Marburger and Sociobiology
A couple of brief items to follow up previous items in either News or Notes and Comment or both – she said pompously. My point isn’t to be pompous, it’s just to say that these items refer back to previous items as opposed to being new ones, just in case anyone wants to, you know, get a broad overview of er um –
Anyway. There is a long, detailed post by Chris Mooney on his blog, about Bush’s science advisor John Marburger and his response to the charges by the Union of Concerned Scientists that Bush administration has systematically distorted science. Mooney writes for The American Prospect and the Washington Post about these issues, so his blog is an excellent place to check for science coverage. He doesn’t think much of Marburger’s response.
In order to paint a picture of a series of scientific abuses by the administration, the UCS report relies heavily on previously published media exposes and interviews with disgruntled scientist-whistleblowers (many of them from within the government). By contrast, Marburger presents the government’s official line on each incident, which of course tends to minimize or ignore the whistleblower accounts. But by proceeding in this way, Marburger pretty much automatically loses the argument. He accuses the UCS of failing to “seek and reflect responses or explanations from responsible government officials,” but he never gives us any good reason why we should trust the administration, instead of all the scientists who have risked retribution by going public with their charges. Indeed, the mere fact that there are so many whistleblowers out there points to something systematic going on–namely, an unprecedented level of science politicization by the administration (precisely what UCS is alleging).
And this article by Melvin Konner is very good on the subject of sociobiolgy/Evolutionary Psychology we were talking about a few days ago, and the often automatic hostility to it in some quarters.
As the new field of sociobiology has emerged during the past quarter century, it has met with firm and unrelenting opposition from prominent liberal critics…It has also drawn opposition from a group of biologists on the left who have raised general scientific and philosophical objections and have had great influence in shaping liberal opinion. The scientific critics have included highly respected figures in biology: Ruth Hubbard, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jonathan Beckwith, among others. None in this group had done direct research on human behavior when sociobiology first emerged in the 1970s. Nonetheless, they immediately perceived a grave threat to liberal values, and their opposition has persisted ever since. However respected the source, the criticism from this group has had little effect on the direction of scientific research: sociobiology is now firmly established as an accepted branch of normal science. As a result, liberal opinion about sociobiology has increasingly diverged from scientific opinion. If liberals are to understand why this has happened, they need to consider the possibility that Gould, Lewontin, and other prominent scientific critics were wrong in their attack on sociobiology in the first place.
So Konner explains how they got it wrong.
Didn’t think much of that Konner article (surprised? ;-))
“Sociobiology—also known as evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinian theory”
Um, no. Sociobiology is not the same thing as evolutionary psychology. Neo-Darwinian theory is the new synthesis of natural selection and genetics. Sociobiology is concerned with the evolution of social behaviour in animals. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the evolution of high level cognitive processes in humans in the putative environment of evolutionary adaptedness (think men with spears).
Lewontin, Gould and Rose can talk a lot of rubbish when it comes to evolution, sociobiology and even EP. But this radical leftist fringe is not the be all and end all of objections to EP. The fact that they have objected to neo-Darwinism, sociobiology -and- EP should make it clear that you could have objections to EP that don’t rest on the outright rejection of Darwinian principles in human behaviour.
“The danger, though, is that the “anti” position may become so congenial for liberals that they ignore the almost universal acceptance of neo-Darwinian or sociobiological theory among researchers in natural history and animal behavior and among many psychologists and social scientists”
Not quite the same as EP here though is it. No. Nicely conflating of acceptance of evolutionary thinking among most scientists with acceptance of EP. Not the same thing at all.
“The theory’s failures have been local; it has proven uninformative in many instances, and specific hypotheses arising from it have often failed empirical tests. As an overarching viewpoint, though, it successfully organizes much of the behavior and social organization of animals—including, to some extent, us.”
Interesting no? Its failures have been specific (i.e. when it actually comes to telling us anything useful) but the viewpoint (i.e. evolutionary thinking in behaviour) is sound. Something we can all agree on I think!
And his specific example:
“Over the past 15 years systematic research on child abuse and pedicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson—research specifically motivated by neo-Darwinian theory—has shown that a child is between 10 and 100 times more likely to be assaulted or killed if he or she lives in a household that includes an unrelated male. Careful studies show that controlling the things we think of first to explain such a finding—socioeconomic status, ethnicity, religion, educational level, and so on—fails to abolish this very large effect…Because it persists when cultural and sociological variables are controlled, it is difficult to interpret these findings without reference to neo-Darwinian theory.”
The theory here is that males will kill the children so that the females don’t have to care for them and are thus able to reproduce again more rapidly. This is the theory for why male lions taking over a pride kill many cubs, a similar comparison can be made with mice concerning mothers killing their own offspring. Can’t claim to be an expert on this but I’m sure there are many questions about the validity of the EP explanation, as far as I know 1) Human females do not have their reproductive status influenced significantly by having children 2) We don’t know if male fitness goes up/would have gone up by killing children or female fitness by killing their own children (bearing in mind it has already gone down after killing their own offspring) 3) If it does go up, why is it so uncommon? 4) Could we explain it in terms of males being likely to kill or assault generally but fathers being biologically predisposed not to kill or assault their own children – thus a adaptation against infanticide, not for it…etc. (any more anti-EP just-so stories I could make up)
PM is a god, so I will defer to his superior judgment. But just to add to his comment, why is the alleged political provenance of critics of EP of value as evidence against their criticism, inspite of the fact that such political identifications are frequently wrong? Could this not, to the contrary, be considered as evidence of the political provenance of the claims of EP, especially when it is claimed as “normal science”, that is, as incontrovertible, and when it is claimed that scientific claims are necessarily apolitical, as if the differentiation between scientific and political claims amounted to their mutual exclusion, in the name of the “purity” of disinterested scientific claims with respect to contamination with this world? But such a “logic” of inquiry, with its more-than-transcendental claims strikes me as only bad faith. The fact of the matter is that disputes over EP can only really occur between participants who accept a broadly naturalistic framework and, more especially, the basic terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory, on the principle that arguments can only form among participants that accept some basic common ground. The displacement of such arguments onto those who don’t accept its basic terms can only amount to a solicitation of straw men. The idea that arguments about causality, complexity, emergent levels of organization, and human freedom must be decided in favor of the most reductive options is not only fraudulent and shameful, but evades the political, which is to say, the broadly human, consequences. Which is not to say they are wrong, but rather to say that they necessarily occur in a political context and that they can not evade the considerable burdens of proof by decrying the cross-implication of the political with the scientific. Scientific claims are no less free of interogation and limitation than political claims and both are subject to the perplexities of claims to “authority”. There are myriad reasons for objecting to EP, not the least of which is its lusting after a conquest of “reality”, when reality, upon reflection, must consist of any number of levels. But does not such a myriad, by Darwinian reasoning, count against its plausibility?