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Saturday, July 13, 2013

Newitz Notices EvoPsycho Douchebaggery

Describing recent evidence of stupidity, bigotry, and fraud in the pseudo-scientific precincts of evolutionary psychology Annalee Newitz announces, The Rise of the Evolutionary Psychology Douchebag. My quibble with her piece is that the word "Rise" in the title there suggests this ugly idiotically reductive rancid reactionary bullshit is some kind of recent phenomenon, which suggests -- to be kind about it -- that Newitz is arriving rather late to the diagnosis party. (Comments on her piece suggest a readership deep in denial, which will probably provoke an eventual kindly capitulation and qualification of even this belated bit of modest critique, as happened when Newitz dared declare in the meekest way Evgeny Morozov's critique of Silly Con valley was actually worth reading.)

EvoPsycho and EvoDevo discourses are, of course, veritable rationalization engines churning out the most arrant racist, misogynist, queer-bashing parochialisms imaginable, all the while abounding in self-congratulatory buttresses for imperialist and plutocratic prejudices. Newitz is entirely correct in her denunciations -- indeed, obviously so -- and errs only in underestimating the scope and depth of the phenomenon.

Evolutionary psychology and development discourses are bubbly swells in a wider, richer reactionary reductionist tide that also endorses endless racist Bell Curve bad baby IQ bullshit, repackages generations-tired Social Darwinist fallacies with a splashy neologism for the New York Times bestseller list and the Edge.org crowd to hyperventilate over every few years, declares "evolution" an algorithm exploring "decision space" in a universe hilariously misconstrued as a vast Holodeck red in tooth and claw, indeed, typically suggests that every social relation is a market relation and all matter a software phenomenon and the universe a vast computer running a program written by Ayn Rand or Alan Turing or Adam Smith (none of whom they have read, they couldn't even get all the way through the execrable Atlas Shrugged), fancying that people are nothing but strings of fizzy data in a fuzzy profile, fancying that historical struggle is some kind of viral phenomenon punctuated by sneezes, fancying that discourse is really nothing but PR, fancying that culture is a shelf of sweet sticky "memes" wrapped in cellophane awaiting payment and then popped in a consumer's maw... well, these lanky white suburban stupidities are just endless, of course. "Welcome to the age of the evopsych douchebag," writes Newitz, or as I would put the point, what an interminably long dull deranging destructive dumb trip it's been and looks to long keep being.

Newitz concludes her piece with a truism: "Science is not immune to cultural trends, and this [evopsycho douchebaggery] just happens to be one of the worst." Needless to say, trend-spotting pop-tech journalism misconstrued as technoscience critique might be a worse trend still, especially when it functions mostly to highlight the tip to exclusion of the vast vicious iceberg threatening your particular Titanic. What would happen to io9, one wonders, were Newitz to contextualize the evopsycho douchebaggery she decries in the reactionary reductionist impulse of scientism more generally, or to grasp the ramification of this gesture in the techno-determinisms, digital-utopianisms, global "progressive" developmentalisms, gizmo-fetishisms, neoliberal and transhumanoid eugenicisms, and eager acquiescences to unsustainable consumption that constitute the go-to grab-bag of futurological discourse to which her entire website and now so much of her day to day life is utterly devoted?

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Jay here.

There's some sense to Evo-Devo. Evolution made us what we are, so understanding our evolution is key to understanding our nature.

The bad news is that any attempt to understand human nature tends to hang up on the human ego, which requires that all humans view themselves positively compared to other humans and adjust their theories to fit.

That's not Evo-Devo's fault. It's just inherent in any attempt to understand human nature while being a specific human.

Dale Carrico said...

Evolutionary change radically underdetermines sociocultural change; evolutionary explanations of historical phenomena are always mystifications. It isn't accidental that these usually amount to rationalizations for inequity and incumbency (just as it isn't accidental that rationalizations for incumbency always "make some sense" -- inasmuch as shoring up sense is part of what incumbency always does). For those who cling to evo-devo in the face of all this I agree that it isn't "evo-devo's fault" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I ain't mad atcha, but don't expect me to blow kisses at evopsycho assholery -- na ga ha pen.

Unknown said...

Incumbent elites always use any ideas at hand to justify their incumbency.

The next rank down uses any idea at hand to accuse the incumbent elites in the hopes of building a coalition that can seize power.

None of that has anything to do with whether the ideas are true or not.

If you seek the truth, it will get in the way of your pursuit of political change, and vice versa. Do one or the other; you can't do both.

Dale Carrico said...

Again, evolutionary change radically underdetermines sociocultural change; evolutionary explanations of historical phenomena are always mystifications. You haven't responded to that claim. If you hold some facile correspondence conception of "the truth" (my views on truth are pragmatic/poststructuralist) as well as an equally facile conception of power as coercive/sovereign (my views on power are Arendtian/Foucauldian) it might seem that knowledge/power are antithetical. I don't have that problem. I regard scientific practice as a democratic practice, I regard democratization/ consensualization a facilitation of ramifying knowledges. Cling to evopsycho and its dumb reassuring "truths" if you want, declare my exposure of its conspicuous deficiencies as a politically correct refusal to see the natural awesomeness of incumbent elites if you want, see where it gets you.

Unknown said...

evolutionary explanations of historical phenomena are always mystifications. You haven't responded to that claim.

That's because I can't parse the claim. It doesn't convey an intelligible meaning to me. Explaining what you mean by "mystifications" might help.

Having spent over 20 years in physical sciences research, let me assure you that if your scientific practice is democratic you're doing it wrong. Openmindedness and willingness to consider alternative viewpoints are all well and good, but the key to science is making testable predictions and getting them right.

My working philosophy of truth could best be called perspectivist. There seems to be a physical universe, or something doing a damn good impression of one. OTOH, any human attempt to understand it is necessarily coupled with that particular human's perspective, identity, ego, etc. Controlled experiment, independently repeated experiment, and other scientific practices are ultimately attempts to get enough blind men touching the elephant in a systematic enough way to develop a decent idea of elephant anatomy.

Jay

Dale Carrico said...

"evolutionary explanations of historical phenomena are always mystifications. You haven't responded to that claim." That's because I can't parse the claim. It doesn't convey an intelligible meaning to me. Explaining what you mean by "mystifications" might help.

You quoted the second half of the sentence without the first half of the sentence that seeks to provide the clarity you demand. Again, third time, the first part of the sentence: evolutionary change radically underdetermines sociocultural change. Is that a claim you can parce? As any dictionary will tell you, even an online one, "mystification" is a word sufficiently like mistake or error that I can't really believe you find it THAT hard to grasp the meaning here.

By "underdetermine" I mean that when you say in your earlier response "Evolution made us what we are," this is only loosely true since quite a lot of what matters most about us in our specificity -- the specificities of our discursive commitments and practical lifeways -- is compatible with our evolved disposition and morphology but the more direct result of our different histories, upbringings, negotiations of subcultures, and so on, and it is to the developmental vicissitudes of these that we must turn to grasp them in their relevant specificity.

And hence it is BECAUSE evolutionary change radically underdetermines sociocultural change that evolutionary explanations of historical phenomena (implied here just to be clear, though I do not concede this is unclear, social and cultural phenomena are indispensable to a proper characterization of historical phenomena) fixated on that more general level of change will be prone to error, or more usually will offer explanations at a level of abstractness that will tend to conduce to the benefit of incumbency (align with established distributions of authority, resources, knowledge that have assumed the force of common sense/hegemony).

That is just a long-winded elaboration of what I believe is already contained in the sentence you couldn't parce. It isn't an effort to elaborate the ideas in any greater depth, which of course I can also do. I teach critical theory (including critical thinking/ writing) and philosophy at the university level, and my area of expertise is science and technology studies, just to be clear about where I am coming from.

Now, for your second point, as a term of art, "perspectivism" happens to be associated in scholarship specifically with Nietzschean views I doubt you actually would endorse. Your more or less commonsense view of scientific practice is roughly the same as my own and is perfectly compatible with a pragmatic characterization. That is, I agree that in the matter of instrumental belief -- beliefs from which we aspire to facilitate prediction and control -- those beliefs on offer are better will have been warranted by the usual criteria, testability, publication, evidenciary substantiation, coherence with existing knowledge, saving the phenomena, and the rest.

As a pluralist, I will note that not all beliefs are instrumental, and that reasonable moral, aesthetic, ethical, legal, political beliefs will be warranted by different criteria related to those domains (I wrote about that topic a bit a while back, here). As for my claim that proper scientific practice is democratic, what I mean by that claim is probablyt both more complicated but also more sensible than you probably think: Is Science Democratic?

Hope that helps you understand where I am coming from.

Unknown said...

I took the first half of that sentence as obvious, but if you intend me to read it strongly enough to justify the second half of the sentence I disagree with you. Human nature doesn't dictate human society, but it does set limits on what's possible. For a rhetorically extreme example, any culture that outlawed sleep or required 150 years of education just wouldn't work; what exactly the limits are is obviously not well understood and is a point of political contention.

I tend to reserve the word "truth" for what you call "instrumental beliefs", and to refer to the other stuff as conventions, arrangements, policies, laws, tastes, or some such. It seems to be mostly a semantic difference.

As far as elites go, I don't much like the current ones, but I don't see any reason to think the next ones will be better. That leaves me generally indifferent.

Jay

Dale Carrico said...

Human nature doesn't dictate human society, but it does set limits on what's possible.

Assuming the lifeway and trait diversity available within those limits is not utterly negligible, you've just undermined, pretty much fatally, most evopsycho evodevo crapola. Obviously what is "obvious" -- including what is obviously entailed by the obvious -- is one of the most crucial things that is in the eye of the beholder.

As far as elites go, I don't much like the current ones, but I don't see any reason to think the next ones will be better. That leaves me generally indifferent.

That is not a topic we have discussed hitherto, and I'm not sure it is relevant to the substance of the questions at hand. The observation of a relation between incumbency and hegemony and commonsense and the lower evidenciary bar demanded of the latter that benefits the former is a point that you should probably not be indifferent to even if you believe that some now emerging elite will be as irrational and violent as some now eclipsing elite, which is a point I think is valid.

Now, I happen NOT to agree that there is a necessity that a minute, static, insulated plutocratic elite shored up by particular white-racist and patriarchal histories will always undermine equity-in-diversity in the way it presently does -- I would point to the historical reality of a less intensive concentration of wealth in comparatively recent history, as well as to the palpable reality of demographic diversification and secularization in the present day as a quick initial justification for that claim.

This is not a claim that requires disavowal that even democratizing forces and outcomes remain and may long remain stratified by sex-gender / race-ethnicity / class-positional in inequitable monologizing ways, by the way, and I am very alive to the force of these points (although I cannot know in advance what sorts of objections are more likely to be yours).

Dale Carrico said...

I tend to reserve the word "truth" for what you call "instrumental beliefs", and to refer to the other stuff as conventions, arrangements, policies, laws, tastes, or some such.

You may think you do this while you are arguing your point here and now, but I doubt you really feel that way as you live your actual life. I daresay you hold at least some political and moral beliefs you would bet the house mortgage or even your life on, and when it comes to it instrumental beliefs never yield more substantial confidence than that even if one decides to be all drama diva about this confidence and claim it to be "certainty."

Be all that as it may, since there is no criterion of warrant that has selected as the best belief among those on offer a belief that has not subsequently been supplanted by another better belief, it is wrong to think instrumental beliefs are any less conventional than moral or political ones.

And let me be very clear about this: In making this claim I am not claiming that there is no external world, I am not claiming that beliefs are not beliefs about the world, I am not claiming that every belief is as good as every other belief, I am not claiming that every belief that is a well-warranted belief will be supplanted by later beliefs, I am not claiming that there is no basis for claiming some beliefs more reasonable than others.