Douglas T. Kenrick

My review will focus on style and content.

STYLE:
The book is easy to understand, and at times funny, but because it is written for readers with grade 2 education, its tone is a bit condescending and it leaves out major areas that one expects to be covered in a book that deals with a “scientific” issue. There is no much discussion of methodology or any shortcomings of the theory of evolutionary psychology. Normally for a book that is written for the general reader, one expects a more balanced approach and not one-sided arguments.

CONTENT – GENERAL COMMENTS:

Rationality and economics: Rationality is a relative concept since it is in reference to an objective function. The reason for assuming a particular rationality is to build a general predictive theory and not to explain every nook and cranny of human behaviour. Theories that explain something specific are, by definition, not general! The authors criticize economics, but economics, as the name implies, was developed to explain the allocation of economic resources – not to explain women’s ovulation. Economists are not interested in predicting the behaviour of a single individual, but rather the behaviour of a market as a whole. And if the assumption of self-interest provides as good a prediction as anything else, then, using the principle of Occam’s razor, we do not need the other stuff. It appears that the authors are somewhat confused about what economists assume about individuals. Economists assume that individuals are maximizing their utility, not their income. Income is a constraint to the maximization process.

The critique of economics for assuming rational, self-interest maximizing individuals is a bit problematic because, according to the book, humans do what they do in response to the needs of their seven selves. But since these selves are within us, isn’t this a self-interest maximization too? Why else would you care about Protection, Disease avoidance and mate acquisition in the first place?

We all know and agree that every person has a reason for behaving the way s/he does. But the authors seem to be confused about having a reason for what you do, the definition of rationality for theoretical purposes, and being smart. A reason why someone does something may not necessarily fit into the definition of rationality. The subtitle to the book is “How evolution made us smarter than we think”. But what they mean is that as long as your behaviour is explained by one of the seven selves, then that's smart! But buying into Ponzi schemes because of our need to acquire mates or avoid getting sick is not smart – it is an explanation of why it is happening, but definitely not smart. It is not even smart in their own terms since if you give up resources in exchange for nothing, which is what happens when you buy into Ponzi schemes, then this would fail the “evolutionary fitness” test.

Evolutionary psychology: The narrative of this theory seems to be a caricature of evolutionary biology. In evolutionary biology genes survive and propagate either by chance (gene-drift) or because of natural selection. Evolution happens because of random mutations in our genes and because of random changes in our environment – neither of which are controlled by our genes. So our genes are not little conscious beings running around inside our bodies making tactical and strategic plans! Crap happens to them all the time and some of this random crap survives by chance and some survives because the person that carried the gene happens to be in an environment that is best suited for this mutation (natural selection) - which in a way is also by chance since this person could have been in a different environment. But to take this model and transpose it onto conscious, self-aware beings like ourselves, especially when we have no clue what consciousness is, where it comes from and how it controls everything else, in order to explain behaviour is almost comic. Well, at least they should have taken the whole story of evolutionary biology including the environment and the randomness of things. No-one would disagree that our genes control to a large extent who we are and to some extent how we behave, but so does the environment. It can change gene expression, which is the process that translates genetic code into proteins and other gene products, and hence our behaviour.

The authors make a distinction between proximal explanations – these are just superficial stuff that economists explain - and “deep” explanations – which are of course the ones provided by evolutionary psychology. And the deep narrative usually goes back to the cavemen, for whom we have very little information as to how they behaved, or to some minor insect or fish species. Well, this anecdotal approach to developing a general theory of human behaviour is, to say, the least, irritating and the cartoonist explanations that are being provided are even more so. Why go back to the hunters-gatherers? Why not the Greeks or Romans, for whom we have more information, or if you really want to be evolutionary, to the Last Universal Ancestor? And why even stop there if you really want to go deep: why not go to the fundamental particles of physics and quantum mechanics, after all, these are the stuff that make up all living and inanimate matter in the universe!

Many of the seven selves in their theory, that are supposed to explain behaviour, they do so tautologically: For example, if the question is: why do people avoid getting sick? Then the evolutionary psychology answer is: Because our Sick Avoidance self takes over – in other words, because people don’t like getting sick! How does this explanation provide any further information on the original question?

Finally, now that we know, thanks to evolutionary psychologists, all these stuff about us, wouldn’t the authors expect people to change their behaviour? For example, if women knew that during ovulation they dress like sluts, wouldn’t they change their dressing habits?

The authors' closing remarks identify curiosity as one of the reasons why they wrote the book. That is, they, and millions of other scientists, were curious of what makes humans tick. But how is this powerful human drive – curiosity – explained with the seven sub selves? At first glance, it does not seem to fit with any of the sub-selves. The book is quiet on this, but I am sure that if you push them they would come with some ill-designed experiment to show that it is also related to some of the seven dwarfs!

CONTENT – SPECIFIC COMMENTS

One could go through and criticise the various studies mentioned in the book, but as I said before, the book is short on methodology. So I just picked some examples to show design or logical problems with their studies:

Dowry vs bride price:
The authors claim that in some societies men pay to choose the most fertile woman. In other societies the woman’s family pays a dowry to ensure that their daughter and grandchildren are taken care in the future. But why wouldn't the families in the first society also want their grandchildren to be taken care? And why would men in the second societies also pay a bride price as this gives them some degree of choice? The only way that this theory works is when men in the first example want to preserve the right to choose, while in the second they don’t and the family of the woman in the first model don’t care about her or her children but in the second society they do!

Natural frequencies vs Probabilities – or the Linda problem:
The authors present a story about Linda(s) and ask a question in two different ways in order to show that people cannot answer easily questions that are formed in man-made units of measurements, like probabilities, but they can answer easily in natural frequencies because - yes you guessed it - our caveman ancestors only understood natural numbers, like how many cows were on the field:
Statement 1: Linda is 31 and majored in philosophy and was deeply involved as a student with issues of discrimination, social justice and nuclear proliferation. Which is more probable? A. Linda is a bank teller; B. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement?
Statement 2: Out of 100 women that are 31, majored in philosophy, and were deeply involved as students with issues of discrimination, social justice and nuclear proliferation, which is larger? A. The number of women that are bank tellers; or B. The number of women that are bank tellers and active in the feminist movements.

Now as it is evident from the phrasing of these questions, these are not exactly the same questions and the initial story about Linda, or the 100 Lindas, has nothing to do with the question. The story is there to trick the reader. The first question about Linda can also be interpreted as “Is Linda likely to be just a Bank teller and not active with feminism, or a bank teller and active with feminism?” On the other hand, the second question is much clearer. It asks which of the two sets of people is greater. So for me this has nothing to do with natural frequencies and more to do with proper phrasing of a question so that the person who is expected to answer it can understand it.

Columbus vs. Macon or the magic of sex ratios:
The authors claim that the good folks of Columbus, Georgia – and by this they mean the men – carry a massive credit card debt when compared to their fellow Georgians who live in Macon. The explanation for this is that Macon has more women per men than Columbus where there are more men than women. So the explanation goes like this: when men are in excess supply relative to women, they have to compete with each other to get the woman and in the process they spend a lot of money to impress their potential mate. While in Macon where there are more women than men, women practically throw themselves on the men who do not have to spend much on them. The logical problem with this argument is this: if women need to procreate as much as men, then in Macon it should be the women who now spend money to get their men so the debt levels should be similar with Columbus. But that is not what is happening and we have no explanation why this is so. In any case, there is also no explanation of how the study was designed. I mean, if we are going to test the theory that sex ratios explain debt accumulation, then we should test if it works in the right market. Clearly men less than 15 or over 70 are not in the market to acquire a bride, neither are those who are already married. So did the study account for this when they measured the supply of men and women or did they just take everyone into account? Second, if this theory is true, then since women in Columbus will take their time to choose which man to accept, then the average marriage age of women and their average age of giving birth to their first baby should be higher in Columbus than in Macon where the guys control the game. But of course no implications of their theory are being tested. I tried the US Census Bureau and CDC to find data on this but they only have this information at the state level.

The same explanation, i.e., supply of men and women, is used to explain the free and unrestrained sex in the 60s. But how did the young men and women of the 60s figured out that they were more women around - especially since most of them were stoned most of the time? And is the rebellion against authority and war, which was reducing the number of men, also a consequence of this unbalanced of sex ratios, or is rebellion a superficial, proximal explanation?

Shoes:
The authors seem to imply that all shoes are the same and hence if you are buying an expensive pair you are doing it for the sole purpose of gaining status? But not all shoes are the same. Some you wear and you feel good in them, some give you blisters after 5 minutes of walking, and some you cannot possibly use for other purposes, like you cannot use diner shoes for running a marathon. Why are all these shoes differences not relevant when someone is making a choice and decides to spend more on a pair or to buy more pairs?… (mere)

I should, before reviewing, disclaim that this was a free book from Librarything, which I got on the condition that I review it.

Douglas Kenrick's Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity Are Revolutionizing Our View of Human Nature was, on the whole, a very enjoyable audiobook.

Generally, Kenrick does a good job of bringing together his personal experiences and the research he and others have done -- both pointing towards very interesting insights into human nature. This is especially interesting given Kenrick's unusual background (at least, unusual for an academic): his experience having a father who landed in prison, his youthful days as a street hoodlum, and his frank discussion of his past divorces all lend interesting notes to the discussion of evolutionary psychology he presents.

I realized, only late into reading the book, that I'd heard of Kenrick before: he was in the news -- a certain kind of rarefied academic news, that is -- as one of the researchers who had proposed a revised form of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (I'd been researching the Maslovian concept of a hirarhcy of needs for a paper a couple of summers ago and come across Kenrick and company's proposed rearrangement.) I'm not sure what I think of Kenrick's reconstruction -- on the one hand, I'm not wholly sure that self-actualization need be discarded, or separated from child-rearing, and on the other, I rather think that the "self-actualization" that Kenrick folds down into Esteem and other social-capital related values is a bit problematic. Some people, for example, compose music for respect: others do it to get the music in their heads out into the world, to give it life. (Most writers I know write for the same reason.) I think, rather, there may be a sort of fluidity in our brains about different kinds of offspring, whether biological, mechanical (in the case of an inventor or repairman), memetic (the musician or writer), or whatever.

The book does raise interesting questions, while explaining things clearly and understandably. I especially appreciated the section where he and other researchers find evidence supporting a proposition that they'd originally doubted: that the difference between the Religious Right and the Left in America is fruitfully seen as a playing-out of different mating strategies... though it presents us with the dilemma (which Kenrick doesn't address, beyond saying he takes the issue less personally now) of what we are to do with this reality, given how things far removed from child-rearing (such as foreign policy, the state of public education, and more) hinge on something as basic as the conflict between different mating strategies?

In any case, I liked the book for rounding out my knowledge of some studies, for raising anew certain questions that vex me, and for lending a new perspective on a few interesting questions. Kenrick's book may not be a groundshaking new contribution to the popularization of evolutionary psychology, but he is interesting and funny... and I think you can safely ignore reviewers who imply he's sexist, or doesn't know what he's talking about. From what I can tell, they weren't "reading" (or listening) all that carefully, or are hellbent on being offended by scientific inquiry into human sex differentiation... or, they simply don't understand what's being argued. I am pretty sensitive to people justifying sexism on the basis of theory, whether scientific, cultural, or otherwise, and I saw none of that. And Kenrick doesn't gloss over racism: indeed, his discussion offers a partial explanation for it. (Incomplete, yes, but what are we expecting him to do, explain it all the way through?)

As for the audio, Fred Stella is a good narrator in general, with a friendly and engaging narrative voice. The only thing that drove me crazy was the amount of punched-in dubbing in the text, especially -- and somewhat embarrassingly -- in the names of researchers who had worked with Kenrick. One wishes that whoever was producing the audiobook had gone ahead and either gotten the pronunciations checked beforehand, or at least allowed Stella to punch in and out with longer clips. Or, hell, a little more professional handling of the audio setup could have made the edits done later a little bit less apparent. But all in all, it was very well narrated.… (mere)