Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking, Part I

This post is intended to help guys (or girls!) interested in social dynamics to think clearly and cleanly about the "why"s of human behavior. In particular, I think folks who put themselves in a teaching or "dating guru" position have a responsibility to at least be aware of whether the things they teach are logically sound, because there's a lot of very sloppy thinking flying around. These bad mental habits reach their apex in discussions of sociobiology and evolutionary psych.

Before we start I have some questions that I'd like you, the reader, to ask yourself. The function of this post is not to accuse, and these questions aren't meant to be asked between you and me. They're meant to be asked between you and yourself.

*Is your thinking about cause and effect in human behavior clean, or sloppy?
*Is your understanding of why people do the things they do logical and coherent?
*Are you capable of detecting logical inconsistencies and incoherence in things you read and hear?

Okay. Now, assuming you've answered those questions for yourself, and before reading the rest of this post, identify the sloppy thinking in the following explanation of human behavior as it's commonly used by dating gurus:

"Women cheat because it increases the genetic diversity of their offspring, which has evolutionary value."

Please stop reading until you've thought about this.

Now, before I continue - assuming you've come to your conclusions - a few more points:

*This proposition about women and cheating is not actually invalid. It has merit. It's only criminally sloppy in the context in which it's being used.
*If your answer concerns the use of the word "cheat" and the question of whether it's appropriate to frame this behavior as cheating, there's better than even odds you have good mental hygiene. Questioning the subtext of word choice is a useful habit of thought, but isn't what this post aims to address.

The actual root of the sloppy thinking at work here is the seemingly innocent word "because." The reason "because" is problematic is that sociobio (or evo-psych, take your pick) must account for two types of causation in order to explain any human behavior. "Because," on its own, doesn't specify which type of cause it refers to - and this seems to be the source of a great deal of confusion.

In the interests of developing a useful vocabulary for use in explaining the difference between the two, I'm going to crib a couple of terms from Aristotle. He described four kinds of causation; I only need to borrow two.

EFFECTIVE CAUSE is the direct, typically physical cause of an event. If I push a book off of a table, the force exerted by my hand is the effective cause of it falling to the floor.

In contrast, FINAL CAUSE describes causation in terms of purpose. I may own a hammer because I need to drive nails (Final Cause!) but that doesn't mean that the moment I developed a need to drive nails I immediately had a hammer as a result.

Effective Causes are a part of any physical system. Without effective cause nothing would happen.

Final Causes exist in those systems, such as (learned) human behavior and (genetic) evolution, in which an infinite set of possibilities exist but only a very small subset of these are viable.

In case that's not clear, some examples should help:

*FINAL CAUSE: You start up your car so you can drive to the supermarket.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: Your car starts because you turned the key in the ignition.

*FINAL CAUSE: You burn a flag because it represents something you object to.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: A flag burns because you apply flame to it.

This becomes crucial to the understanding of social dynamics when it comes time to distinguish between the purpose of a behavior and the mechanism by which it is activated, like so:

*FINAL CAUSE: You eat because that way you can survive long enough to reproduce.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: You eat because you're hungry.

If your appetite failed and you went to your doctor, he would not concern himself with the overall reproductive value of your eating or not eating. He would concern himself with the mechanism of your appetite.

For the same reason, social theorists should concern themselves first with the mechanisms that drive behavior and only afterwards with the reasons those mechanisms have evolved. Not only are the two distinct, but one is actually more useful than the other.

Worst of all, of course, is to fail to distinguish at all.