Steve Jay Gould: Evil Genius

In common parlance, an evil genius is someone who wants to take over the world. He has an agenda, an evil plan, and with a cackle wants to upset the applecart of the righteous. Evil geniuses are great for movies, are wonderful topics for popular history books, and are marvelous ways to mobilize the population, the troops, or the stock market. In the halls of academe though, evil genius is usually cause for, well, apathy. The answer is simple. Intellectual conquest usually occurs without muss or fuss, and if its easy to delude yourself that you are taking over the world of academic or popular opinion, it's just as easy for others to ignore your smiling face on that book cover in an isolated corner of Barnes and Noble. Moreover, if bad intellectual thought is bereft of any concrete impact on our lives (like bad economic policy), and doesn't cause train wrecks, economic depression, or world wars, it just hangs around in the minds of a coterie of true believers, who generally ignore everybody else, including true disbelievers.

Sometimes though, a scientist comes along who has the intellectual wattage to attract a lot of readers, and to dispute popular intellectual ideas. It is here that intellectuals rise up like a horde of army ants to bite on the reputation of the evil genius who stomped on their hill. Such a writer was the late Steven Jay Gould. An eminent evolutionary biologist who just happened to be an eloquent essayist on biology, Gould perceived his discipline from separate perspectives of history, literature, and the arts. He advocated a pluralistic tradition, whereby knowledge was informed by many intellectual venues. Gould argued that it was impossible to have a monolithic perspective that gave precedence to one metaphorical perspective on how organisms develop and behavior, namely that everything had to be explained by natural selection, or survival of the fittest. Accident may have as much to do with the development of species as selection, and the idiosyncratic behavior of humans may owe more to the ability to learn than any inborn instinct.

Naturally, this was anathema to those Darwinians (e.g. Dennett, Pinker, Tooby and Cosmides, Dawkins) who saw evolution in everything, and Gould was roundly ostracized for not keeping the Darwinian faith. Now this writer is as attracted to bad psychology as a gourmet is to stinky cheese, yet bad psychology as well as bad science is characterized not by a Renaissance taste for an integration of general knowledge, but by the one track mind set that has given us fundamentalists of the religious, political, and now Darwinian sort. For a Darwinian or evolutionary psychology, the one track of evolution has led to a mind that has many different tracks, or modules if you will, where the experience of millennia is engraved by evolution.

The core principle of evolutionary psychology is concept of 'massive modularity', which holds that the human brain has developed through evolutionary selection separate neural engravings or instincts to be altruistic, selfish, monogamous, ambitious, or misplacing the remote. Since postulating evolutionary modules rises above proof, as we can't go back in time to see how our ancestors evolved the tendency to misplace soup bones (in present times replaced with the remote control), it's as easy to be a evolutionary psychologist as it is to be a spinner of fairy tales. Gould said as much, and therefore lies his notoriety. Science is not necessarily a hard thing, but it does require a bit more than a healthy imagination. Perhaps that was Gould's evil genius after all, that he indirectly told us that genius does not come cheap.


It's worth noting that recently the distinguished neuropsychologist Jaak Panksepp, addressed the neural reality of the concept of massive modularity, Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology, concluded that it indeed was a fairy tale.


For a good debate between Gould and Darwinian fundamentalists, the following link is most instructive:Darwinian Fundamentalism

Sound Bite Psychology

Quick Question

The preeminent role for psychologists in the 21st century is:

a. explaining how the mind works.
b. providing new procedures for self control.
c. show how psychology can end human suffering and provide world peace.
d. create lots of sound bites for consumers on the go.

If you said 'd', you were right. Long ago, before computers bequeathed to us a world so bountiful that only a person with a manic lifestyle could appreciate, we had three TV channels, one car, a stay at home spouse, four kids, and a library with maybe ten books. We were unhappy then, but we didn't know it. Now, in this new world of bliss with so much to see and do, we really don't have the time to ponder anything that requires our conscious attention for more than two minutes.

Enter the sound bite.

It comes in many forms. In popular psychology, it is known as the 7 habits (Covey), 12 life laws (Dr. Phil), or 4 rules of power (Tony Robbins). For academic psychologists whose idea of a short concise summary is a preface to a journal article written in a language akin to ancient Greek, this poses a problem. How do you deliver your arcane wisdom to the public so they can understand the import of decades of wisdom in a phrase. Why a sound bite of course.

It is a two sentence summary, posted on some web portal, providing a filler paragraph in the lifestyle section of the newspaper, or making a fun fact for the nightly news. The sound bite is how academics let the world know about their life's work. Of course, something is lost in translation, and all we get to know are facts that seem screechingly obvious, unimportant, or redundant. But that's ok, since in this day and age we need to be constantly reminded about the facts of life. So we learn again and again (distilled from the latest study of course) that broccoli is good for you, exercise helps you lose weight, and that people without families tend to be depressed.

But if sound bites are what we 'think' science is all about, it leads to the conclusion that collections of sound bites represents wisdom for the ages. This is of course psychology of the self help kind, a psychology that can make what ails you into a nice well rounded metaphorical morsel that does not need any more explaining. Besides the usual self help suspects like Dr. Phil, academics have been getting on this bandwagon by neatly dividing human nature into simple bits and pieces that seem obvious, but are comfortably beyond doubt because they are beyond proof.

So obesity, bad breath, and voting Democratic is a disease, and everything else is an instinct that evolved because our ancestors survived by procrastinating, lusting after their neighbor's wife, and not paying their income taxes. Soon however, I predict that practitioners of the sound bite will be dividing into schools of thought that will become the 21st century equivalent of the 20th century Freudians and behaviorists, and 19th century empiricists and rationalists. Thus one should look forward in the next few years for these following trend setter schools of thought:

Center for knowledge of stuff we can't do anything about
-being born in winter increases the likelihood we will freeze.
-we will all die soon, and in the meantime will have to pay taxes

Institute of the Blitheringly obvious
-drinking and driving don't mix
-eating too much causes weight gain

Foundation for the promotion of unprovable concepts
-evolutionary psychology
-psychotherapy

Please and Thank You

Mind experiment: mental imagery which represents hypothetical events and outcomes, and usually without hypothetical explosions. Used by good physicists (Einstein) and bad psychologists (Freud) to respectively explain how the universe and the mind work.

Consider a world where nobody said please and thank you. Open a door for someone, and they will silently pass you by. Give a present to a relative, and they accept it without even a nod of appreciation. Help a little old lady across the street, and she will keep on going. Nothwithstanding places like New York city, it's hard to imagine living in such a place and remaining the mellow and virtuous selves we consider ourselves to be. Without please and thank you, I shudder at what the world could become. Courtesy and simple kindnesses would disappear, and mankind would revert to his primal and selfish nature. We would all become, in a manner of speaking, assholes. Balderdash, you say? Well consider an environment where we can't say please and thank you, the open highway. Drive slow in a parking lot and on a street, and we can see the whites of other drivers eyes. With a friendly nod, we allow other drivers to merge and pass, and feel somewhat good about it. But get a driver behind you or travel at higher speeds, and if a driver intends to pass you or drives up close behind you, he has only his horn and lights to signal his intentions. Without a please or thank you, the scene can degenerate into road rage, and slow torture is not good enough for the ingrate tailgater or speeder who has imposed on you without scarcely a nod.

Highways are not virtuous places because we cannot make the virtual transactions whose subtlety makes for virtue. Please and thank you denote reciprocity or 'thanks, bud, I owe you one'. It keeps the accounting slate balanced, even though we know that we will never be able to collect on the minor favor of courtesy. The point is, virtue is its own reward because human beings can tally in their minds the virtual rewards of being good. And goodness is good because we don't recognize that it really is the thought that counts. Evolutionary psychologists in particular find this hard to understand, and postulate (through mind experiments of course) ancient scenarios where altruism evolved as a genetic trait to permit human survival. But this is no different than associating virtue with God's will or man's laws since it ignores the fact that realities can be in many places, more often than not made up in our own minds.

Humans can tally the debits and credits of assorted kindnesses when they can model the minds of other people. This is called empathy, and it develops through learning, or our socializing experiences with other people. Grow up in a world where everybody is empathic, and you'll be empathic too. There is no divine spark, no instinctive cause, no legalistic mandate to virtue, it is simply behavior that is paid for by a nod, both actual or imagined, to a simple kindness. It derives no less from our imagination of our world.

ADHD: gone stir crazy

Working as I do from a home office, there comes a time after a few days of making phone calls, penning memos, and drafting proposals, that I begin to feel, well, stir crazy. If I were not such a well socialized individual who is ever cognizant of my wife's potential retribution, I would have hurled objects through the window, thrown temper tantrums, and become a veritable domestic deliquent. Luckily, I can also schedule appointments to see customers far from town, which quiets the little anarchist within me, and fortifies me upon my return for another few days of tedium.

There's nothing magical about the human mind's need to have some change of pace, and nothing perverse when the same mind goes loco when it doesn't get it's way. Luckily, adult minds can control for this, and let off steam, create diversions, or simply leave town when things get too boring. No such luck however if you're a five year old kid, for your inability to articulate your boredom makes you prey to the prescriptive powers of a new type of vampire, the psychologist. For the psychologist, simple learning won't do, we need a syndrome, a disease, something that is prescribed by counsel and remedied by prescription. And so, going stir crazy is now a spanking new disease, ADHD (or attention deficit hyperactive disease), a malady our grandparents never had when they were kids, as well as nobody else in the world outside of the continental USA. Perhaps its due to the fact that physical education and simple recess has been waning in a country more concerned with safety, budgets, and high SAT scores. So how come with all our smarts we take the harder way out, and skirt the obvious while heading to the ridiculous? Why, money of course.

In psychology the nature/nurture, learning/instinct debate is slanted by the market place for the simple fact that an appeal to instinct and nature can command a fee. For manic behavior due to a cockeyed environment, changing the venue is like changing the dial, it remedies ennui and is free. But if you can make that behavior due to some instinctive or genetic trait, then you've got the makings of a lucrative industry. And so we drug our children while keeping them locked away in classroom dungeons, and provide the funds for psychologists to trumpet their incompetence in books, seminars, and the Oprah show. It drives me mad, an illness that I fear in this new age of ignorance, only Prozac can cure.

More on the fraud of ADHD here.

Chuck E. Cheese weight loss plan!

Moscow, July 2003. Yup, I was on my 'vacation' then, about to hop a train to visit the wife's folks somewhere in the Urals, or 1200 miles north east to be exact. Strangely, except for an inexplicable alphabet that read like the DaVinci Code, the place seemed as normal, busy, and nondescript as any large American city. One thing that caught my eye was not the architecture (Soviet New Deal mainly), traffic (bad, and getting awful), or billboards (Givenchy in Cyrillic), but rather the people. For a folk who ate too many carbs, drank and smoke too much, and had a life span of 60, they looked remarkably buff. The population was lean, mean (well at least serious looking), and remarkably fit. It was as if the obesity 'disease' which had been sweeping the western world stopped short, like Napoleon's armies, before the gates of Moscow. It was only after I had spent a night or two in the Moscow apartment of a friend of my wife's family that the cure was painfully revealed to me. To get anywhere, Moscovites had to walk all over the damn place. Up stairs, down stairs, to the subway, to the store, crossing streets in zig zags to escape cars coming at you like cannonballs, and repeating this all endlessly. A recipe for an America soon running out of gas? I'm not so sure.

To make getting your exercise a bad or glad part of your day's routine, you need either a dose of the Russian specialty of bad government, or the American specialty of good marketing. But how does one provide this magic recipe for good abs and good times?

Enter Chuck E. Cheese.

It was a revelation really. It's a pizzeria, with a disco dance floor (led by an animatronic Chuck E. Cheese, who is a friendly five foot rat), plastic tube mazes hanging from the ceiling like plumbing, and a scattering of electronic and other interactive games that whirred and clicked like slot machines. About them was a swift current of little feet and shrieking noise, manic children mainly, circling about like ravenous piranhas.

Naturally, my four year old daughter had to be part of this. Taking at turns a bite of pizza, she was off to the disco floor, up a plastic tube, and running about with the mob. I marveled at this joyous cacophony. Chuck E. Cheese was a restaurant where you eat and run, literally. No need for exercise when it was rolled at once into your play and dining experience at the same time. Unfortunately, what Americans have learned is to divest them from each other. We work separately, dine separately, play separately, and exercise separately, and since we don't have time for all four, we tend to drop the running around bit, and end up resembling human zepplins.

I believe it's all because we misunderstand play. Starting from school, play is something that is separate from learning, separate even from exercise. It is idle meandering in a denuded play ground, divested from the marketing smarts of Chuck E. Cheese. In our schools, play is eliminated as we focus on more serious things, and recesses are replaced with study hall, play with sport. So we learn to watch people play, and our participation is limited to pressing the remote control or twitching on a joy stick. Everything becomes virtual, and our bodies respond by bloating out of control, and our minds wither along with our muscles.

So here's my unoriginal recipe. Start with kids, and have them play. Make their culture one of pick up sports, spontaneous groups who have to climb the plumbing, hit the dance floor, run up and down chasing and throwing balls. Eliminate school sports, expand recesses, and populate playgrounds with the tools of play. Chuck E. Cheese knows this, laughing I think all the way to the bank. And perhaps if we let marketing types control our schools rather than educators, we would learn a lot, play a lot, and life would be a blast.