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I am a fan of the evolutionary neurology and psychology, but I have been highly critical of “just so” stories about our current development and the nostalgia for a paleolithic past found in many people who abuse evolutionary psychology to come up with primitivist theories. Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology wrote a very enlightening post on an article by Prof. Marlene Zuk who wrote an article for NY times on the fantasies of the Paleo-diet.
I am going to quote from both Downey and Zuk to get why I think this is important. Downey comments:
Zuk draws on Leslie Aiello’s concept of ‘paleofantasies,’ stories about our past spun from thin evidence, to label the nostalgia some people seem to express for prehistoric conditions that they see as somehow healthier. In my research on sports and masculinity, I frequently see paleofantasies come up around fight sports, the idea that, before civilization hemmed us in and blunted our instincts, we would just punch each other if we got angry, and somehow this was healthier, freer and more natural (the problems with this view being so many that I refuse to even begin to enumerate them). It’s an odd inversion on the usual Myth of Progress, the idea that things always get better and better; instead, paleofantasies are a kind of long range projection of Grumpy Old Man Syndrome (’Things were so much better in MY day…’), spinning fantasies of ‘life before’ everything we have built up around us.
While I am a huge promoter of Enlightenment values, there are two meta-narratives–two myths if you don’t want me sounding post-structuralists–that come out of the Enlightenment philosophy that I find myself arguing against: the teleological myths of inevitable progress (which is different than advocating technologically progressive policies) and the myth of the noble primitive. The romantic imperative.
This romantic imperative has shown up in many people who should know better to abuse evolutionary development theories as justifications of nostaglia about the deep and pre-historical past. Zuk really gets into how this is a myth narrative read into evolutionary biology:
As an evolutionary biologist, I was filled with enthusiasm at first over the idea of a modern mismatch between everyday life and our evolutionary past. But a closer look reveals that not all evolutionary ideas are created equal; even for Darwinians, the devil is in the details. The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.
First, when exactly was this age of harmony, and what was it like? Scavenging, or eating the carcasses of dead animals left by (or stolen from) predators like lions, was probably replaced by active hunting and accumulation of wild plants about 55,000 years ago, and agriculture seems to have begun a mere 10,000 years ago. We did a lot of different things during each of these times.
How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?
But the difficulty with using our hunter-gatherer selves as icons of well-being goes much deeper. It is not as if we finally achieved harmony with our environment during the Pleistocene, heaved a sigh of relief and stopped.
As Downey says,
In fact, the idea that our bodies were perfectly suited to a particular environment is an adaptationist fantasy. Processes of evolution, including variation and natural selection, niche creation and co-evolution, even catastrophe and fluctuating rates of evolutionary change, suggest that adaptation is usually imperfect, with abundant glitches that, as long as they don’t constitute abject failures, usually continue to exist unless selection and variation conspire to find a way to get rid of them.
So what does this have to do with the paleo-diet? As Downey says,
I think the biological evidence points to the fact that both of these impressions is incorrect, as Zuk suggests: we are neither so perfectly well adapted to foraging (or scavenging or living in trees or whichever stage we develop paleonostalgia for) nor are we so ill-suited for our own environment (in spite of our health problems, we actually live a long time compared to our ancestors, for example).
So before we start waxing nostalgic about all the health benefits of a Pleistocene diet, perhaps we should remember that our ancestors’ food often came in this nasty packaging which tended to run away, attack them, or just go missing entirely when they were really hungry
One commenter attacked the article for being “fuzzy” while the Paleo-diet was “clear and logical.” But our knowledge of the past is fuzzy, particularly when making claims about longevity caused by a diet in an age would violent death killed most people just out of adolescence.
This gets me to a crucial point: reason, by that I mean formal logic, is necessary, but if not grounded in sound empirical facts is still subject to all sorts of mythic thinking. Something can sounds clear and logical, be perfectly logically argued, but its premises could be founded on any number of biases or unconfirmed narratives.
According the Economist, out of listed modernized and post-industrial countries in Europe and the US, only Turkey has less belief in evolution.
From my own, Beyond Left and Right
We live in an age where hypertext has made the memory hole irrelevant and totalitarian attitudes transcend state or party or even capital apparatuses. Ideology does not need a state of church or factory to enforce the dictates of an ideology now, and, perhaps, it never did. In a time of hyper-abundant information, truth does not need to be destroyed, just discredited. The heretic does not need to be killed or purified, just made a laughing stock. In many situations, discrediting is not necessary. The perpetual loop of credulity itself reinforced by the shame of feeling wrong is all that is needed for a man or woman to lie themselves into a goosestep. Once a heuristic is imposed through an ideology, a cultural bias, a class bias, or whatever overarching framework a person attaches to his or her thoughts, the cognitive tendencies to block out counter-information and to find confirmation of what one already believes starts one on a mission to discredit as self-evident disinformation anything that does not fit with the heuristic. Propaganda becomes an internal mechanism even without any forced or coercive actors
read more at Unlikely Stories.
The Freethinker talks about Channel 4 recent decision to have the President of Iran to give a Christmas message offends A TON of people.
And I was surprised that it was more offensive than even the recent Rick Warren debacle, but even the government of the UK is upset about it.
Now, I actually have a deep respect for Persian culture and hate the way the things have gone since the “Islamic revolution”–but letting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to play to the worse trends in multiculturalism. It hardly seems to anyone interest to show tolerance and even condonability to people who do not and would not do the same.
