Links a-go-go

Revere delivers a Sunday Sermonette. Earlier this week he reported on the petition from hell.

Mixing Memory reports that Elizabeth Lloyd's work on the evolution of the female orgasm is getting a chilly response from certain feminist blogs.

I'd hate for Lloyd to get the wrong idea about the feminist blogosphere. So, here are some links to other feminist bloggers who are sympathetic to Lloyd's work: Pharyngula, Rob at HelpyChalk (cf. Rob's Lloyd-inspired nine-part series), Coturnix of Science and Politics, the aforementioned Mixing Memory, and Amanda. I meant to write a pro-Lloyd piece when her book came out, but unfortunately, I didn't get around to it.

Work is interfering with my higher cognitive functions, so I'm just going to recommend this fascinating conversation about explanation and justification: Brad DeLong, hilzoy, Brad DeLong II.

Finally, a newcomer to the blogroll: Phronesisaical a liberal philosophy blog with lots of juicy pictures.

Comments

[coturnix]

I was also pro-Lloyd. and have writtem a long 'un at the time of the first post.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Send me the link and I'll add you to the list, Coturnix. That goes for the rest of you feminist bloggers, too.

[rob helpy-chalk]

Thanks for the shout out.

[Nancy]

Well many contributors to this blog seem to be fans of Daniel Dennett, and he's a strict adaptationist - so it's no surprise that Lloyd is being attacked in the blogosphere for making a case against strict adaptationism.

But what's up with that, Lyndsay? A month or so ago, somebody on this blog claimed that Daniel Dennett was your mentor, and that you sided with him against Gould.

Did that person misrepresent your attitudes towards Gould and Dennett?

To quote Gould - this is from '97, so perhaps Dennett changed his mind since "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" - if so, please share what you know about it...

In his second attack, Dennett denigrates the importance of nonadaptive side consequences ("spandrels" in my terminology) as sources for later and fruitful reuse. In principle, spandrels define the major category of important evolutionary features that do not arise as adaptations. Since organisms are complex and highly integrated entities, any adaptive change must automatically "throw off" a series of structural byproducts--like the mold marks on an old bottle or, in the case of an architectural spandrel itself, the triangular space "left over" between a rounded arch and the rectangular frame of wall and ceiling. Such byproducts may later be co-opted for useful purposes, but they didn't arise as adaptations. Reading and writing are now highly adaptive for humans, but the mental machinery for these crucial capacities must have originated as spandrels that were co-opted later, for the brain reached its current size and conformation tens of thousands of years before any human invented reading or writing.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould.html

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Dennett's views on evolution and adaptation haven't changed substantively, AFAIK.

Gould believed many of the "big ticket" characteristics of the mind to be spandrels, but he didn't deny that adaptations exist or that adaptation is one major influence on the course of evolution.

Relatively speaking, Dennett assigns a larger role to adaptation as an evolutionary force than Gould does, but he's not committed to saying that every anatomical or mental characteristic of an organism must be an adaptation.

My views are very similar to Dan's, but I have more sympathy for the Gould/Lewontin critique than he does.

[Thad]

Speaking of Dennett…

[Amanda Marcotte]

I'm almost positive I came out in favor of Lloyd. If I didn't, I think I meant to. It seems silly to me to care about *why* women have orgasms because there's no *why* in evolution. There's no implications but what you want there to be in the idea that female orgasms are a side effect of male orgasms. If sexist men want to use that as an excuse to neglect their duties as lovers of women, then the problem is their small-minded sexism, not the fault of a series of random accidents that got us where we are.

[Gary Sugar]

Ugh, Dennett. I'd be more polite about what a waste of time his nonsense on consciousness is, but I can't help remembering his relentless obnoxiousness and really dumb final argument.

About Lloyd and orgasms, I'm not a fan of the word 'adaptation.' Afaik it's supposed to mean 'lucky accident,' not anything in any way purposeful. In any case, I hope the prospect of an orgasm is at least part of a woman's reason for having sex with me. Wouldn't women who enjoy sex more have more sex and more babies? But I admit, I didn't read Lloyd's book.

This is a good opportunity for my favorite joke.

Q. Why do women fake orgasms?

A. Because they think men care.

[Nancy]

Gould believed many of the "big ticket" characteristics of the mind to be spandrels, but he didn't deny that adaptations exist or that adaptation is one major influence on the course of evolution.

Yeah, well if you deny adaptations exist, you're pretty much denying a fundamental mechanism of evolution, so nobody would expect Gould or any scientist to deny adaptation.

Relatively speaking, Dennett assigns a larger role to adaptation as an evolutionary force than Gould does

Yeah at least - Dennett seems to be on the outer fringes of extreme adaptationism, and even gets the concept of spandrels ass-backwards, as explained by evolutionary geneticist H. Allen Orr:

In any case, Dennett completely ignores my biggest worry about adaptationism: Adaptationist culture encourages wild story-telling just where Design is least obvious. The problem is sociology: nobody ever got famous for speculating on why birds have wings ("So they can fly?"). The road to glory instead demands ingenious stories that are far from obvious, and the whole business can degenerate into a display of cleverness. Ironically, Dennett's response provides a superb example of this problem. Now that he's told us it's wrong, consider this hypothesis: Spandrels were "designed to have the shape they have precisely in order to provide suitable surfaces for the display of Christian iconography." This, I submit, is a perfect example of the peculiar excesses encouraged by adaptationism. If you want to understand why biologists - while loving our natural selection-worry over adaptationism, study this example. Note its features: flatly implausible (a guy hoping to hold up a 42 foot dome is worried about mosaics?), but very cleverly argued. And just wild enough to turn heads. A more sober hypothesis (spandrels are, say, the cheapest way to do the job) would have a far better chance of being right. But, alas, such a hypothesis wouldn't make much of a splash. Exactly the same dynamic occurs in biology with exactly the same result: a big waste of time.

http://www.bostonreview.net/br21.5/orr.html

Extreme adaptationism is at the very heart of what is wrong with evolutionary psychology - there is virtually no phenomenon of modern gender conventions and sexual practices that can't be explained by evolutionary psychology "wild storytelling."

Of course being an extreme adaptationist hasn't done Dennett any harm - and in fact, he seems to have a booming career as science philosopher-about-town.

It can't be due to his writing style - I've seen Intelligent Design debunked more elegantly, succinctly and with better humor than in Dennett's piece in today's NYTimes.

[rob helpychalk]

Worth noting: although Lloyd is siding with Gould and against adaptive explanations on this one, she counts herself as an adaptationist, and is actually close to the Dawkins/Dennett end of the spectrum on most issues.

The annoying thing about the gould/dawkins debates is that you can never tell how much of the disagreement is rhetorical and how much is substantial. When you talk about specific traits, like ability to orgasm, people from either side of the spectrum can agree on whether it is an adaptation based on the evidence in that case. But most of the time the debate is held at a much vaguer level, where people argue about "most traits" or "big ticket traits." The vagueness of these terms enables people in a debate to sound like they disagree on everything, and still be able to concede any particular case without sacrificing their rhetoric.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I'm almost positive I came out in favor of Lloyd. If I didn't, I think I meant to. It seems silly to me to care about *why* women have orgasms because there's no *why* in evolution.

No offense intended. I don't mean to malign anyone or marginalize their reaction. Mostly, among the feminist bloggers reacting to the publication of Lloyd's book, I recall Lauren being respectfully skeptical, but by no means judgmental, let alone slanderous.

I suspect that Elizabeth Lloyd formed her conclusions about the feminist blogosphere from Technorati or Google. She emphasizes that she's not cherry picking from the feminist blogs, and I take her at her word. However, if she's just going by what crops up on those searches, she's not getting a representative sample of the opinions of feminist bloggers. Really, she's not even getting a fair look at the opinions of the feminists who commented directly or obliquely on her work. I had a long exchange in my comments threads on the posts about the nature of disease that centered around the centrality (but not adaptational character) of the female orgasm. I doubt those exchanges popped up on Google or Technorati, just because of nature their search metric. That's not a criticism of anyone, it's just an ascertainment bias that probably deserves mentioning.

[Amanda]

Okay, I stated my case here. I understand feminist skepticism--there's a lot of pseudo-science tossed around about women's supposedly intractable inferiority in both the realms of sex and intelligence that one is overly cautious. But I have no problem with Lloyd's findings. In fact, I'm alarmed that Americans want something pleasurable to have a reason--Puritans to the end. If I wrote a book about how cool it is that we evolved a love of music, no one would mind.

[Nancy]

Worth noting: although Lloyd is siding with Gould and against adaptive explanations on this one, she counts herself as an adaptationist, and is actually close to the Dawkins/Dennett end of the spectrum on most issues.

I'm not an expert on Lloyd, but I read what she wrote, the piece that others were reacting to, and it sounds to me like she's closer to Gould - if for no other reason than because Dennett's views are so extremely adaptationist.

I recommend everybody read Orr's review of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" to see just how extreme Dennett is.

Orr observes:

Apparently, Dennett sees red whenever adaptationism is questioned because he suspects a plot to sneak in a skyhook: If you don't like adaptationism, what do you think explains all this biological design? Unfortunately, Dennett's skyhook-phobia gets the best of him, undermining any hope of a balanced review of the powers and perils of adaptationism. His review of attempts by biologists to circumscribe the role of natural selection is extraordinarily unbalanced. Consider this remarkable omission. Although a full third of his book examines challenges to evolution by natural selection "that have arisen within biology itself," Dennett never once mentions the most serious and famous of all challenges to selectionist story-telling: the neutral theory. Championed by Motoo Kimura, this theory claims that most evolution at the molecular level is not caused by natural selection, but by "genetic drift," the random replacement of one gene by another, functionally equivalent gene. If this is true, many differences between species have no adaptive significance. The fact that your hemoglobin looks like this and a spider monkey's looks like that reflects chance, not adaptation.

The reason that Dennett is so extreme is because he apparently doesn't bother considering any phenomenon that demonstrates genetic drift, and also because he's obsessed with natural selection as an algorithmic process.

When you talk about specific traits, like ability to orgasm, people from either side of the spectrum can agree on whether it is an adaptation based on the evidence in that case.

The problem in the debate is that while many evolutionary biologists don't make a case for adaptations in the absence of evidence, evolutionary psychologists are not in the least shy about making huge leaps and telling wild stories and then publishing them in mass-market books that people swallow out of sheer ignorance - and then the biology-based scientists have to spend years cleaning up the mess made by these fearless philosophers and psychologists.

As Orr notes:

Our problem, as evolutionary biologists, is not a weakness for fictitious alternative causes of Design. Our problem is that, in many adaptive stories, the protagonist does not show dead-obvious signs of Design. Is it obvious that the recessivity of most genetic diseases is adaptive? Evolutionists used to think so, but we now know they were almost surely wrong. Is it obvious that flower color differences in plants are adaptive? Many evolutionary biologists have begged to differ. Is it obvious that most molecular differences between species need adaptive explanation? The neutralists and selectionists give very different answers. And, last, is it obvious that the neural wiring that allows human language evolved as an adaptation for language? Different linguists reach different conclusions. The fact is we often have enormous difficulty distinguishing what is and is not "Designed" -- what does and does not require its very own adaptive story.

If this weren't bad enough, our problem gets exacerbated by a little-noted, but immensely important, characteristic of our scientific culture: Evolutionary biologists thrive on creating adaptive stories where Design is least obvious. After all, where is the glory in explaining why some new species of mite is brown ("it hides in dirt")? The great challenge is to explain why some feature -- whose Design is far from apparent -- is actually adaptive and optimally Designed ("this enzyme is more common in the mother than the fetus because . . .").
Given our difficulty discerning Design, and this penchant for concocting adaptive stories just where Design is least conspicuous, how could evolutionary biologists not have jitters about adaptationism? It would be an extraordinarily unreflective group indeed that did not ask questions like: How seriously should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn't there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its cause and those cases where we try to make Design manifest by concocting a story? And isn't it worrisome that we can make up adaptive stories (and pen wildly speculative papers) faster than we can make up experimental tests? Note that there is no mystical talk here of imagined alternative causes of Design, nor any fatuous Darwin-bashing. There is just sensible concern about how much adaptationism is too much of a good thing. When does adaptationism stop being a useful research strategy and start being a silly exercise in cleverness? Dennett never confronts these legitimate worries. It is far easier for him to ridicule Gould and Lewontin's rhetorical excesses.

[Gary Sugar]

"Speaking of Dennett…"

A few comments.

"improvements automatically emerge"
No, variations emerge, and those that can survive do survive. Calling them improvements is unnecessary at best.

"The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant." "breathtakingly ingenious designs."
Dennett is easily impressed. Calling variations that have survived "brilliant" or "ingenious" is even sillier than calling them improvements.

Even the word "design" is misleading. "Adaptation" is close enough I guess - I don't expect scientists to be philosophers; but "design" is ridiculous. Why can't he say "structure" or "form" or "anatomy?"

"if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals"
Rivals might be involved, but not necessarily. To survive, a variation doesn't have to survive more than anything else. It just has to survive. Notice that there are several species, not just one.

I admit, Dennett's frequently arrogant tone does annoy me. But I don't think it's a coincidence that someone suffering from so much arrogance would believe all this about ingeniously brilliant improvements, since it adds nothing to evolution theory except celebration of ourselves.

[Njorl]

When I read "Petition from Hell" I couldn't help but think it was a request for redress of grievances by the damned.

We the the undersigned, hereafter referred to as "The Damned", submit this request for redress of numerous grievances - including but not limited to, exposure to burning pitch, submersion in boiling lakes of blood, tearing of flesh by capriform humanoids and three cases of eternal mastication. Such treatment is ostensibly for actions committed by the Damned, despite the fact that they were created by an omnipotent being. Said being created the Damned in the manner of his own devising, thereby creating them in the flawed manner such that they transgressed to commit the acts for which they were punished. Furthermore, the aforementioned omnipotent being, being also omniscient, was fully cognizant at the time of creating the damned that they would commit the transgressions that they did, eventually, commit. Ergo, said omnipotent being bears full and knowing responsibility for said transgressions, and should immediately exchange circumstances with the undersigned.