William Morse  wrote:

> wilkins{at}wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
> news:bbi99n$1dtm$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 
> 
> > Phil Roberts, Jr.  wrote:
> > 
> > ...
> >> Back to evolutionary theory, what is your view of the behavior of
> >> the 9/11 terrorists?  A minor discrepancy, or a major headache for
> >> evolutionary psychology?
> > 
> > The problem with evolutionary psychology arises, IMHO, when it leaves
> > the realm of cognitive and psychological biases, tendencies and
> > propensities, and tries to provide a simple, monistic account of a
> > complex event in a cultural context.
> 
> Well said - and most evolutionary psychologists would probably agree.
> Actually, as pointed out by ??, being unpredictable on an individual
> level is probably itself adaptive, since otherwise one could be too
> easily manipulated. So expecting any psychologist to be able to
> completely explain a particular individual's actions is not realistic.

True, but we ought to note this is an argument for the maladaptiveness
of rigidly monotypic populations, rather than an argument against EP
explanations. *Any* evolutionary explanation is going to be stochastic
over populationsal distributions (that's how I understand it, anyway).
>  
> > The behavior of fundamentalist terrorists falls under the class of
> > dominance hierarchy behaviors gone wrong, attempting to
"protect" the
> > home territory at the service of an "alpha male" (in
this case, Allah)
> > and his beta male lieutenants (the Imams and terrorist leaders). The
> > altruism extends to the service of "kin" (i.e.,
coreligionists, even
> > though they are not necessarily *genetic* kin), as we see in the
> > trials of the Bali bombers - who apologise and show remorse only for
> > killing Muslims accidentally (as Imam Samudra did recently).
> 
> I'm not sure I agree that the behavior is "gone wrong". As pointed out
> by  Pinker (in How the Mind Works), the Doomsday Machine is a viable
> strategy, and probably important in some aspects of human behavior. A
> recent article (I think it was in Science) noted that most of the
> suicidal terrorists are not poor and lower class but fairly well
> educated  and middle class. The key element is a feeling of humiliation
> - what I think Phil would include under "self worth". Having
humiliation
> lead to suicidal rage could well be a Doomsday Machine response that is
> adaptive in a cultural evolution context. One would not want to
> completely humiliate an opponent if the result was a suicidal attack by
> the opponent. 

Do we really need an adaptive story here? It is a periphrasis to call it
a trait "gone wrong" - all that means is that while it is adaptive in
one context, it may not be adaptive now, qua *biological* trait. This is
because the adaptation occurred when the human population was small
enough for these traits to go to fixation across the entire species (so
far as I know - all humans are the same, within variational limits, in
this respect). So being adaptive in the environment of evolutionary
adaptation almost guarantees it will be maladaptive in novel and complex
environments like sedentary civilisation.

There may still *be* an adaptive story here - it is no doubt a
phenomenon with a *cultural* fitness, but this does not mean that we
should expect the biological trait to itself be an adaptation - the
conflation of the two levels of adaptation strike me as a longstanding
error in evolutionary thinking, going back to Darwin and Spencer.
> 
> 
> > 
> > To run with this explanation, we need not only the
"sociobiological"
> > story, but also the "evolutionary psychology" story
about adaptation
> > to troop-size populations in the EEA, and also the cultural evolution
> > story about how Islam has been developed and employed in the countries
> > from where these people come. Sometimes these explanatory levels
> > directly connect - you could argue that the almost medieval
> > village-like culture of parts of Iran and the Middle East contribute
> > to the impression that defense of religion is defense of kin, for
> > example. 
> 
> I agree that the psychological motivations probably include some sense
> of family defense. 
> 
The main difference being that in the Pleistocene, family was one's
community, so a community defence mechanism *would* be adaptive in kin
selection terms. *Now*, though, community no longer represents real kin
(ceteris paribus), so the "defend community [in order to defend kin]"
strategy no longer works biologically.

The ceteris paribus comes from a doco I saw recently, in which it was
noted that the genetic populations that built the pyramids, as based on
PCR of the buried workers (each of whom was labelled as to original
poulation and region), has not significantly changed in over 5000 years.
It seems to me that genes are usually *less* mobile than languages,
religions and agricultural practices. Hence it may be that the "defend
community" trategem is often enough adaptive to keep other strategems
from taking over.

-- 
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
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