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"LOVE OF SHOPPING" IS NOT A GENE: Introduction

Shopping: "It must be in our genes as former hunters and gatherers," a journalist writes cheerfully in her regular column (Gagnon, 2001). "There is no qualitative difference between gathering fruits and shopping for food, clothes, houseware or knickknacks. As for men, they like to shop for big ticket items such as cars and computers: the modern version of big game."

Although few people have studied genetics, our culture is full of casual references to genes; in my files I can read not only about the "shopping gene" (early women's ability to locate food plants is correlated with an aptitude enabling them to "spot and remember which object might eventually go on sale"), but also about the "reading gene," the "humility gene," the "coaching gene," the "selfless gene" (as in women), the "God gene" (for religious belief), a "non-visiting gene" (in people who won't visit hospitalized friends) and a gene for "meditative sky-watching." This is pop science, fostered by Darwinian psychology, run amok. What are we to make of it?

This book is a critique of Darwinian psychology, alias evolutionary psychology, alias sociobiology--the study of social behavior of animals and people based on evolution. Darwinian psychology rests on the premise that the current social behavior of human beings largely evolved genetically during the six million years since our ape-like ancestors split into two lineages, one leading to ourselves and the other to chimpanzees and bonobos. An alternate possibility, and the one to which I subscribe, is that as our ancestors developed large brains they became increasingly able to react in appropriate ways to their environment with reason rather than instinct. As hominid groups spread into different regions around the world, their intellectual ability resulted in the development of many diverse behaviors and cultures.

Genes vs Culture. There is no certain proof, one way or the other, that we act largely according to our culture and our individual personalities (which do have a genetic component) rather than to our general genetic inheritance, but there are four major reasons that suggest we do: a) the myriad of errors present in data claiming to support Darwinian psychology which this book will detail, b) the difficulty of even defining a social behavior in order to search for genes that might cause it, c) the dearth of possible genes for social behavior from extensive examination of the human genome, and d) the profound distance mentally between non-human and human animals. (For simplicity, the former group in this book will be referred to simply as animals and the latter as human beings.)

a) Charles Darwin would have been aghast at the often shoddy data used to support Darwinian psychology; he was much too good a scientist to tolerate inaccurate information. He worked meticulously, gathering relevant facts and checking them out, one at a time, thousands each year, to build his theory of evolution. He spent eight years studying barnacles through a microscope so that he would understand exactly how evolution worked in this one complex order. One highlight was the discovery of a male sixteen-hundredths of an inch living in the valve of a female--her "little husband" (Desmond and Moore, 1991, 355). His research was so central to his family's life that his son out visiting once asked another child, "Where does your father do his barnacles?" (Browne, 1995, 473). Darwin would have shuddered at a "science" such as Darwinian psychology in which an academic could grab an idea out of thin air and then marshall only data which supported it, not negated it, to declare the hypothesis likely valid.

b) Although it is easy to talk casually about genes for such things as infanticide, war, rape and criminality, as some Darwinian psychologists do, how are these characteristics defined? If there is a gene(s) for infanticide, as Larry Milner (2000) claims in his book Hardness of Heart, Hardness of Life, how would we be able to track it down when few people actually kill children? If a teenage father shakes his baby to death because it cries too much, would we assume that he possesses the infanticide gene(s)? Would a mother suffering from postpartum depression who smothers her newborn also have the gene(s)? What if a bachelor possesses the gene(s) but has no children to kill? How would we know to include him in the small population whose DNA could be studied?

c) The past few decades have been flooded with the importance of genetics to human beings, fostered in large part by hype from the multi-billion dollar Human Genome Project. Yet after decades of work, thousands of highly paid researchers have failed to locate significant social behavioral attributes in our genetic inheritance. Briefly and to much fanfare scientists initially claimed to have discovered genes governing characteristics such as aggression, criminality and homosexuality, but with further research these claims have not been substantiated.

d) Darwinian psychology focuses on the inheritance of human social behavior from our primate ancestors. The common ancestors of chimpanzees, bonobos and human beings lived about six million years ago at which time the future ape group and the future hominid group (which would evolve into human beings) split apart. The former evolved into chimpanzees and bonobos who continue to live in the forests of central Africa; the latter initially migrated from forests to African savannahs in small nomadic bands. Because the members of this lineage were now adapting to an entirely new environment and in the process developing an enlarged brain and greater intellectual powers, the hominid individuals developed different behaviors than those of their ape-like "cousins."

Because social behavior is genetically based in most animals even if not in human beings, proponents of Darwinian psychology often use results from animal behavioral research to bolster hypotheses about human behavior. This is especially true for chimpanzees, but also for many other species so that the activities of a few random species including fish or insects (for example in rape studies) are used to shed light on human behavior, which is too much of a stretch to make sense. A discussion of animal behavior is included in this book when it highlights topics that involve a wide spectrum of species such as infanticide (to show that its rationale for animals and human beings is entirely different) and homosexual behavior (to prove that it is so widespread that to call it "unnatural" in people is not logical).

Another dilemma clouding the discipline of Darwinian psychology is that its proponents and opponents tend to come from either end of the political spectrum (Segerstråle, 2000). The view that human social behaviors are correlated with our human genes is largely held by people who are right wing politically. Opponents of Darwinian psychology, by contrast, tend to be liberals and democratic socialists who believe that the enlarged human brain enabled individuals and cultures to adopt these same behaviors not through genetic inheritance, but because they were best suited to their lives. While these opponents feel that Darwinian psychologists are politically motivated, the latter feel the same about their critics (Gander, 2003, 238). The left-wingers would like to see the world change for the betterment of all, an aspiration more feasible if human behavior is not biologically determined but plastic enough to adapt to new conditions as they arise. For individuals whose lives are in disarray, blame can then tend to rest with conditions and cultures that caused this dysfunction. Can a discipline be truly scientific if it so readily reflects political rather than academic precepts?

Related to this political bias is a sexual/poverty/homosexual bias which pervades Darwinian psychology. Research on animals is usually concerned with how natural selection works for a species in respect to living a healthy life, choosing a mate, producing young and caring for these offspring to ensure they will function well as adults. By contrast, of the scores of topics that Darwinian psychologists could study in human beings, they tend to research those which have social repercussions. These include domination, aggression and competition which often have a positive appeal for men; aggression, rape, infanticide and sperm competition within their wombs which have a negative connotation for women; crime and IQ studies which can be made to reflect badly on blacks and the poor; and homosexuality which is given a negative spin against gay men and lesbians.

Another dilemma for Darwinian psychology is that research findings are virtually impossible to test; human behavior is infinitely complex and it is unethical to carry out intrusive research on people. One can theorize, but can seldom carry out realistic experiments to prove that a particular behavior is either genetically or culturally based.

Opponents of Darwinian psychology claim that its practitioners tend to rationalize what they already wish for and/or believe. Their catholic approval of evolutionary possibilities means that virtually any theory can be (and often is) postulated and presented with little or no proof. Sometimes two views that are 180 degrees at variance are both accepted. For example, Darwinian psychology has long held the belief that female birds and mammals are coy and choosy about whom they mate with; because they have relatively few offspring in their lifetime on which they expend much care, they want them sired by a superior father. However, recent evidence showing that many females cheat on their mate is also accepted by Darwinian psychologists for several possible reasons: to ensure pregnancy in case the first male is infertile, to foster sperm competition, and to increase genetic diversity and kinship relationships on behalf of their offspring (Tang-Martinez, 2000, 268). Proponents of Darwinian psychology seem happy to agree that white is white and that black is white too, as long as it makes, in theory, evolutionary sense.

To illustrate the unnerving flexibility of Darwinian psychology, Professor Steve Jones plays a parlor game with his university classes, asking them first to list human phenomena beginning with the letters A to Z, then to attribute an evolutionary reason for each (Levin, 2001). So A is for Acne, which may prevent young people from having sex until they are old enough to care for possible children responsibly, while Z is for Zoophilia, a sexual attraction for animals. An elaboration of this game is given in Appendix A.

Most of the chapters of this book highlight problems that undermine the credibility of Darwinian psychology. These include supporting a hypothesis by collecting only research data that back it, not refute it (Chapter 1 on lion infanticide); using largely anecdotes to "prove" a hypothesis (Chapter 3 on aggression); equating animal with human behavior (Chapter 5 discussing chimpanzees and war); championing a hypothesis by citing references inaccurately (Chapter 9 on rape); titillating the reader with soft porn (Chapter 11 on sperm competition); adopting a moral bias (Chapters 12 and 13 on homosexuality); bypassing accepted academic standards (Philippe Rushton's work on race in Chapter 14); adopting a political bias (Chapter 15 on race and IQ); and hijacking a valid theory (fluctuating asymmetry in Chapter 16).

Darwinian psychology considers itself a science, so why do its proponents countenance such biases and errors? In some cases researchers are so busy collecting data supporting their hypothesis that they do not step back to consider alternate explanations for animal behavior (for example, infanticide in lions). In others, proponents seem to have a political agenda which seeks to "prove" that blacks and the poor have an inheritance that tends toward violence and stupidity (Chapters 8 on crime and 15 on IQ) and that women are by their inheritance subordinate to men both as individuals (Chapter 7 on dominance) and as baby producers (Chapter 11 on sperm competition).

If there is so much wrong with Darwinian psychology, why does it even exist? Why does anyone pay any attention to it? Science is supposed to be self-correcting, with each new published hypothesis being studied, weighed in the balance by other scientists, discarded if it is wrong, and accepted and refined if it is right. Researchers involved with sociobiology and Darwinian psychology originally had difficulty publishing their articles because editors of mainstream journals refused to accept them, finding them scientifically inadequate (Rose and Rose, 2001, 2). Darwinian psychologists have apparently banded together to found their own journals in which to publish their articles and those of their students and other adherents. The journals include Ethology and Sociobiology (changing its name more recently to Evolution and Human Behavior) founded in 1979 and Human Nature founded in 1990.

As well as publishing their "scientific" papers, proponents of Darwinian psychology give public lectures and interviews. They publish books, anthologies and popular commentaries which sell well because their message is music to the ears of the many millions of nonscientific readers delighted to have their (often invalid) stereotypes confirmed--that men are by nature aggressive and dominant to women, that it is in men's nature to rape, that stepfathers are all too likely to abuse and kill their stepchildren, that blacks are dumber and more criminal than whites. Darwinian psychologists are perplexed by gay men and lesbians because they are unable to determine how the existence of homosexuals who do not have children can be explained by evolution, as we shall see in Chapter 13.

Because of widespread media exposure, people begin to believe what Darwinian psychologists say, even when it has been shown to be incorrect. And what they say can have a drastic effect on society. For example, when researchers in 1980 declared that girls were less inherently able to do math than boys, a fact later shown to be incorrect, there was a decline in the number of female college students expressing interest in technical courses (Allen, 1997, 520). As another example, male proponents of Darwinian psychology who devalue women, and especially feminists, in their pronouncements, help impede women's equality in Western society as Susan Faludi describes in her 550-page book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). ("Why do so many men seem to begrudge [women's independence], resent it, fear it, fight it with an unholy passion?" Faludi [1999, 40] asks?) Women working full-time still earn on average only seventy-two cents for every dollar men earn (U.S. government statistics, 2000).

This book will, I hope, make readers ponder the many anomalies at the heart of the Darwinian psychological debate.

I shall show in this book that although Darwinian psychology for animals has been a fruitful topic for biology, Darwinian psychology for human beings has not; it is faulty because it is largely based not on facts, but on fallacies. If we hope to succeed in addressing social issues in the future, we must deal with scientific data, not flawed misconceptions.

 

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