#evopsych

Is this about that war ptsd post from like a week ago? Believe me, the fairly uncontroversial statement of "human beings are probably in some sense wired to be able to handle some intergroup conflict and violence without falling apart" does not imply that I accept any of the woo associated with pop evopsych, and it's honestly fairly insulting to assume otherwise.

Okay, I have a follow up/clarification to my salt bit about emotions being part of rational logic yesterday.

The reason why I get such a BAD twitch about it is that the idea that emotions are “primitive” and rational cognitive processes are “More Advanced” is that it’s from a very old school of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary science; it’s in the same area of evopsy as the idea of a “lizard hindbrain” that “hasn’t evolved since the prehistoric days”. It’s taken a long time to dismantle some of it via evidence, but it is being pretty well shoved out by better research that’s less founded in proving a particular ideology.

(That idea is also bullshit, the human hindbrain doesn’t actually have more than really superficial sillhouette resemblance to lizard brains, and more recent research has found that reptilian brains have plenty of processing centers we had previously said they DIDN’T, just structured drastically differently from mammalian/avian brains.  We have other confirmation that reptiles of at least some species have proven cognitive abilities previously assumed to not exist, as tortoises, given an actually WARM AND COMFORTABLE FOR THEM lab environment and treats they really like, will run maze exercises with a similar success rate to rats and different signs of aptitudes for different parts of the cognitive/navigation tasks.)  

ANYWAY.

The whole “Lizard hindbrain” and “Human rational thinking is MORE EVOLVED while emotions are MORE PRIMITIVE” is a part of early evolutionary science, the area where one of the basic assumed premises was that evolution was a linear progression of increasingly complex and “improved” stages, with Superior Advanced stages usually supplanting and suppressing the weaker, “less evolved”, inferior stages.

The continued existence of horseshoe crabs, nautiluses, ferns, and crocodiles should honestly be enough proof that it doesn’t work that way, as they haven’t really changed a whole lot in billions of years, and by that model should have now been supplanted by a “more evolved, better” version.  Evolution is not a linear progression, it’s a continual adaptive pattern that will hang onto things that work and alter things that aren’t working; if things work, they last for a very long time and sometimes become building blocks for other things that work, if they don’t work, they have a hard time surviving.  Evolution is also kludging from the junk drawer of whatever exists in a given species’ genome.  (also cognitive behavior and cognitive reasoning isn’t a solely human behavior, as far as we can tell humans are just capable of more COMPLICATED cognitive reasoning and emotional/social patterns than other animals that have demonstrated it.  Dolphins are occasionally calling into question just how much more complicated.)

ANYWAY the actual reason it’s a hissy point and not just a “Your science is outdated” is that basically, there were reasons why evolution was treated as a Linear Progression of Improvement in 1800′s/1900′s science, and they were awful ones.

One part of it was that, because things were still REALLY religiously influenced in some ways, there was a continuing need for theory to have Reasons why Humans Were Superior To Animals And Inherently Different, achieved by treating every other species as “less evolved, or they’d have civilizations too”, and thereby assuring humanity of being Better.  It was basically either supporting “BECAUSE GOD MEANT US TO BE SUPERIOR” or replacing the logic behind “BECAUSE MANKIND IS INHERENTLY SUPERIOR TO ANYTHING ELSE”.  

The other part of it was actually from early colonialism, because it was a way to justify superiority over other races; by defining African and North American native groups as “primitive” and “less evolved”, it opened the door for all kinds of dehumanizing and reduction to “lesser states”, as well as assumptions that they were “less intelligent” and “More animalistic” because they were “less evolved”.  (Rigged tests used for “intelligence” that were never designed to be “intelligence” tests were used to further justify this by “proving” that they were “less cognitively able” than “superior races”.)  

This branch of evolutionary science was also the source of eugenics and social darwinism, which are the ideas that the ideal for mankind involves manipulating the gene pool by removing “weaker” traits - the disabled as a drain on society, people that are less intelligent or less productive as ‘something to remove from the gene pool to better mankind’, forced sterilization programs, some Nazi and white supremacist ideologies, and all kinds of ugliness.

Now, in terms of actual accepted evolutionary science in research currently, there’s a lot of amazing things; for one, more evidence-based evolutionary psychology, using cultural psychology comparisons to help gauge inherited/innate behaviors vs. learned and comparisons to animal neurobi and behavior to figure out how patterns of behavior develop and why, has actually been confirming that behaviors associated with compassion, empathy, and altruism are advantages for social species, greatly increasing the survival of the population as a whole; taking care of the weak, sick, old, and ill is a part of why humans were successful, and a trait that exists in different degrees and forms in most social species, along with cooperative behavior and social bonding.  Basically the opposite of a lot of what Social Darwinism and Eugenics preached.  There’s other neat things but they’d be for other posts and rambles.

So basically, I get twitchy about referring to emotions as “primitive” not only because biologically they’re an intrinsic part of human cognition and reasoning where removing or suppressing them does horrific things and tampering with their connections to cognition fucks people up and DAMAGES rational thinking severely, but also because the basic idea that emotions are “primitive” is an outdated idea tied to a branch of evolutionary theory that only survives right now as a justification for discrimination and horrible abuses by people who refuse to accept that it’s been proven wrong, and a historical cautionary tale from past days that should serve as examples why it was an awful idea.