Abstract
Faced with the charge of value-ladenness in their theories, researchers in evolutionary psychology (EP) argue that their science is entirely free of values; their hypotheses only concern scientific facts, without any socio-cultural value judgments. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, a renowned feminist scholar of science, denies this. In her book and papers, Nelson finds that their hypotheses do contain evaluative components. One such example is the fear of snakes. While this fear was adaptive to the environment in the past, evolutionary psychologists argue that this trait is now “maladaptive” because city-dwellers would rarely encounter snakes in their environment. However, Nelson argues that labeling this trait “maladaptive” implies that this fear is irrational since this claim cannot be understood otherwise. This paper argues that this and other arguments made by Nelson for demonstrating the value-ladenness in EP’s hypotheses have serious flaws. For instance, we argue that investigating the psychological mechanisms behind the fear and their developmental and energy costs would allow for proper interpretation of evolutionary psychologists’ claims for the maladaptive fear of snakes without any normative implication. We also maintain that some of her arguments fail to demonstrate their connection to the point at the center of the debates between EP and feminism. While Nelson may be right in stating that EP’s hypotheses have evaluative components, she does not prove their strong political or normative implications, which is central to the debate over EP.
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Notes
It is true that several sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists (for example, Barash, 1979) have made statements in the past which can be understood as ethical judgments about women’s social status. What evolutionary psychologists should mean is that they no longer make such normative judgments.
In recent decades, some feminist biologists have started a new research movement called “Feminist Evolutionary Psychology” (Fisher et al., 2013). Their goals include recognizing the contentious past between EP and feminism, reconciling and integrating the two academic fields, and drawing a more female-centered picture of human evolution. Nelson does not discuss these studies in her work, but some feminist scholars criticize their work (Weaver & Fehr, 2019).
As far as we know, the passage closest to what Nelson suggests is “Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, ..., not of snakes and spiders” (Pinker, 1997, p. 387, our italics). It is worth noting, however, that Pinker does not state here that “being maladaptive” by itself means something evaluative or normative.
As we briefly suggested in the Introduction, this is not the only way in which value judgments might affect how evolutionary psychologists conduct their research and what they produce. For example, sociobiologists have been criticized for using the term “rape” to describe forced copulation in nonhuman animals despite the differences between the two phenomena (Fausto-Sterling, 1992, and others). This is an example of how value judgments can affect the choice of explanandum and how it is described.
To be fair, Nelson does say that the normative content in the metaphors has led scientists not to take an alternative, sociological hypothesis on sexual differences seriously (Nelson, 2017b, p. 271). However, this is not the issue on which this paper focuses on (see the discussion in the last paragraph of Sect. 1).
It is worth noting that the argument here does not prove that all the gendered metaphors used by evolutionary psychologists are the same in terms of their inferential force as “cheap” and “expensive.” Nevertheless, the argument does show that it is wrong to assume that all the metaphors used by scientists are of the same kind—some metaphors may not license many normative inferences.
“It pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle, and undiscriminating. In theory it is more profitable for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the best genes” (Wilson, 1978, p. 125).
A recent textbook on the evolution of human sexual differences (Geary, 2021) uses more nuanced language to describe the evolutionary functions of sexual division of labor in human beings, but the author still seems to hold the view that sexual division of labor is an adaptation.
For example, Tang-Martínez (2000) cites a study in which female elephant seals incite competition among males and suggests that inequality in mating costs does not imply that females are always passive in mating. One difference between their arguments and Nelson’s is that Nelson more explicitly links the use of stereotypes to possible normative implications.
For instance, Allen Quist, the former Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, was reported in 1994 to have said, “You have a political arrangement, and when push comes to shove, the higher level of political authority ...should be in the hands of the husband. There’s a genetic predisposition.” See an epigraph in Sork (1997).
Nelson offers three additional arguments for the existence of value-ladenness in EP hypotheses. The first argument concerns EP’s hypothesis on domestic violence (Nelson, 2017a, p. 219, Nelson, 2017b, p. 271). Her target is the hypothesis that a man’s predisposition to feel sexual jealousy, based on the fundamental uncertainty of his paternity, is a factor in many cases of domestic violence. Nelson argues that this hypothesis makes the same normative assumption as criminal law systems, namely, that heterosexual couples with children are a typical family, and their objective is to raise children. However, her claim is not backed by literature. Her only citation on this hypothesis by evolutionary psychologists is a one-page reply by Daly and Wilson (2005). She also quotes from “Philosopher Heather Douglas” (Nelson, 2017a, p. 217), on the assumption of criminal law systems, but the paper she refers to is written not by a philosopher of science, but by a law professor with the same name, and the quote is not in the paper. Thus, we do not discuss this argument further. Second, Nelson suggests that evolutionary psychologists’ explanations that appeal to the universal adaptiveness of human beings have socio-political implications, because “many feminists view” such explanations “as deterministic in and of themselves” (Nelson, 2017b,, p. 265). Since Nelson does not provide any argument for the alleged connection between determinism and EP’s socio-political implications, we do not discuss this too. Third, Nelson seemingly intends to discuss the value-ladenness of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in another paper (Nelson, 2003) In its introduction, Nelson states that she shall discuss the value-ladenness of Richard Dawkins’s defense of the parental investment theory (Dawkins, 1989). However, she offers no argument for this in the section in which she discusses Dawkins’ defense. Thus, we do not discuss it in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were presented at Tokyo Forum for Analytic Philosophy (April 2022, University of Tokyo) and the 2022 annual conference of Japan Association for Philosophy of Science (June 2022, online). I thank the participants for their questions and comments. The author would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. Funding and Competing Interests: This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number 21K00036. The author does not have any financial or non-financial interests that are directly or indirectly related to this work.
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Amitani, Y. Finding value-ladenness in evolutionary psychology: Examining Nelson’s arguments. HPLS 45, 36 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00590-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00590-7