Abstract
Evolutionary psychologists often try to “bring together” biology and psychology by making predictions about what specific psychological mechanisms exist from theories about what patterns of behaviour would have been adaptive in the EEA for humans. This paper shows that one of the deepest methodological generalities in evolutionary biology—that proximate explanations and ultimate explanations stand in a many-to-many relation—entails that this inferential strategy is unsound. Ultimate explanations almost never entail the truth of any particular proximate hypothesis. But of course it does not follow that there are no other ways of “bringing together” biology and psychology. Accordingly, this paper explores one other strategy for doing just that, the pursuit of a very specific kind of consilience. However, I argue that inferences reflecting the pursuit of this kind of consilience with the best available theories in contemporary evolutionary biology indicate that psychologists should have a preference for explanations of adaptive behavior in humans that refer to learning and other similarly malleable psychological mechanisms—and not modules or instincts or any other kind of relatively innate and relatively non-malleable psychological mechanism.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Accordingly, one way of reading Darwin’s Origin is to see the point of chapter 1, “Variation under domestication”, being that artificial selection is a sufficient ultimate explanation of some kinds of speciation, and then that the argument in subsequent chapters is that natural selection provides an analogous ultimate explanation of species that are, to put it simply, not domesticated.
There is also an important caveat to the claim that, generally, true ultimate explanations do not entail the truth of any particular proximate explanations. For, if some particular pattern of adaptive behaviour did occur in the history of some organism, then it does follow, in a trivial sense, that the organism either has, or at least had, some psychological (or some other kind of proximate) mechanism that has (or had) the function of being able to cause the relevant pattern of behaviour. But it does not follow from this that there is a psychological (or proximate) mechanism the only function of which is to produce the relevant behaviour, since many different psychological mechanisms can satisfy such a functional description. For, again, it is a truism that, if an organism is able to produce a pattern of behaviour B, then some part of it has the function of being able to produce B. Call whatever has this function trait T. Now, note the language used to talk about T does not indicate whether or not T has any other functions. So T could of course be a psychological module, in which case its only significant function may be to produce behaviour B and it is also true that the possession of T is relatively innate and non-malleable. But T could also be information that was acquired from one-off peer learning, in which case its only function may be to produce B, and yet in this case the possession of T is extremely context dependent. What’s more, T could also be a domain-general psychological faculty, or even a system of faculties. In this case the total functional description of T would include the ability to cause B along with a host of other causal functions; indeed, this list might be infinitely long for a sufficiently complex system. These three different (types of) psychological mechanisms—a module, contextually-acquired information, and domain-general faculties or systems—can all be said to have the function being able to produce B. For this reason, it would be a mistake to infer that any specific proximate conclusions follow from the trivial fact that, if behaviour B was produced by an organism, some part of the organism has the functional ability to cause B.
That is, at least until the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology. Importantly, the field’s leading journal, Evolution and Development, was founded in 1999.
References
Alcock, J. (2001). The triumph of sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boyd, R. (1985). Observations, explanatory power, and simplicity. In P. Achinstein & O. Hannaway (Eds.), Observation, experiment, and hypothesis in modern physical science (pp. 349–378). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Boyd, R. (1990). Realism, approximate truth and philosophical method. In W. Savage (Ed.), Scientific theories, Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 14, pp. 355–391). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Boyd, R. (2001). Reference, (in)commensurability, and meaning: some (perhaps) unanticipated complexities. In P. Hoyningen-Huene & H. Sankey (Eds.), Incommensurability and related matters (pp. 1–63). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Bradbury, J. W. (1981). The evolution of leks. In R. D. Alexander & D. W. Tinkle (Eds.), Natural selection and social behavior (pp. 138–169). New York: Chiron Press.
Cartwright, N. (1983). How the laws of physics lie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cartwright, R. (2008). Evolution and human behavior: Darwinian perspectives on human nature (2nd ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cimino, A., & Delton, A. W. (2010). On the perception of newcomers: Toward an evolved psychology of intergenerational coalitions. Human Nature, 21(2), 186–202.
Cleland, C. E. (2011). Prediction and explanation in historical natural science. British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 62(3), 551–582.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375–424.
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1985). Child abuse and other risks of not living with both parents. Ethology and Sociobiology, 6(4), 197–210.
Fine, A. (1984). The natural ontological attitude. In J. Leplin (Ed.), Scientific realism (pp. 83–107). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Giere, R. (1983). Testing theoretical hypotheses. In J. Earman (Ed.), Testing scientific theories, Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 10, pp. 269–298). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giere, R. (1990). Evolutionary models of science. In N. Rescher (Ed.), Evolution, cognition, and realism (pp. 21–32). Lanham: University Press of America.
Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (2012). Reconstructing constructivism: causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1085–1108.
Griffiths, P. E. (2008). Ethology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology. In S. Sarkar & A. Plutyinski (Eds.), Blackwell’s companion to philosophy of biology (pp. 393–414). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Henrich, N., & Henrich, J. (2007). Why humans cooperate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. J. (2006). Evolution in four dimensions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jarvi, T., Sillén-Tullberg, B., & Wiklund, C. (1981). Individual versus kin selection for aposematic coloration: a reply to Harvey and Paxton. Oikos, 37(3), 393–395.
Kurzban, R. (2011). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: evolution and the modular mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Machery, E. (2011). Discovery and confirmation in evolutionary psychology. In J. Prinz (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mayr, E. (1961). Cause and effect in biology. Science, 134(3489), 1501–1506.
Mineka, S., & Cook, M. (1988). Social learning and the acquisition of snake fear in monkeys. In T. R. Zentall & B. G. Galef Jr (Eds.), Social learning: psychological and biological perspectives (pp. 51–73). Hilladale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moczek, A. P., Sultan, S., Foster, S., Ledon-Rettig, C., Dworkin, I., Nijhout, H. F., et al. (2011). The role of developmental plasticity in evolutionary innovation. Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, 278, 2705–2713.
Mora, C., Tittensor, D. P., Adl, S., Simpson, A. G. B., & Worm, B. (2011). How many species are there on earth and in the ocean? PLoS Biology, 9(8), e1001127.
Pfennig, D. W., & Sherman, P. W. (1995). Kin recognition. Scientific American, 272(6), 98–103.
Psillos, S. (1995). Is structural realism the best of both worlds? Dialectica, 49, 15–64.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2006). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schlicting, C. D., & Smith, H. (2002). Phenotypic plasticity: linking molecular mechanisms with evolutionary outcomes. Evolutionary Ecology, 16, 189–211.
Syal, S., & Finlay, B. L. (2011). Thinking outside the cortex: Social motivation in the evolution and development of language. Developmental Science, 14(2), 417–430.
Tomasello, M. (2000). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental plasticity and evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, H. T. P., & Lenton, T. M. (2007). Artificial selection of simulated microbial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 8918–8923.
Wimberger, P. H. (1991). Plasticity of jaw and skull morphology in the neotropical cichlids Geophagus brasiliensis and G. steindachneri. Evolution, 45, 1545–1563.
Xu, F., & Kushnir, T. (Eds.) (2012). Rational constructivism in cognitive development. Academic Press—Elsevier, Waltham.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following for their helpful comments, criticisms, questions, and in one particular case, for several very good ideas too: Amy Allcock, Richard Boyd, Barbara Koslowski, Jane Dryden, Kate Cober, Robbie Moser, Roopen Majithia, Tamar Kushnir, and several anonymous referees.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fedyk, M. How (not) to bring psychology and biology together. Philos Stud 172, 949–967 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0297-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0297-9