Bouchard on Evolutionary Psych & Behavior Genetics

[James Brody]

7/10/05-10/28/05

The human evolution crowd produced a generation of genes-talk that ignored individual differences when evolutionary Psychology (EP) and behavior genetics engaged in too much parallel play (See Bailey, 1998). Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby (1992) provided the icon for EP, a book called, The Adapted Mind, that argued for the primacy of human instincts in the generation of cultures but the trio also proclaimed from their armchairs that we MUST all be the same in our instincts. They made a case for a universal "human nature" and didn't pay much attention to the concept of genetic "metical traits" that are not binary but the outcome of large numbers of genes that produce behaviors of different intensities and targets and that may interact with environments in surprising ways. They told two stories in one moment: genes are important for human cultures and genes are irrelevant for individual ones. While attacking the "standard social science model" that discounts biological events, they also adopted it (a display of tit-for-tat between competing ideologies?).
Behavior genetics became a child for biologists and psychometricians whose spotlights created a different, more complex set of shadows as two parents, one represented by EP and the second by behavior genetics, defined human nature.
At least one parent, however, still misses the other.
Thomas Bouchard remarked: "Genetic influence on the course of development and most features of biological organisms is taken for granted in biology and generalized to behavioral traits by behavioral biologists (Trivers 1985). These scientists presume that the human species evolved just as all the other species did, and that human behavior reflects, in part, our evolutionary history. Many psychologists, however, become upset, if not apoplectic, when evolutionary and genetic facts are proposed as part of the framework necessary to understand the etiology of human behavior and development (See Gottleib, 1991; Oyama, 1985, 1988; for contrary position, see Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Charlesworth, 1992; Plomin, 1988; Wright, 1994). We believe, however, that a framework informed by quantitative genetics and evolutionary theory is both highly appropriate and extremely useful. It allows for a quantitative description of some significant facts, it is consistent with standard practice in a variety of scientific disciplines, it incorporates our understanding that human beings are biological organisms whose functional and developmental mechanisms operate under the same biological constraints as do other organisms, and it provides a solid frame of references for reexamining the validity of the implicit and often deliberately unstated argument that human beings are somehow are a unique species that has evolved beyond ordinary forms of scientific understanding. This view permeates many segments of psychology and is redolent with the kind of mysticism that the scientific mind has had to battle for centuries."
Bouchard published his essay nine years ago.
Our store of ideas now carries goods from statistical physics, developmental biology, behavior genetics, and natural selection: there is not only grandeur but coherence in edifice that assembles without an assembler and according to the dictates of its components rather than a design penciled by an architect.

References:

Bailey, J. M. (1998) Can behavior genetics contribute to evolutionary behavioral science? In Crawford, C. & Krebs D (Eds) Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 211-234.
Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D., Tellegen, A., & McGue, M. (1996) Genes, drives, environment, and experience. Chapter 1 in C.P. Benbow & D. Lubinski (Eds.) Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp 5-43.
Copyright, James Brody, 2005, all rights reserved