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The Evaluation of Competing Approaches within Human Evolutionary Psychology
Abstract
A central assumption of human evolutionary psychology is that the brain is comprised of many specialized psychological mechanisms that were shaped by natural selection over vast periods of time to solve the recurrent information-processing problems faced by our ancestors (Buss, 1995, 1999; Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Gaulin & McBurney, 2000; Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000; Symons, 1995). Although this so-called “narrow” approach to evolutionary psychology1 shares many features with the broader meta-theoretical perspective of evolutionary biology, this approach can be considered just one application (among many) of the basic principles and knowledge of evolutionary biology, rather than the sine qua non of all “evolutionary psychology”. In this manner, the term “narrow” merely reflects a focus on a particular set of core assumptions (inclusive fitness, gene-centered selection, adaptationism), rather than a limited or necessarily myopic application of evolutionary biology. Paradoxically, some researchers have argued that what is referred to here as the “narrow” approach to evolutionary psychology actually represents the ascendent view in much of human evolutionary psychology (see Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000; Ellis & Ketelaar, in press). The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how researchers can evaluate competing evolutionary explanations at all levels of analysis ranging from the most basic assumptions lying at the hard core of the meta-theory to the strong and weak predictions lying in the protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that surrounds the hard core.
... Rather, the point is that evolutionary psychologists also employ deductive reasoning (from meta-theory to middle-level explanation, see Figure 11.1) when they construct their theories. More specifically, the use of an evolutionary meta-theory plays an important role in narrowing the scope of evolutionary-psychological explanations to a delimited set of plausible a priori alternative hypotheses (see Ketelaar, 2002 for a fuller treatment of this issue). Through this process of deductive reasoning, an evolutionary meta-theory allows evolutionary psychologists to focus their efforts on generating middle-level explanations that entail psychological mechanisms that could have-in principle-evolved through natural and sexual selection. ...
... Although the Popperian method of falsification is useful for evaluating the scientific status of specific statements (hypotheses and predictions) derived from middle-level theories (which may explain the appeal of this method to Lewin, Cattell, and many other social psychologists), philosophically minded psychologists have come to see falsificationism as an inefficient strategy for generating knowledge in human psychology and have argued that a Lakatosian philosophy of science provides a more accurate description of theory construction and evaluation in scientific psychology. (For a detailed treatment of the role of the Lakatosian philosophy of science in evolutionary psychology, see Ketelaar, 2002;; see also Meehl, 1978Meehl, , 1990Newell, 1973Newell, , 1990, for a more general discussion.) Cognitive scientist Alan Newell (1990, p. 14) astutely observed: "We are not living in the world of Popper (Popper, 1959), as far as I'm concerned, we are living in the world of Lakatos (Lakatos, 1970). ...
... Rather than using the Popperian strategy of falsificationism to evaluate metatheories as false or not yet falsified, Lakatos (1970Lakatos ( , 1974Lakatos ( , 1978 argued that metatheories 4 are more properly evaluated as progressive or degenerative based on the performance of the middle-level theories they generate (see cf. Gawronski & Bodenhausen, Chapter 1, this volume). According to the Lakatosian philosophy of science, the key scientific criteria for evaluating evolutionary psychology's guiding metatheory is not whether its core assumptions are false or not yet falsified, but rather whether this metatheory leads to fruitful new discoveries, explanations, and avenues of research and how well the metatheory accommodates anomalies (see Ketelaar, 2002). A metatheory that uses its middle-level theories to (1) generate novel explanations/predictions and (2) digest apparent anomalies is viewed as a progressive metatheory. ...
A year before his death, Kurt Lewin taught a graduate course at MIT on theories in social psychology. Stanley Schacter, a student enrolled in the course, described it as "more philosophy of science than a review of different theories. Its purpose was to teach students what a theory is, how to test a theory appropriately, and what makes a theory useful" (Higgins, 2004, p. 138). In this light, Lewin's (1951) assertion that "there is nothing so practical as a good theory" seems less like a simple call for an increased quantity of theorizing in social psychology, and more like a gentle admonition directed toward social psychologists, urging them to develop a better understanding of the role that theories can and should play in their field. More than a half century before Kurt Lewin encouraged his fellow social psychologists to ponder the role of theories in social psychology, Wil-liam James expressed a more general concern about the lack of theorizing in scientific psychology writ large. James saw the emerging science of the mind as too much dominated by purely descriptive accounts of human mental activity. In reviewing the past several centuries of scholarship on human emotion, for example, William James (1890/2009, p. 308) worried that a focus on description rather than explanation had resulted in a psychological litera-Gawronski_Book.indb 224 8/20/2014 12:07:41 PM
... Brought to the forefront, they serve to anchor observations to bodies of knowledge that have withstood repeated testing. Such high-level bodies of general theory inform middle-and lower-level theories that in turn generate testable hypotheses (16,28). The explanatory relevance of broadly applicable principles does not conflict with the observation that domestication of any plant or animal is a particular, local, and historically contingent process. ...
The introduction of new analytic methods and expansion of research into previously untapped regions have greatly increased the scale and resolution of data relevant to the origins of agriculture (OA). As a result, the recognition of varied historical pathways to agriculture and the continuum of management strategies have complicated the search for general explanations for the transition to food production. In this environment, higher-level theoretical frameworks are sometimes rejected on the grounds that they force conclusions that are incompatible with real-world variability. Some of those who take this position argue instead that OA should be explained in terms of local and historically contingent factors. This retreat from theory in favor of particularism is based on the faulty beliefs that complex phenomena such as agricultural origins demand equally complex explanations and that explanation is possible in the absence of theoretically based assumptions. The same scholars who are suspicious of generalization are reluctant to embrace evolutionary approaches to human behavior on the grounds that they are ahistorical, overly simplistic, and dismissive of agency and intent. We argue that these criticisms are misplaced and explain why a coherent theory of human behavior that acknowledges its evolutionary history is essential to advancing understanding of OA. Continued progress depends on the integration of human behavior and culture into the emerging synthesis of evolutionary developmental biology that informs contemporary research into plant and animal domestication.
Two books have been particularly influential in contemporary philosophy of science: Karl R. Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both agree upon the importance of revolutions in science, but differ about the role of criticism in science's revolutionary growth. This volume arose out of a symposium on Kuhn's work, with Popper in the chair, at an international colloquium held in London in 1965. The book begins with Kuhn's statement of his position followed by seven essays offering criticism and analysis, and finally by Kuhn's reply. The book will interest senior undergraduates and graduate students of the philosophy and history of science, as well as professional philosophers, philosophically inclined scientists, and some psychologists and sociologists.
First published in 1976, this is a volume of studies on the problems of theory-appraisal in the physical sciences - how and why important theories are developed, changed and are replaced, and by what criteria we judge one theory an advance on another. The volume is introduced by a classic paper of Imre Lakatos's, which sets out a theory for tackling these problems - the methodology of scientific research programmes. Five contributors then test this theory against particular and celebrated case-studies in the history of the physical sciences (particularly in the nineteenth century). The volume ends with a characteristically forceful and original critique of the whole enterprise by Paul Feyerabend. the book is a companion volume to Method and Appraisal in Economics. Both are natural sequels to Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge and attempt to work out in particular cases the implications of some of the theories presented in that book.
An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an oragnism into unitary 'traits' and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes, with Baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. We support Darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.