Christopher Hitchens’ essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny”, excited a certain amount of discussion around the internets recently. I’m not going to add my 2 cents on his hypothesis*, but one blogger’s reply did an excellent job of making some points that I think would be useful to keep in mind any time a pundit uses evolutionary biology to justify an argument. My 2 favorites:

1. Learning, culture, human malleability. It’s the whole nature/nurture thing cast in terms of how we adapt to different circumstances.

Many animals can be trained.

We can be taught. We are teachable.

To be trained is to be habituated, conditioned—reprogrammed. To be taught to how to do something is also to be taught how not to. Anything we’ve been taught, we can unteach ourselves.

So it seems to me that whenever you want to try to explain why a person, or a whole lot of persons, are the way they are, the first thing to look at is not what might have happened to their homo erectus ancestors millions of years ago, but what they themselves have been taught right here and now.

If you have to go back in time, you needn’t go back more than a few generations, where you can read what their great-grandparents were taught.

Now, the difference between believing that people are what they are because of what they’ve been taught and they are what they are because what they are was biologically determined for them millennia ago is that the first belief allows for people being able to change and the second belief is pretty much an argument that they can’t, they’re stuck being what they are, no matter what.

2. Panglossianism. Since the argument is that people have evolved to behave in such and such a way, we need to skate over the possibility that the behavior is neutral or (gasp) maladaptive. Instead, it’s a relatively straight path to the best of all possible worlds.

The general weakness in all these arguments has been that the amateur assumes that everything about us has an evolutionary cause. Take us for all in all, we are the pure products of natural selection.

But as Stephen Jay Gould was often at pains to point out—usually to religious types who wanted to prove that evolution is not a fact and thought they had a Gotcha! when they could point to something about an animal they felt made no sense as an adaptation and therefore could not have been naturally selected for or something that appears too complicated to have been the result of biological accidents to have invented and refined—not everything about an organism is there because it is useful.

Some qualities or features appeared because of accidents—mutations, etc.—and stuck because there was no reason for them to be naturally selected against.

And some features and qualities are there because they are contingent upon other features and qualities that were useful.

…

It’s finally an argument that whatever is, is right, an aphoristic thought that as Dickens pointed out, “would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.”

The second point reminds me of why I stopped studying economics – it starts to smell like theology after a while – justifying the ways of god to man…

*why? 1. It’s a trap – “Look! Those that disagree with me – dull, earnest, no sense of humor!”. 2. Been done (better).