Pinker’s curse

The other day, Brian Leiter linked to this review (PDF) of David Buller’s new book for MIT Press, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.

This looks very promising for a number of reasons. First, like Paul Campos in the Obesity Myth (see here), this review indicates that Buller actually examines some of the studies that ostesibly undergird some of evo pysch’s most popular and oft-repeated just-so stories. This is an important part of any critique of evo pysch–the public face of this field is dominated by story-tellers, and their popular audiences aren’t particularly well-equipped to assess the ways in which these studies are transformed into the stories in question. Second, Buller is a philosopher, but he’s no stranger to the science of the mind. In this 2000 article, (PDF) he and Valerie Grey Hardcastle take a look at evo psych’s use of the concept of modules in light of recent developments in developmental neurobiology. It’s a good read, as it demonstrates that the logic of evo pysch is often deeply anti-evolutionary in content–evidence of all sorts of developmental and adaptive mechanisms are reduced to a trigger effect of some existing but essentially unchanged module.

I’ll probably be buying and reading this book at some point. Not because I have a strong interest in developmental neurobiology, but because the stories and the logic of popular evo pysch make my job difficult. There is a strong tendency, particularly amongst undergraduates I encounter, to use the stories and the logic of popular evo pysch as a sort of trump card against a serious and troubling political theory argument they don’t want to accept, but can’t quite figure out how to respond to on its own terms. It’s bad enough that I’ve instituted a “no human nature” policy in student papers. That is, they are banned, under penalty of nasty comments and a grade reduction, from citing human nature in generic terms as a reason for accepting one argument and rejecting another, etc. So part of the reason I’ll be buying this book is to make me a better teacher of political theory; that is, to help me do a better job of explaining to students why they should be a fair bit more skeptical about this stuff.

Let me speculate for a moment or two about why. There’s a peculiar dichotomy at work in students response to the history of political thought. There are a few who identify strongly with what they understand as the cynical pessimistic realism of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and to a lesser extent Burke, and a few others who embrace Rousseau’s romantic anti-modernism. But by and large, they want very much to fall in line with Locke, Mill, and the liberal tradition. That liberal tradition identifies individuals as capable if flawed moral agents (Locke) and the source of progess, development and the search for a better world (Mill). On the other hand, they rush to embrace a view of the world that purports to identifies a series of fairly concrete empirical limits on the moral and creative agency of individuals. This is an interesting puzzle. I don’t have any brilliant explanation for it, but I’ll suggest a few possible ones.

1) They like the rights and freedoms that go along with a liberal theory of individualism, but don’t care much for the responsibilities that go with it.

2) Locke and Mill’s view of individuals is attractive, but damned hard to live up to. Failure to live up to the moral demands of full liberal agency can be attributed to faulty mental equipment rather than an actual agency failure. In other words, popular evo psych is a way of protecting what they like about this theory of individual agency from it’s drawbacks, by placing it’s drawbacks in another sphere altogether.

3) People hold views in tension if not outright contradiction with each other all the time, this is just another example.

Other explanations?