Only just-so
On Rob Kurzban’s -- How the Psychologist Got Confused
In Rob Kurzban’s recent How the Psychologist Got Confused Explanation is a word, but a word is not an explanation —we get an excellent diagram, a four pointer. Pointer as in to point, as in the arrow of whatever puny vector space our minds can handle at anyone time.
Like most blog pieces that are engaging, like many one can learn from, there is some experience that has haunted the author for years and they finally get to write it down. In this case it is the use of “just-so stories” to ‘dis’ people attempts to research within an evolutionary psychology framework.
Now I’ve called things ‘just-so stories’ as well, so I read this personal engagement with this topic as a criticism with some interest. Spoiler: I nodded along most of the time, but I did not nod-off. Indeed I thought about it as I woke up this morning, made coffee, and walked to the keyboard. Yes, those damnable psychologists and their sleep-inducing factors.
The important thing about the four pointer chart above is that there is, somewhere in science, a test. There is a method, a routine, a ritual of the test, that there is methodology to sort the testing of proof the explanations as hypothesis, and from which the story we call a theory can be, well, better defended from criticism that it is false.
The criticism of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology inherent in the labelling of their studies as just-so stories is that their framework is mis-applied, and that their explanations do nothing of the sort. That they just collect data along lines of investigations of particularly unacknowledged fears or hopes, which spots behavioural modules in the brain, but actually it is painting them on the hide of our cortex, so to speak, and that these are assumptions of the crudely minded investigator, fooled by their own cleverness.
My criticism of lies in a slightly different frame again. But we’ll keep that spotty metaphor in mind as we skin it.
I am going to talk about modularity, so as some light escapism, you may want to read The Buttoned Sky by Robert W. Krepps writing as Geoff St Reynard. It is golden age science fiction which pre-figures the ‘modularity’ of human consciousness in some psychologies (it is 'brains' all the way down rather than modules), which evolutionary psychology takes as a basis of evolutionary selection in the individual that is available for study. And that these modules vary in intensity, trade-off, style and direction in different individuals and classes of individuals across a population. Now The Buttoned Sky uses telepathy as the conflict generator, usually my least favoured SF trope, but works well in discussing modularity of the protagonist's phenomenological experience of those mental games in a telepathic world. The character Revel wouldn’t use those words. :)
The deeper in evolutionary time we go the more likely the nature of our evolutionary past is with us in the taphonomy of our individual gene collections in a underlying but now degraded form (which may or may not be usefully modeled by modularity). i.e. it gets a bit spotty because we have domesticated ourselves.
Please forgive me if current evolutionary psychology research has eschewed modularity. I will now charge ahead.Unfortunately for evolutionary psychology, in recent developments we have been outsourcing much of our cognitive abilities down across generations and over across cohorts, and so a focus on sub-units of the individual most evolutionary psychology seeks as a way to study ourselves means, that it is missing most of what human evolution does that made us human, i.e. what we do to make us human as we make do.
I call it the worlding urge. This should be testable (as a trait or instinct if not a 'module' for a trait-- I argue it relies on empathy...).
For example, Garvey reckons this outsourcing has actually lead to a rollback of more straight forms of natural selection of traits (regardless of how module-y they are). I came to a similar position via a personal experience that also haunted me for decades, see also the about page for context.
How has that trait 'the worlding urge' been selected for? Domestically or by natural selection? That is more interesting for me than straight modularity and its trait selection, even if it works at a certain level.
That is the explanation I am seeking. Modules work in some old places, but in the new places that police the old? I think not so much.
That urge, that urge to world the self among others selfing in the world, is a module evolutionary psychologists have difficulty perceiving because it is a unit of selection (the world) which is very nebulous. Perhaps fish have difficulty noticing the water they swim in.
And it is as nebulous as the self. I guess that is why we often study it’s sub-units or spots and not what we have done with it. Even though like id/ego/superego they hint at the worlding we do.
The best they could hope to explain is the horror story of baboon social hierarchies. Or perhaps the regression to the mean of baboonlike social hierarchies in human worlding. (If we see the nomothetic case of the narcissist as a recidivist and not as a parasite surfing our success at worlding as we self in empathy.)
The frame that misses the point in evolutionary psychology is the psychology not in the evolutionary framework itself. It is the psychological emphasis on the individual which they cannot find, and so go looking for in its bits (often called modules) which are not even homunculi all the way down (at least), based as they are on asking why and hoping if they sum the bits they get more.
Just-so stories answer why.
Now small children ask why, often to hear you talk and use language so they can learn language, not to hear the factoid an answer might be. So be careful with you whys and answer-whys.
The answers evolutionary psychology discovers is not without its useful bits, or spots, but it ignores the worlding individuals do, which is a hard question, as Kurzban right puts it:
Which of the following two questions is harder to answer: 1) why do some people at certain times elect their leaders by polling the majority while others rely instead on a hereditary passage of power, or 2) why do tides rise and fall?
I offer the ‘worlding urge’ as a simplifing framework. It's probably not a module. As it domesticated us it was already outsourced to the population, or at least in the perception of the world by the individual self. Have fun with that lead as a module.
The answer to 1) lies it in being an outcome, a derivative product, of the worlding urge in a particular context with a contingent history, geography and technology, as well as ways of moving. Breaking it down into modules in order to simplify it does not help.
Instead look to what 'they all' do, but not just what is common or essential to human experience, but to the baseline of what they do in fact do, study the language use, when you ask why, and not the factoid of an answer they give. Do not think someone's accent can tell you about the truth of the answers they give? All Cretans are liars after all.
Evolutionary psychology should study not the complex complications of the spots called modules (which could end-up in a model collapse and metaphysics) or at the very least _not just_ those spots of explanations, and also look at what the individual does at a meta-scale, as a self in the world.
Like the self the world does not exists but we carry on as if it does. How do we study that? That is the primary hard question.
Psychologists in the name of their discipline often ignore the world our selfing takes place in, just as sociologists will ignore in the name of method the selves that world it together.
One can read about my journey into the worlding urge over the ast two years or so on my substack.com, which I have been migrated into a self-hosting platform with more control over some of the structure.
It begins with a personal memory of something that also bugged me for decades.
The underlining I want to do here is not that evolutionary psychology is a goose chase, it will produce useful leads, but that, if it walks like a duck… it might actually be a rabbit.
What we must study and seek evolutionary explanations for is the world, the worlding urge, and not so much the bits left of that more brutal past in the self.
I do not doubt that there is in the self a taphonomy of that which evolutionary psychologists study, and that it is useful, but unfortunately there is even more complexifications ahead.
self-duck | world-rabbit
References:
Krepps, Robert W. writing as Geoff St Reynard, 1953. ‘The Buttoned Sky’, in Imagination. [Ebook at gutenberg.org]
Kurzban, Rob. 2025, January 16. ‘How The Psychologist Got Confused’, Living Fossils. Retrieved 17 January 2025 from
.
meika loofs samorzewski. 2019. Why We Should. Hobart: meika loofs samorzewski. https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
Paul Noth. (n.d.). ‘There Can Be No Peace until They Renounce Their Rabbit God and Accept Our Duck God’, The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a18662
Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com