my response to Massimo Pigliucci's essay "Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience"
Essay is here: Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience
my response:
I think it's disingenuous to lump sociobiologists in the same boat with Freudian psychologists. Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not. Just because you are unable to imagine an easy way to gather experimental evidence for a given scientific theory does not disqualify it as a valid hypothesis. I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory. Scientists are still working on devising new experiements to test Relativity half-a-century after this theory was proposed.
You've used this line of argument before. In your essay, "Do you believe in human nature?", you wrote:
But you inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt.
my response:
I think it's disingenuous to lump sociobiologists in the same boat with Freudian psychologists. Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not. Just because you are unable to imagine an easy way to gather experimental evidence for a given scientific theory does not disqualify it as a valid hypothesis. I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory. Scientists are still working on devising new experiements to test Relativity half-a-century after this theory was proposed.
You've used this line of argument before. In your essay, "Do you believe in human nature?", you wrote:
"Our genetic makeup certainly poses limits to what we can and cannot do, but how ample those limits are is currently largely beyond the scope of human biology, partly because we cannot do the right experiments that would settle the matter (it is both impractical and unethical to breed human beings and raise them under controlled environmental conditions, which is what we do with other animals and with plants when we wish to study gene-environment interactions)."
But you inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt.
Labels: hubris, philosophy of science, psychology, science, sociobiology
posted by whiterabbit at
7:09 AM
2 Comments:
Well, a few comments of my own, in the spirit of general discussion:
"Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not."
Ah, but Freud did claim that his theories were rooted in biology...
"I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory."
But physicists have devised such experiments, conducted them, and the theory has successfully survived!
"your inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt."
But the proof is in the pudding. I am not saying that nobody will ever be able to design such experiments. But if an evo-psych supporter claims they are *doing* science, right now, then where are such experiments?
Sociobiology is not primarily related to gathering new kinds of data; rather it's a way of looking at biological phenomena related to social behavior from a comprehensive and explicitly evolutionary perspective.
Nevertheless as all birds exhibit social behavior, the studies of ecologically and behaviorally oriented ornithologitsts are by definition sociobiological in nature. Sociobiology has influenced ornithology in the developement of field studies based on testable (falsifiable) hypotheses. R. Trivers in his theoretical papers on parental investment, mate choice, parent-young conflict, and reciporcal altruism had provided several basic questions that are specifically addressed in much bird research.
Take Brown and Brown's study of helpers in Grey-crowned Babblers (Pomatostomus temporalis). Having found a positive correlation between the presence of helpers and the number of offspring fledged, the Browns sought to establish a caual relationship by removing helpers. They found that the controls averaged roughtly twice as many fledglings as did the breeding units from which helpers had been removed. It is clear that more experimental work along these lines needs to be done, but The Browns' pioneering experiments at least indicate that sociobiological hypotheses about helping behavior are amendable to experimental tests in the field.
Consider the work of R.L. Trivers and H. Hare regarding the hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps). These insects have an unusual asymmetry in kin relations that allows for quantitative predictions that can be tested. Because these worker (sterile female) insects are three times more closely related (The probability that a worker shares a gene with her sister is 3/4 and with her brother is 1/4) to their fertile sisters (diploid queens) than brothers (haploid drones), their theory predicted that workers should make three times the investment in their sisters than brothers. The observed weight ratio between queens and drones is close to three-to-one, in accordance with the prediction.
The theory made a testable prediction, which was then successfully tested. These examples--and there are many more--should at least confirm the scientific basis and experimental testability of sociobiological theories in general. Whether they apply to primates and humans are indeed very difficult and challenging but not fundamentally impossible.
Evolutionary psychology is getting much more sophisticated about the methods it uses, experiments and observations, to test some of these theories; the wonderful thing about mate choice is that there are already a large number of methods that biologists use routinely to study animal mate choice that are just starting to be applied to human mate choice.
Testing big hypotheses like this is too large a job for any one individual to do—it requires cooperation between dozens or hundreds of people. It took one person to think up Darwin's sexual selection idea, but it took hundreds and hundreds of theorists and animal experimenters to actually show that his theory works. The same is true of trying to apply Darwin's sexual selection ideas to understand human nature.
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