2nd Edition of Gaulin & McBurney?? Nah...

Steve Gaulin at HBES invited my thoughts on their first edition as they form their thoughts for their second edition. I slavered and spit and ran all that energy through 10 digits. The following resulted and I cast it, with apologies, across the wire on 7/4 of this very year. Alas. No response. I guess they're gonna do again what they already did. Perhaps abandoning the market to Todd and me. Please enjoy...

Jim

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7/4/2002
re: 2nd Edition of Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach

Steve and Don,

It was good to meet both of you at the Rutgers HBES meeting.
I've gone back over your book. The following is a first draft...I can do much better if you need.

Again, I like the sequence and layout and evolutionary tags such as "trail markers." You might brainstorm for others that might tickle our cognitive architecture. Possibilities: resources, trophies, displays, and survival tidbits. (You think I'm kidding?)

The literature summation is comfortable and reads well. I suggest that you enlist Todd Stark (toddstark@aol.com): I've known him for several years through his contributions to my forum at Behavior OnLine. He is younger by two decades and more current with some of the modern camps and debates within mainstream psychology. He's also a dedicated evolutionist but one who understands emergent phenomena.

Writings:
Lehn has a provocative article on supramolecular chemistry in Science, 295: 2400-2402. It seems that big molecules organize themselves, demonstrate fitness phenomena, and develop receptors.
You might benefit from reading Barabassi's recent book on Linked: The New Science of Networks. It's an easy go and shifts perspectives on emergent organizations whether in cells, genes, neurons, or Internet pages. There is substantial transfer from fitness concepts in networks to those that we muddied in biology.
David Rowe's Limits of Family Influence eases nearly anyone into the modern concepts from human behavior genetics. Indeed, only the truly stubborn (a gene?) will not be shaken by his calm presentation.
You will probably enjoy Laland & Brown's little guide to the current mutations from Darwin and from sociobiology. They discuss EP, human ethology, dual inheritance theory, and mimetics in an orderly manner. They also, particulary since Kevin Laland is really into the concept of organisms making niches that become the foundation for further refinement of the organism, allude to emergence thinking as an old tradition that may find new expression in the coming decades. I hope so!

The big "HOWEVER":
As you can tell from the above references, I'm not comfortable with the basic framework of EP. Certainly, your presentation is consistent with Santa Barbara EP but I think that it's wrong and in costly ways that will limit our access to the best students and their options for advancement if we should attract them.

First, EP is too limited from the perspectives of modern biology.
a. The chance of a "universal human nature" is slim to none (see Griffiths & Sterelny's Sex and Death on this point. Hell, there's not even a universal human hemoglobin.)
b. Biology has rediscovered the idea that environments are defined by organisms. Behavior geneticists have reached the identical conclusion. They distinguish between shared environment that forces compliance and usually contributes about 2% to long term outcomes and nonshared environment, the unique experiences that each of us seeks and carries to our shroud.
c. Ethology teaches that ontogeny is channeled and constrained in wild creatures, behavior genetics leans toward recognizing similar constraints and channels in the unfolding of a human life.
d. There is a genetics confound in every cross cultural study ever done. The behavior geneticists have found a genetics loading for nearly every measure of human environments whether education, social class, or even the memories that we have of parental warmth.
e. Heat shock proteins (Hsp90s) have the function of suppressing variation that is already carried by the organism. They may also suppress the expression but not the removal of novel mutations. (See Nature, 417, p 598 & 618.) Heat, radiation, cold, thirst, hunger, and toxins sometimes appear to suppress Hsp90s and phenotypic variation appears that is transmitted to offspring.
f. There are lots of surprises in that variation. Gerhart & Kershner mention the bar-head goose that changed one proline to an alanine in its hemoglobin, increasing hemoglobin's affinity for oxygen but without changing its 3D structure (Gerhart & Kirshner, 1997). Bar-headed geese can now fly over Everest.
Mayr comments: "No case is known to me in which a change in body chemistry initiated a new evolutionary trend. Invariably it was a change in habits or habitat that created a selection pressure in favor of chemical adjustments" (Mayr, 1964, p. 68).
Mayr is highly respected but this idea is no longer tenable. How many geese died over Mt. Everest before one made it over the top? Or did it happen that a hemoglobin-mutant gander explored higher altitudes, made it look easy and impressed a lot of ladies? I vote for the latter.
g. Variations lead to exploration of new niches. For example, "The receptor characteristics of our ancestors, mates, and predators shaped us once through long intervals of phylogeny as they led us to light, warmth, and running water. They eventually led our clinging to our mother's breast where we were calmed by her heartbeat, warmth, murmurs and milk. The taste of particular fats may have led us not only to hunt and fish but also to follow coastal highways of sand as we devoured the protein and oils of surf dwellers along ancient Mediterranean shores and the coasts of Asia Minor, Asia, and the Pacific rim (McKie, 2000; Culotta et al., 2001; Cavalli-Sforza, 2000). During all of our travels, receptors in various arrangements led our way from sea vents or still ponds to Interstate 95."
h. We now have no coherent concept of gene, organism, species, niche, or environment. Kitcher remarked that a gene is anything a reasonably competent biologist chooses to call a gene. PCR machines give us both operational definitions and counts that do not yet align with our intuitions. (Wolfram's recent book makes the same pitch; Sigmund made it in '93 in Games of Life."
i. Sexual selection: appears that a lot of it may spin from receptor characteristics known as lateral inhibition.
j. There is still validity Maynard Smith's notion of mutation needing to be in a very narrow range if it is not to be lethal. On the other hand, there be more tolerance than we once thought. After all, we are not tacking a new unit into the heart of a 747. The airplane analogy is false.
A mutation occurs as part of the conserved core and as part of existing features. The new goodies connect with whatever else unfolds during ontogeny. The new critter figures out what to do with the new toy beside attracting mates with a similar new toy. (Forced cross breeding of spiders produces kids that mate with each other but not with either parent line. It happens in the first generation.)

Second, we can tell stories about the ways that we are often similar but we will never verify them. EP tales have a valuable heuristic function, just as "drive" once did in learning theory. However, we dare not merge heuristics with what we present to be fact.

Third, the social constructionists and EP theorists are fundamentally the same: both see environments as instructors. The SC's think mostly about current environments and EP about former environments. SC lets culture instruct us, EP lets environment also instruct us but over many generations through a process of selection.

I think that what Gerhart & Kirshner call an internalist approach will have a longer career because it addresses some of our enduring unanswered questions about individual differences (yes, they are meaningful because they are orderly and have consequences, including our expression of personal will that we have for the same reasons that other living things have it: the arrangement of our environments in ways that suit our unique preferences.)

Thus, you can modify your opening framework so that it is more open to the newer adaptations that appear almost weekly from biologists and evolutionists, gambling for more longevity in your core beliefs and adhering less to EP dogma. (Yes, I would say the same things to David Buss!) You would also get applause from the developmentalist tradition within establishment psychology.

My recommendation of holding your core and supplying hooks for new modules of a more varied nature is not my idea. It happened about 500 million years ago.

Consider:
a. Gerhart and Kirshner's impressive Cell, Embryo, and Evolution argues that metazoans not only evolved into smaller populations of more diverse forms, but apparently picked up evolvability as a characteristic of its own. G&K refer frequently to a highly conserved core assembly, perhaps spun from the first Hox assembly, one that appears to have been copied, in toto, four times or a doubling followed by another doubling. (See Nature, 417, p xi for a lead to 3 papers on this theme in a recent Nature Genetics. Gould, 2002, The Structure, also addresses this possibility and the phenomenon of evo-devo, a discipline that studies the evolution of evolution itself and refinement of ontogeny.)

It is less surprising that:
b. We and avians exhibit striking similarities of vocal, group, and mating routines...remarkable since we have no recent common ancestors.
c. MacLean's work and students also found that lizards do pretty much the same things that we humans do but talk about it less. For example, small children rear and yell at their mothers, wives and husbands rear and yell at each other. Rutting male lizards do the same thing. Likewise for hunting, territory, and about 25 or 30 other routines. Much of the EEA simply polished whatever routines we carried into it. The bird and lizard phenomena are consistent with very old but conserved core routines that acquire new tools as new niches are found.

Finally, behavior genetics now teaches that environments are a function of organisms. Scott Turner's magnificent book, The Extended Organism, is consistent with this emergent tradition. Likewise for Lewontin's recent jewel, The Triple Helix. (I have plenty of quotes if you want them! Even Tom Bouchard was impressed by some of Lewontin's recent insights.)

In summary, evolutionary theory abounds with explanations for what environment did, the externalist approach, but with scant attention to emergent phenomena. We, however, are not merely hammered by environment, we swing our own hammer and make our own arrangements. We, typical metazoans, not only became more adaptable with time, we became better at adapting other things.

Comparative Trivia:
Malthus was wrong and unnecessary. Please consider erasing him. Darwin possibly stumbled onto Malthus later in his thinking and perhaps used him as a desperation move to plug a gap in speciation theory. See Eiseley's disputed book, "Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X."
Population may be regulated by density. We will seldom find piles of starved critters. Hungry mothers often cut back reproduction first of males, and then of females. And Wynne Edwards may have been correct: bird territory has recently been found a more salient cue than coloration and song. And Barabassi's book makes an identical suggestion about information networks.

In closing: my own bit of defiance from HBES...

"The received view of evolution is that environment selects from options in genes, varied genetic combinations compete, and differential reproductive success forms species. Natural selection makes conspecifics more similar and variation between individuals represents the lack of selective pressure. Natural selection is thought to be slow and gradual. Discomfort, migration, and extinction are more likely when environmental conditions change and the genetic characteristics of organisms no longer align with them. We are going to be helpless and miserable.

"This is not the whole story.

"First, Gerhart & Kirschner (1997) refer to an "externalist" and an "internalist" approach to evolution: the former measures the effects of settings on organisms. This paper follows the "internalist" school, a view that physiology, morphology, and receptor systems modify settings and turn them into environments which can sometimes become a platform for further evolutionary change in the organism (Laland & Brown, 2002). This tradition owes more to Leibnitz than to Locke and can be found in Galton (1883/1907), Darlington (1953, cited in Plomin, 1994), Allport (1955), Plomin et al., (1977), Scarr and McCartney (1983); Popper (1984/1992), Cohen (1999), Laland et al, (2000), Plomin et al., (2000), Coen (1999), Turner (2000), and Lewontin (1998/2000). There is a partial overlap even with some of Lamarck's ideas (Turner, 2002). Organisms can be seen as builders, renovators, and designers and consider the outcome from genes in settings to be not an organism, not an environment, but a construction (Lewontin, 1998/2000).

"Second, ideas about "emergence" and "self assembly" have moved closer to established science that measures traits and refutes hypotheses. Selection and self organization have penetrated physics, chemistry, emerged networks, receptors, and behavior genetics. Organization came before genes and established boundaries for their operation (Thompson, 1917/1992). It also established requirements that genes must achieve if their vehicles are to find coherence (Kauffman, 1993; 1995). Thus, it is possible to sketch a suggestive ladder, one that describes similar functional relationships at widely different levels of observation. Fitness, sexual selection, and personal will are a few of many concepts that take a new form in this alternative view, one that blames environments less and recognizes self determination more."

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Nice meeting both of you...thanks for the work out.
Please stay in contact if you think it useful!

Jim

Replies:

Re:2nd Edition of Gaulin & McBurney?? Nah..., by Todd, 09/16/02

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