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. 
> 

My view is somewhat different from both of the above.  I see man as
driven, not by the need to sustain physical needs, but mostly by the
need to sustain emotional needs, with the latter not easily translated
to anything that makes all that much sense from a physical need
point of view.  These emotional needs are grotesquely underreported
and underacknowledged in the natural sciences simply because they
seem so out of place from the perspective of everything we have come
to understand about our naturally selected history, but lie at the core of
the humanities.  And, in this respect, without actually trying to
be, I have long viewed the humanities as actually more scientific
than the sciences where the study of human nature is concerned.  I
quess you might say that the problem with our scientific view of
man is that we are so focused on being scientific, that we are quite
prepared to force human nature into a mold that it really doesn't
fit.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with a romantic sentimentality,
but with the simple realization that the dominant need in myself is
simply not physical, but my need to sustain my sense of self-worth,
hidden just below the surface in virtually everything I think and
do.  And that until such time as evolutionary psychology begins to
put this feature of the mind right at the very center of its
perspective, its all going to remain a bit of a joke:

   One of the characteristics of the majority of modern psychological
   theories, aside from the arbitrariness of so many of their claims,
   is their frequently ponderous _irrelevance_.  The cause, both of
   the irrelevance and of the arbitrariness, is the evident belief of
   their exponents that one can have a science of human nature while
   consistently ignoring man's most significant and distinctive attributes.
   (Nathaniel Branden).


My own views in philosophy of science have perhaps been best mirrored in
a little paper that you really can't find anywhere except at my website.
It was presented at the 1981 meeting of the 'Society for Philosohpy
and Psychology' at the U. of Chicago.  Here is how it begins:


       Implications of the New Philosophy of Science

                         A Topology for Psychology
 

            Peter T. Manicas, Queens College, CUNY
                 Paul F. Secord, University of Houston

						
                                     Introduction

 From early in this century to the present day, psychology has been
characterized by a number of polarities reflecting various conflicts and
tensions in the field. These may be variously described as experimental
versus clinical, biological reductionism versus humanism,  basic research
versus applied, scientific versus professional, mentalism versus behaviorism.
By the late 1950's voices expressing deep dissatisfaction with the
discipline appeared. Most notable was the appearance at this time of the
monumental Psychology: A Study  of a  Science, edited by Sigmund Koch.  In
that work, one eminent psychologist after another, after many years -- or
even a lifetime of research -- admitted to strong doubts about what had been
achieved, and some suggested that our most basic assumptions had to be
questioned.

Koch's diagnosis was incisive. He argued that psychology was unique
insofar as "its institutionalization preceded its content and its methods
preceded its problem's....  The 'scientism' that many see and decry in
recent psychology  was thus with it from the start...  From its earliest days
of  the experimental  pioneers, man's stipulation that psychology be adequate
to science outweighed his commitment that it be adequate to man" (Vol.
p.  783). And even more crucially, Koch went on  to point out that
"(psychology) still bases its understanding of  vital questions of method
on an extrinsic philosophy of science which (in some areas) is twenty years
or more out of date" (p. 788).

More recently, we find Koch in 1969, Taylor in 1973 and Toulmin in
1978 observing (here in Taylor's words) that "psychology is a vast and
ramified discipline" containing "many mansions," yet
"intellectually divided
against itself" (Taylor, 1973). Moreover, the "busy
research" of the past
dozen years or so has seen the fragmentation of psychology into "dozens of
highly specialized, and largely non-interacting subdisciplines" (Toulmin,
1978). Toulmin attributed this, rightly on our view, to the still dominating
neo-positivist theory of the behavioral sciences that succeeded the old
positivism of the 1930's and 1940's.

But if as these writers have argued, the root issue remains the very
conception of science, of its methods, tasks and limits, then the time may
be ripe for a resolution. In the decades since the publication of
Psychology: A Study of a Science, there has been, indeed,
a virtual  Copernican Revolution in the philosophy of science, a radical change that
has profound implications for the human sciences. Moreover, currently with this
  "revolution" there has been an extraordinary convergence on a
new heuristic
for the human sciences. This heuristic, converging from a wide variety of
disparate quarters, from continental hermeneutics, post-Wittgensteinian
action-theory and philosophy of mind, phenomenology, structuralism and
neo-Marxism, is not merely consistent with the new philosophy of science, but
as we shall argue, it can be seen to be grounded in the same fundamental
insights (Bhaskar 1975, 1979a).

*********************************************************************

What does all this have to do with 9/11.  From my perspective, the 9/11
terrorists do not make any sense from the perspective of the theory of
natural selection, and are providing us with evidence of indeterminism.
IOW, man is indeed the rational animal, as is evidenced by the fact that
he is increasingly less concerned with staying alive (e.g., self-
incinerating Buddhist monks, suicide second leading cause of death in
teenagers, etc.) and increasingly more concerned with sustaining REASONS
for staying alive (self-worth maximization manifested in needs for love,
attention, purpose, meaning, wealth, power, religion, dignity, autonomy
justice, etc. etc. etc.).  He is beginning to question the most central
mandate of natural selection itself, and is offering irrefutable evidence
that we as a species are beginning to show signs of transcending our
genetic influences.

PR



> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
>>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. 
> 
> 
> 
>>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. 
> 
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Bill Morse
>
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