I took my kids to an event tonight with Eric Wielenberg, and my 11-year-old daughter found herself puzzling about how our emotions could evolve. I tried to convince her that some aspects of our emotional lives that have plausible evolutionary explanations. But she came up with a number of challenges for evolutionary explanations that withstood my critical scrutiny. They are an interesting bunch:
- The desire to do what is wrong
- Happiness, in the sense of contentment—think of a cat lying down while being stroked (my example)
- The drive to achieve things the hard way even when one can get them without effort—wanting the achievement of getting a meal by hunting even if one can get an equally delicious meal without much effort (her example)
- Mercy towards weaker animals, even ones that we could eat or that could eventually harm us.
Of course (1) is puzzling on a theistic view (whether evolutionary or not), though perhaps the theist can give a view on which it's a distortion of a desire to imitate God, by desiring to be ultimately in charge. On the other hand, (2) and (4) have very nice theistic explanations.
Why assume that evolutionary psychology is necessarily not a theistic answer?
ReplyDelete(3) has a nice theistic explanation, too. Note that (3) is just the basic motive behind the construction of games; in fact, your statement of (3) looks a lot like Bernard Suits' definition of games, of which I am convinced. What you want when you seek difficult activity for its own sake, it seems to me, is the good of exercising one's own powers for its own sake. But this is apparently identical to glory (the manifestation of excellence) -- which is at the least one of God's major motives in creation and in many of his other actions, if not his primary motive (that's all over Scripture). So (3) can be explained in terms of the image and imitation of God.
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ReplyDeletePerhaps Martin Novak's cooperative mechanisms in evolution might help here.
ReplyDeleteThe simple presentation on Youtube (for dum guys like me) is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NS8nbspeh8
... and the Scientific paper with connections to Maths (for smart people like your daughter!) is here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/
BTW, he's a Catholic and the video above contains a nice defense of the "God and Evolution" theme.
Thinking about cooperation does make for an explanation of (1): there is a pleasure in defecting and not being caught.
ReplyDeleteI doubt that (4) has any plausible cooperative explanation.
Perhaps (4) could work with Prof. Novak's third mechanism, indirect reciprocity, which involves the notion of reputation.
ReplyDelete"I help you, somebody helps me". By being merciful to weaker animals you gain a reputation of mercifulness, and that can be attractive to females judging whether you will be a good person to care for your future children.
I can think of other explanations (this time not with cooperation):
-you spare the animals you eat, out of mercy, when you are not really starving. Then these animals reproduce and you have a larger population available when you really need them.
-you have mercy on a weaker animal, and go home feeling happier and more in the mood for kindness, tenderness, and sex. Increased interest in sex might help your victory in the battle of evolution.
Granted, these ideas are sometimes fanciful or even slightly humorous, but the whole evolution theory works like this... you can't go back and test hypothesis, so you're left just making them up...