Chapter
Eleven
The function of consciousness
of man and his history’ (1859, p. 488) and that psychology would find a secure
foundation in biology. But it was many years before he discussed how, in The
Descent of Man (1871). In the 1960s, Williams pointed out how difficult it is for
‘people to imagine that an individual’s role in evolution is entirely contained in its
contribution to vital statistics [. . .], that the blind play of the genes could produce
man’ (Williams, 1966, p. 4).
This opposition reached its height with the publication, in 1975, of Sociobiology:
The New Synthesis, in which biologist Edward O. Wilson explored the evolution
of social behaviour, including that of human beings. For this he was abused and
heckled, and even had water thrown over him when he lectured on the subject.
Perhaps it is for such emotional reasons that the term ‘sociobiology’ is rarely
used today, but many of its principles survive in the newer field of evolutionary
psychology.
These two fields have much in common. For example, both have explored how
human sexual behaviour and sexual preferences have evolved, whether there are
sex differences in ability and aptitudes or just in socially created gender roles, and
what the evolutionary roots are of aggression and altruism. Both try to account
for, and assume there is such a thing as, human nature. Among the founders of
evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (2005) describe its goal
as ‘mapping universal human nature’. We are not a ‘blank slate’, says psychologist
Steven Pinker (2002). Nor are we noble savages corrupted by society, or beings
imbued with a soul. Contrary to the currently dominant view in many intellec-
tual circles, we are not capable of learning absolutely anything or escaping our
evolved abilities and tendencies. We must learn to understand and accept human
nature. Evolutionary psychology has been attacked for being reductionist, deter-
minist, and adaptationist (e.g. Rose and Rose, 2000), but arguably these criticisms
target a distorted idea of what the field actually is.
Unlike sociobiology, evolutionary psychology treats the human mind as a collec-
tion of specialised modules, or information processing machines, that evolved to
solve particular problems – a view often caricatured as the ‘Swiss army knife’ view
of the mind. Although we all share the same collection of evolved modules, each
of us behaves in our own unique ways, depending on the genes we were born
with and the environment in which we find ourselves. Sadly, few evolutionary
psychologists have concerned themselves with consciousness, or asked whether
there is a consciousness module, but Pinker lists some of the most troubling
questions about consciousness, like whether your experience of red might be
the same as mine of green, whether your visual system could be kept alive in a
dish and have visual experiences, and whether beetles enjoy sex. He comes to the
pithy conclusion, ‘Beats the heck out of me!’ (Pinker, 1997, p. 146).
Another difference is that whereas sociobiologists tended to treat most human
traits as adaptations, evolutionary psychologists emphasise two reasons why
they may not be. First, most of human evolution took place when our ancestors
lived on the African savannah as hunters and gatherers. So we need to under-
stand which traits would have been adaptive then, not which might be adaptive
now (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992; Buss, 1999). So, for example, a taste
‘An important feature
of consciousness is that
it seems to break the
modularity of mind’(Andrade, 2012, p. 596)