Have you ever noticed the way Pinker dresses? In the early 90s, when I saw him talk at the Pitt linguistics department, he wore a too-large navy suit with shiny shoes. Brad Pritchett and I mocked him to each other. "Maybe his mother helped him pick the outfit."

he wore baggy jeans and a button-up light blue shirt when i met him.

The Fodor critique does not make sense to me. The only point I get out of the Fodor article is that he is simply not intersted in understanding the basis of human behavior beyond the simplest level.

What, someone actually trademarked
the EP franchise? Figures. Anyways, while I also find the Fodor critique a bit uninspiring, I have three main problems/dilemmas with the way EP is carried out. I take this opportunity to get them off my chest:

1) no distinction between derived
characters and conserved traits. We should be circumscribing what a
"psychological" trait is (behavior, ontogeny, substrate, phylogeny), and then testing whether such and such trait or suite of traits is uniquely human or not. And "human" behaviors needn't always be strictly adaptive. They could be refinements of traits conserved among Primates or even Mammals (spatial navigation comes
to mind). More clarification of behaviors as phylogenetic traits is needed.

2) the modules idea is attractive at first glance, but seems to be almost phrenological in practice. There is
a hypothesis by Jon Kaas I like, which states that neural networks need a certain amount of units devoted to it to be functional. As these networks expand, reorganize, and contract in the course of development and evolution, they come gradually online and/or change their functional output. This might happen not in a linear fashion, but rather as more of a cascade (when a certain number of neurons can be devoted to a given task, then a coherent function emerges that wasn't there before).
"Modules" might exist, but probably not as self-contained computational units.

3) This whole "apes on the savanna"
thing. As far as I know, the
Homo lineage is one of the more ecologically generalist groups on the planet. Such ecological generalism
allowed us to adapt to all sorts of
ecosystems (jungles, savannas, tundra, etc). So how do you end up with a bunch of fixed adaptive behavioral traits? Put it another way: would it have been possible to
adaptively radiate across the planet in 100-200K years if our brains were so adapted to life on the savanna?
The transfer of "problem-solving" to different domains might be the answer, but it isn't clear to me how
exactly this works. And what is the connection between culture and ecological specialization, anyways?

Didn't Fodor originally propose the idea of modules? Anyways, that's my .02 cents, and viva EP!

What, someone actually trademarked
the EP franchise

actually, it's just my "inside" joke. the problem is that within the community of human natural scientists Evolutionary Psychology means something very specific, but outside that community (the general public) it means something very general. when kevin macdonald was being raked over the coals john tooby basically disavowed him as an Evolutionary Psychologist, though he talked about both evolution and psychology, because he did not fit within the narrow paradigm tooby espoused (in particular, macdonald promoted group selection rather than the individual/genic selectionism that is the mode most EP in the tooby-cosmides school like to think in).

no distinction between derived
characters and conserved traits

well, it seems that the tooby-cosmides is only interested in derived characters, that is, species universal unique traits (ie; language). i tend to share your issues as far as #2 and #3 go, though i suspect (hope?) a lot of the confusion is semantic (i mean, how self-contained is a module?)


Didn't Fodor originally propose the idea of modules?

yeah, but his modules are very particular and distinct, and tend to be slanted toward obviously non-conscious tendencies-like reflex response i think. the EP school tends to push modules much further, ergo, 'massive modularity.'

Bradly says:


1) no distinction between derived
characters and conserved traits. We should be circumscribing what a
"psychological" trait is (behavior, ontogeny, substrate, phylogeny), and then testing whether such and such trait or suite of traits is uniquely human or not. And "human" behaviors needn't always be strictly adaptive. They could be refinements of traits conserved among Primates or even Mammals (spatial navigation comes
to mind). More clarification of behaviors as phylogenetic traits is needed.


This articulates very well a concern that I had with the EP approach.

Surely, there must be a whole bunch of primate paradigms that we have inherited that are only slightly modified. For example, the separation of human children into same-sex play groups as described by Eleanor Maccoby in The Two Sexes: Growing Apart and Coming Together seem to be a development of similar behavior seen in Pan Trog, and so on ...

Perhaps we should be cataloging behavior primitives and looking for their precursors among other primate species and even other mammals.

Razib, I thought that Tooby disavowed Macdonald for purely political reasons rather than for his group selectionism. Simply, Tooby didn't want evolutionary psychology to be associated with someone who was accused of anti-semitism". A classic move: relieve the pressure by excommunicating the members under a political attack.

Razib, I thought that Tooby disavowed Macdonald for purely political reasons rather than for his group selectionism.

yes, this is probably so, though macdonald's group selectionism probably does disqualify him from being part of what tooby considers EP (which draws from a more hamilton-trivers tradition).

Fodor has some very good critiques of the logic of the Cosmides and Tooby Wason selection tasks. He published it in Cognition (I think) a few years ago, maybe in 2000 or 2001. His book is like most of his books since the late 80s, full of fire and humor, but short on arguments (the exception may be Concepts, which is classic Fodor: take a bad idea to its absurd but logical conclusion, and then accept it as self-evident). Still, there is at least some substance to Fodor's critique of EP, and Pinker's rejoinders fall flat as well.

That's really where Buller's book is good. The theoretical arguments for EP, which Pinker tends to accept uncritically, and Fodor tends to correctly criticize, but with the wrong criticisms, are treated well there.

There is one part of the Tooby and Cosmides that just drives me crazy: their assertion that traits really important to a species will, after a sufficient period of time, show no variance attributable to genetic variation in a population.

Am I the only one who thinks that thirty seconds of thought is enough to render this assertion transparently absurd? Consider bipedal locomotion, perhaps THE defining trait of genus Homo. The hominid lineage appears to have been selected for bipedal locomotion. In other words, alleles for efficient bipedal locomotion have been favored in the hominid lineage for a very long time. According to Tooby and Cosmides, that means that selection should have "used up" the genetic variability of the relevant loci and left no remaining genetic variation in modern humans with respect to efficiency of bipedal locomotion!

What about intelligence? After all, that seems to be a trait that dramatically distinguishes humans from other extant species. Clearly there has been a great deal of species for it. So how come modern humans aren't monomorphic for the loci governing intelligence?

Read Sarich and Miele's RACE for a cogent explanation of why at least some traits important to a species will still show genetic variation (and perhaps substantial genetic variation) after many generations of selection. Surprisingly, I haven't encountered their particular explanation anywhere else; I say "surprisingly" because the idea strikes me as an important one.

The opening sections of Pinker's response to Fodor are truly outstanding. The most cogent synopsis of what evolutionary psychologists hope to accomplish in the way of a theory of the mind that I have seen be far. Might make a materialist out of me yet!