SIO268: Defending Evolutionary Psychology with Lindsey Osterman

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 268. I'm Thomas, and as you can hear, I have a cold. Sorry about that. And that is Lindsey Osterman. How you doing, Lindsey?

0:00:38 Lindsey: Awesome. Like, really good. I don't have a cold or anything.

0:00:40 Thomas: I'll rub it in. Yeah.

0:00:42 Lindsey: Yeah. That

0:00:44 Thomas: Also, I'm awesome because we had such a good time on the stream last night. That was a ton of fun. Just to let everybody know.

0:00:49 Lindsey: Was fun. Yeah, I was very impressed with the questions we got.

0:00:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, we were on my Twitch stream, twitch.tv slash SeriousPod. I was trying to beat Battletoads. Spoiler, I didn't. Have not advanced past the ice level. It's impossible. But anyway, during that time, we also took questions from listeners. And, geez, we talked about a lot of stuff, Lindsay. That was fun. You got a good kin selection versus group selection question. You broke that down for us a bit. What And then it eventually turned into a Comedy Shoe Shine Dad episode. So that also happened.

0:01:22 Thomas: But anyway, next time, make sure to come and hang out live and ask questions and interact. It was so much fun. I can't wait till we do it again.

0:01:11 Lindsey: Yeah uh-huh. I Yeah yeah me too.

0:01:32 Thomas: All right. Well, having said that, everyone, go check it out. Twitch.tv slash SeriousPod. Oh, also, I should let everybody know that for opening arguments, we're doing a fundraiser. It's like the last, you know, the last chance to swing things in Georgia. It's this Sunday, December 20th from four to seven Eastern or one to, you know, four my time, which is exactly when the kids are napping. So, just, are supposed to be napping, I am letting you know that I am sacrificing a lot. We all make sacrifices. I am sacrificing my kids nap time to do this live stream. So come and join us for this live stream. It's going to be so much fun. It has, of course, opening arguments, getting Ross and Kerry on the live stream, Mueller, she wrote, Ice Cream Social, Legal Eagle, Devin Stone, and, of course, the crew from Puzzle in a Thunderstorm. That's a killer lineup and it's all to raise money for the Georgia Senate races. Make sure to come join us on Sunday.

0:01:45 Lindsey: Yeah that's exciting. I'll be there. Mm

0:02:30 Thomas: Nice. Okay, so today's episode, by way of introduction, I know we've done a few on this before, but that was 100 years ago, so just pretend we haven't. We've gotten some comments here and there since Lindsay started coming on the show more often, which are about Evo Psych as a field, because that tends to be your specialty, where you're coming from. And I think I think people have gotten the impression there have been various critics of Evo Psyche that have made the rounds, especially among the skeptic circles. And I think some people have been left with the impression that Evo Psych is kind of a problematic field, or that it's all just so stories to justify sexism.

0:02:40 Lindsey: Hmm. Yeah, I

0:03:12 Thomas: There are a lot of negative claims about the field. So we thought it'd be a good idea for maybe Lindsay to come clarify that conversation for us. So why don't you go ahead and start us off? How do you how do you respond to those kind of claims?

0:03:25 Lindsey: Don't think it's a problematic field. And but I do understand where the intuitions come from. And actually, I think I've developed more and more sympathy for where people are coming from with these objections over time. Because I've seen more of the problems people are talking about. They're just they're not coming from within the field, I Think is going to be my main point here. And also, I don't want people to forget that we did those episodes a million years ago. Because I went back and I

0:03:45 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, don't forget that we did them. But just pretend we don't. It's been a long four years or whatever. So pretend we Don't remember the content of them very well.

0:03:59 Lindsey: Don't wanna forget that either. So I went back and re-listened to them because I didn't want it to be redundant. And like I was wondering how well they would stand up because I know that my views on these things and my attitudes have changed so much. But I think they stand up. And I think it's really good stuff. And it's not going to be the same kinds of things that we talk about today. So So yeah, I think if people are interested in this, that's good listening. So that was back when the show was Atheistically Speaking, and the episodes were 265 and 266. Anyway, okay, so I just want to start off with a basic definition. What is evolutionary psychology? And then I'm going to get into some common objections that I hear and the claims that I would want to make to respond to those objections. So evolutionary psychology applies evolutionary theory to the study of the human mind, and to behavior. And so the assumptions of the field are that the human species was shaped by natural selection. This does not tend to be the premise that skeptics

0:04:22 Thomas: Okay. All Yeah.

0:05:00 Lindsey: Are skeptical of. The second assumption is that our brain minds were also shaped by national selection. I don't think that's a huge leap, right? And finally, that the mind can be understood as an integrated network of cognitive modules, which are like these information processing units that were we're shaped to help our ancestors solve specific problems of survival and reproduction, right? So, I mean, so far, I think that all sounds great, right? I don't think there's anything objectionable about the assumptions of the field. So, you know, where does this intuition come from about evolutionary psychology being garbage? Because as you mentioned, like it is a very widespread belief. And I think it's interesting that it's a widespread belief among people who who otherwise accept evolutionary biology and nonetheless believe that the way that it's being applied to humans is or might be garbage.

0:05:46 Thomas: Yeah I

0:05:53 Lindsey: So I'm really glad that we're getting to do this.

0:05:53 Thomas: Think it likely let me know your opinion on this. I Because and I'm not blaming feminists. I'm saying like within debates about like, oh, gender roles, you know, there are people who have rigid views of gender roles. And then often those people you use Evo psych or those kinds of arguments or evolution to justify those rigid gender views.

0:06:01 Lindsey: Yeah. No.

0:06:18 Lindsey: Yes.

0:06:19 Thomas: Views. And then, you know, feminists will respond like you're just, that's not valid. And so I suppose maybe what you just said earlier about how it's coming from outside the field, maybe the problem isn't with EvoPsych, but with people misusing it.

0:06:30 Lindsey: Yes. I think that that's absolutely the case. Yeah. And I've got a couple of examples. There is this one quote unquote study. It wasn't really a study, but there's one study that people send me a lot if they're trying to convince me that the field is garbage, and it's worth spending a few minutes talking about that and where that actually came from and the person who wrote it. But yeah, so there's three objections, and the one that you just raised is definitely one of them, like almost verbatim. I don't think you read my notes, Thomas.

0:07:05 Lindsey: But yeah. So let's jump into these. So for two of these objections in particular, there's a very reasonable sort of like intuitive emotional reaction that I think is motivating them. And I think I understand and sympathize with them a lot, right? So I want that to be up front and center. Um, so first intuition, I think this is the easiest to dispense with in some ways, um, is that, or the first objection rather, is that maybe evolutionary psychology is garbage because evolutionary theory applies to all living species except humans, right? And so I'm intentionally sort of starting with the strongest version of that objection, and I highly doubt that very many people in your audience, audience specifically, would want to own that position, right?

0:07:48 Thomas: Is this like coming from a Christian view more or like a religious view? Okay.

0:07:51 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, right. So religious moderates are trying to reconcile Genesis with what they learned in biology might take this position and do, right, I've encountered people like that. But there's a weaker version of this objection that I do hear from more secular skeptical folks, which is that, you know, sure, maybe there are some similarities between how like hamsters and dolphins select mates with how humans select mates, but things are a lot more complicated with humans because we have culture and complex cognition. And so sometimes people question how much the principles of evolutionary theory can explain human behavior versus the behavior of other animals, and how much requires other explanations that invoke culture, which they see as a competing explanation. And I do not, right, that's, that's something that we'll hopefully have time to get into a little bit. You know, a little bit of mind reading here that I hope is charitable and reasonable.

0:08:42 Lindsey: I think that part of this objection is rooted in this kind of like, emotional resistance to viewing what are really very central and important aspects of our experiences through like an animal lens, right? So for example, For it's just interesting to learn about the fact that across the entire animal kingdom, sex differences and the cost of reproduction predict the suite of physical and behavioral adaptations that differ between males and females, right? So the sex that has to invest more in offspring, which tends to be, invest less, excuse me, so the sex must invest less in offspring which is usually males, tends to be less choosy about sexual partners and more aggressive and competing for mates. Primates and you See those patterns, again, across species, and cats and seahorses and primates and so on. But when you make that claim about people, it sounds different. So to say that men are more interested in casual sex than women because of an evolved sex difference causes, I think, more of an emotional reaction than the general claim about other species.

And I really do get the discomfort, because reducing this, you know, incredibly complex and meaningful part of our lives to this one aspect of our species' history feels very removed, I think, from the richness of the experiences that we have. And I think that causes some resistance. And additionally, and I think this is a nice segue into the next objection, which you previewed a minute ago, I recognize that the claims about patterns in the mating behavior of non-human animals doesn't tend to get weaponized

0:09:21 Thomas: Right.

0:10:09 Lindsey: In sociopolitical discussions about whether it's okay to subjugate women, for example. And, you know, obviously claims about patterns in human mating have been used that way, or misused that way. So

0:10:20 Thomas: Yeah. So I see the problem here, but and I kind of see both sides of that. On one hand, you don't want to be like, well, humans are just animals. And so in some way, like, you're excusing some sort of bad behavior maybe or something. But on the other hand, like, when I think about an analogous thing, um, and let me know if, if, if this makes sense, um, like diet, you know, like it's one thing to say, you know, we are, because of our evolution, we're attracted to certain foods, like, you know, bullshit carbs and sugars and stuff, that it's something to say that, and then it's another to say, like, but it's also like it probably would be better if we don't give in to that. You know, you can kind of, both things, can be true. Like, it both can be true that it's because of our evolution, are certain decisions we tend to make. Like, we tend to, you know, absent any other, like, cultural effort of will on our part, you know, we would just eat terrible crap, you know, probably.

0:10:38 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:16 Lindsey: No.

0:11:16 Thomas: And I think the evidence in shows that humans do often eat terrible crap, but that doesn't mean, like, there doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who, you know, recognize that, or as a society, we kind of recognize, or should recognize, what we maybe should be eating that'd a little healthier and push back against kind of the force of our evolutionary history and our diet.

0:11:37 Lindsey: I, I think that that, that is a good analogy to what we're talking about, and it comes down to the naturalistic fallacy, right? I mean, the claims in evolutionary theory in general, right, but they're more salient, evolutionary, evolutionary psychology, are claims about the history of certain traits, as you just laid out, but like they don't, they don't imply that those traits are good, or that we shouldn't be trying to to modify behaviors that are harmful and problematic, um, and so on. Yeah, and again, like, typically, you don't hear, um, these claims being, you don't hear evolutionary psychologists making that mistake.

It tends to be people outside the field that are making that mistake. So, yeah, okay, so you set me up pretty nicely for the second one, right? So the second objection that I hear is that, you know, maybe applying evolutionary theory to humans could work in principle, but that the field in practice is garbage because the actual people who are doing the research are pseudoscientists and they have questionable motives, and specifically they have motives to justify harmful social positions about race and gender and so on. And again, this intuition doesn't come from nowhere, you

0:11:55 Thomas: Mm hmm. Right. Yeah.

0:12:42 Lindsey: Know, like, you can, you can do a quick search for, like, evolutionary psych and Google News, or, you know, uh, the words that are related to to that, right, and find things like, you know, does science show that men are programmed to cheat? Or, you know, scientists prove that black women are unattractive, that's the article we're going to talk about in a minute, and like, yeah, okay, so, like, if that were really representative of evolutionary psychologists or evolutionary psychology in general, like, yeah, that sounds like a garbage field. But yeah,

0:13:02 Thomas: Jeez. Yeah, And let me bring up an example. Gad Saad is an evolutionary psychologist and he sucks, and he does this kind of thing where he justifies like conservative, you know, gender views and stuff like that because of evolutionary psychology, right?

0:13:28 Lindsey: It's, you know, this is the interesting thing to me is that there are so many people who, you Know, are claiming the title of evolutionary psychology, and people think of them that way. And they are people that like, I am, I would barely be aware of, accept that people are, you know, sending me to them. Because they're not, they are not mainstream evolutionary psychologists. They're not the people that you see at conferences.

0:13:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:54 Lindsey: It's just, yeah, they're Not representative of the field. And some of them aren't even in it, we wouldn't claim them at all. So Gadsad, like I wouldn't have been aware of. Yeah.

0:14:01 Thomas: You know what he He, I'm just looking into him, because he, he uses that label, but I don't, I don't even know what his background is, because it, he, it also looks like he's a a professor of marketing, so it's, it's like, you know, and, and sorry for anyone who's not familiar with this Gad guy, he's, he's a real piece of shit that I, like, kind of made a few waves in the skeptic community a few years back, but he's such a colossal asshole that he, he just, like, blocks anyone who, who doesn't buy into his, like, cult of personality. Anyway, um, he, he seems to be a professor of business, and I'm looking in his, he's listed as, like, you know, has it, having some, some expertise and evolutionary psychology, but I'm not really seeing what, where his, it looks like his, his education is in other fields. So who knows? Yeah. So anyway, point taken that he's, he's not some, like, a major evolutionary psychologist, regardless of maybe if he does have any sort of background in it, but, but a lot of people will use that label maybe. Okay.

0:14:11 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah yeah, it's kind of interesting because the the guy who wrote the article about black women being less attractive, he's also in a business department and also does not clearly have training in evolutionary psychology or evolutionary biology or anything. So that, I

0:15:14 Thomas: Huh. Interesting. Maybe it's a common selling point of like, cause it looks like evolutionary psychology to predict how people will buy stuff. Maybe that's a pitch that can work in business.

0:15:26 Lindsey: Guess, yeah, I really don't know. But that is an interesting coincidence, or maybe it's not a coincidence. I don't Know. Yeah, so I think that the issue with this objection is twofold, right? So sometimes it's that there's actual good research from evolutionary psychology that gets communicated poorly. And we're going to talk about an example of that. And sometimes it's bad research, right? And or research by pseudoscientists who have questionable motives. Sometimes bad research is held up as representative of the field when in actuality, the first people to call it garbage would be reputable mainstream evolutionary psychologists.

0:16:02 Lindsey: And again, like I think people really should, if they're interested in this, go back to those old episodes because there's a ton of good stuff there that I think responds to this intuition and that we're not going to cover again today. So anyway, so I think that that objection comes from an honest place. There really are bad actors. I just, you know, I want to make the case that that doesn't, that that's not how you should be evaluating the field. We don't claim those folks. So third and final objection is that maybe evolutionary psychology is garbage because although applying evolutionary theory to humans could work in principle, the scientific study of psychological constructs is less scientific. And I've heard this in some versions several times.

0:16:01 Thomas: I

0:16:47 Lindsey: So psychological construct versus like studying physical structures or observable behavior, right, which is mostly what you see in evolutionary biology. And that, you know, to try to study psychological constructs here, especially in the context of evolutionary theory, requires some speculative leaps of logic. So this was, Carrier made some version of this argument, if memory serves well. But what I want to point out here is that that's just a critique of psychology generally, right? Like evolutionary psychology is not particularly vulnerable to that criticism. And I don't think it's true that you can't be scientific in studying psychological constructs. I mean, that whole idea is kind of a hangover from behaviorism.

0:17:34 Lindsey: So when psychology was dominated by behaviorism, the behaviorists rejected the idea that studying anything that wasn't directly observable, in other words, all the contents of the mind, could be scientific. They thought that wasn't possible. But there are virtually no psychologists working today who think that it's impossible to find meaningful ways of quantifying and measuring internal processes like thought and emotion. There are good ways to do that. And so, you know, again, I don't think that evolutionary psychology in particular is very vulnerable to this critique. And it's worth saying that we have decades and decades of research from evolutionary biology that establishes, you know, how to study physical and behavioral traits in terms of their function in order to piece together how those traits evolved.

0:18:21 Lindsey: And we also have entire fields, namely psychology, dedicated to finding reliable ways of indirectly observing internal states with all the complexities and difficulties that that entails. And so F-psych is just the convergence of those two disciplines. Those are the three objections. And then I have three claims, each of which that I want to make about evolutionary psychology, and each of them addresses sort of one or more of the objections that we just talked about. So first claim I'm going to try to support is that evolutionary psychology is a scientistic, and the claims that it makes are as testable as the claims in evolutionary biology. We're going to walk through some fun research about babies and plants For that one, so that'll be fun.

The second claim is that instances of research that are being done in bad faith or to promote harmful ideologies are uncommon. And when they happen, they are rejected by this area. And the third is that evolutionary explanations don't compete with learning or culture to explain psychological phenomena, which I think is a very common misconception and sort of response that I get when I'm trying to explain the role of evolutionary mechanisms in psychology. So here's our first claim. So claims of evolutionary psychologists are as testable as those that you find in evolutionary biology. Overview of this response, I think, so claims about psychological evolutionary mechanisms are tested in exactly the same way that claims about biological evolutionary mechanisms mechanisms are.

0:19:04 Thomas: Love

0:19:55 Lindsey: But I get that part of the rub here is that you can't directly see a psychological adaptation in the same way that you see an evolved part of body, right, like a hand or an eye. And so people are like, okay, so how do you know it's there, you know, this evolved psychological mechanism? And how do that it's actually evolved, right? And the answer is very similarly to the way that you figure out that you figured that out with a physical structure, which is by examining its its function. So you can state specific hypotheses about the form and function of a psychological mechanism, and then test whether or not the predictions about it are borne out in data, right? And so I've got this, I think it's a really fun research example to illustrate what this looks like.

0:20:39 Thomas: Fun research examples. Those are my favorite things.

0:20:41 Lindsey: Yeah, you're going to like this one. I want to hear if you've got any fun stories about your kids that line up with any of this. So I think the best way way to demonstrate this is just to go through the details of this research. I thought about talking about incest again, but, man, did we talk about a lot of incest in that last pair, but

0:20:57 Thomas: Did we? Oh man, enough of that. I must have blocked it out of my memory.

0:20:58 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty fun. I enjoyed it. Yeah. So let's consider a specific psychological adaptation. I think this is really cool. And go through a lot more of the research that has investigated whether it exists and how it works and what it looks like. All right. Okay. So you're a baby, right? Like, no offense, Thomas, but you're your big baby. Okay, so you're baby, and you're out in the woods, I don't know why. And hopefully not alone. And you're surrounded by plants, right, and your baby so you don't know anything about the plants, right? And you know, from what we know about plants, some of them are going to be harmless. Some of the plants are going be food, but plenty of them are going to be very intent on killing you. So if you do what babies do, which is explore your environment by putting literally everything

0:21:21 Thomas: I am? Okay.

0:21:52 Thomas: Yep.

0:21:52 Lindsey: In your mouth, you're going to die, right? If you do that with plants, right. And some of them actually will kill you even if you touch them. Like there's some really gnarly trees that just cause like incredibly severe rashes if you you even like come in contact with them and can be fatal. Yeah, so plants are awful. They're always trying to kill us. So as a species, we have historically over evolutionary time, we've been in this really weird position with plants. And we need to develop sophisticated knowledge of them because one, they're everywhere, right? Unless you live in an urban environment, which our ancestors did not. And they're really important, right? Especially as a food source. But they have also been a recurrent threat over our ancestral history because they don't necessarily have distinguishing features that reliably let you know, like, this kind of plant is a threat and this kind of plant is harmless. Some of them look exactly the same. Right?

0:21:52 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Jeez.

0:22:54 Lindsey: Okay. So plenty of edible plants, plenty of poisonous plants that have extremely small detectable differences. And there's not a really good, reliable way to differentiate. So dangerous plants are likely to have been a ubiquitous, recurrent threat to ancestral humans. And someone coming from an evolutionary perspective would postulate that because of that, because they've been a recurrent thread, it's very likely that humans have some evolved psychological architecture that is specific to plants and that functions to protect us from that threat, especially when we're young, right? As well as some learning architecture that will help us to learn to distinguish over time harmful from valuable plants in a way that minimizes cost. Okay. So it's from that theoretical place that Dr.

0:23:42 Lindsey: Annie Wertz, who is not a medical doctor, but should be referred to as doctor, by the way. So Dr. Anne Wertz, she's a, sorry, yeah.

0:23:49 Thomas: Let's not open that can of worms. Yeah. No.

0:23:54 Lindsey: She's a research psychologist who focuses focuses on developmental evolutionary questions. And she's been conducting for the past few years this super novel, interesting research about how infants interact with plants. And so the two central questions of the research that she's been doing are these. So first, how do human babies, before they develop knowledge and experience with plants, feel about plants? And specifically, do they have any aversions in place to protect them from plant danger? Right, the second is, how do humans develop knowledge of which plants are okay to eat and touch over time, and which plants are dangerous? This is, you know, the developmental aspect, right? And this is the, this is the part that I'm curious if you have intuitions about, right? And it's, it's cool if not, because I'd literally never thought about this until I read her research, but like that, that thing about babies, that they, they reach around, they touch everything, they put everything in their mouths, right? But, but where we're getting to is that maybe they don't do that with plants.

0:24:56 Lindsey: Um, I don't know if you've paid, if you paid attention to any of this or have noticed anything like this.

0:24:40 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Well, Here's the problem, so I want, hopefully there's a another field of cat evolutionary psychology, um, because cats will eat all my fucking plants, and so to the point where I can't even buy flowers for my wife on her birthday because our stupid fucking cats will eat all the plants and barf all over the house and ruin my life, which they did last time I bought on flowers for my wife, which was a couple months ago, and they did it so fast, so fast.

0:25:29 Lindsey: Uh-huh.

0:25:29 Thomas: I knew it was coming. I knew I was like, okay, I'm going to put this somewhere safe, but I got home from the store, and I set it down. I was, like, I got to go pee real quick. Come out of the bathroom, bam, already ate, already barfed within 30 seconds. It is amazing. So, whatever the cat psychology, it's different than baby psychology, so I've covered that. So, as a result, we don't have plants in the house, so there's not really, unfortunately, I don't really, you know, I can't help you here. Sorry.

0:25:43 Lindsey: Sorry, it's not funny. Yeah. Okay. Okay, no, that's fine. That's fine, maybe you can, uh, maybe you can do a replication of the procedure that she used.

0:26:00 Thomas: But we have set up the Christmas tree, and Arlo, who is, well, he's not a baby anymore, but the kids have not, like, gone and eaten the Christmas tree or anything, which is, you know, Arlo's still, he is a bit old now, so hopefully he is putting fewer things directly in his mouth for no reason, but, you know, he hasn't messed with the Christmas tree whatsoever. That's the only tiny bit of evidence I have.

0:26:20 Lindsey: Okay interesting. Okay all right, there should be a callback about that.

0:26:27 Thomas: Meanwhile, the cats, they barf several times over the Christmas. They don't even learn. They keep doing it. God, it's infuriating. Anyway, can

0:26:27 Lindsey: Okay, um, yeah, all right, I'm gonna do some research about what's going on with cats because I've noticed that too. Yeah, yes, yeah, it's

0:26:40 Thomas: I start a cat evolutionary psychology field? Is that okay? I'm going to, I'll start that. Everybody, let me know if you want in.

0:26:47 Lindsey: Possible, that's just evolutionary biology. I don't know, uh, but yes, start it, um, yeah,

0:26:52 Thomas: Okay, so what are the actual science, what does the science show us about this?

0:26:57 Lindsey: Yeah, okay, so, uh, but just to underline that fact, right, like kids learn about tons of things through trial and error, right, just exploring their worlds. And, um, and so it's, it's interesting to put forward that, like, this might, might be a category of objects in their environment that they show a marked sort of tendency not to do that with. But again, the rationale would be it's too risky to experiment with plants through trial and error in the same way. Anyway, so Wertz considered it likely in her research that there would be some other learning mechanism instead of trial and error that kids rely on to learn about plants.

So Wertz and her collaborators did a series of studies, and the one that we're going to talk about today, or the two that we are going talk about, are really foundational, to examine just whether infants show avoidance to interact with plants, per se, compared to other types of objects. And so the participants were infants ages 8 to 18 months, and during the study sessions, each infant was sitting in their caregiver's lap, facing away from the caregiver and toward the experimenter.

And it's important to say that the caregivers were given careful instructions to keep their eyes closed during the trials and to maintain a neutral facial expression, to just sort of avoid giving any subtle influence to the infants.

0:27:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:16 Lindsey: And we'll come back to that too, about why that's incredibly important with this study. So they're sitting in the caregiver's laps, and the experimentor is placing objects in front of the infant on the table in front of them, within arm's reach, one at a time, right? So for 30 seconds, one-at-a-time, they put a plant in front the infant, a hairbrush, a lamp, right, a couple of weird objects that the infants have not seen before.

They look, there's pictures in the article which I'll send to you, they look kind of like alien craft projects of some sort, pipe cleaners and they're painted weird colors, very strange. So one at-a time, these different types of objects, and the research question was, will the infants show more hesitance to touch the plants relative to the other objects? So just a very basic foundational question that you have to answer first, and she found that indeed, like, marked reluctance to touch the plants compared to the other objects. And there are some videos of this study procedure that I've seen, and unfortunately they are not public access, so I can't share them.

I really wish I could, but it is just striking, seeing the difference between the behavior of the infants when they are presented with plants versus, like, all these different kinds of objects that they're seeing. Like, you put a hairbrush in front of them, immediately pick it up, stick it in their mouth, you know, do all kinds of stuff with it, feel it, but with the plants they just kind of look at it. And then another thing they do which is interesting is that they'll look up at the experimenter, like, looking for something, the experimenter is just blank face and then they'll turn around and, like, try to get some sort of reaction or feedback from their caregiver, and

0:29:22 Thomas: Okay,

0:29:55 Lindsey: They're not doing anything.

0:29:54 Thomas: That's so interesting. Thing? Hmm.

0:29:56 Lindsey: Yeah, and then, like, they kind of look back at the plant, and in, in most of the trials, the infants don't touch it at all, and when they do touch it, they take way longer to touch it than the other objects, everything else, like, they're immediately grabbing. So there's this marked hesitance, right, and so that in and of itself, right, suggests, like, potentially a cognitive adaptation here to avoid plants that we have early in life.

0:30:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:19 Thomas: It's like in our Firmware that we're, like, you know, ask Mom about plant, you know, like, it just run through the programming, it's really fascinating, and

0:30:25 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know I love this, this area. It's so cool. Um, yeah. So, so it seemed to have this adaptation to avoid them. And then the question, yeah, no, that's definitely where I'm going with this.

0:30:35 Thomas: Therefore women need to stay home and tell kids no. I'm just kidding, like, that's where you go, it always finds its way back Gad sod will find his way back to gender roles with this one. I was

0:30:45 Lindsey: Yeah absolutely. Right. Cause otherwise they'll die of plants. Um, yeah, no. So, so, so once we've established the, the aversion, um, then the is, you know, what are the, what're the features of the plants that are driving the avoidance, right? So this is where we're really starting to flesh out, like, what does this adaptation look like, what's triggering it, um, and the number of, like, the control objects that they used allowed them to test, like, some competing possibilities in terms of what is, is, uh, is triggering the avoidance reaction. Um, so along with real plants they had objects that were just, like, um, artificial plants, they looked very realistic, but they're made of, like, that plasticky fabric stuff, and then the novel objects that I talked about, yeah,

0:31:27 Thomas: Gonna ask if they did anything like that, like, do, do something that is a plant but doesn't look like a plant, and then vice versa. Well, that's not really that valuable, I guess, because, if, you know, it's not like anyone thinks the kid is using anything other than vision, you know, like, it, I guess it might, that might be interesting with a pet or something, but, like, I'm sure if you just took some, some plant leaves and concealed them, it's not like the kid is going to somehow magically know it's there.

0:31:34 Lindsey: Well, okay, so that's an interesting question. So what would be a plant that wouldn't look like a plant, uh, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a good point, right, yeah, so that, that's maybe like the one hypothetical control they could have done that they didn't do. Um, but what they did do, right, is artificial plant, right, looks like a plant but isn't, so, like, the one thing that they're maybe controlling for there is, like, odor cues, so if they'd touch the artificial plant but not the real one, like, maybe it's because they can smell the plant. I don't know, but that, that turned out not to be the case, so they touched the, they also would not touch the artificial plants.

Um, but then those novel objects that I talked about, the weird craft projects, they constructed these in very specific ways so that they had some features of plants but not others. Which is kind of cool. Um, so some of them, like, they attached fake fabric leaves to them, but then they would paint them black, and, like, the object overall would be, like, blue or something that you, you wouldn't naturally see occurring in nature. Um, and then some of the other ones, um, they were green, right, but they didn't have, like, the shape of a plant. Um, so it's, it's really interesting, again, I encourage people to look at the pictures.

0:32:18 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, trying to isolate Isolate variables and see what, what they're using.

0:32:58 Lindsey: Yeah, Exactly, exactly, um, and, uh, and then, you know, you've got the familiar objects, right, the hairbrushes, the lamps, and then they also use seashells as a category, because that's a naturally occurring object, right, that's not a plant, essentially. And so by using those control variables, they're able to sort of answer a number of questions about why kids are avoiding plants. Is it just familiarity? Like, no, right? Because they've got familiar and unfamiliar objects as controls, right. And they're totally willing to touch all of those. It's just the plants that are showing the aversion.

0:33:36 Lindsey: Is Is it specific features, like having leaves or being green? And like, nope, that didn't seem to be the case, because when they isolated that with the weird alien things, you know, that did not create an aversion. It was just the real plants. So, like, in terms of what is triggering the adaptation, she is still doing ongoing research about that. So that is not clear yet. But I think that it is reasonable to expect that, like, you now, maybe we have like a threshold for detecting plants, like there's lots of features that could characterize a plant, and maybe if something has like, you know, three out of eight features or something, then it triggers the aversion or something like that, you know. But anyway, so that's ongoing, right? She's still sort of sketching out, uh, that part of the, um, of the adaptation, but it's super cool. Okay, so another question you'd want to, um, you know, follow up on this one about is, uh, how do infants end up learning about plants, right? If it's not about trial and error, right, how are they learning about it?

0:34:32 Lindsey: And there's a clue, right, in terms of what the infants are doing in the plant trials during those videos, right? They're doing social referencing. And so she's done a number of follow-up studies where she shows that infants will specifically seek out social information when they're presented with plants. And they'll look for positive and negative facial reactions from their caregivers. She's also done some trials where she has people model like eating something from, you know, one plant and not eating something from another one, and then, you know, infants will model that behavior and keep it. And so this seems to be an adaptation that is like specifically mediated by social learning, which I think is cool, right?

0:35:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:18 Lindsey: It need not have been that way, but it's like for this specific kind of stimulus, right, like it is the is the safest, right? It minimizes cost the best. And also, like, social, social information is probably going to be a super reliable cue as to whether you can eat that berry or whether you should avoid this other berry that could be poisonous. Is that cool?

0:35:40 Thomas: Yeah, it is cool. It's also, it's just mind-blowing to me to think about all the animal ancestors that had to die to give us this stuff. Many animal ancestors died to give this disinformation.

0:35:48 Lindsey: God, no, right? I'm glad you said that because like that is how that came to be, right? A bunch of babies died because they didn't, yeah.

0:35:55 Thomas: It's crazy. Well, I don't know. So, sometimes, though, isn't it also, you know, not baby humans per se, but some sort of non-human ancestors. Testers.

0:35:58 Lindsey: What? It's, yeah, no you, you're absolutely right. Yeah, that's,

0:36:07 Thomas: But it's still crazy to think like for everything like this, that some level of, I don't know, thousands of millions, you know, like it's not like this happens once and then the whole genome is fixed, you Know, like, it must be a lot of times. It's so interesting.

0:36:07 Lindsey: That's true. Right. Nope.

0:36:19 Lindsey: Lots. Lots and lots of times, lots and lots of of deaths. Yeah. That's

0:36:24 Thomas: And that's why there is no God. Anyway, any God would have not done that. That would be the worst first possible way to teach, to let human beings come into existence.

0:36:29 Lindsey: Correct. Um, I know, I know, this wasn't very nice. Um, yeah, so just, uh, yeah, brief, brief coda. This is some of the other stuff she's working on now. She's working on like repeating these experience experiments in more naturalistic environments, it's like not in the lab, but, uh, you know, having, doing these kinds of exposure experiments, but in like out in gardens, right? Places where plants are like naturally occurring, which is important. And she's working on replicating and extending the effects in non-weird samples. And for anybody who's not familiar, WEIRD stands for white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries. And it's where, you know, a lot of psychological data comes from because you know, these kinds of cultures, so

0:37:18 Thomas: But when we look at these kinds of things, are they, because oftentimes, based on maybe my memory of your other episodes on here, or I'm not sure what, but isn't it, when we're looking at these kinds of traits and the history of evolutionary psychology, isn't usually the case, kind of how we just talked about, that the evolution took place long before a different time. So it's not like, oh, this group of humans over here that live in another area, maybe they have a totally different, you know, system for this kind of thing. Isn't it the case that the revolution is more in common back further before, you know, humans were dispersed throughout the entire globe?

0:37:20 Lindsey: Right, Yes, Absolutely. Yeah, so the, the thing that they're, they would be testing there is not like whether there is variability in the adaptation across cultures, it's more about whether there's variability and how is it, how it's expressed. So if, if we're talking about like modern hunter-gatherer tribes, for instance, right, those, those babies are likely to have a lot more exposure to plants way earlier. Um, and they're likely, you know, in cultures that have like a lot more sort of cultural knowledge around plants, right, that might sort of speed up learning, right? Or might, you know, something like that. But looking at these effects in those cultures could give us, you know, information and as we're trying to sketch out what the adaptation looks like and, you know, when the normal developmental milestones are and things like that. Yeah.

0:37:59 Thomas: Okay. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Cool.

0:38:44 Lindsey: Yeah, so I chose this research in particular as an example for a couple of reasons, and one is it's just freaking, and she wrote this super accessible short review article about this program that I'm, again, I'll send you, and it's great, it's very easy to read. But also, I think it's a nice example of what the process of establishing the features of a cognitive adaptation looks like, and how little it resembles post hoc storytelling. I mean, it's, it's rooted in these, these assumptions that we have from evolutionary biology, right, that are very well established, uh, but from there it's just a series of like stating some, some hypotheses and then specific predictions from those theories and testing them and figuring out like, you know, sorting out the, the good stuff from the garbage.

0:39:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, I imagine if somebody, you know, if say this experimenter had done a more of a just so story thing, I imagine a bunch of other, you know, Lindsey Osterman would be like write papers being like, hey, actually this, you know, here's another explanation or you would actually need to prove this or demonstrate this in order to prove that this was such and such. And then, you know, there'd be a lot of criticism of that experiment.

0:39:29 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, um, yeah, yeah, because, you know, science and stuff, peer review.

0:39:57 Lindsey: But yeah, so and one other reason that I really liked this as an example for this episode was that it's an evolutionary hypothesis about learning architecture, and specifically about social learning. And so it's, in effect, that necessarily includes culture, I'd say, as like a central explanatory piece. And it's not unique in that, right? I think that evolutionary approaches to understanding the human mind, right, actually center context and learning and culture a lot more than people think it does. It's not a field that's trying to establish these sort of like inflexible genetically determined patterns. So anyway, I think this is a nice illustration of that, at least in one sense. So we're at claim two, 40 minutes in. That's cool.

0:40:44 Lindsey: All right. So claim two, right? As a field, I'm claiming that evolutionary psychology is not a thinly veiled pseudoscientific enterprise to smuggle in justification for bigotry and oppression. And I, again, we've talked about a couple of examples here. I've seen some studies with an evolutionary frame that do seem like thinly veiled attempts to justify bigotry. And again, like the vast majority of the time, the really questionable studies that are brought to my my attention are not because they're being showcased in evolutionary psych journals or at conferences. Instead, they're coming to me from people who want to critique the field. So as an example of this, so one article that's been sent to me several times is Satoshi Kanazawa's article

0:40:43 Thomas: All

0:41:29 Lindsey: Called "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" And So just a few things, yeah, it is. Um, and so just right off the bat, okay, this article is widely discredited by evolutionary psychologists. There was a, an open letter that was published by like 35 evolutionary psychologists that was like, hey, we don't claim this, this is garbage. Two, it's not a peer-reviewed paper, it was a Psych Today paper, which is a magazine, it is a popular press article. Three, it, it was taken down shortly after it was published because it's garbage. And really, like, I don't want to spend too much time on what it purports to show because it is such garbage. Like, there's barely anything here to critique methodologically or otherwise because it just garbage. So it purports evidence that black women are objectively less attractive than women of other races.

0:41:34 Thomas: Well, that sounds horrible.

0:42:25 Lindsey: And do you want to venture a guess on how objective attractiveness is measured here? Kind of, yeah, yeah. So they pulled data from an existing data set. And there's a question that happens to exist in that data set that's an interviewer's rating of an adolescent about how attractive they are. And that's their objective measure of attractiveness. And they, so this, this person just ran some descriptive stats, he just ran the means of attractiveness, uh, for, for along the lines of race, I have no idea why, they didn't have any theoretical justification for doing that, uh, but ran that and happened to see that like, for, for whatever reason, right, I don't know why, I don't, I don't care, right, this is obviously garbage, um, happened to see that the mean was lower for, for black adolescents in this, in the sample. I, okay, okay, so many things

0:42:30 Thomas: Surveying white people? Yeah, someone just really

0:43:20 Lindsey: Wrong with this.

0:43:20 Thomas: Wanted to do a racism, like, real bad, and they're like, oh, this is, can I do a racist? Okay, I'm doing it. And then a really shitty magazine published it.

0:43:23 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's almost like this person saw critiques of evolutionary psychology about how it's sexist, racist, garbage, and they were like, oh, is that what it is? I could probably write one of those.

0:43:40 Thomas: Yeah, I want to get into that field. Yeah, well,

0:43:42 Lindsey: Yeah! Let's try! And then, you know, forever, this piece of garbage is trotted out to me as evidence that the field is garbage, like, no, this is not, we I know, yeah.

0:43:53 Thomas: And like Already, look, you're the, uh, evo psych person, you tell me, I mean, there's not even, when it comes to attractiveness, I mean, wouldn't any sort of, not just evolutionary psychology, but, you know, biology, evolution, wouldn't that already tell you there's no objective attractiveness? Like why would there be an, it's going to be relative to like the species and what, you know, like certain, a million other cues, like there is, there's not going to be an objective attractiveness. Where would that come from?

0:44:22 Lindsey: I mean, what, so there's two possible things you could be saying by, I think I understand the, the way that you mean it, but maybe I ought to respond to both. Um, like, yeah, no, it can't be objective because it is based on like the natural history of every species in terms of what they're going to find sexually attractive.

0:44:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:38 Thomas: Well, plus don't like environmental factors play a role. Like I could, you Now, uh, in if you're talking animals, for example, like maybe if there's some adaptation that has an advantage in a given environment, like, maybe that would become attractive as a, you know, it's stuff like that is kind of what I have in mind. It's not some one rigid objective, you know, definition of attractiveness.

0:44:40 Lindsey: Sure, Yes, Yeah, No, that's, that's absolutely true, right? But, but another thing that sometimes people mean when, when they say that is, is that, uh, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder essentially, like in a sort of a deeper way, that there's no, there's no, um, there are no traits that strongly predict attractiveness. And that, that is the case, right? Like symmetry, for example, is like universally attractive to humans. Um, probably other species too, actually, because of what it's correlated with. And also, that brings up a good point here, which is that, like, there is, there is not even a credible hypothesis that you could offer a priori about why there would be racial differences in attractiveness.

0:44:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Yeah

0:45:32 Lindsey: If anything, you would predict consistency of attractive judgments across races, and actually, when you do that research, that's exactly what you find because of things like facial symmetry and what those things track with. So it's stupid.

0:45:32 Thomas: Right, yeah right, although the symmetry Symmetry thing, every time I hear that, I'm like, okay, what if I had a nose that's four feet long, but it's perfectly symmetrical, like it's right down, know, like right and left side, you know, so it's not just symmetry. There's something more going on. What if I add two eyes the size of baseballs, but perfectly circular?

0:45:58 Lindsey: Yeah. No. No, no, no. It's not just symmetry. We don't have time. Actually, larger eyes for reasons related to neoteny people really like.

0:46:09 Thomas: Oh, There has got to be a limit, though.

0:46:12 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. No, there's a limit. There's a bunch of different features that feed into attractiveness. Yeah, like, yeah. But symmetry tends to be one of them and it's a fairly strong one, but, um, anyway, so, so yeah, so this is garbage, like, tell your friends it's garbage and that it's not, it's not, evolutionary psychologists, uh, we don't, he's not one is what I'm saying, it's not a thing.

0:46:37 Thomas: There This is not an evolutionary psychology paper even. It's just something somebody wrote, not peer-reviewed. Okay, gotcha. So that's crap.

0:46:41 Lindsey: No. Nope. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, go check out that guy's Wikipedia page and, like, look at all the, it's, it's, yeah, okay, okay, so but, but aside from low-hanging fruit like Kanazawa, um, what I actually see more often than, like, obvious bad faith research is good research that's just communicated poorly, Right? Sometimes innocently by a journalist who doesn't know the area very well. And sometimes by someone who appears to be cynically taking the logic of evolutionary theory and using it to justify oppression or bigotry.

0:47:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:15 Lindsey: Or whatever.

0:47:14 Thomas: And that's absolutely a problem in every single field. I mean, if you're somebody who's into space or, you know, like physics, how many times a year is there some paper or reporting on a paper that's like, new, faster than light, something. And every time, Sean Carroll will be like, no, it's not. It's not what it says, you know, stuff like that. Like that happens in every field.

0:47:18 Lindsey: Absolutely. Yeah, It does. It does. It's just, it tends to, it can be more dangerous in some ways in evolutionary psychology because of the specific ways that people are misusing the claims, But, like, yeah, no, this is a problem everywhere. I mean, you know, Nazis during World War II come to mind, right? Like, the whole ideology there was, like, a a misuse of Darwinian thinking, right?

0:47:47 Thomas: Right.

0:47:59 Lindsey: Um, and you know, obviously there are plenty of modern examples of that, right? People who have massive platforms who want to say things about how our ancestors evolved and then jump to the inappropriate prescriptive claim about how we should feel about strict gender norms, as you've, um, I think, covered pretty well there. So,

0:47:59 Thomas: No, Well, we are out of time here for part one. Um, but we are going to do more on this. It's going to be so interesting. Uh, I I'm loving hearing about these experiments and, uh. It's really cool to, to hear about how science is actually done and not, not just a, mischaracterization of it. So we're going to pause here for part one and then we'll do part two. And as always, patrons, patreon.com/seriouspod, you'll get early access to part two, so that's how we like to do it. Make sure to sign on there. Lindsay, thanks so much for this. This was very informative and I can't wait for part two!

0:48:30 Lindsey: Sweet.

0:48:50 Lindsey: Thank you.

0:48:59 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.