X-Message-Number: 23166 Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 17:27:32 -0500 From: Keith Henson <> Subject: Politics Psychology used to be a study that "floated" in knowledge space. In recent decades people have begun to understand psychology as naturally building on evolution, thus the evolutionary psychology approach. Eventually everything in psychology will be understood in terms of selection in the ancestral environment. From: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind. Natural selection, the process that designed our brain, takes a long time to design a circuit of any complexity. The time it takes to build circuits that are suited to a given environment is so slow it is hard to even imagine -- it's like a stone being sculpted by wind-blown sand. Even relatively simple changes can take tens of thousands of years. The environment that humans -- and, therefore, human minds -- evolved in was very different from our modern environment. Our ancestors spent well over 99% of our species' evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies. That means that our forebearers lived in small, nomadic bands of a few dozen individuals who got all of their food each day by gathering plants or by hunting animals. Each of our ancestors was, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted an entire lifetime, and this way of life endured for most of the last 10 million years. Generation after generation, for 10 million years, natural selection slowly sculpted the human brain, favoring circuitry that was good at solving the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors -- problems like finding mates, hunting animals, gathering plant foods, negotiating with friends, defending ourselves against aggression, raising children, choosing a good habitat, and so on. Those whose circuits were better designed for solving these problems left more children, and we are descended from them. Our species lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times longer than as anything else. The world that seems so familiar to you and me, a world with roads, schools, grocery stores, factories, farms, and nation-states, has lasted for only an eyeblink of time when compared to our entire evolutionary history. The computer age is only a little older than the typical college student, and the industrial revolution is a mere 200 years old. Agriculture first appeared on earth only 10,000 years ago, and it wasn't until about 5,000 years ago that as many as half of the human population engaged in farming rather than hunting and gathering. Natural selection is a slow process, and there just haven't been enough generations for it to design circuits that are well-adapted to our post-industrial life. In other words, our modern skulls house a stone age mind. The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American -- they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others. For example, it is easier for us to deal with small, hunter-gatherer-band sized groups of people than with crowds of thousands; it is easier for us to learn to fear snakes than electric sockets, even though electric sockets pose a larger threat than snakes do in most American communities. In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city. In saying that our modern skulls house a stone age mind, we do not mean to imply that our minds are unsophisticated. Quite the contrary: they are very sophisticated computers, whose circuits are elegantly designed to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors routinely faced. A necessary (though not sufficient) component of any explanation of behavior -- modern or otherwise -- is a description of the design of the computational machinery that generates it. Behavior in the present is generated by information-processing mechanisms that exist because they solved adaptive problems in the past -- in the ancestral environments in which the human line evolved. For this reason, evolutionary psychology is relentlessly past-oriented. Cognitive mechanisms that exist because they solved problems efficiently in the past will not necessarily generate adaptive behavior in the present. Indeed, EPs reject the notion that one has "explained" a behavior pattern by showing that it promotes fitness under modern conditions (for papers on both sides of this controversy, see responses in the same journal issue to Symons (1990) and Tooby and Cosmides (1990a)). Although the hominid line is thought to have evolved on the African savannahs, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, or EEA, is not a place or time. It is the statistical composite of selection pressures that caused the design of an adaptation. Thus the EEA for one adaptation may be different from that for another. Conditions of terrestrial illumination, which form (part of) the EEA for the vertebrate eye, remained relatively constant for hundreds of millions of years (until the invention of the incandescent bulb); in contrast, the EEA that selected for mechanisms that cause human males to provision their offspring -- a situation that departs from the typical mammalian pattern -- appears to be only about two million years old. ******************* end of quote Politics is another study floating out there in knowledge space without underpinnings. It is clear to me that our ability to deal with other humans, i.e., politics, has been subject to the same evolutionary shaping as any of the other psychological traits we have. Of course, the environment in which we live, "a world with roads, schools, grocery stores, factories, farms, and nation-states," bears little resemblance to the hunter-gatherer bands in which we evolved. The difficult part is figuring out how our minds map modern political or psychological situations into analogous situations that we have been shaped to solve in a hunter-gatherer bands. The recent past might be instructive here. The communist meme might have exploited hunter-gatherer traits of at least giving lip service to the ideal and practice of sharing. We are far out of our "natural environment." Those who deeply understand this and figure out how to create a social environment better suited to our evolutionary history might accomplish a lot. It would be of some use just to be able to analyze political movementsin terms of how well they mesh into average human psychology. (It is fairly clear that some political movements appeal to people well off the average and therefore will never become very large.) Finally, we are not that far from being able to deeply change human nature. It might be time to start thinking about what traits we want to keep and what to discard from our social primate, hunter-gatherer past. Keith Henson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23166