Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 18:16:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: HAB: In Praise of Evolutionary Psychology For over a week now, I've wanted to assert my delight at seeing the publication of Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, _The Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ (Harvard UP), surely to be a landmark in the history of theorizing natural selection. Yet, of course, the theory of natural selection doesn't obviously relate to evolution in JH's social anthropological sense. Nonetheless, JH clearly recognizes the anthropological deep-seatedness of his own formal pragmatic discourse in the "history" of our form of life and thereby wagers (or "nests") his discursive project in the large-scale interdisciplinarity of philosophical anthropology, which is not merely The Question of the conceptual foundations of interdisciplinarity, but also The Question of our "being" after metaphysicalism. And this discursivity is evolving. Let me try to render this situation briefly (i.e., give me a break on the enthymemicness of this). John Searle importantly says: "The mind is what the brain does" (_Rediscovery of the Mind_, Cambridge, 1992), which the cognitive neuroscientist knows well, as does the pediatrician, the developmental psychologist, the social worker, the nutritionist, and the learning disabilities specialist. NO doctor of medicine has any difficulty recognizing that we humans commonly "look" like primates, in the way we habitually (if not stupidly and addictively) "live" our lives. Psychoanalysis dramatized this first, perhaps (or was it the novelist), but now the depth-anthropological understanding of our 1% genetic difference from chimps is more sophisticated, GIVEN the understanding of science which belongs to science itself (rather than armchair sociologists of science; see any issue of any scientific journal, or _Science without Laws_, Ronald N. Giere, Chicago, 1999; or _Theory and Truth: Philosophical Critique within Foundational Science, Lawrence Sklar, Oxford 2000). Evolutionary psychology exemplifies the exciting "theater" of interdisciplinarity in the sciences that reach from "systems biology" (_Science_, 1 March 2002) to "the bionic human" (_Science_, 2 February2002), which has nothing to do with scientism, by the way. According to The Center for Evolutionary Psychology, at the University of California at Santa Barbara: "Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems--programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature. "The goals of the Center are (1) to promote the discovery and systematic mapping of the adaptations that comprise the evolved species-typical architecture of the human mind and brain, and (2) to explore how cultural and social phenomena can be explained as the output of such newly discovered or newly mapped psychological adaptations." And this venture is not proceeding uncritically! We have the biological revolution of the past half century to thank for the discourse of biophilia (EarthMindedness, if you will), "green" politics and the discovery of our real "place" in nature with other complex forms of life (the discourse of dwindling diversity and our duty of care, as the governing species). De-mystification of our humanity, beyond being some special "creation" of a Being imagined by our ancestors--which IS the mythical *intuition* of our evolutionarity!--is an emancipation from a division of (1) an "ethic of the species" (JH, "On the way to liberal eugenics?") from (2) our "essential" planetarity. ...Which, dare I add, we "share" with undiscovered other planets. The sense of *cultural* evolutionarity that I sketched last month ("Evolutionary thinking," 0202.114, first half-or-so, i.e., up to line 265, where Ken poses his "star" of postmodern theology) is accordant with the broadly / deeply "natural" planetarity of our being or presence in "The Local Region" (which includes thousands of "local" galaxies, of which "our" Milky Way includes approximately 400 BILLION stars), among other Regions of "that which regions" (Heidegger, "Conversation On A Country Path" / Gelassenheit). The anthropological literature that backs up evolutionary psychology is immense, including the normal, healthy "camp" of skepticism, reflected in the important anthology edited by Valerie Gray Hardcastle, _Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays_, MIT 1999. But controversy belongs to good science (e.g., see the editorial of this week's _Science_, addressing their decision to publish the highly controversial research article on acoustic fusion [<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/295/5561/1793> ]. See also this week's AP story on this [http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020305/ap_on_sc/tabletop_fusion_3]. I can provide a pdf of either of these references.) Yet, the complement of skepticism (such as _The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics_, Paul L. Farber, U.California, 1994) is the compelling research that annoys the skeptic, such as _Evolution of Cognition_, edited by Cecilia Heyes, MIT 2000; or _Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, by E. Sober and D.S. Wilson, Harvard 1998; and _Heirarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm, Harvard 1999. More exotically--but, I would argue, of profound importance--is the ultimate problem of our evolutionarity in the probable Event of "Contact". As reported in this week's NYTimes Science Section, the problem of communication is immensely difficult, while the Event of Contact will be inestimably affective ("Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds," http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/05/science/space/05SETI.html )--which I mention only to dramatize the reality *going forward* that we face, as being increasingly the designers of our own evolution, which the discourse of evolutionary psychology metonymically echoes. The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku expressed this superbly in _Visions_, Anchor 1996, a book that sought to integrate his years of interviews with leading scientists about what they see up the pike of Time (which expresses the futurity of our evolutionarity). WAY forward, they see a "planetary civilization" in a universe of three "Types" of planetary civilization, those mastering terrestrial energy (e.g., our present "greenhouse" problem of mastery); II: those mastering their star ("[Freeman] Dyson has speculated that, by building a giant sphere around their sun, such a civilization might be able to harnass their sun's total energy output," 18); and III: civilizations that "must reach out to neighboring star systems and clusters, and eventually evolve into a galactic civilization," as our ordinary Sci-Fi culture takes for granted, as part of the cultural imagination of what we are becoming. Like it or not, David Hawkes of this world, evolutionary psychology is here to stay, because we exist. We are eternally the "renaissance" species of the Earth. Regards, Gary __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! 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