Evolutionary Psychology -- Classic or Dud?

Since the Social Darwinists made such a hash of applying Darwinism to social issues and B.F. Skinner wrenched psychology away from the humanism of William James to the inhumanism of behaviorist theory, people are understandably leery of this area of study. Both the Social Darwinists and Skinner were aggressively prescriptive, not just descriptive, which is a damn good way to pervert science from knowledge to ideology.

For me, the interest in evolutionary psychology is its power to explain the use and purpose of strange and messy mental tendencies I can recognize in myself and others, but we all seem to have poor control over, as well as some of the seeming genius we all appear to share. It can't tell me a damn thing about how to live my life, and I am far more relieved than troubled by this fact.

What I like about ev psych most of all is that it essentially turns morality into a pragmatic engineering problem to be solved, like all pragmatic engineering problems, within a reasonable margin of error. Yes, the default state of humanity is to be kind of a solipstic asshole. Big deal -- that's just one more thing we share with every other species of animal, vegetable, and protozoa. Now, what can we do to mitigate this? That's the interesting question.

As for what it will be used for, it's already been used for all sorts of research in vision, language, and pretty much everything else related to the brain, or really, humanity as a whole. My main interest in it, though, is that it provides a framework for a form of moral leftism that's actually grounded in some sort of empirical claims, rather than semantic hoobajoob and the wishing unpleasant facts of life into the cornfield. Plus, I think it's just plain interesting.

evolutionary psychology

Here's an evolutionary psychology faq that propose answers to a lot of questions like:

What is evolutionary psychology?
Why couldn't humans have evolved during the last 10,000 years?
How can we identify psychological adaptations?
Is evolutionary psychology another form of genetic determinism?
Is evolutionary psychology racist?
Is evolutionary psychology sexist?
Is evolutionary psychology a form of Social Darwinism?
Is rape an adaptation?
If my 'genes made me do it', am I still responsible?
Do evolutionary psychologists think that everything is an adaptation?
Why do some people hate evolutionary psychology?
What are your politics? (Translation: Doesn't evolutionary psychology have a crypto conservative political agenda?)
Does evolutionary psychology have any problems?
etc etc

It will be "used" to shed light on the extent to which various factors in human evolution contribute to current human behavior. Comparative anatomy, embryology, microbiology, genetics and many other life sciences show beyond a doubt that the form of the human body, innards and all, is strongly influenced by the evolutionary path followed by our ancestor species. Evolutionary psychology tries to extend that knowledge to find out what evolution contributed to the form of the human mind.

When approched non-dogmatically, it seems self-evident that we share a lot of similarities in our mental life with other animals. For example, a pretty wide spectrum of animals exhibit fear. That's part of our genetic inheritance. What the heck is wrong with investigating other parts of our minds and asking, could this be influenced by genetics, and if so, how and how much?

Most people already freely acknowledge there is such a thing as 'human nature'. In my view, the subject of evolutionary psychology is to discern between the universal human traits and universal human tendencies that make up 'human nature', and the strictly cultural and the strictly personal. All of these exist and contribute to each of us. It might be nice to know more about them.

Diferent evidence of design proven with the scientific method.

Diferent evidence of design proven with the scientific method.

One of the points on the page kieran linked to was overestimation of the degree of localization (2.2 Evidence from neurosciences).

But everything comes from/is based on the past, no? Culture is still influenced by genetics, right? Sure, some parts of culture change rapidly and are most likely not tied to genetics, but this seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Yes, but native speaker or not, spelling the name of your ostensible subject a half-dozen different ways on one page does not do wonders for your credibility. If you have the time to shake the foundations of science, you have time to fuckin' spellcheck. As for the grammatical issues, considering the abstract and example-light language the writer often uses, even minor grammatical mistakes are going to blur his points, even if it doesn't necessarily invalidate them. Also, the writer lives in the UK, which leads me to think that, if he can't find a single native speaker willing to help him with basic issues of proofreading, this is less likely to be a groundbreaking new theory than typical dime-a-dozen Internet gibbering. Of course, I may be wrong, and the writer may in fact a genius cruelly ostracized by a conspiratorial claque of evil scientists unwilling to even divulge the secret of how to correctly spell "psychology." But personally, I'm putting my money on the Time Cube guy.

"What sort of evidence do you think would lead him to other conclusions (besides the platitude about "infinite possibilities of language")?"

You...you don't actually know how to read complete sentences, do you? You just sort of find phrases that you object to and make up your own meanings for them? Seems like it must be a lot of fun and all. But really, I'm not going to bother responding to your claim about my supposed "platitude" when anybody can scroll back up and see what I actually said and the context that I said it in. I wish I were mouthing platitudes, as I'd at least get credit for inventing the first platitude to contain the word "moosh."

As for evidence that would lead him to other conclusions, I admit that there is probably none at all. But then again, I doubt there's much evidence that would convince this guy that John Lennon wasn't killed by Stephen King. Some people have already figured out everything about the world that they're going to figure out. Such is life.

My question was a response to Aimless, who claimed that the page I linked was "crafted solely... to exclude any argument or evidence that might lead the reader to conclude otherwise." I do not see the platitudes of Generative linguistics as constituting such argument or evidence.

Well, it depends on what scale you're looking at culture at. In many ways -- fashion, politics, theory, etc. -- obviously things change quite a bit, but in a biological sense, most of this is just random static. In the major ways, many things haven't changed at all. People still make the same facial expressions to register surprise, disgust, fear, joy, etc. People still seek status with an unquenchable drive and are more willing to invest their money in signs of high status than in "inconspicuous consumption" such as health insurance, long-term investments, etc., even if they realize that the latter would make more sense. (See Robert Frank's excellent book "Luxury Fever" for an excellent analysis of this tendency, as well as one that uses the tools of ev psych in a pragmatic and moral manner to make specific policy recommendations that I, for one, completely agree with.) People still impute moral nobility to status and physical attractiveness, as seen with the near-psychotic outpouring of grief at the death of the perfectly pleasant but morally unexceptional Princess Diana. People are still repulsed at the thought of eating, say, bugs, even if they were a perfectly healthy source of protein that could be cost-effectively and unobtrusively used in hamburgers, hot dogs, etc. People still find symmetrical faces, on average, more attractive than asymmetrical faces. People still value their biological children more than their stepchildren, their kin more than their non-kin, and pretty much any other "us" more than any other "them."

And then, of course, there's gender. Again, in many important ways, things have changed quite a bit, of course -- 100 years ago in America, women weren't allowed to vote, hold most jobs, join the military, etc., and now, thanks to suffragism, feminism, and just general overall enlightenment, this has all changed. But we're still essentially the same fancy monkeys: heterosexual American women still, on average (and I will say it once so I don't have to say it 100 times: a basic moral precept is that you don't judge individuals by the average of their group, so anecdotal counterexamples, such as the fact that I tend to date women taller than me and that they tend to be able to beat me at chess and other spatially-oriented games, are not really the issue here) value qualities such as height and status/income in their long-term partners more than males do, and males value qualities such as facial symmetry and waist-to-hip ratio in their long-term partners more than females do. Men, on average, prefer to marry someone slightly-to-moderately younger than them, women someone slightly-to-moderately older. Men are more prone to achieve their goals through physical violence, while women are more prone to achieve their goals through social ostracization. And so forth.

Note, again, that these are merely averages, and that no moral judgment should be ascribed to them, because that again would be falling into the naturalistic fallacy. What's more, since we possess self-consciousness, there's no reason that people can't make an effort to not just "hit [Return]" and end up with whatever their default setting is. But the moral point of ev psych, if there is one, is that it does require effort, just like resisting the urge to gorge on sugar and simple carbohydrates instead of eating broccoli and brown rice does. Consider it this way: think of the "dumb" people you know, and think of the "smart" people you know. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that the "dumb" people fit many, many more of the averages I mentioned above than do the "smart" people. That's what makes the "smart" people "smart" -- through whatever process of education, self-examination, or general perspicacity they've been through, they've learned enough about their own default modes to figure out how to at least somewhat circumvent the ones they find objectionable: they drink diet sodas that fool the brain into thinking it's getting a hit of sugar, they play Quake and watch action movies instead of starting random bar fights, they jack off to porn every so often instead of cheating on their significant others, etc., etc. As I said in an earlier post, what I like about ev psych is that it puts some meat on the bones of Rorty/Singer-style utilitarian pragmatism, which is my main interest.

2. It would seem difficult to draw conclusions from the past because I doubt the past could be reconstructed in the detail required.

Actually, in terms of separating biology from culture in some sort of control vs. experiment fashion, there's all sorts of handy tricks available: two of the most useful are aboriginal tribes and identical twins that have been separated at birth. Trust me, anybody who thinks culture always trumps genetics should read some identical twin studies. That's some freaky shit, yo. It disturbs even me, and I'm quite comfortable with the idea of being a fancy monkey. And, despite the various pranks pulled on the charmingly ingenuous Margaret Mead, there's never been a "primitive" (or "civilized") tribe discovered that doesn't fit a staggering list of Human Universals. Many of these will seem tautologically obvious, but that's the point -- as I said, whether or not genetics or culture strikes one as more important really depends on whether you're taking a close-up or wide-angle view of humanity. To us, cultural changes often seem like massive paradigm shifts. To a bunch of Martians who are to us as we are to chimps, it probably seems like the exact same creatures wearing a different silly hat. It's all a matter of perspective, which is why ev psych and sociology are to some extent complementary -- like prescriptive and descriptive grammarians, they're interested in fundamentally different scales of perception.

3. When linguists first started talking about an innate language acquisition device, they weren't doing it on the basis of empirical research.

Right -- it was a theory. Like how the theory of relativity wasn't tested by Einstein building a rocketship that can travel at near-light speeds. Gotta start somewhere.

(I think the general line of reasoning was linguistic development outpaces the rest of cognitive development, so language acquisition must be hardwired. But they didn't test their hypotheses or look for alternative explanations. Nowadays there is more empirical research and interdisciplinary work, but as far as I know, the evidence for innateness is not conclusive, e.g., morphology acquisition is likely to be rule-based, but acquisition of syntax is likely to be case-based.)

For one thing, it seems fairly obvious at this point that language acquisition, on some basic level, is hard-wired: considering that all attempts to teach language (by which I mean syntax, not just individual words) to non-humans has been an abject failure, and that it's virtually impossible to prevent human children from generating a coherent grammar even if all the adults around them speak a syntactically incoherent pidgin (which is where creoles generally come from), on some level humans are just as programmed to communicate through manipulation of phonemes in set patterns as dogs are programmed to communicate by sniffing each other's butts. I'm certainly interested to hear about any alternative theories for spontaneous grammar generation, though.

As for Words and Rules (the name, incidentally, of a Pinker book on that very subject, which I found sorta interesting but not so much my thing -- I'm a politically minded generalist, after all), even the case-based syntax seems to be based on some sort of basic presets, like the fact that there's no known language that goes Object-Subject-Verb, or that there's no language that turns a statement into a question by reversing the order of all of the words. The big question, of course, is how innate and universal and specific these presets are. I dunno. It's a young science, and I'm sure in 100 years, people will be chuckling at some of Chomsky, Pinker, Dawkins, etc., just like not everything that Darwin said holds water. I hope that I live long enough to find out how what we think today is wrong, but, after examining the other options, I'm reasonably confident that this is the least worst thing we've come up with so far. And, unlike Freud, Marx, and other secular religions, it's both robust and elegant: ev psych makes strong enough predictions that it can be empirically attacked and verified, and all it requires you to believe in is the basic mathematical precept that the genes that prompt the behavior that leads to the most reproductive success are the genes that eventually become most prevalent.

There is a difference between developing the technology and methods to test one's theories, and presenting every bit of available evidence (often from introspection or overinterpreted data) as confirmation of these theories.

"For one thing, it seems fairly obvious at this point that language acquisition, on some basic level, is hard-wired: considering that all attempts to teach language (by which I mean syntax, not just individual words) to non-humans has been an abject failure, and that it's virtually impossible to prevent human children from generating a coherent grammar even if all the adults around them speak a syntactically incoherent pidgin (which is where creoles generally come from),"

No adults speak pidgins at all times (that is part of the definition of "pidgin"). If there isn't some degree of consistency in the way adults (or children) speak to children, children will not be able to communicate, and it has yet to be shown how "language" is different from "successful communcation".

" on some level humans are just as programmed to communicate through manipulation of phonemes in set patterns as dogs are programmed to communicate by sniffing each other's butts."

There are good reasons to think the opposite.

" I'm certainly interested to hear about any alternative theories for spontaneous grammar generation, though.
As for Words and Rules (the name, incidentally, of a Pinker book on that very subject, which I found sorta interesting but not so much my thing -- I'm a politically minded generalist, after all), even the case-based syntax seems to be based on some sort of basic presets, like the fact that there's no known language that goes Object-Subject-Verb, or that there's no language that turns a statement into a question by reversing the order of all of the words. The big question, of course, is how innate and universal and specific these presets are."

See linked article.

" I dunno. It's a young science, and I'm sure in 100 years, people will be chuckling at some of Chomsky, Pinker, Dawkins, etc., just like not everything that Darwin said holds water. I hope that I live long enough to find out how what we think today is wrong, but, after examining the other options, I hope you examined these options beyond the caricatures in Pinker's books. I'm reasonably confident that this is the least worst thing we've come up with so far."

I hope you examined these options beyond the caricatures in Pinker's books.

it has yet to be shown how "language" is different from "successful communcation".

kieran, I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you suggesting that human language is not unlike non-linguistic forms of communication in other species?

I looked at the page on language universals from the page that you linked to. The author argues that it is faulty to reason that language universals are innate because they are what you'd get by default for optimal communication. But most of the "universals" discussed are pretty general. The claims of linguistic theory are closer to those presented at the bottom of the page, and these the author allows cannot be predicted directly from the communicative role of language.

I'm not arguing for learning, exactly, but I think that the regularity of the creole reflects the frequency of its use rather than anything innate; pidgins are irregular mostly because their context is so restricted.

"Are you suggesting that human language is not unlike non-linguistic forms of communication in other species?"

More or less. I don't believe language has any non-social meaning (except as a set of learned tendencies).

I have to say that page Kieran linked above is pretty lousy.

" I dunno. It's a young science, and I'm sure in 100 years, people will be chuckling at some of Chomsky, Pinker, Dawkins, etc., just like not everything that Darwin said holds water. I hope that I live long enough to find out how what we think today is wrong, but, after examining the other options, I hope you examined these options beyond the caricatures in Pinker's books. I'm reasonably confident that this is the least worst thing we've come up with so far."

That's rather odd, considering that the first half of the paragraph was obviously addressed to me and that Aimless never even mentioned anything about linguistics. Are you taking writing lessons from Harpaz, or just backpedaling?

Overall: Look, I'm sorry, but I'm far too busy trying to disprove the theory of the Four-Dimensional Time Cube to read an argument about how the brain can't think in a coherent symbolic fashion by an author who can't write in a coherent symbolic fashion. I mean, talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies. As far as I can tell, the basic argument is like saying that Legos can't exist because atoms aren't actually solid, but I suppose it's perfectly possible that Harpaz is right about the stochastic nature of neural pathways -- I'm not a neuroscientist, so who am I to say? -- and I guess I'll find out when someone who can actually write translates his insights into something a little less, shall we say, stochastically written. If you care to put the effort in, I'll certainly check it out. But I'm not about to spend a whole day parsing even-more-abstruse-than-usual academic writing so I can make sure that one of the least personally interesting (do the words "political" and "generalist" not register with you at all, or what?) aspects of evolutionary psychology stands on firm ground. Christ, I barely have the patience for Jerry Fodor.

More or less. I don't believe language has any non-social meaning (except as a set of learned tendencies).

Guh? As far as I can tell -- and it gets harder and harder and harder -- you're simultaneously saying that language is a) qualitatively indistinct from, say, a bee's waggle dance, and b) of Wittgensteinian complexity due to its meaning being derived entirely from social context. I like bees as much as the next guy, but this seems a bit much.

"I'm not arguing for learning, exactly, but I think that the regularity of the creole reflects the frequency of its use rather than anything innate; pidgins are irregular mostly because their context is so restricted."

Yes, but there's plenty of things that children frequently use that are completely irregular, as I learn every day when I pound my head against the wall after teaching math to 16-year olds. If there's not something innate about the structure of linguistic grammar -- which is, from an objective standpoint, a much, much, much more complex endeavor than SAT-level math -- why is every non-neurologically damaged 16 year essentially a grammatical genius and (9 times out of 10) a mathematical 'tard? After all, they're both just formal languages and methods of communication -- if it's all entirely arbitrary and learned, there should be just as many children spontaneously generating logically consistent but untaught mathematical rules as there are children spontaneously generating logically consistent but untaught grammatical rules. But there aren't.

From The Language Instinct:

"The linguist Derek Bickerton has presented evidence that in many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex lanugage in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. That happened, Bickerton has argued, when children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in the pidgin. Not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings, the children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting a brand-new, richly expressive language."

And there's the whole segment about the spontaneous generation of sign language syntax among individual deaf children who are raised by "pidgin-signing" deaf parents, who learned ASL as adults and thus pretty much suck at it:

"Astoundingly, though Simon saw no ASL but his parents' defective version, his own signing was far better ASL than theirs. He understood sentences which moved topic phrases without difficulty, and when he had to describe complex videotaped events, he used the ASL verb inflections almost perfectly, even in sentences requiring two of them in particular orders. Simon must somehow have shut out his parents' ungrammatical "noise." He must have latched on to the inflections that his parents used inconsistently, and reinterpreted them as mandatory. And he must have seen the logic that was implicit, though never realized, in his parents' use of two kind of verb inflection, and reinvented the ASL system of superimposing both of them onto a single verb in a specific order. Simon's superiority to his parents is an example of creolization by a single living child."

But of course, since this does not account for the stochastic nature of the neural pathways, it is all LIES LIES LIES.

All I could extract from it is that you think that the particulars of behavior that are prescribed by culture are interesting, while the universals are not very interesting to you. Perhaps what you're saying is that the properties of a movie screen aren't interesting, compared to the movie that's playing on it. If that is anywhere close to your point, then I'd simply point out that movie screens, however bland they might seem at first glance, influence movies in a whole host of ways you might not have thought about much.

But the fact remains that I could be misunderstanding your point very, very badly.

Not quite. He isn't arguing that neurons do not form any regular structures, but that they don't form such structures at the level required for complex symbolic thought. I've heard that the randomness of systems is difficult to establish, which may hurt the author's thesis, but I haven't seen evidence that the cortex is otherwise, either.

"Guh? As far as I can tell -- and it gets harder and harder and harder -- you're simultaneously saying that language is a) qualitatively indistinct from, say, a bee's waggle dance, and b) of Wittgensteinian complexity due to its meaning being derived entirely from social context."

I'm saying that if you can't consistently understand something, it isn't language. Where do you get b) from in my statement?

"After all, they're both just formal languages and methods of communication -- if it's all entirely arbitrary and learned, there should be just as many children spontaneously generating logically consistent but untaught mathematical rules as there are children spontaneously generating logically consistent but untaught grammatical rules. But there aren't."

Mathematical rules get more complex than grammatical rules rather quickly. Also, the former have less social value (and much less room for incoherence) than the latter.

As to your examples: what about the average amount of time the adult(s) spent with the children, the nature of their verbal interaction, and the behavior of the children as they developed the creoles (did they develop at all, or did they emerge fully formed)? Pinker has glossed over these details and used vague anecdotes, as he does throughout this book, to "prove" his innatist hypothesis. All he has shown is that young children are (sometimes) better at learning linguistic rules than older ones. There are good reasons, outside of innateness, why this might be (fewer other patterns occupying their minds, greater urgency of communication, etc.) which most cognitive linguists refuse to consider.

"But of course, since this does not account for the stochastic nature of the neural pathways, it is all LIES LIES LIES."

If the stochasticity is indeed a fact, it should encourage researchers to look at alternative explanations for their results, and to question the methods they have used in analyzing them.

The author mentions that inaccurate models were implemented on account of limitations in technology. If people in cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science have largely ignored connectionist models in favor of symbolic models because they were easier to implement, then it's understandable that linguists followed suit. Nowadays there is greater interest in statistical natural language processing, corpus research, and linguistic models that incorporate processing. It seems like everyone needs to catch up with each other. If linguists could formulate their theories in terms that didn't literally require hard-wiring, then maybe they could be implemented in connectionist models. I think there is some of that, but then I don't know how concerned linguists are with the specific requirements for implementation in the brain.

Also, is hard-wiring required for something to be innate?

I think that the regularity of the creole reflects the frequency of its use rather than anything innate

If creoles can emerge in a single generation, as compared to how long it took for human language to emerge (don't know but assuming more than a single generation), doesn't that suggest that it's something more than the frequency of use?

If I understand your question, no, but the article seems to show that symbols cannot grow in the brain any more than they can be hard-wired.

"If creoles can emerge in a single generation, as compared to how long it took for human language to emerge (don't know but assuming more than a single generation), doesn't that suggest that it's something more than the frequency of use?"

It's conceivable to me that language emerged within two generations. Pidgins are less consistent than creoles because their speakers have no need to develop and learn a full lexicon, or to maintain every communicative distinction. Children, who use their first language in a wide range of contexts, need to do all of these things, and will modify what adults teach them if it serves their purposes better.

The stochastic ocnnectivity of the cortex is based on comparing connectivity across individuals, both in animals and in humans. By now no neuroscientist will look for similar connections across individuals in the cortex, because it is obvious to everybody that there aren't.

Ofcourse that is not an absolute proof, but you are not going to get a better proof for anything.

"It can be argued that the way to propagate symbol tokens is learned, or acquired by some other process. This, however, would require some part of the brain to know (in some sense) in advance the appropriate transformation (|X| -> |Y|) for each |X| between each pair of locations, so it can direct the acquisition process. In a system with stochastic low-level connectivity, there is no way to know this transformations in advance, so this is not a possible explanation."

Why does some other part of the brain have to know in advance which transformation is required? Couldn't the brain just respond predictably to input from the rest of the nervous system? (Could static connections for features of perceptions be formed during cognitive development so that the relationship between connections and features of perceptions was one to one?) What if there are no representations in the brain? (Do philosophers have a position on this?) I'm sorry if I haven't understood everything in the paper.

Comments from a review of the paper here:

"From a neurobiological point of view the neural assembly theory based on many experimental finding is one of the favourite approach to discussing the author's topic. The recent discovery of stimulus induced cortical synchronization in the visual system now provides a basis for bringing neural mechanisms of local and global stimulus encoding into juxtaposition with connectionist conceptualizations, with a view of accounting for construction of subsymbolic composites out of elementary stimulus features, on the way towards creating symbolic representation. The author does not refer to this important approach."

I wonder if it's like this for hearing. If not, maybe it would explain why my memory of music is so poor.

If structure is acquired in a non-random way (i.e., if it is not learned), information about the structure has to be stored somewhere in advance. Stochastic connectivity would seem to rule out any kind of storage.

"Comments from a review of the paper here:
[...]"

That interested me as well. YH tries to dismiss the idea here, but I'm not sure how conclusively he does so.

limiting the study of this purely to what goes on within the brain is a mistake, maybe?

Kieran, do you mind my asking how you found the human-brain.org site?

"do you mind my asking how you found the human-brain.org site?"

Through Google; I was searching for info on syntactic traces and found one of the psycholinguistics pages.

"limiting the study of this purely to what goes on within the brain is a mistake, maybe?"

Purely to the cortex, you mean? There are parts of the peripheral nervous system with more (though not much more) precise connections than the CNS.

No. We already know enough to be sure that it is only the
brain that does thinking. This was known for about 2000
years, since the experiemnts that they did in Alexandria
where they actually cut live people (apparently, only
criminals) apart.

We also know enough to be sure that the main thinking part
is the cortex.

Even if neural activity is stochastic, it appears that connectionist models have a way of using stochastic input to determine symbolic output, namely, activation values for nodes.

The claim that I make is not thatthe activity is random.
It is that the connectivity is stochastic, by which I
Mean varies randomly accross individuals. That is established
by comparing the connectivity across individuals. The full
discussion is in section 4 of http://human-brain.org/n-brain-symbols.html .

Where did you get the idea that the claim is that the
activity is random?

"It tells us that the set of neurons which will tend to become active as a result of activity of some specific neuron is stochastic, i.e. uncorrelated to the set that will tend to become active as a result of the activity of any other neuron, even in the same brain."

I understood this as if event A occurs in the real world, the connection from a to b may become active or the connection from a' to b' may become active, etc. My problem is how do you know what events the brain is responding to?

If, in fact, you are saying in response to event A, the connection from a to b may become active in Person X and the connection from a' to b' in Person Y, I don't really see why this is a problem. I don't have a background in neuroscience, and I get the impression that a lot of effort is put into localization of neural activity, but if that kind of granular localization is disproved does it necessarily disprove nativist assumptions? Couldn't the "genetic programming" be heuristic?

How is this different from the claim that the brain is programmed to develop a certain structure, the problems with which I tried to explain above?

I don't see how you can understand this from my statement that you quote. There is nothing in my statement about (a)events in the real world, (b) connections that become active (c) 'or' relations between anything. Where did you get this from?

> Couldn't the "genetic programming" be heuristic?

How is this different from saying there is no genetical programming?

(YH: sorry i was unable to follow through on my questions, but i have yet to read your proposal and i probably wouldn't have the background knowledge to know what to ask anyways to clear up my confusion. it seems unfair for me to expect you to anticipate what i'm trying to ask.)

In The Algebraic Mind, Marcus argues that variability across individuals is not necessarily an argument for learning (161-162):

We noted that although brains seem to share a macroscopic structure, their microstructure differs to some extent; this too does not entail learning. For instance, we see the same kind of thing in the development of the vasculature of the heart (e.g., Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997, p. 189). The overall hierarchical organization of the heart (such as arteries, veins, and capillaries) is constant at a functional level across individuals, but the exact number, length, and placement of blood vessels varies from individual to individual. The genetic code clearly does not provide a blueprint specifying exactly what type of blood vessel will be in a particular location. Instead, it provides something more like a plan for how to build a heart. This plan is systematic (for example, "new vessels always arise from old vessels by sprouting") (Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997, p. 169) and is tightly constrained, leading to organisms that are physically different from one another but functionally similar. Yet this functional similarity arises without learning. Analogously, human brains may be functionally similar even though some variability exists in the exact placement of cells. The lesson from the heart is that such functional similarity need not depend in any way on learning.

I don't know if Harpaz was using the stochastic connectivity of the cortex as an argument for learning, but it need not be interpreted as evidence against nativism.

> We noted that although brains seem to share a macroscopic
> structure, their microstructure differs to some extent; this
> too does not entail learning. For instance, we see the same
> kind of thing in the development of the vasculature of the
> heart (e.g., Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997, p. 189).

Interesting argument. When was the last time you have seen
a heart thinking?

The difference is that for pumping blood, the exact details
don't matter. For thinking, the exact details do matter.

dud, it appeals to fuckwits whose very naff little interests it -- sur-prize -- serves, e.g.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/21/william-leith

The reason that the man shortage has become the perceived reality is that women in their late 30s write books and newspaper columns, whereas men in their early 20s tend not to. They just sit around talking to their mates about football and cars. And then, when they get to their late 30s, they sleep with lots of younger women, and sit around talking to their mates about football and cars.

yeah yeah, you and david baddiel.

i very much like his style of rhetorically asking a qn and the answering it incorrectly.

i'll still rep for that flesch book, comeuppance, and i think that evo pysch is... interesting.