The psychology to which Pinker and others subscribe reflects a merger of sociobiology and computational theory of mind, a marriage that is now called evolutionary psychology. The two halves of this union are rather like spouses who don’t appear to have all that much in common but nevertheless seem to get along quite well. Sociobiology asserts that Darwinian natural selection and its adaptations can, in part, explain animal and human behaviors, not a particularly controversial claim in scientific quarters. The book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by the entomologist E. O. Wilson, made the term “sociobiology” famous and infamous when it was published in 1975. Although most of Wilson’s book was uncontroversial, his last chapter applied his evolutionary ideas of adaption and natural selection to human beings and created a fury of criticism, specifically that Wilson was advocating a dangerous form of biological determinism that resonated with earlier ideas in eugenics used to justify racism, sexism, and various ugly human versions of survival of the fittest. Professor Wilson, however, is not Professor Lynn. Lynn, of the “rutting stags,” describes himself as a eugenicist. Among Wilson’s most vociferous critics was the biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin, who was profoundly aware of the ideological uses of science and the professional atmosphere that encourages preordained boxes for understanding. Although Wilson nowhere in the book advocated eugenic policies, his arguments do presuppose, as did Galton before him, that what is innately human can be separated from cultural and environmental influences and is the product of naturally selected traits.
In an article published in the New York Times Magazine the same year the book was published, Wilson wrote, “In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have genetic origin.”157 Actually, women do not “stay home” in hunter-gatherer cultures, something Wilson surely knew. They are out “gathering.” Without the daily labor of women foraging for food, the members of the group would starve because it is generally recognized that hunters do not always return with game. But there is another odd assumption here. Women in both agricultural and industrial societies have been working outside “the home” in droves for centuries. Wilson must have thought the word “women” referred to white middle-class housewives or to Victorian ladies of a certain economic status. Were the countless women working in laundries or in factories or the women out in the fields for centuries all over the world at home? It may be useful to remember that in 1975, second-wave feminism was gaining ground, and there may have been “cultural” reasons for Wilson to wish the ladies would simply shut up and go home.
The nature/nurture view in sociobiology was well articulated in 1979 by one of its high-profile proponents, David Barash: “Biology and culture undoubtedly work together, but it is tempting to speculate that our biology is somehow more real, lying unnoticed within each of us, quietly but forcefully manipulating much of our behavior. Culture, which is overwhelmingly important in shaping the myriad details of our lives, is more likely seen as a thin veneer, compared to the underlying ground substance of our biology.”158 It is true that biology is generally regarded as more real and hard than culture, but as an intellectual position, this strikes me as naïve. What would Barash say about the rates of pseudocyesis in Sudan? Again, what does “biology” mean here? Isn’t learning to read biologically real? Isn’t gaining literacy at once a cultural and a biological process? The illiterate brain and literate brain are different. This too has been studied.159
Perhaps Barash would regard literacy itself as a cultural veneer. It certainly came late in human history. He admits he is tempted to speculate on biology’s more robust reality, but what exactly, I wonder, is so tempting about imagining that our behaviors are caused and manipulated by some hidden biological substance? Is this substance our genes? Biological, for Barash, means, I believe, a naturally selected adaptive trait rather than simply a physiological process. Barash’s use of the word “biology” further demonstrates the semantic slippage that occurs in its use. “Sociobiology” has mostly vanished as a name for a discipline. Sarah Hrdy, who changed thinking about how our Pleistocene human ancestors organized their lives, especially the roles played by women, proudly calls herself a sociobiologist, but many have dropped the term altogether.
Computational theory of mind, unlike sociobiology, is only indirectly biological, however one uses that word. It maintains that the human mind literally, not metaphorically, functions as a computer by processing information. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon argued for the physical symbol system hypothesis in 1976. In this theory, intelligence is equated with symbol manipulation. In their paper they state, “A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.”160 A digital computer is a physical symbol system. Newell, who made contributions to artificial intelligence, argued, “Our minds are a technology—like other technologies in being a set of mechanisms for the routine solution of a class of problems.”161 Newell created a structural model of human cognition. He did not pretend to explain how this model was realized in an actual physical brain. The application of computers processing symbolic information to organic processes is reminiscent of François Jacob’s explanation of the computer metaphor in genetics. The difference is that Newell does not treat “mind as technology” as a metaphor. His mind is a Hobbesian “calculating machine,” but unlike Hobbes, Newell didn’t seek to explain mind as part of the organic body. He felt no need to root his claims in actual brain processes.
The difference between sociobiology and what is now called evolutionary psychology can be explained as one of emphasis, from an organism’s behavior—what it does—to its thoughts or inner psychological states that are believed to cause what it does. Evolutionary psychology focuses on the idea of mind. Behaviorism, which dominated American psychology in the early half of the twentieth century, had no interest in the internal workings of the human mind. It posited that everything could be explained by observing behaviors. Behaviorism has fallen on bad times. The extremity of some of the positions held by James Watson and B. F. Skinner are no doubt to blame. Their emphasis on behavior to the exclusion of all internal mental processes became dogma, and dogmas often collapse under their own weight, despite the fact that human and animal behaviors obviously deserve to be studied closely. Unlike both the behaviorists and the sociobiologists who came before them, evolutionary psychologists are interested in human psychology, in the human mind as an evolved mechanism or machine that drives behaviors. But to understand how this idea came about, why so many people now assume the mind is a computer technology, it is necessary to track some examples of the remarkable variety in thinking about how to frame the question of how human beings became who they are.