the choice of intervention, speech therapy, for example, doesn't touch DNA. It just provides opportunities for learning. So, you know, the. So we've got science wanting to understand things better and we've got clinical practice wanting to make things better. And the two are not incompatible.
- [38:30]
G
Good. And this is a real important distinction. I think part of what's going on here is a discussion about explanations from the vantage point of the theoretical psychologist, the philosopher, the neuroscientists, the sorts of things that we do when we're thinking and writing. But there's also sort of behind the scenes, this, at least for me, this consideration of how then do we use the resources from this kind of research into the domains of our lives that we need to address language problems in children or other kinds of health related matters. The thought, I think, from the public, when we think about evolutionary psychology, we think that from an evolutionary psychological perspective, if we simply understand these things over here, then perhaps it affords us the paths to design and make the relevant kinds of corrections in our societies to bring about, I think, a better world. But the truth is there is no such.
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F
Yeah, I'd agree that there's a big gap between the gap.
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G
Is there?
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F
Yeah, between the scientific inquiry into the causes of some of these conditions and what are the treatment implications.
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E
I mean, Keith, I can see you nodding as well. And just, you know, we're reaching the end of our time, unfortunately. And so let's just cast our eyes forward. So there's a difference between understanding the biology of something and knowing what to do. And so, Keith, I wonder if you could talk a little bit to what I think sits at the heart of this conversation, which is, you know, all right, so we make all these measurements, we have all these fantastic understandings of the biology. Does that actually change how we do anything? How much does it actually afford that? Right, like this idea that we can change our culture. Sounds fantastic. We can change our culture without knowing anything if we want to.
- [40:35]
B
So, yeah, so I see it. What evolutionary theory tells us is something about the constraints we're operating under. Okay, so we have all this wonderful autonomy, but, you know, our biological constraints on it. Okay, so there's some things we simply can't do and it's good to know about. For instance, if you have a genetic. Their predisposition to a certain disease, I think it's probably good to know that because there are then things you can do, preventative measures that you can take and so on. It tells you the constraints under which your decision making operates. It doesn't tell you what decisions to make.
- [41:18]
E
I mean, I agree with you, Keith, but I think there's a distinction between sickness and physical ailment and behaviors, which is what we're kind of talking about in this context. Right. And that's where the biology becomes a little bit stretched and where evolutionary psychology comes into its own.
- [41:36]
B
Well, I don't see that evolutionary psychology. I mean, really, we need to be very careful here of some of the popularizations of evolutionary psychology, which are the worst thing for discipline in either sense. I think that some people are popularizing it in ways that I think are dangerous and are trying to draw prescriptions from it. I don't think that that's. It may be that. Suppose. Suppose it were true that we had a genetic predisposition to engage in some sort of antisocial behavior. That'd be worth knowing because then we could try to combat that disposition. The idea that we should say, oh, well, it's natural for people to do that. Just they should be indulged in it. No, if there were a genetic predisposition to certain sort of baby, that would give us a reason to take, to devise policies that counteract it. It's what we do with the knowledge that matters. And that's not something that science tells us. That's something we as a society have to decide. And we can shape culture. We can shape culture to counteract.
- [42:36]
E
I mean, I realize I'm playing devil's advocate here at the last, like, at the 11th hour, but as a biologist, I can't believe I'm saying this, but so what if we know all this stuff? I mean, human beings have been shaping societies and cultures for millennia effectively.
- [42:51]
D
Right.
- [42:51]
E
I mean, of course I agree with you. It's nice to know. It's nice to know where our limits lie and all that stuff, but materially, we could probably make a lot of good changes without needing to know any of the science. Right. Like, what's the justification for knowing?
- [43:05]
F
Yeah, I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned social Darwinism in the context of this debate, because when you take evolutionary ideas and misapply them. It can be very dangerous. And Dan Dennett's other book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, reminds us that when Hitler was organizing the social hierarchy not just with white people above black people, but with Aryans at the top of the human chain and looking at levels of superiority and inferiority, he was borrowing Darwin's idea about evolution and human progress. But at the very bottom of that hierarchy, he also put people with disabilities. And it led from a scientific paradigm, Darwinism, through to a political program of extermination of people with learning disabilities and physical disabilities as part of eugenics. So although we've talked about how wonderful it is to be thinking about the Darwinian paradigm, we also have to look at its dangers.
- [44:15]
E
Fantastic. I think that's a wonderful note upon which to thank our speakers. Please. We're out of time, I'm afraid. So please thank our speakers.
- [44:29]
C
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our Times. What did you think? What purpose does evolutionary psychology serve in today's society? Is it merely a justification for outdated behaviors? How can we separate nature and nurture? What did you think of the episode?
- [44:43]
D
Daniel I thought it was great and it really made me think about what the role of science actually is. We're in this constant quest to be able to explain everything scientifically down to something as small and complex as our DNA, when often this isn't necessary to fix the issue at hand.
- [44:59]
C
There's actually a great article that I read recently on our website on IAI News, all about whether aliens would have the same science as us. And it points out that actually for most of human history, we didn't really do science in the way that we think of it today. We would, for example, figure out how to make bread and weapons through trial and error without ever having to understand the details of metallurgy or how yeast works. And so this really has been making me think about why we even do science and why we explore these questions about the universe. Universe and and whether it's really just for our own curiosity.
- [45:35]
D
Well, if you got something entirely different out of the episode, feel free to get in touch. We've got our email down in the show notes, or you can leave a comment on the platform of your choice.
- [45:44]
C
And if you'd like to hear more, please like and subscribe and head over to our website, IAI TV for thousands more debates, talks and interviews from the world's leading thinkers.
- [45:54]
D
Bye bye.
- [46:03]
G
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