Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology [ハードカバー]

This book is a testimonial to the fact that Sociobiology continues to go against the grain of many behavioral scientists, long after the ideological debates of the previous century have subsided, and at a time when a more measured approach to the contribution of this strain of biological and social theory is plainly available. The novelty of this book is that it counterposes sociobiology to developmental biology rather than its traditional foe, anti-biological approaches to human sociality. This counterposition is particularly curious, since many developmental biologists consider this the age of "evo-devo", where the synergistic interaction of evolutionary and developmental modeling are increasingly recognized. Despite Francis' concerted and repeated attempt to portray sociobiology and behavioral developmental biology as alternative approaches to understanding social behavior, I remain completely unconvinced.

Francis writing style and mode of reasoning are profoundly distasteful to me, though others might enjoy it. Francis relishes in contrasting ideas that are in principle mutually consistent and even reinforcing. He draws the intellectual landscape in stark black and white/good and evil, where I generally see the textured grays of creatively contrasting and equally plausible ideas just waiting for some insightful researcher to draw them together into a satisfying explanatory framework. For instance, he depicts the search for the evolutionary origins of social behavior as the "paranoic" search for "teleological explanations." Metaphors relating to psychological illness when speaking of "adaptationist theory" recur incessantly throughout this distinctly intemperate book. Evolutionary psychology, for instance, is flippantly referred to as "evo-psycho."

Even substantively, Francis' method of dealing approaches alternative to his own is, to my mind, shallow and distasteful. I was taught that when disagreeing with a theory, one must first present the theory in as strong and coherent manner as possible, and critique only the most shining and forceful of the theory's ostensible successes. Francis, by contrast, is a bottom-feeder who will launch his missiles against any random representative of the opposing school. Indeed, despite that fact that more than one-third of this book is devoted to notes, index, and bibliography, Francis rarely deigns to cite directly his opponent, rather being content to provide an broad description of the field in question. Typical is the argument relating to the title of book. I don't know of a serious sociobiological argument as to why men don't ask for directions. I don't even know if it's a true fact in search of an explanation. Francis, nevertheless, treats the issue as though it had some intrinsic scientific value.

Francis is smart enough, however, to recognize that he is no match for the greats of the field, so when George Williams, Ronald Fisher, John Maynard Smith, Edward Wilson, or Niko Tinbergen is mentioned, Francis abandons the derogatory bravado and accurately describes the eminently reasonable positions they have taken on the issue of the relationship between evolution and development, adaptation and developmental constraints, and the other topics treated in this book.

The stance taken by Francis is a shame, because there are
super-adaptationists that tend to consider just-so story as adequate explanations, and are loathe to deploy any non-adapationist argument.

Francis' chapter on the mimicking capacity, perhaps the best in the book, is a case in point. Francis defends the sensory exploitation hypothesis ably against the classical runaway selection and costly signaling approaches to modeling mate choice, and effectively defends the theory that the mockingbird's mimicking capacity is simply a by-product of their song-learning versatility. This versatility may itself have adaptive value, but the fact that many bird species that occupy ecological niches similar to that of the mockingbird lack its versatility calls this into question. Indeed, Francis presents a welcome argument to the effect that exotic animal characteristics are unlikely to be adaptation, or they would be more widely share among species share the exotic species' life style and ecological niche. The female hyena's hypertrophied clitoris, the elephant's trunk, hermaphroditism fish, the giraffe's neck, and the human brain may all be examples of characteristics that occurred despite, rather than because of, adaptationist dynamics.

Francis is insistent that sociobiology can only countenance causal forces from physiology and genetic constitution to social constitution, and not vice versa. He contrasts this view, which he calls "misguided materialism" with the developmental view that social organization can affect brain physiology in the short run and genetic structure in the long run. Presumably he never heard of the Baldwin Effect (the term does not appear in his index), despite its centarian age, or the gene-culture coevolutionary models of Cavalli-sforza and Feldman, Boyd and Richerson, and a host of related analyses that have populated the biology, anthropology, and even economics journals for the past quarter century.

Perhaps the most egregious chapter in the book is "Sex without SEX," in which he critiques the adaptationist theory of sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is not an adaptation in vertebrates. Rather, he argues, there is a developmental constraint against hermaphrodism, and adaptationists are too blind to see this shining truth. Francis' argument is shabby and incorrect. First, sexual reproduction is extremely costly and could not persist if it did not provide offsetting advantages. Second, as he notes, there are many hermaphrodite fish species, and lizard species as well, but they appear to be evolutionary dead ends. This could be because there are development constraints in vertebrates (there certainly are, in the form of gene imprinting, in mammals), but this remains to be determined. Third, there is no general non-adaptationist theory of sexual reproduction, to my knowledge. He certainly presents none.

Historically, developmentalists have been indifferent or hostile to evolutionary modeling because the do not see how such dynamic historical modelshelp them develop the structural and developmental mechanisms characteristic of living organisms. This stance is no longer fruitful. We now understand that evolutionary models do not prove anything. Rather, they suggest hypotheses to be explored and substantiated. Adaptationist arguments are essential because they suggest the function of homologous and analogous physiological structures. Charting the development of behaviorally-relevant characteristics, such as brain size and social organization, the structure of brains and vocal apparati, using the paleographic evidence, sheds critical light on the path to successfully modeling biological development from the level of cell to that of the complex animal or human society. We increasingly need researchers to explore the synergy between development and evolution. This ill-tempered book could have been written in that spirit, but it was not.

This book does three things at once. One might not think it was possible to successfully combine all three in one book, but Francis does succeed. First, it contains a very accessible and lively introduction to recent biological work about sex and sex differences, especially in the vertebrates (animals with backbones, like us). Some of the details and anecdotes here are extremely surprising and strange -- in the animal kingdom sex *is* often strange. The book goes quite deeply into the biology here, but remains vivid and readable throughout.

Secondly, the book contains a fairly intense and sustained criticism of some of the current strategies and habits of thought that are applied to these questions in some parts of biology and psychology. Francis thinks that there is far too much emphasis on 'functional explanation,' on the search for the answer to 'why?' questions as opposed to 'how?' questions. Here the book is quite unorthodox and challenging. It is common to think that there is now, in biology, a harmonious division of labor between work on 'how?' questions (work on mechanisms), and work on functional explanations that seek to tell us 'why' the biological world works as it does. It is thought by many that ordinary Darwinism provides us with a straightforward integration of the two kinds of investigation. Francis, in contrast, thinks that many people allow the search for functional explanation to dominate their work. If we understood the 'how' better, we would see that many 'why' questions are transformed or even dissolved.

Thirdly, the book is in many ways a contribution to the philosophy of science. Francis thinks that we need to be much more suspicious of a set of ideas, concepts and strategies that have been embraced by many philosophers of science. Francis thinks that some parts of science have allowed themselves to depart from the materialist pattern of explanation that is appropriate for biology and related sciences. In particular, he thinks that the current enthusiasm for abstact informational and functional concepts is far more antagonistic to materialist and naturalistic projects than people realize.

On these more theoretical and philosophical issues, it is very hard to work out whether Francis is right. I tend to think that he goes too far. (Here I might add that I know the author and have discussed these issues with him, though my own work does not figure in the book.) But the book is extremely valuable as a challenge to some very popular ways of thinking in these areas.

So although the book can be read just as a lively, vivid introduction to the strange sex lives of animals closely related to us, it is also a very deep and careful piece of argumentation. Sometimes Francis is rather polemical in his style, and I can see why some readers (and reviewers) might find the tone a little combative in places. But to me, this makes the book all the more enjoyable to read. I recommend it to anyone interested in sex who also enjoys an intellectual workout.

Francis takes an in-depth look at the difference between what he calls (riffing on John Maynard Smith) the difference between why-biology (or teleological explanations) and how-biology (or non goal-oriented changes). Riffing on Aristotle, this can be seen as the difference between final cause and proximate cause explanations. Or adaptationism, especially in a hard-core form, and neutralist stances.

The book is overall a mixed bag, almost infuriatingly so at times.

The last chapter, "Darwin's Temptress," is far and away the best. He goes after Evolutionary Psychology quite well, notably exposing weaknesses in the thinking of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

By the end of this chapter, I was almost ready to give the book a four-star rating. BUT, before the start of this chapter, I was quite ready to give it a two-star rank instead.

As noted in my review of David Buller's "Adapting Minds," I distinguish between Ev Psych the quasi-metaphysical theory of biosocial development and ev psych the more legitimate study of evolutionary origins and causes of human mental attributes and differences in their development.

Francis, in a challenging book with plenty of high points and low points alike, does not. Hence the three-star rating.

Let me look at the high points of the final chapter before pointing out what I see as the more notable errors of reasoning earlier on.

In discussing Dennett, Francis points out how he has shifted his embrace of "stancing" from seeing it as a viable bridge between folk psychology and more materialist approaches to study of the mind in his earlier books, to being more disingenuous about it later. By "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Francis says "his stance stance had become disingenuous ... let[ting] him claim allegiance to the materialist natural scientists, without actually having to act like one." I think there's a fair amount of insight there.

Francis also notes that the algorithmic view of the mind (whether fully modular or not) championed by Dennett (and Tooby/Cosmides, et al) is clearly a top-down, design-driven version. I had always disagreed with this algorithmic idea; I now understand why.

He faults both Dennett and Dawkins for being such hard-core adaptationists that their support for design as the explain-all almost goes full circle back to Bishop Paley and his untenable watchmaker analogies.

Dawkins gets faulted in other ways. Most notable of these is defending Paley's emphasis on design to the point of dismissing Hume's CRUSHING destruction of the argument from design in general. Dawkins goes so far as to overlook Hume's contribution to antimetaphysical thought in general; Francis points out his claim that not until Darwin was it intellectually reasonable to be an atheist.

Having read much of Hume, I'd have to call Dawkins' claim pure rubbish.

But, somewhat unfortunately, 10 chapters in the book come before this one.

Here's a few problems.

First, on page 49, Francis clearly only allows teleological explanations in evolutionary biology to operate at one, overarching level. He doesn't say why teleology, or even quasi-teleology, couldn't operate at, say, the individual genus level.

Second, on page 50, he says how-biology can be seen as both a competing counterexplanation to why-biology and a complementary explanation, specifically re sex change among certain fish. But, especially as we get closer to his take on evolutionary psychology and its dealing with the human mind, his emphasis seems to be ENTIRELY on the competing rather than complementary half of that sentence.

While decrying that many evolutionary psychologists seem to have social or political axes to grind, he neglects that people as strongly opposed not just to Ev Psych, but a fair degree to ev psych as well, including perhaps people like himself, have their own axes to grind.

Along with this (and this book is three years old, but not THAT old) he seems dismissive of people such as feminist psychologist, philosophers, etc., who report sex-based human mental differences of a nature, both depth and breadth, along with the number of them, that they can't all be dismissed as socially conditioned.

A few more specific critiques.

Page 140ff, he claims that, in songbirds at least, ev psychers all seem to claim that the hippocampus' function is primarily about spatial memory. Well, I don't know about songbirds, but I've NEVER seen that claimed about the hippocampus in mammals.

Page 161. A sexually dimorphic trait need not be *antagonistic* against the sex that doesn't have it. Rather, it just needs *enough additional evolutionary pressure* in the sex that does have it. Since the body naturally switches off one copy of each chromosome pair in the non-sex chromosomes, it's easy to postulate that functioning control genes for the actual coding gene(s) for a sexual dimorphism, say antlers in males, could cause the male copy of the particular chromosome to always turn on in males and the female copy to always turn on in females. I'm not a geneticist, so I don't know HOW likely that is; but, from the point of logic, there's nothing to contraindicate it.

Page 168. It's a straw man to call Dennett a "reformed behavioralist ... a behavioralist with a computationalist veneer." Given that his academic study is in philosophy, not psychology, referring to him as ANY sort of behavioralist in trying to trace out the intellectual history of both Ev Psych and ev psych is less than enlightening. Given that this philosophy study, at the graduate level, took place in England with the analytic philosophy muse Gilbert Ryle, the computationalist label is certainly understandable, but it should be further seen as removing himself from the behavioralist fallout as it played out.

Page 168 footnote: Calling Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" a "regrettable book" is ridiculous. Thought-provoking? Yes. Often wrong? Yes. Sometimes right? Also yes. Regrettable? Not a chance.

Page 169: Saying that Ev Psych (I'll do Francis the favor of assuming he's talking about my capitalized version) makes Jerry Fodor look like a "shrinking violet," and that he in turn did the same to Noam Chomsky is one of the more ax-grinding strawmen of the book.