attention? (Or Pixie Dust and Moonbeams)

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

tgivon wrote:
<<It is, of course, comforting to have someone find so much hilarity in 
someone else's attempt to be serious>>

Tom, there are a lot of ways to respond to absurd ideas.   Humor may not be 
the kindest or the safest, but it sure beats fury.

<<The best summary I know of the research program(me) of Ev.Psych. is Dave 
Geary's book "Origin of Mind". It is a coherent, indeed admirable 
summary...which basically takes it for granted that if the body has evolved under adaptive 
selection, and if the brain has likewise, then the mind, behavior, and--God 
forbid--culture, probably have too.>>

But it also takes a rather narrow view of how that evolution could have 
occurred, and as Jonathan Kaplan, Panksepp and others have pointed out, there is an 
evidence gap.   On the other hand, it could be a great deal more productive 
to investigate less how biological evolution affected human culture, and more 
how human culture affected evolution.

In terms of morphology, it is short-work to distinguish between natural 
selection (including non-human sexual selection) and human-directed selection.   No 
species out in the wild shows the morphological diversity we see in the 
domesticated dog and that diversity was acheived in a few thousand years at most 
(think Chihuahua versus Great Dane versus wolf).   The gap between humans and 
early hominids and other primates smacks of the same kind of intervention.   
Human culture is a powerhouse when it comes to changing the environment and the 
things in it, and that includes biology.   

If I were Professor Geary, I'd start looking in the other direction.   And 
that includes the notion that "sexual selection" among humans has been as much 
or more a communal matter than it has been one of "intra-species' competition.

<<One could perhaps also say something about the logic of the experimental 
paradigm that Steve finds most offensive--or risible. The logic of NOT priming 
experimental subjects with purposive context in this type of experiment has to 
do with expectations of automaticity, habituation,
innateness or "ingrained old adaptation".>>

Tom, there are ways to control for these variables in experimentation.   At 
minimum, see how subjects perform when both instructed and not instructed.   
And of course different instructions as control may make a difference.   This is 
after all basic scientific methodology.   

But also something else.   Why even assume that any lack of "goal-direction" 
would uncover innateness?   What if if nothing but learned responses are 
available?   How many "goals' are on the normal human to-do sheet every minute of 
every day?   How would one know the difference?   (Can a response to a stimulus 
get any faster than stomping on the breaks when you see a red light or Eric 
Clapton fingering his guitar at the right cue?   These things are not innate 
responses.   Clapton said at first he just didn't get how to play guitar and I 
watched a student driver blissfully drive thru a red light yesterday.)

<<Frequency effects over one's lifetime lead to automaticity.   Frequency 
effects over multiple generations lead to adaptive-selective-genetic evolution.>>

They also lead overwhelminly to extinction for probably a billion species.   
Genetically inherited behavior may be adaptive today, but it may be a disaster 
tomorrow.   The breakthrough in adaptability appears to be when organisms 
stop relying on inherited behavior, not the other way around.   It's not like 
Joan Bybee's language paradigm.   Pre-wired appears to have come first.   
Plasticity, not automaticity, was the next big step in biological adaptation.

Speaking of evolutionary psychology in the strict sense, the wonderful work 
done by Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar on the "intelligence" of the Raven 
may have a lot more meaning than anything coming out of Santa Barbara.   

Here's one of their observations: "By some process that still remains one of 
the great unsolved mysteries of biology, exquisitely precise behaviors can be 
genetically programmed in animals with brains no larger than a pinhead... [eg] 
a wasp that makes paper expertly from the time it is born, that fashions a 
nest of precise architecture with that paper... The big question, then, is why, 
if behavior can be so precisely programmed, some animals [like ravens and 
humans] are consigned to muddling.   Why are they not endowed as most animals are 
'to do it right,' except after the many things that can go disasterously 
wrong... from muddling."

Here's a suggestion.   How about "evolutionary psychology" spends a bit more 
of its time on the "muddling" part and a little less time on how people spot 
other humans in photographs quicker than they spot staplers?

Regards,
Steve Long


















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