Here’s a link.
Thanks for the link! 
I have a more general question about “Evolutionary Psychologists”. Do they primarily seek to explain human behavior, or do they favor a certain category of prescriptions as well. For instance, if someone goes to them with depression, how would their approach be different from other psychologists? Or, do they not do that? Are they more anthropologists than psychologists?
Those are good questions!!
I only became interested in this subject a year or two ago after reading Survival of the Prettiest and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, so I have to admit I’m still a dilettante with this subject, and an evolutionary psychologist might say that I have a simplistic view of this school of thought.
So far, I think that “evolutionary psychology” is more of a descriptive than prescriptive field. That’s because evolutionary psychologists believe that everything that “_ is _,” in human society, is that way for some sound evolutionary reason. So, whether they intend to or not, they often end up performing a lot of apologetics for whatever the status quo happens to be.
Some evolutionary psychologists have made some prescriptive arguments, but not for psychotherapy. Instead, they try to invoke evolutionary psychology when it comes to public policy. So far, their prescriptions for political economy have been illogical and unimpressive (as I will discuss later in this post).
I don’t know of any advice that evolutionary psychology pioneer Edward O. Wilson or sociobiology sympathizer Jared Diamond has for psychotherapists. Yet they believe that evolutionary psychology proves that the free market is evil and self-destructive and that the government must curtail industrial production to prevent the West’s “collapse” (as if their brand of Statism never caused the “collapse” of a society).
Indeed, the late Ronald E. Merrill, who claimed to sympathize with Objectivism, bought into that ridiculously Malthusian assumption:
The Objectivist ethics must deal with the importance of competition and conflict in crowded ecologies. The “frontier” model of abundant resources and steady growth needs to be supplemented with an account of ethics in a crowded, constricted environment in which discontinuities are the norm and not the exception. . . .
We must consider the possibility that in modern, high-density societies, Objectivist ethics as currently formulated may break down. Empirically, individualism seems to be associated with conditions of low population density (though the converse does not hold). It remains to be shown that Rand’s version of egoism can be adaptive in a crowded and constrained environment.
Say’s Law has refuted Merrill for the past 200 years in the West. And it has refuted him in East Asia for the past 30 years. Or, to say it in simpler terms, Merrill’s prediction fails to come true to the extent that a society lives under economic freedom.
If evolutionary psychologists applied many of their current assumptions to psychotherapy, I think that the results would be pretty terrible. The authors of the book Mean Genes have a view of human nature that is comparable to Sigmund Freud’s (which is Platonic in the long run), though they don’t admit that their view is Freudian.
Mean Genes’s authors, Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan, imagine a Freudian mind-body dichotomy where none exists. They believe that, on the one hand, a person has his rationality. In his rational mind, he knows that he must think long-range and about his long-term survival. That’s their equivalent of the “ego” and “superego” (in the Freudian sense). On the other hand, insist Burnham and Phelan, humans have an uncivilized, irrational, biologically-evolved set of predispositions that somehow “tempt” you to only think short-range and seek immediate gratification. That is Burnham and Phelan’s version of the “id.”
In Mean Genes, Burnham and Phelan maintain that it is good when a person can allow his rationality (his mind and soul, or “ego” and “superego”) to triumph over the “temptations” of his or her own evolution-created biological impulses (his body, or “id”). And Edward O. Wilson endorsed this book.
Burnham, Phelan, and Wilson believe in the nonsensical view that the human mind is constantly at war with one’s “inborn biology” because they do not admit that the human mind is part of a person’s “inborn biology.”
What I find hilarious on so many levels that evolutionary psychologists try to separate themselves from “Social Darwinists.” They constantly say, “We are not Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.”
Please forgive my long interlude in discussing “Social Darwinism”; by the end, I will show why this is relevant to the “prescriptive” elements of evolutionary psychology and not a true digression.
First, historians have yet to cite a single example of either Spencer or Sumner calling himself a “Social Darwinist.” The term “Social Darwinism” became popular long after the two died. No one who has ever been dubbed a “ninteenth-century Social Darwinist” popularly used that term for himself in public. One may be surprised to find that, though “Social Darwinism” is considered a ninteenth-century ideology, this term was not widely used before 1944. Actually, it was a pejorative epithet that leftwing historian Richard Hofstadter coined in 1944 to smear anyone who believed that some people in society deserved to have some “higher status” than another, even if that “status” merely involved being richer than other people.
Hofstadter and his followers (particularly John Kenneth Galbraith) pretty much created a strawman image that they applied to Herbert Spencer, W. G. Sumner, and anyone else who wanted a reduction in welfare spending. Galbraith puts the following words into Spencer’s mouth: When somebody goes from rags to riches, it is necessarily because he has superior genes. And then this rich guy can spread his superior “get rich” genes to the next generation. If somebody stays poor, it is because he has inferior “stay poor” genes, so poor people should just die without reproducing so that they can spare the human race of passing on their inferior genes.
That’s a misrepresentation of what Spencer and Sumner said. Contrary to the leftists’ smear, Spencer and Sumner didn’t hate poor people per se. They did, however, say that many poor people in economically-freer countries like America and England are ultimately responsible for their own financial situation (and they had very harsh words for drug addicts) and that there is such a thing as “misguided philanthropy.” Leftwing historians quote Spencer and Sumner’s criticisms of drug addicts out of context in order to make it sound like they hated poor people as such.
Plus, Spencer didn’t even agree with Charles Darwin about natural selection; he believed evolution occurred in the way that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck described. Spencer did not even have a concept of “genes” in the Gregor Mendelian sense. Spencer – characterized by the Left as the ultimate “social Darwinist,” did not use the adjective of “Darwinist” for himself. (In fact, Spencer believed that it was Darwin who should have learned more from him).
Ironically, the economist who comes closest to making a “Social Darwinist argument against the welfare state,” as described by Hofstadter and Galbraith, is an economist widely hailed and cited by leftists, environmentalists, and evolutionary pscyhologists: Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus. When Malthus said that population will eventually outstrip food production in the West, he actually thought he was arguing against the welfare state.
Malthus said that, if welfare spending and private charity keep increasing, then the population of poor people will grow too big and limit the amount of food available for the entire population. Malthus believed that if you discontinue welfare (and even vaccinations) for the poor, then this will prevent the population from growing too big, which will then leave enough food resources for everyone. To some extent, Rev. Malthus really did just want poor people to die so there would be less “competition for natural resources.”
Malthus, like every collectivist who follows in his footsteps, failed to acknowledge that free enterprise provides the greatest profits to those who can increase a region’s “carrying capacity.” (And one of the first economists to dispute him on this was – you guessed it! – Jean-Baptiste Say.)
Spencer and Sumner, contra Rev. Malthus, strongly advocated private charity (something one would never know when going by the words of Hofstadter, Galbraith, and practically any leftwing or conservative intellectual), and, in fact, Spencer made the nauseating argument that a person was necessarily evil if he were rich and did not give to charity (this appears to be Andrew Carnegie’s favorite aspect of Spencer’s philosophy).
Thus, the leftwingers’ critiques of Spencer and Sumner are based on what are misunderstandings at best and distortions at worst. Leonard Peikoff and Ayn Rand are among the very few intellectuals to publicly criticize Spencer for what he actually deserved to be criticized for (his embarrasing concessions to socialist ideology) and Dr. Peikoff is one of the few people to take Sumner to task for his actual failings.
Anyhow, in Social Darwinism in American Thought Hofstadter first presents his strawman argument against “free-market Social Darwinism” and then he equivocates it with other ideologies that use “evolutionary” terms to say that some people deserve a higher status than others, such as (1) advocates of state-imposed eugenics (like Charles Davenport and Karl Pearson), who argued that states should coercively sterilize people who have mentally-relatives, (2) supporters of “scientific racism,” who said that whites are inherently superior to other races, (3) those who argued for “imperialism” because different countries are in “competition” and a country’s superiority is proven by its victory in war, and (4) Nazis who simultaneously espoused state-imposed eugenics, imperialism, and “scientific racism.”
Herbert Spencer was a classical liberal who argued for laissez faire (aside from his atrocious concessions to altruism and his agreement with David Ricardo and Henry George that all land rents should be taxed 100 percent), and yet Hofstadter, Galbraith, and other leftists chose to exploit his evolutionary rhetoric to lump free-market advocacy together with the statism of state-mandated eugenics and National Socialism.
Spencer and Sumner said that rich people in a free market deserved their “economic power” because they earned it. Statist eugenicists and fascists said that dictators had political power because they had genes that made them superior. Just because Spencer, Sumner and these statists all talked about evolution and “defended inequality,” Hofstadter, Galbraith, and the rest of the Left chose to classify all of them in the package deal of “Social Darwinists.”
Basically, Hofstadter’s underlying point was that any classical liberal who argued against the New Deal and the welfare state was really a crypto-Nazi.
And this is why I find it extremely funny that evolutionary psychologists try to separate themselves from the “Social Darwinism movement” – there never really was a Social Darwinism movement! Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner were wishy-washy classical liberals who tried to invoke evolution in their arguments, and they emphatically denounced another political movement that Hofstadter called “Social Darwinism” – British colonization of other countries.
The eugenicists espoused genetic determinism. Spencer and Sumner did not.
In some sense, the term “evolutionary psychology,” as well as its synonym, “sociobiology,” do sound like “Social Darwinism.”
In the case of “evolutionary psychology,” both “psychology” and “Social” refer to behavior, while “evolutionary” refers to “Darwinism.”
Likewise, with “sociobiology,” “socio-” means “Social,” while “biology” has to do with “Darwinism.”
When Edward O. Wilson created the modern “evolutionary psychology” movement in the 1970s by writing the book Sociobiology, he was attacked by campus Marxist groups who said that he was trying to revive “the Social Darwinism of John D. Rockefeller and Adolf Hitler.”
And do you know what Wilson’s response was? He said that he resented seeing his own work be equated with the evils of “Rockefeller and Hitler.”
Neither E. O. Wilson or his critics perceived any difference between John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s economic leverage and Hitler’s mass murder.
This is why I see “Social Darwinist” as an anti-concept. Its literal meaning is “Someone who tries to apply evolutionary theories to the social sciences.” But its underlying meaning is, “Anyone who disagrees with egalitarian statism is a Nazi who wants poor people to die.” This is why we see often see leftists and conservatives smearing Ayn Rand as a “Social Darwinist.”
Because of all this, I find much humor in sociobiology-sympathizer Jared Diamond disclaiming “the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner,” as he repeats ad naseum the arguments of Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, who much more accurately fits the modern image of a “Social Darwinist economist” than do either Spencer or Sumner.
What’s even funnier about Diamond proclaming himself to be unlike and superior to Sumner is that, in the early 1900s, Sumner even anticipated the central point to Diamond’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. According to Guns, Germs, every society is the way it is today because of its geographic conditions. Basically, Diamond says that every society has certain customs today because of “gene-culture co-evolution.”
Edward O. Wilson’s “gene-culture co-evolution” stems from the idea that the passage of customs from one generation of people to another is the result of human beings having genes that make it easy for them to be conditioned. Great apes learn certain behaviors through copying what they see, and, in some ways, so do human beings (for instance, a baby learns to talk by observing adult speech and then trying to copy it).
Among humans, it is not only “genetically programmed” behaviors that determine which people are most successful at propagating their genes, but also the skills that they learn. To the extent that a set of learned behaviors affect which groups of people become “reproductively successful,” varieties in conditioning itself affect whose genes are passed on. In this way, says Wilson, customs and social mores themselves become factors in determining which members of society have the easiest time passing on their genes in the long run.
Anyhow, all human cultures undego the process of “gene-culture co-evolution” simultaneously. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond contends that the West is dominant today because Europeans got a “head start” as a result of the Eurasian region having a natural environment most conducive to agriculture. Basically, he says that the Mesopotamians invented agriculture first because they lived in the best geographic location, and that these customs spread throughout Europe thanks to geographic circumstance.
Then Diamond makes the ridiculous (il)logical leap that, just because Eurasians got this “head start,” all Western prosperity existing today should be attributed much more to luck than hard work, rationality, or economic freedom.
Diamond’s contempt for “Social Darwinism” is here laughable, because his argument was already made by “Social Darwinist” William Graham Sumner in his 1907 book Folkways. Sumner contended that every society has its current set of customs because a society’s geographic circumstances led to certain customs being adopted through the natural selection of “gene-culture co-evolution” (not the term he used). For instance, he noticed that people wore very little clothes in hot regions, while they wore a lot of clothes where it was cold.
In this sense, Sumner, so demonized by the academic Left, actually helped form a concept held very dearly by the academic Left today: “cultural relativism.” Wikipedia claims he even coined the term “ethnocentrism,” which the academic Left now employs as a euphemism for “evil.”
Sumner admitted, though, that certain traditions could outlive their usefulness and, at some point, they should be abandoned (such as the ridiclous practice of sacrificing somebody’s life to appease the gods). Sumner is different from his academic descendants in that he admitted that one could objectively judge some non-Western customs to be counterproductive.
Anyhow, given that Sumner anticipated Diamond by decades in saying that a given society’s customs were determined by a combination of “geography” and the “naturally selective” interaction between geographic environment and generation-to-generation conditioning, it is ironic that Diamond is today hailed as a genius while everyone scorns Sumner.
Incidentally, what is so specious about Diamond’s Guns, Germs argument is that it gives insufficient credit to what sustains societal longevity in the long term.
If a guy won a many-mile triathlon after having a two-second head start, should we attribute his victory solely to that two-second head start? Or could we say that, even if his head start was unfair, that guy still had to exert some effort to win?
When people buy into Diamond’s idea that “the West dominates because of its geographic head start, and that’s all there is to it,” they ignore the fact that civilizations are sustained in the long term by economic freedom.
The Mesopotmians lived in what is now Iraq. If geography were everything, why isn’t Iraq still the world’s richest region? If the natural resources in a geographic environment are everything, then why are Russia, Latin America, and Africa – so abundant in natural resources – so poor? And why are Japan and Hong Kong – which are so poor in natural resouces that the latter doesn’t even have adequate farming land – so wealthy per-capita?
Jared Diamond, like so many evolutionary psychologists, comes to specious conclusions as a result of dropping context. This is why so many evolutionary psychologists make prescriptions for public policy that are outright execrable.
However, evolutionary psychologists are more insightful than most political advocates in one sense: they are much more aware, under certain circumstances, that life is not a zero-sum game.
Despite the Malthusianism of so many of its adherents, there are some people in evolutionary psychology who admit that peaceful commerce is a positive-sum game.
Game Theorist and evolutionary pscyhologist Robert L. Trivers, as well as science writer Matt Ridley, observe that, when both buyer and seller make a peaceful trade without violating anyone’s rights, both sides profit. They admit that this is a “positive-sum game” (John von Neumann’s term) in which all participants win.
In this sense, Ayn Rand’s observation that there is not a conflict of interests between rational individuals actually anticipates a popular notion of evolutionary psychologists and Game Theorists.
Unfortunately, these evolutionary psychologists and Game Theorists have their semantics all mixed up. Because both sides benefit in a peaceful commercial transaction, Robert L. Trivers and Matt Ridley refer to commerce as “reciprocal altruism.”
What insanity!
Trivers, Ridley, et al. consider voluntary trade to be “altruism” because your participation in a trade benefits someone else.
They don’t care that altruism, as coined by Auguste Comte, involves sacrifice of the self – something completely absent in a mutually profitable exchange.
Better terms would be “mutually self-interested beneficience” or “mutual profit.”
