So glad to see you bring up Subrena Smith's matching problem paper, as I think this (and Maung's) is an important critique that I rarely see people engaging with, wherever one might fall in their agreement/disagreement. Curious what you think about its relevance and whether you were fully satisfied with Jesse's response.
To me this is a great example of a certain fault line you often see between those who feel strongly that empirical research must rest on sufficiently coherent philosophical grounds to be defensible, and those who consider philosophical/conceptual coherence less essential (if perhaps still desirable) as a precondition for viable research programs, where the latter find such critiques hopelessly abstract.
My own not-quite-fleshed-out response to the matching problem is that it is a genuine problem and it’s important to acknowledge, however, the kind of under-determination of data that results from it is commonly seen in many areas of psychiatry and psychology (and probably other areas of science) and doesn’t preclude evolutionary psychiatry from doing productive scientific work.
I suppose the implications would depend in part on whether you're primarily concerned about the underdetermination of data, or you think there's a fundamental incoherence and/or faulty set of assumptions that undermines the whole project. (Hence, the fault line).
A few thoughts on evolutionary psychiatry. For one, I don't believe human evolution has been following the rules of "survival of the fittest" for a long time. Humans are so successful that negative traits, such as near-sightedness, are easily passed on to successive generations. There is no reason to believe psychological traits that are somewhat harmful, but not devastating to survival chances, will be eliminated until humans reach some kind of choke-point where only the fittest can survive.
I also believe that evolutionary psychology focuses too much on complex outcomes, like OCD, rather than the more granular foundations of such disorders. Seems to me that OCD and anorexia nervosa are extensions of mostly beneficial anxieties, particularly social anxieties, positive evolutionary reactions for the most part. If not anxious about where their next meal is coming from people could easily starve to death. If not anxious about social interactions people can easily become social outcasts. And social anxiety can be easily traced back to pre-human social primates. It is not something that evolved with humans. The real question is: what causes anxiety to go into overdrive and become debilitating?
One more point. I am confused by the statement "the scientific understanding of social behavior was transformed by the recognition that tendencies for an individual to make sacrifices that benefit the group are shaped not by benefits to the group, but by benefits to kin who have genes in common with the individual." I am well aware of the "kin selection theory" and find it unconvincing. The "group benefit" idea makes much more sense. What is the background of this transformation? This topic seems worth of a detailed discussion.
"We should all still hope that specific causes are found for devastating conditions like autism, schizophrenia and OCD, but a mountain of evidence suggests that such hopes are unlikely to succeed."
I get that Nesse makes some important points re evolution etc, but DAMN does he make sweeping claims about "devastating conditions".
Is it the “devastating” part you are referring to? Sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, and sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings, and at times a source of strength… some degree of ambivalence helps in thinking about this.
I thought of autism in particular - I'd say very few writers who are themselves autistic would like to describe that as a "devastating condition". For my own part, yeah, I've had my fair share of "devastation", but I still take issue with talking about a whole bunch of psychiatric conditions in this sweeping way. Saying "sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings" like you do now, is VERY different from just going "devastating conditions" period. Also combined with that "we should still hope to find specific causes" - is the implication here so that everyone can be cured one day, so that only neurotypical people will remain?
I agree about not overgeneralizing the "devastating" part. But isn't an even bigger problem here that the generalization implied in his statement is at odds with the purported goal of evolutionary psychiatry to highlight and explore any functional and adaptive aspects of these conditions?
That's true! I guess I was translating it the opposite way (that one potential of an evolutionary lens might be to depathologize somewhat), but there's certainly lots of space for dysfunction and suffering.
I believe that we should separate sharply our vulnerability to psychological disorders from our vulnerability to infectious diseases.
The rise in deaths from infectious diseases in the last five thousand years is a result of a profound change in human habitat. For a long time, the hunter-gatherer bands lived in a high level of isolation from each other. Think about isolated Inuit communities before the advent of the snowmobile or isolated tribes of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Interestingly, this once universal human lifestyle closely resembled the social pods that some people organized during the early months of the COVID pandemic. These pods generally avoided human contact and masked up, except with a small group of careful human beings with whom they socialized face to face.
However, a great change became possible with the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and the real shift came with the arrival of cities about five thousand years ago which crammed together thousands of human beings in close quarters with suboptimal sanitation. These cities also had regular trading relationships with other population centers. Thus, whatever germ jumped over from an animal species (the usual source of new human infectious diseases) had an environment in which to spread that was one hundred times more advantageous than the dispersed hunter-gatherer bands which had been our habitat for so long.
Basically, our vulnerability to infectious diseases reflects the fact that our immune systems evolved to meet the challenges of living in isolated hunter gatherer bands, and we now live in cities, breathing on each other, having sex with strangers, and shaking each other’s unwashed hands.
So glad to see you bring up Subrena Smith's matching problem paper, as I think this (and Maung's) is an important critique that I rarely see people engaging with, wherever one might fall in their agreement/disagreement. Curious what you think about its relevance and whether you were fully satisfied with Jesse's response.
To me this is a great example of a certain fault line you often see between those who feel strongly that empirical research must rest on sufficiently coherent philosophical grounds to be defensible, and those who consider philosophical/conceptual coherence less essential (if perhaps still desirable) as a precondition for viable research programs, where the latter find such critiques hopelessly abstract.
You are quite right to point out the fault line!
My own not-quite-fleshed-out response to the matching problem is that it is a genuine problem and it’s important to acknowledge, however, the kind of under-determination of data that results from it is commonly seen in many areas of psychiatry and psychology (and probably other areas of science) and doesn’t preclude evolutionary psychiatry from doing productive scientific work.
I suppose the implications would depend in part on whether you're primarily concerned about the underdetermination of data, or you think there's a fundamental incoherence and/or faulty set of assumptions that undermines the whole project. (Hence, the fault line).
A few thoughts on evolutionary psychiatry. For one, I don't believe human evolution has been following the rules of "survival of the fittest" for a long time. Humans are so successful that negative traits, such as near-sightedness, are easily passed on to successive generations. There is no reason to believe psychological traits that are somewhat harmful, but not devastating to survival chances, will be eliminated until humans reach some kind of choke-point where only the fittest can survive.
I also believe that evolutionary psychology focuses too much on complex outcomes, like OCD, rather than the more granular foundations of such disorders. Seems to me that OCD and anorexia nervosa are extensions of mostly beneficial anxieties, particularly social anxieties, positive evolutionary reactions for the most part. If not anxious about where their next meal is coming from people could easily starve to death. If not anxious about social interactions people can easily become social outcasts. And social anxiety can be easily traced back to pre-human social primates. It is not something that evolved with humans. The real question is: what causes anxiety to go into overdrive and become debilitating?
One more point. I am confused by the statement "the scientific understanding of social behavior was transformed by the recognition that tendencies for an individual to make sacrifices that benefit the group are shaped not by benefits to the group, but by benefits to kin who have genes in common with the individual." I am well aware of the "kin selection theory" and find it unconvincing. The "group benefit" idea makes much more sense. What is the background of this transformation? This topic seems worth of a detailed discussion.
"We should all still hope that specific causes are found for devastating conditions like autism, schizophrenia and OCD, but a mountain of evidence suggests that such hopes are unlikely to succeed."
I get that Nesse makes some important points re evolution etc, but DAMN does he make sweeping claims about "devastating conditions".
Is it the “devastating” part you are referring to? Sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, and sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings, and at times a source of strength… some degree of ambivalence helps in thinking about this.
I thought of autism in particular - I'd say very few writers who are themselves autistic would like to describe that as a "devastating condition". For my own part, yeah, I've had my fair share of "devastation", but I still take issue with talking about a whole bunch of psychiatric conditions in this sweeping way. Saying "sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings" like you do now, is VERY different from just going "devastating conditions" period. Also combined with that "we should still hope to find specific causes" - is the implication here so that everyone can be cured one day, so that only neurotypical people will remain?
I agree about not overgeneralizing the "devastating" part. But isn't an even bigger problem here that the generalization implied in his statement is at odds with the purported goal of evolutionary psychiatry to highlight and explore any functional and adaptive aspects of these conditions?
IDK, I didn't think that was at odds with the main theme of "just because something has an evolutionary explanation doesn't mean it's good for you".
That's true! I guess I was translating it the opposite way (that one potential of an evolutionary lens might be to depathologize somewhat), but there's certainly lots of space for dysfunction and suffering.
I believe that we should separate sharply our vulnerability to psychological disorders from our vulnerability to infectious diseases.
The rise in deaths from infectious diseases in the last five thousand years is a result of a profound change in human habitat. For a long time, the hunter-gatherer bands lived in a high level of isolation from each other. Think about isolated Inuit communities before the advent of the snowmobile or isolated tribes of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Interestingly, this once universal human lifestyle closely resembled the social pods that some people organized during the early months of the COVID pandemic. These pods generally avoided human contact and masked up, except with a small group of careful human beings with whom they socialized face to face.
However, a great change became possible with the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and the real shift came with the arrival of cities about five thousand years ago which crammed together thousands of human beings in close quarters with suboptimal sanitation. These cities also had regular trading relationships with other population centers. Thus, whatever germ jumped over from an animal species (the usual source of new human infectious diseases) had an environment in which to spread that was one hundred times more advantageous than the dispersed hunter-gatherer bands which had been our habitat for so long.
Basically, our vulnerability to infectious diseases reflects the fact that our immune systems evolved to meet the challenges of living in isolated hunter gatherer bands, and we now live in cities, breathing on each other, having sex with strangers, and shaking each other’s unwashed hands.