ALL IN THE FAMILY:
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOBIOLOGY, AND CLINICAL PHENOMENA

James Brody, Ph.D.

"Evolutionary Psychology" (EP) is relatively new and should enhance rather than supplant SB. EP concepts closely rely on a "hunter-gatherer" (H&G) model of adaptive physiological and behavioral systems for particular environmental conditions. EP, as stated by Barkow, et al., in the Adapted Mind, (Oxford, 1992) rests on assumptions that:

1. the human mind is a mosaic of "information processing systems" that are extraordinarily efficient in handling specific kinds of stimuli and responses to them,
2. human evolution has been generally static since the Pleistocene,
3. human information processing systems (complex adaptive systems, functions, or mechanisms) were evolved because they solved recurrent, universal problems of survival and propagation (food and mate acquisition, family coherence, and cooperation) associated with Pleistocene H&G conditions and did it more efficiently than earlier systems,
4. these systems are "content specific" and generate many invariant aspects of human culture.

There are problems and benefits with this view. EP would appear to share the same circular morass of the Instinct Crowd from decades ago. ("Why do we eat cheese?" "It's instinctive." "How do we know it's instinctive?" "Because so many of us do it.") There are two escapes: (1) EP will use hunter-gatherer hypotheses to generate predictions about unstudied, subtle aspects of human performance in cognitive and social tasks. (2) It also tries to weaken the circularity issue by specifying physiological systems that solve an adaptive problem. Rather than assuming the independent evolution of a dozen components that just happen to work well together, EP asks "What adaptive problem is solved? What physiological resources would be needed to solve it? Is it possible that visual and motor systems work so well because their interplay led to fuller bellies at some point long ago?"

When things go well, EP generates more parsimonious explanations than other models of human behavior. Thinking about the interplay of selection pressures upon our biological equipment should give us new insights and predictions about and control of our overt conduct. EP then tries to use those explanations to organize our ideas about contemporary human adaptive systems. EP thus gives us a convenient, organized set of organizational hooks for many existing bits of information about ourselves, ranging from the data on infant visual and taste preferences, to male-female differences in language, perception, and motor skills, and through even larger social phenomena.

There is even a suggestion that our modern angst, experienced by in some of us, arises from a mismatch between our biological equipment and our technically-driven culture. Some types of anxiety could be attributed to a mismatch between our basic adaptive systems for building close relationships and the fleeting nature of modern society that makes such relationships difficult. Depression is commonly understood to be associated with shorter days, social rejection, and repeated failures. EP may suggest that there are at least three different types of depression with different neural foundations and different responses to different treatments. Mania can be seen as an exaggeration of behavior associated with achieving social dominance and with mating. A similar analysis is likely be successful for personality disorders, especially if they are viewed as complex adaptive systems in their own right.

Meanwhile, sociobiology (SB) cannot be ignored. It is one foundation for Evolutionary Psychology and is as much about us as it is about ants and bees. SB describes functional relationships between key variables (largely associated with population density and reproductive success) and builds those relationships into models that describe communication, competition, and cooperation, and evolution. The relationships can be expressed in a way that applies across species. The language is often that of "functional relationships," (e.g., as population density increases, competition increases,) rather than static, descriptive values. Observing these functional relationships in shorter-lived, sometimes manipulated creatures and in an extraordinary range of species hints of the power of the same relationships for ourselves. These principles become more obvious in ourselves as nature or human failure produces more extreme social or environmental conditions. Altruism, for example, is more likely when a species, nearly any species, is getting established; competition is more evident when a territory is saturated. (Check your own courtesy in an empty vs. a filled parking lot if you doubt me!)

Even though SB is older than Evolutionary Psychology and devotes more attention to nonhuman species, we had better respect it. SB mechanisms predate the Pleistocene; we and other creatures had to master Reproduction 101 or we would never have evolved to the point of cooperative hunting and gathering cultures. SB effects may be more troublesome or helpful than we suspect at present because our range of behavior is restricted by comparative environmental abundance. Things will change when water and oil become more scarce.

Clinical applications can also be attempted with SB concepts. For example, one treatment for managing aggression is increasing physical space (cutting population density). Instances of sibling rivalry can be tempered by using the Red Queen concept (have the boy pay his sister a fine whenever he's annoying or change his bedtime so he goes to bed later than she does).

Finally, (in fun!) there is a new set of ecological niches is created by SB & EP for the crowded, competitive field of psychology. There are new opportunities to form societies, start journals, establish degree programs, and define consulting relationships. There are even chances to swap ideas late into the dark and with the zeal of any new movement. We can blurt, speculate, and cook ideas about what might be, just as we once did in graduate school but now in the context of an on-line forum!

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