Anne Innes Daag: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene

[bibliogramma]

I have very serious issues with so-called "Darwinian psychology" and a fair bit of what passes for sociobiology. Not that I don't think that our genes (and other interesting stiff like epigenetics) play a role in more than our physical appearance and basic biology, because I'm quite sure they do. It's more that the proponents of this approach tend to argue from the position that the behaviours they see in a specific set of cultural circumstances must be the result of evolution, and hence coded into our brains, and then go looking for the evolutionary mechanisms that brought about the coding. This approach inevitably serves to reinforce the status quo, and, as Cory Doctorow argues in a most incisive review of Anne Innis Daag's critique of Darwinian psychology, "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene, "justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality." [1]

Daag notes in her Introduction to "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene that there is

... a sexual/poverty/homosexual bias which pervades Darwinian psychology. Research on animals is usually concerned with how natural selection works for a species in respect to living a healthy life, choosing a mate, producing young and caring for those offspring to ensure they will function well as adults. By contrast, of the scores of topics that Darwinian psychologists could study in human beings, they tend to research those which have social repercussions. These include domination, aggression and competition which often have a positive appeal for men; rape, infanticide and sperm competition within their wombs which have a negative connotation for women; crime and IQ studies which can be made to reflect badly on blacks and the poor; and homosexuality which is given a negative spin against gay men and lesbians.

In the book, Daag examines a number of studies published by Darwinian psychologists and raises many questions about the quality of research upon which Darwinian psychologists base their conclusions, delineating a pattern of inconsistencies, rejection of valid data that fails to support research hypotheses, relying on anecdotal evidence, misreading or misreporting data and conclusions from previous studies, and failing to follow accepted academic standards for research. She also notes that:

Geneticists are notably lacking among Darwinian psychologists even though genetics is the basis for all matters of inheritance. This is because Darwinian psychologists use genetic inheritance not as a framework but as a mantra; their analyses of specific behaviors, although theoretically based on genetics, virtually never indicate how the genetics might work.

Daag draws particular attention to the right-wing bias inherent in the field of Darwinian psychology, and the consequences of this bias:

"... their findings too often provide a framework for policy makers who want to blame the victims in society by claiming that much of human social behavior is genetic rather than learned and cultural. They favor the status quo. It is far easier politically nowadays to cut off funding for social work than to provide more money to address difficult problems of the poor.

I can think of no more fitting ending to my comments here than to quote Cory Doctorow once more:

As a debunking of pseudo-science, this is very masterful; but it is even better as a piece of social criticism, a look at exactly why Darwinian Psychology has found such a receptive audience among ideologues, particularly from the right.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is.html - the entire review, which is far more specific than my comments here, is worth reading.