Heated Objectivity

You wrote:
"Crawdads don't learn to speak English, whether or not they are raised in an environment in which they hear lots of English throughout their lives. Therefore, there must be some genes essential for learning English. However, as humans raised in environments in which they are never exposed to English never learn to speak English, it must be the case that environmental influences also contribute to the ability to speak English."

Okay, I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit of a nit-picker, but the irony of the above statement in an article pointing out the illogical conclusions and factual errors of others really struck me.

It's not English that has a genetic component, it's language. Human beings are genetically hard-wired to communicate with each other and will always, without exception, create language to do so.

Environment influences what language is used, not the very fact that a language is used at all so your statement that there are genetic components to learning "English" is incorrect.

Using this example to "demonstrate" your point invalidates your entire argument, which I'm not sure is incorrect, but can't really tell at this point.

I personally have seen enough stepparent abuse (from both men and women) to believe that as a divorced parent myself, it's not safe for my children to bring stepfather into their lives.

I tend to believe there is a genetic component to stepparent abuse. The failure rate of marriages of divorced parents is upwards of eighty percent. Second marriages of people who don't have children from the previous marriage is somewhere from 40 to 50 percent; they actually have a better chance of staying married than first marrieds.

There's a reason for this. Parents will protect their children first and foremost and it breaks many marriages up.

It also explains, to a certain extent, stepparent abuse. The resources needed to help a child thrive are, by nature, given to natural born children before the stepchildren.

It's a complicated problem, but in my heart of hearts, I believe the biggest problem here is selfish parents who end marriages when they can and should be saved thinking the "grass is greener" on the other side and then find out it's not.

Anger and resentment build to extraordinary levels and, heartbreakingly, the abuse worsens. Add to that a narcissist, psychopath, or otherwise unstable, anti-social personality, and you've got a deadly combination.

Tessa

"It's not English that has a genetic component, it's language"

If you mean that English is not an adaptation I agree (I didn't assert that it was). If you mean that you don't need specific genes (i.e., human genes) and environments (i.e., hearing English) to be able to speak English, you're wrong.

This is all well and good but I don't understand what the point of evolutionary psychology is... certainly the main objective is to see "why" we evolved certain behaviors. Thus "we have genes that predispose us to ___" obviously the environment would play in with that, but what makes it different from biopsych, or any other psychology trying to figure out the heritability of behaviors? That you're finding the "origin" or the "why" of how it came about?

I just don't find a use for it, I guess. People make far too much out of it as though "nature made us this way, so it's okay/what we should do" without realizing that evolution can and has created negative outcomes. So, "just because we evolved this way, doesn't mean it is 'good/right.'" You can take that in moral terms if you want, but it doesn't have to be, I'm just not finding the best word to use.

Essentially, I feel like it tells us nothing about behavior in the end... we're just trying to justify certain behaviors we see, find some far off genetic reason for it... great.

Now what do I do with that?

I meant the ability to use language is genetic. A group of humans never exposed to any language will create one of their own to communicate. It's hard-wired in our genetic code.

There are no genes essential to the use of English, the genes are essential to the use of language.

What language used by any given group is influenced by its environment. However, and this is what's important, the lack of environmental exposure to language doesn't mean there is no language.

What I am saying is:

Language=genetics
English=environment

Yes, you need the genetic ability to speak and environmental exposure to English to learn how to speak English, but you don't need environmental exposure to anything to use language, you're born with that ability.

So, comparing crawdads to humans in the regards to the use of language shouldn't include references to a specific language, it's comparing apples to oranges.

Tessa

"Language=genetics
English=environment"

No. English and language generally both require specific sets of genes and environments to exist. If an especially cruel experimenter put a fetus with human genes in a dolphin uterus, this individual would never speak any language (it would die first, actually). The question of whether environmental influences are associated with unique variance in the ability to speak language in any particular sample (i.e., in practice) is one for behavior genetics, not evolutionary psychology.

English, as I have already demonstrated, requires specific genes and environments to exist.

There are no genes that enable one to speak English, rather than French or German. If you were correct that "English ... requires specific genes," it would not be possible to take a German baby and raise him to speak English. Language classes would be impossible. As Tessa explains, it's the ability to learn/speak language that is genetic, but which language is learned is purely environment.

Christopher-
Yes, I never said that there were different genes that enabled one to speak English instead of another language. The ability to speak language is not "purely genetic," though, as I've demonstrated above. Which language you speak is only "purely environment" if you only sample humans.

I think this exchange aptly demonstrates why there is even a "nature vs. nurture" debate. To scientists this debate is silly: everything is both. But even for an attribute as benign as learning English, Tessa splits the characteristic into its genetic and environmental components, and does not accept that learning English is both.

"Environment influences what language is used, not the very fact that a language is used at all so your statement that there are genetic components to learning 'English' is incorrect."

Yes, her analysis of the components are correct, but her conclusion is wrong. If A requires B, and B requires C, then A requires C. English requires language skills which require genes; therefore, English requires genes. Is this faulty logic?

I myself have found it mind-boggling whenever I argue this with others. To me, there's nothing to argue about. But for some reason, it seems like other people want to be able to say whether something is a person's fault or not; that in black and white terms, it's someone's choice and responsibility, or it's their genes. To me, this seems like a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than an objective assessment of a situation. You can't fully blame someone if their actions or attributes are partly influenced by their genes.

So if I try to give another example of something affected by both genes and environment, say, height, people will say, "Well, one's maximum potential height is influenced by genes, and the nutrition will affect how well they fulfill that potential." And though such analysis again is correct, it further shows that people have an uncomfortable time with anything being both. Which is why when people talk about much more controversial things, like sexual orientation, or one's temper, etc., the conversation gets so heated.

The best way I've found to demonstrate nature vs. nurture is to elaborate on the example of handedness. Most people are right-handed, and very few people chose to be right-handed, and thus most people think it's genetic, but its heritability is only like 0.3, if I recall correctly. And then I explain how China used to force students to use their right hands, and thus there were no left-handed Chinese.

I agree completely that every trait or behavior has both a biological and environmental component. In fact, I think this is almost tautological. Thus, I too feel the frustration when critics make the riddiculous argument that evolutionary psychologists are genetic or biological determinists (whatever this would mean). However, there is still a reasonable debate to be had about the relative contribution of different factors in producing a trait or behavior. For example, all (normal) humans hit puberty whether or not they recieve any social input. Of course, we need all sorts of contributions from the environment for this (e.g. food, water, air, etc.), but most people would be content to call this a biologically determined trait since it occurs automatically and without flexibility. Learning english, I presume, would be considered an environmentally determined trait because it requires specific social inputs to accomplish (e.g. being around and hearing native english speakers) Logically, one is no more biological than the other; theoretically, it does make sense to make a distinction between them. So, when a scholar states that male promiscuity is a socialized behavior, I think they are making the point that it is more akin to learning a language (it needs social input, presumably patriarchy) than puberty (all it takes is food, water, air, etc.). In this case, I think that the former hypothesis is incorrect--it is manifestly true that males, on average, are more prone to short term mating strategies regardless of social input.

I think that the human brain is ill equipped to understand these fine distinctions, thus we see scholars resorting to various non-sensical arguments.

By the way, do you think that Tim Lincecum's cy young award was biologically determined?

Your question reminded me of something my freshmen psych professor told me. He applied it directly to psychology but it really is the nature of science as a whole. He called it the "UPC of Psychology": Understand, Predict, Control.

All of science revolve around those three ideas. Evolutionary Psychology is just one of many frameworks to use with those ideas. In that sense, it is no different then biopsych or any other method; it's just another way to approach the problem. I believe many people feel that it might be the "best" approach (at least currently) because it does hope to find the origin of behavior. That's "why" people study behavior in an evolutionary model.

From an epistemological standpoint, why wouldn't you want to find the true origin to some unknown? If you don't know the true cause, then all your future efforts based on it will be faulty. If your understanding is faulty from the get go, then your predictions and attempted controls will likely be faulty.

If you find it hard to find a "use" for evolutionary based behavioral theories, I would ask, do you find a use for any empirically based behavioral theories? Biopsych or other? If you answer yes, then why not look at evolutionary theories as just that, another theory which you can agree with or not. You might not agree with the theories, but to question "why" is to question the basic nature of scientific investigation.

After reading through abit of the Newsweek article, it does seem that she is taking a very categorical approach to evolutionary psych ("programmed" to rape/not programmed) yet a more fluid view for it's opponents.

I have never heard anyone who actually knows what they are talking about speak that deterministically about evolutionary psychology theory. In fact I've noticed more of the "it depends" attitude she seems to attribute only to the behavioral ecology field.

To me this reeks of the "evolution = biology = deterministic" mantra. I thought the old "stimulus-response" model was pretty much forgotten (except for maybe amoebas, maybe?)

German and English might (and, for the most part, probably do) require the same exact genes to make their expression possible. That doesn't mean that you don't need specific genes to enable the expression of English, nor does it mean that they are purely behavioral.

If you have identical twins, one who is only exposed to German and one who is only exposed to English, we know with great certainty that the expression of English by the English exposed twin is a high-probability event and that the expression of English by the German exposed twin is a near impossibility (and vice versa). This shows us that there is an environmental component.

We also know with great certainty that dogs and ferns that are exposed to English can not express English despite being in an ideal environment, showing us that there is a genetic component.

Subcategories of language still require specific genes.