Evolutionary psychology, Jerry Coyne, Robert Kurzban, and the so-called creationism of the mind

by Massimo Pigliucci

Time to take a break from philosophy of mind and get back to evolutionary psychology. The occasion originates from a recent post by evopsych researcher Robert Kurzban, on what he calls "creationism of the mind." There Kurzban excoriates our good old friend, PZ Myers for some apparently silly criticisms he leveled at the field. Kurzban goes on commending Jerry Coyne for having recently seen the light, becoming a supporter of the field. Contra to what some of my seasoned readers may expect, this is going to be neither a defense of PZ, nor an attack on Coyne. But I doubt Kurzban is going to like it anyway (about Jerry, I'm not taking bets).

Let's start with Kurzban's criticism of Myers, whom he tags with the obviously disdainful label of creationist of the mind. According to Kurzban, the latter is someone who subscribes "to the view that the theory of evolution by natural selection ought to be used to inform the study of the traits and behaviors of every living thing on the planet except the bits of the human mind that cause behavior, especially social behavior." I'm pretty sure no evolutionary biologist actually subscribes to this rather strawmanly view, including PZ, but let's proceed. Kurzban further characterizes this brand new type of "creationists" thusly: "Like creationists full stop, creationists of the mind take their positions for reasons other than looking at the relevant evidence. This is clear from the emotion that pervades their remarks about the discipline." Uhm, ok, though it is worth noting that this bit of rhetoric comes from someone who has by this point indulged in a pretty emotional characterization of his own opponents. [Note: I've got nothing against being emotional; to me it means one gives a damn. But you ought not to belittle your opponents for the same kind of behavior you yourself indulge in.]

What exactly did Myers say that so railed Kurzban? Apparently he stated that evolutionary biologists assume a one-to-one causal mapping of genes to behavior, proceeding to dismiss the field on the grounds that such an assumption is in fact ridiculously simplistic (it is). Well, if PZ did say that, he was also attacking a straw man. But the problem of genotype-phenotype mapping is, in fact, a rather big one for evopsych researchers, more so than for pretty much any other evolutionary biologist, because such mapping (i.e., the details of how phenotypes are causally related to genotypes) is made much more complex in humans by the existence of an enormous amount of behavioral plasticity, much of which is induced by a pesky little thing called culture, and all of which makes it pretty difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to test adaptive hypotheses about modern human behavior.

After having dismissed Myers, Kurzban moves on to some good news for evopsych: Jerry Coyne's alleged "conversion" to the field: "Jerry Coyne’s conversion I think serves as a powerful example. His journey from staunch critic to defender of the discipline illustrates that smart people who know a lot about biology can be persuaded. Some of the field’s critics might be induced to read the primary literature, as Coyne did. More deeply, Coyne’s public change of heart, I think, will make it easier for others to say they were wrong." (Note the use of religiously inspired terminology, such as "conversion" and "journey.")

But did Jerry change his position so dramatically? I went and checked what he actually wrote, and it doesn't sound at all like what Kurzban so enthusiastically described. Jerry confirms his (harsh) criticism of evopsych researchers like Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (them of "rape is an adaptive strategy" fame), as well as of much of "pop" evopsych (citing as one of the most ridiculous recent examples David Brooks' latest book - essentially a Republican fantasy of how things are and therefore ought to be in the world).

Nonetheless, Coyne continues, the field is, ahem, evolving, and getting better. There are some serious researchers who actually pay attention to the testability of their hypotheses, and who try to be careful about what they say when they write for the public. I don't know many critics - either within biology or in philosophy of science - who would disagree with that kind of cautious assessment. When Jonathan Kaplan and I wrote about evopsych in our Making Sense of Evolution we were careful to draw exactly the same distinctions that Jerry draws. I know there are misguided postmodernists out there who reject evopsych no matter what, but most thoughtful commentators have never done that, just like current critics of the excesses of neuroscience do not thereby dismiss it as phrenology.

That said, I still don't think Jerry's criticism of evopsych goes far enough, for one very important - but also, I would think, very obvious - reason: human beings really do present special challenges when it comes to the scientific study of their behavior, especially of the evolution of that behavior.

To get us started, let's look at some of the entries in Jerry's list of recent successes (or at least examples of progress) in evopsych. Some are obvious and hard to dispute: incest avoidance, innate fear of dangerous animals, parent-offspring conflicts, and the like. As Kaplan and I (and plenty of others) have pointed out, these are the areas where evopsych is at its strongest because the target behaviors are common among mammals, or at least primates. Which means that phylogenetic comparative analyses - one of the best hypothesis testing tools at the disposal of evolutionary biologists - work well.

Other examples are a bit odd. Jerry mentions, for instance, the evolution of sexual dimorphism (differences in size between male and female) and the evolution of concealed ovulation in human females. These are actually morphological, not behavioral traits, though they certainly influence behavior (and perhaps have been historically influenced by behavior). One needs to be careful about not unduly expanding the domain of evopsych to include every human trait, or it becomes too easy to claim success. (For instance: yeah, human females evolved larger breasts than men because they nurse their babies. I doubt even a postmodernist would try to culturally relativize that one!)

Jerry also mentions traits that are variable within the human species (as opposed to the classical focus of evopsych, human universals), for instance offspring numbers across societies, or physical and physiological differences among ethnic groups (though, again, why would the latter count as behavior is a bit puzzling). Kaplan and I also highlighted this area (systematic variation within Homo sapiens) as potentially fruitful for evopsych, though caution needs to be exercised because some of these traits (e.g., offspring number) could vary at least in part as a result of cultural forces, not genetic evolution (just think of the differences between, say, some fundamentalist religious groups and many mainstream ones: in societies where the former are in significant numbers the birthrate will be much higher than in societies where religious fundamentalism is numerically insignificant, but I would guess that culture, rather than genetics, is doing much of the work here).

Jerry also counts as a success for evopsych research on gene-culture co-evolution, as in the famous case of lactose intolerance. Which is odd, because that approach is usually seen as significantly distinct from evopsych (it's based on the extension of standard population genetics models to cultural evolution), and at any rate has had somewhat limited success (there aren't that many documented cases around, other than the oft-cited lactose intolerance).

Things become seriously iffy with yet another group of examples advanced by Jerry as positive entries in the evopsych column: the evolution of language and the evolution of morality. Steven Pinker's interesting speculations aside, we really don't have much of a hold on the evolution of language, for the simple reason that it is a classical worst case scenario for evopsych: it is unique to humans (yes, yes, other animals communicate, but language is a whole different beast) and not really variable within humans - except for pathologies - which means that comparative phylogenetic studies are out; so, of course, is the fossil record (except insofar that tells us when we evolved the anatomy necessary for language); and, needless to say, we have no access to direct measurements of relevant selective pressures. Yes, something can be learned by the study of the (very complex) genetics underlying language abilities, but it is hard to see how one can significantly move away from the sort of "just-so" stories for which evopsych is infamous. (If these stories are instead presented as untested but reasonable scenarios, then it's a different matter.)

As for morality, I am the first to agree that Frans de  Waal-type studies with other primates provide the basis for interesting speculations on how it evolved, but let's remember that his comparative studies are based on an extremely reduced number of species, that these species are pretty distantly related to us, and that they show very significant differences among themselves in terms of prosocial and pre-moral behavior. Not to mention that human morality is exceedingly more complicated than any animal equivalent because, you guessed it, of cultural evolution.

Which brings me to the crucial point where I disagree with Jerry about evopsych, in this case (which is unusual, believe me) in the sense that I am more conservative than he is. As Jerry puts it in his post: "My position has always been that good evolutionary psychology should
meet the evidentiary standards of papers on the evolutionary significance of behavior in other animals ... Those who dismiss evolutionary psychology on the grounds that it’s mere 'storytelling' ... if they are to be consistent, they must also dismiss any studies of the evolutionary basis of animal behavior."

Well, no, that's really moving the bar too low. Sure, evopsych research has to meet at the very least the standards of research on animal behavior (and believe me, a number of evopsych studies don't, though some certainly do). But human beings are far more complex and flexible (the technical term is plastic) in their behavior, and far less beholden to their genetic leash, than any other species on the planet, largely of course because of the power of cultural evolution. That means that evopsych researchers need to be much more careful in their studies than animal behaviorists, for precisely the same reasons that research psychologists get a lot more headaches while carrying out their work than their colleagues studying mice or fruit flies.

So, I agree with Jerry that it is silly to reject evopsych outright. It is a borderline field that can easily produce crap as well as good stuff. Therefor, criticism from the outside is vital in keeping evopsych tilting away from the former and increasingly toward the latter. But a rejection of certain conclusions alleged by evopsych does not at all require an equal rejection of animal behavior research. The standards ought to be higher.

Understanding the conservative mind, without brain scans

by Massimo Pigliucci

Is Nietzsche to be found somewhere between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia? This is just one of a series of intriguing claims I am encountering while reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by my CUNY colleague Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

The context of that specific statement is Robin’s contention that there is a level of coherence among reactionaries across times and places, so that it is possible to draw parallels between the thoughts of people so apparently different from each other as the three mentioned above. But my goal here is not primarily to discuss the details of the book (which I’m still reading, and to which I will likely come back), but rather to use it as a vehicle for a broader discussion of what in philosophy are referred to as levels of analysis.

Let’s begin with something very different from the topic of how conservative minds work. Say that you are interested in the workings of a particular ecosystem, like the Arctic tundra. Pertinent topics of study will include the composition, distribution and abundance of the fauna and flora of the tundra, as well as of the nature of the various species-species interactions, i.e., you’ll be doing population biology and biogeography. It will also be relevant to know things about the local climate, its short term variability, and its long term changes (both past and future). So you’ll engage in a bit of climate science and paleoclimatology. Moreover, you’ll need to develop an understanding of nutrient cycling within the ecosystem, thereby bringing geology and geochemistry into the mix.

There are also a number of scientific disciplines that will likely not cross your mind to engage during your study of the Arctic tundra: quantum mechanics and cosmology, for instance. Why not? Isn’t the tundra a particular type of bio-physical system on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy? Shouldn’t cosmology, therefore, be relevant? And isn’t everything that makes up said ecosystem made of quarks and other subatomic entities, the understanding of which is obviously the province of fundamental physics?

The answer to the latter questions is that while yes, the tundra and everything in it is both made of particles and located in a certain corner of the cosmos, neither level of analysis is informative to the problem at hand, namely the description and understanding of the bio-dynamics characteristic of the Arctic tundra.

This, mind you, isn’t an argument against ontological reductionism (the claim that everything is made of the basic stuff identified by fundamental physics), nor is it a panegyric on behalf of emergent properties. Ontological reductionism may or may not be true, and conversely strong emergentism may not or may hold, and you’d still have no use for quantum mechanics and cosmology when it comes to ecosystem studies. The issue is epistemic, not ontological.

If the case I have just made for the tundra is relatively uncontroversial (as I certainly hope it is!), then we are ready to move to another one that is a bit more complicated and certainly more controversial: the issue of “the conservative mind” with which we began.

Let’s start easy: we can surely agree that conservatives (meaning human beings who expound one version or another of a range of political positions collectively referred to by political scientists and philosophers as conservative, as opposed to progressive) are also made of quarks and located in a particular corner of the Milky Way. And yet, just like in the case of the Arctic tundra, neither quantum mechanics nor cosmology will tell us anything relevant about the conservative mind, yes?

Now let’s zoom in a little. Coming from “above,” so to speak (i.e., zooming onto our problem while descending from a cosmic perspective), we may want to embark on a philosophical analysis of the ideas proposed by conservatives; or (not exclusive) we may be interested in the history and sociology of the conservative movement.

Coming in from “below” (i.e., adjusting our epistemic zoom while ascending from the quantum mechanical level), we could consider the psychology of the conservative mind, or its brain anatomy and physiology, or even inquire as to whether there are “conservative genes” that may help us explain, say, the Red/Blue state divide in the United States of America. Which, naturally, would then lead us to ask how and why such genes evolved in the first place.

I think all these perspectives (i.e., from philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology) are pertinent, but some much more than others. That is, I argue that some of these approaches will be epistemically significantly more informative than others in terms of the task at hand, to wit, understanding the conservative mind (hint: notice that I am using the term mind here, not brain).

At this point you may want to pause before reading any further, and perhaps place online bets with other Rationally Speaking readers as to which of the above fields I am going to up-play or down-play in what follows...

As you must have realized, we live in a brave new era of brain scans and genomics, so that every claim that comes with an fMRI attached to it (or, less sexy, a high throughput DNA scan), is ipso facto cool and scientifically interesting. [No, I’m not implying that neurobiology and genomics are not actually interesting. Then again, quantum mechanics and cosmology are also interesting, and yet irrelevant to understanding tundras...]

The problem, of course, is in assessing the usefulness of claims made on the basis of these new technologies. For instance, it may be interesting to see which areas of the brain are primarily involved in, say, reading as opposed to talking. But that some areas of the brain underly both activities is a truism: how else did you think you were capable of reading and talking?

Take, for instance, several recent studies showing particular patterns of brain activity during meditation or deep prayer. Skeptics of the more mystical claims made by practitioners of these techniques triumphantly say: “Ah! See? There is nothing transcendental about this stuff, it’s just your brain doing weird things.” True believers retort along the lines of: “I told you so! There really is a transcendental realm that the human brain is uniquely equipped to access!” In reality, of course, the fact that our brains behave in a particular manner when we engage in meditation or prayer says absolutely nothing about the reality, or lack thereof, of any supra-physical realm. That is because we expect to see those very patterns under either scenario, so that the high-tech demonstration of “your brain on prayer” tells us what we already knew: whatever behavior a human being engages in, it’s got to have something to do with his brain.

Back to conservatism. A few months ago, Julia Galef and I had a nice conversation with Chris Mooney during a Rationally Speaking podcast, focusing on his latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality.  The first quibble I have with Chris’s book is the title [1]. While his previous volume, The Republican War on Science, was aptly titled (it was, after all, about the anti-science attitude of the G.W. Bush administration), this one is, I think, unnecessarily contentious: it’s not Republican brains in particular that are of interest, since Republicanism is a specific product of a given time and culture (indeed, modern day Republicans have very little to do with, say, Lincoln-type Republicans), but rather the conservative attitude of which contemporary Republicanism in the United States happens to be a particular instantiation.

Be that as it may, Chris’s book has received much attention because it promises to provide a scientific (as in natural science, particularly neurobiology and genetics) understanding of the problem at hand, rather than a “merely” philosophical, historical, sociological or psychological one. [Of course, if you happen to be a conservative, and in particular a Republican, you will not see what “the problem” is in the first place.]

While Chris is careful to dispel easy accusations of biological reductionism and determinism, he does paint a picture whereby the brain (not, more expansively, the mind) is the main locus of the conservative attitude, and where there is evidence of a genetic basis for conservatism, with a hint of (just-so) scenarios concerning how such attitude may have been engrained in some of us by natural selection in the distant past (say, the Pleistocene, far earlier than the onset of the Grand Old Party).

I do not wish to engage in a detailed critique of specific claims made in the studies that Chris used as the basis of his book. Some of that criticism has been done in thoughtful reviews of the volume (there were also a number of decidedly not thoughtful ones), and at any rate several of those studies are sound, as far as they go. The question I wish to raise is just how far do they, in fact, go in providing us with an understanding of the conservative mind.

Not much, and far less, I think, than the combination of psychological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches do.

Let’s start with the evolutionary biology. Broadly speaking, there is little doubt that the repertoire of human behavior evolved over a long period of time, and that some of that evolution was adaptive in nature (i.e., the result of a process of natural selection). But readers of this blog should know that I put little stock into many specific evolutionary psychological explanations, for a variety of methodological problems that I do not need to repeat here.

As for the genetics, again, it should certainly be uncontroversial (pace some extreme postmodernists) to claim that genes affect human behavior, but even Chris points out that the amount of variation in the population explained by candidate genes for complex human behaviors (such as homosexuality, and probably even more so the somewhat fuzzy concept of conservatism) is a small fraction of the total. Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best.

It also means that much of the explanatory power to be found in brain activity is actually dependent on the environment and/or on its interactions with the basic structure of the brain itself. [And a further complication is that brains develop through time and maintain a degree of plasticity throughout one’s life. Yet, for obvious logistical reasons, we don’t have as yet any study using fMRI to track changes in brain activity in response to the bewildering variety of environmental stimuli we all experience from the pre-natal period until we die.]

Which is why the most informative loci of analysis to understand conservatism are the historical-sociological (the broader environment), the philosophical (the conceptual stuff of which conservative ideas are made of), and the psychological. This last one is, of course, connected to the lower level that is the target of neurobiology, but contra what appears to be an increasingly common misconception, psychology doesn’t reduce to neurobiology. Or, to put it another way, neurobiology isn’t psychology done with fMRI, and therefore more “scientific.” That’s because psychology deals with the mind, not just the brain. The mind (I actually prefer to use a verb, minding, because we are not talking about an object) is what the brain does when it interacts with the various layers of the external environment. And these layers are shaped by the history, sociology and philosophy of ideas.

That is why, for instance, it only took me a few pages to find the first interesting statement in Robin’s book: “conservatism is ... the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” One may agree or not with this way of conceptualizing conservatism (i.e., in terms of power struggles), but Robin proceeds to give a detailed political-sociological-historical-philosophical analysis to back it up, and one cannot reject his take on it without engaging in some detail with his analysis.

Along similar lines, Robin writes: “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality and the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality ... is not the threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers.”

Proceeding from this way of framing the issue, Robin immediately arrives at an interesting analysis of the otherwise highly puzzling fact that libertarians tend to be associated with conservatives, rather than with progressives (or rather than distancing themselves from both): “When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. ... This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.”

I am not suggesting that Robin’s analysis is necessarily correct. I am still near the beginning of the book, and I will need time to process his framework and the historical and sociological evidence he brings to the book. But my brain (!) sure started working at a much higher rate than usual even while reading the introduction to The Reactionary Mind, while the same brain seems to have by now developed a dulled response to yet another fMRI scan or just-so story about the very distant evolutionary past of Homo sapiens. And that’s because I think evolution, genetics, and neurobiology are far less explanatory of the conservative (or, for that matter, the progressive) mind than the disciplines that Robin’s book calls upon as resources. This is no slight to the natural sciences in question, no more than the one delivered by the ecosystem ecologist who wisely ignores cosmology and quantum mechanics.

———

[1] Unless he objected to it and the publisher overruled him, which happened to me with Answers for Aristotle...

Friendly advice to skeptics

by Joan Roughgarden

[This is a guest post by my colleague Joan Roughgarden, one of the most prominent evolutionary biologists I have had the pleasure to meet. Joan is Professor (Emerita) of Biology at Stanford University and Adjunct Professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. She is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004, UC Press, available also in Portuguese and Korean) and The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (2009, UC Press, also available this September in French). Her YouTube channel is “JoanKauai.” She is a co-editor of the journal founded by Massimo, Philosophy and Theory in Biology.]

Massimo’s recent post about skepticism inspired this distillation and extension on four issues: evolutionary psychology, objectivism, women, and religion. “Skeptics” refers here, as in Massimo’s sense, to contributors and readers of magazines like Skeptical Inquirer, to participants in blogs like Rationally Speaking, and to others whom Massimo identifies as comprising a broadly construed  “Community of Reason” (CoR).

Evolutionary Psychology

Massimo criticizes evolutionary psychology (EP) as a “science-informed narrative about the human condition.” In the blog thread, Brett, extending a rebuttal by David Pinsof, writes “I'm not aware of a single such critic who has given practical advice about how evolutionary psychologists could do their jobs better.” Here then is what EP should do.

Pinsof notes that EP is adaptationism, and yet adaptationism has well-known limits. The net strength of an adaptive selection pressure must exceed the reciprocal of the population size by an order of magnitude to evolve over genetic drift. An adaptive argument should not only show a bona fide benefit for some trait but also that the benefit is sufficiently large. Far fetched adaptive explanations as found in EP are ruled out by this well known population-genetic criterion. EP workers should deal with the magnitude of the selective advantage of any hypothesized adaptive function.

Pinsof claims that EP is “a way of testing the predictions entailed by theories from evolutionary biology (i.e. parental investment theory, reciprocal altruism, signaling theory, biological markets theory, etc.) on humans.” That would be nice, if true. To the contrary, EP assumes these forty-year old theories are correct and attempts to confirm them with data on humans, leading to a discipline riddled with confirmation bias. Sexual selection, parental investment, and the evolution of cooperation and altruism are controversial today in biology. Sexual selection’s premise of near-universal sex roles during mating has met many counterexamples including species with multiple genders, homosexuality, gender switching and sex-role reversal. Even textbook examples such as the peacock and the Bateman fruit-fly experiments have been reevaluated. Genetic analysis has further undercut sexual-selection theory in species such as the collared flycatcher. Behavioral ecologists have increasingly discarded sex-role expectations, placing them at arms length relative to a generic concept of sexual selection simply as “any form of competition for mates” (1,2). Wholesale alternatives to sexual selection are also becoming a possibility (3). Yet EP research seeks to discern classic sex roles within human behavior. EP workers should view behavioral ecology as a work in progress, not as settled science, and should entertain and test hypotheses alternative to those originating in the 1970s. They should not seek to “apply” behavioral ecology to humans, but instead to extend and if necessary, revise behavioral ecology with data from humans.

Objectivism

Massimo characterizes Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism as “an incoherent jumble of contradictions and plagiarism from actual thinkers.” I think the appeal to skeptics of Ayn Rand’s philosophy is her ethics: the virtue of selfishness and rejection of altruism. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene naturalizes Ayn Rand’s objectivist ethics and provides a seamless transition from evolutionary biology to normative human conduct resulting in what might be termed “evolutionary objectivism.”

The problem is that objectivist ethics may be unnatural after all. Is any animal purely selfish and devoid of cooperative and even altruistic, instincts, intentions and thoughts? Probably not. According to the 1970s framing, cooperation and altruism are selfishness in disguise (Dawkins), or are products of group selection, renamed multilevel selection by the Wilson’s (DS and EO). Skeptics invariably line up behind Dawkins and therefore seek to explain cooperation through limited devices such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism while viewing the Wilsons' as delusional or even over the hill.

The 1970s were a heady time. I was there. We young turks enjoyed exposing the naivety of “good-for-the-species” stories from nature-show narrators, seeing behavior as animal choices to fulfill evolutionary objectives rather than as uninterpreted instinct, and injecting evolution into ecology to bring an explanatory logic to otherwise arbitrary population properties and community structure. So it would be churlish to begrudge the glee of today’s social scientists and philosophers who have begun to play with the power of natural-selection thinking. But much has been learned since then and skeptics ought to pay attention.

It has become ever so clear that more altruism and cooperation occur in animal social activities than can be accounted for with kin selection or reciprocal altruism, and clear that serious doubt remains about the empirical plausibility of group selection even given its theoretical possibility. Instead, a third way can account for how cooperative behavior forms — through social construction of the individual phenotype. The creature that hatches from the egg or springs from the womb has yet to complete much of its development. It then develops morphologically and behaviorally in the company of others. This development culminates in an individual that possesses an evolutionary fitness. Individual-level natural selection selects for individuals who cooperate in their mutual development of a high individual fitness. I have analogized this process to teamwork in athletics in which training together leads to team winnings that underwrite the individual reproductive success of each teammate (4). Yet individuals on the team will not prosper if each does not perform to the best of their ability, nor if lovers cheat.

Today’s skeptics disappointingly project one side of an obsolete evolutionary debate as the basis for an ethical norm. In doing so, skeptics not only confuse is with ought, but are mistaken about what is.

Women

Badrescher observes that Massimo lists only one woman among the 15 CoR “leaders” he singles out. Mark Erikson adds that “there is serious work to do in the CoR on this [gender imbalance] issue.” Massimo replies that “I honestly couldn't come up with names [of women] that had the same visibility as those [men] I listed.”

The near absence of women in the CoR dialogue has two main causes, I think. First,
CoR members know what they want to hear, making it nearly impossible to advance alternative views. Men listen to men. They slap each other on the back with their tongues. Men regard another man as competent until proven otherwise, and men regard a woman as incompetent until proven otherwise. Volunteering to engage under these circumstances is difficult and usually a waste of time.

Second, the CoR project is inherently masculinist. It privileges Reason. Although evidence may show that people rarely make decisions rationally, by the CoR project they should. Reason is a goal, if not a fact. But is Reason a good goal, or more accurately, should Reason offer the sole guide to decision and action? Men are raised to think so. Men think through Reason they can control their bodies, overcome their emotions and manage the world.

Feminist scholarship, novels and art consistently highlight the body. A woman’s lived experience teaches that Reason cannot control the body. Periods come and go on their own, a baby grows on its own, tears flow on their own. Why fight it? It’s best to recruit one’s body as a partner to make decisions that make sense and feel right too. Male athletes may also come to this realization.

The CoR project should apply its critical acumen to itself. Is its emphasis on Reason reasonable? Could the evolutionarily refined lower brain be more reliable than the evolutionarily recent higher brain? A welcoming discussion on such questions and a general sense of openness will surely lead to more participation by women.

Religion

Lance Bush writes “teaching children nonsense and bad ways of thinking is wrong, religious education by its very nature almost always entails this, and the atheist community should not shy away from saying so.” Bill continues, “sometimes one [encounters] situations where an entire field is full of hogwash, and skeptics specialize in saying this. For example, I dismiss what clergy have to say in general — I think the whole discipline is just defective, and I have little regard for what they have to say.’’ Massimo agrees with Bill, saying “the academy itself, of course, is far from perfect, and I don't think departments of theology (as opposed to, say, philosophy of religion) belong there. So yes, in those cases your skepticism is well grounded.” Marcus Morgan adds that an atheist should ask a spiritualist “if God is ‘knowable’ (knowledge is our highest level of rational satisfaction). If yes, then analyze their reasons and see if they constitute knowledge and decide whether you believe them. If no, and the spiritualist is also agnostic (believes in something that cannot be known) and [sic] all you can do is move on (fast).”

The CoR is relentlessly negative about religious people. I have two pieces of advice about this. First, demonizing religious people has produced a self-indulgent caricature intended for ridicule. Participating in a religious community is not about proving that God exists (whatever that might mean) but about sharing an experience. Part of the experience is identifying with a leader whose words offer guidance to navigating human dilemmas, part is seeing oneself as continuing an ancient tradition, part is enjoying friendship, part is finding others to count on in hard times, part is joining in community projects, part is finding a regular time to reflect on how to live more ethically, part is acknowledging the week’s mistakes and resolving to move on, part is being introduced to timely issues (yes, many churches and synagogues present talks with two “sides”), and so forth. The human need for this participatory experience is difficult to satisfy in secular circles, even in large cities, and is nearly impossible in rural locales. For many religious people, an element of faith is intertwined with their overall participatory experience. Yet the CoR mistakenly foregrounds only the faith element of religious life. What brings people back to church again and again is the participatory experience and what turns them away is a bad experience. The many people who do positively experience religious practice dismiss the CoR as ignorant (true) and not worth listening to (false). All the CoR’s other points, such as the importance of teaching evolution, are lost, shouted to the howling wind. My advice is: lay off the “prove there is a god” stuff. It’s irrelevant and counterproductive.

Second, theology does belong in a university just as say, engineering does. Theology is applied humanities. In 2005 I was invited to lecture in gender studies at Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit university. I noticed members of the lecture organizing committee from the theology department. I had never met a live theologian face to face. So I asked to extend my stay a day to meet theologians, to find out what they were like, what they did, and what made them tick. What I discovered was an interdisciplinary humanities program combining history, literary analysis, and philosophy. Their research products are often analyses, similar to the policy studies produced by social scientists. Cutting edge scholarship in theology is some distance from the positions taken by Roman Catholic church leadership. Nonetheless, official church positions do change in response to theological research but at a pace making plate tectonics seem reckless. I respected the intellectual thoroughness, inquisitiveness, patience and honesty I encountered. In 2007, the Loyola theology department organized a symposium that led to a book edited by Patricia Jung and Aana Marie Vigen. I was honored to contribute a paper to it coauthored with Patricia Jung on gender diversity in the Bible (5). Not only the philosophy of religion but also theology itself is an appropriate domain for skeptical methodology.

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(1) 2009, Roughgarden, J., Akçay, E., Do we need a Sexual Selection 2.0?, Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/ j.anbehav.2009.06.006  79(3):e1-e4.

(2) 2009, Shuker, D.M., Sexual selection: endless forms or tangled bank? Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/ j.anbehav.2009.10.031

(3) 2012, Roughgarden, J. The social selection alternative to sexual selection. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B. DOI:10.1098/rstb.2011.0282

(4) 2012, Roughgarden, J. Teamwork, pleasure and bargaining in animal social behaviour J. Evol. Biol. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2012.02505.x

(5) 2010, Jung, P. and J. Roughgarden. Gender in heaven: The story of the Ethiopian eunuch in light of evolutionary biology. Pp. 224-240. In: Jung, P. and Vigen, A. (eds.) God, Science, Sex, Gender. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois.