Reading Evolutionary Psychology While Creationist
Six Suggestions for Studying Secular Sources
Recently, my wife, a Christian counselor, recommended that a counselee read a book on relationships by the eminent psychologists John and Julie Gottman.
The counselee, a Christian woman, asked if the recommended book was a Christian book. On hearing, “No,” she was taken aback, saying, “I haven’t read a secular book in years.”
Why hadn’t she? Why would a Christian think she should only read books by Christians?
Christians read Christian books in order to limit our reading to trusted sources. These sources earn our trust by explicitly conforming to our worldview.
But in doing so, we narrow the range of what we can know significantly, as well as our own intellectual virtue. We need to gain the ability to learn from secular sources without fear.
(Ironically, while the Gottmans’ psychology is eminently scientific and secular, the Gottmans are religious Jews.)
The burgeoning secular literature of evolutionary psychology might appear to be a counter-example to my recommendation. After all, the literature is explicitly grounded in a naturalistic, evolutionary worldview. If there are any secular sources that are not to be trusted on account of their indebtedness to a non-Christian worldview, you would think it would be works of evolutionary psychology.
But evolutionary psychology is an extraordinarily fertile discipline for understanding human psychology and doing so with a realism about our own biological nature. While its observations have some debt to their authors’ evolutionary beliefs, they concern human nature as it is, enfleshed and organic.
The insights of evolutionary psychology can and should be reaped by Christians, including even creationist Christians - like me. How then should creationists read works of evolutionary psychology?
I offer six (6) guidleines for reading evolutionary psychology while creationist.
(And by the way, if you accept theistic evolution - that God used evolution to create life - you will find several of the points equally relevant. Though see my series against even theistic evolution here.)
1. Evolutionary psychology has the same topic as theological anthropology: fallen human nature.
Inklings of an initial state of nature pervade ancient mythology, biblical literature, ancient philosophy, modern political philosophy, and even contemporary biology. In each is latent an anthropology.
Evolutionary psychology has its own mythology of a state of nature: The ancestral environment. Our biology and psychology are to be understood as having adapted to this environment, even though many of us no longer inhabit such an environment.
As a result, one of the central themes of evolutionary psychology is the mismatch between our “ancestral environment” and our modern environment. That environment was one of material scarcity, in which we had to be alert to many threats, in which the difference between the sexes was extraordinarily salient, and in which tribalism was absolutely necessary.
Evolutionary psychology utilizes this mismatch both to explain our behavior and to diagnose our sufferings. As an example of the first, Rob Henderson explains how, in the ancestral environment, the most successful strategy for human behavior involves cooperation within the group and violence toward those without. Our adaptation to such an environment explains our contemporary tendency toward tribal behavior, even in multi-cultural and modern societies in which such behaviors are, if anything, maladaptive.
As an example of the second, Randolph Nesse, founder of evolutionary psychiatry, writes about the evolutionary explanation of many mental disorders:
“Living in modern environments explains the prevalence of some mental disorders. Substance abuse, eating disorders, and attention disorders are problems mostly in modernized societies. … Mismatch is the first of six reasons why we are vulnerable to disease. It is an important explanation for some mental disorders” (36).
(Nesse’s book is Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry.)
Evolutionary psychology, especially in popular and therapeutic discourse, is helpful for its diagnosis of our mental suffering. The conditions of modernity are certainly novel on a biological level. While the ancestral environment is no paradise, human beings do not suffer from many diseases and mental disorders when living in such conditions (as even many primitive tribes do today). There is a real difference between the environment for which our bodies and minds are ordered and that in which many of us live.
The other interesting observation, as a Christian, is that the ancestral environment is no Edenic paradise. While Rousseau, for example, theorized a state of nature that was paradisiacal and free of scarcity, evolutionary psychology suggests that our bodies and minds are adapted for an environment that is constrained, imperfect, violent, and replete with suffering. In theological terms, this is a “post-lapsarian” environment, that is, the environment that arose after the fall in the biblical story.
Without this observation, a Christian may assume that all of our mental suffering comes from the fact that we were “designed for Eden,” but we live, as Steinbeck might have put it, east of Eden. Yet evo-psych, on the basis of empirical observation of human nature, concludes that we were designed for primitive, post-lapsarian conditions. Accordingly, our bodies and minds are actually adapted for scarcity and suffering.
It is also significant that evolutionary psychology identifies modernity itself - which is an attempt to create more Edenic conditions - as a new source of our suffering. This means that Christians may and should accept discourses critical of modernity.
Nevertheless, we should not think that the premodern state was paradisiacal. We should not identify modernity and technology with the fall. The fall, in theological terms, precedes even the ancestral environment.
2. Natural selection is real, but limited in explanatory power.
While evolutionary psychologists argue that natural selection equipped us for the natural, ancestral environment, I urge that God designed our bodies and minds for a post-lapsarian, ancestral environment.
However, this is not to deny a role for natural selection. It is only to insist that natural selection needs a biological kind to work on and adapt further. (I argued for this scientifically and philosophically in “Why Not Theistic Evolution? Part 3: Darwinism Is Devolution?”)
For instance, biblically, God cursed Adam with hard work. But biologically, God also equipped males with much greater strength to accomplish this work.
Proponents of an evolutionary explanation would argue that natural selection and the exigencies of the ancestral environment together explain greater male strength. And I cannot deny that natural selection would indeed favor males who had higher testosterone and physical strength. That is, over generations, genes that contribute to greater testosterone and physical strength will tend to preponderate within human populations in an ancestral environment.
However, I would deny that the sexual division of labor and the difference in testosterone levels are themselves explained by natural selection. Natural selection, after all, only gets off the ground given a reproducing species, and in this case, a sexually-reproducing species. Natural selection can explain genetic drift within a population of a particular biological kind over many generations. What it cannot explain is the biological kind itself and the capacities and mechanisms it possesses.
Natural selection only operates on an extant phenotype and genotype. It is that biological kind that is able to survive given certain exogenous constraints.
Thus, while greater male strength does not come only from natural selection, natural selection certainly reinforces that sexual difference over generations, in an ancestral environment.
In “The Distinctiveness of Human Aggression,” Rob Henderson argues that human beings are less violent than similar apes because we had a practice of socially killing those who were individually violent:
“We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder.”
How much nicer than chimps? “Chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.”
Frankly, differences of 150 to 550 times are not explained by human beings killing off the most violent among them. The difference is too great.
What is more, where did human beings get the behavior of focusing socially-sanctioned violence on violent offenders in the first place? This difference in behavior between human beings and chimps must already be significant in order to even arrive at the point where humans killing the violent even begins to reduce the level of violence within the population.
This is also an odd example because it does not concern natural selection but the earliest forms of artificial selection.
Of course, to the evolutionist, natural selection simply must explain the difference. This contributes to writers ignoring where explanations fall short.
3. Replace “Evolutionary” with “Biological”
A simple tip for reading evolutionary psychology while creationist: Replace the word “evolutionary” with the word “biological.”
Many writers in evolutionary psychology are trying to place our self-understanding within the field of biology. Activities that we like to view in uniquely human and mental terms are revealed to be subtly biological. This observation can be made independently of the further question of biological origins.
The word “evolutionary” functions as a crutch for many biologists to hide the appearance of purpose or design. If I want to explain why we have opposable thumbs, all I need to do is relate opposable thumbs to one or more of our biological functions. Getting food, manipulating our environment, standing upright - together these explain our having of opposable thumbs. They place our thumbs in the context of the rest of our biology. Whether this biology is explained by natural selection or design is a distinct and further question.
This means that many of the observations of evolutionary psychology should really only be classified as biological psychology.
Understanding psychology in biological terms is a monumental leap in itself. For example, Randolph Nesse’s advisors in graduate school were psychotherapists committed to theories of Freud, according to which many fears and anxieties are explained by learning and not by hard-wired biology.
For example, psychoanalytic theorists assumed that the fear of heights and of falling would be strongest in those who had experienced and survived a childhood fall (p. 70). However, studies showed that those who fell as children were less likely to fear heights and falling at older ages. This suggested that, rather than fears arising from learning, those who had lower innate fear were both more likely to fall as children and to be low in fear later on. Innate biological levels of fear and anxiety were the explainer, rather than learning from childhood events.
Notably, like Nesse’s psychoanalytic supervisors, Christians tend toward learning-based theories of human psychology as well. We tend to assume that such behaviors are either learned by sin or can be unlearned by faith or obedience. Rooting tendencies in biology provides a realism about our nature. We can adopt biological psychology without explicitly adopting “evolutionary psychology.”
4. Evolutionary Explanations are narrower than biological explanations.
Often the confusion between “evolutionary” and “biological” is innocent. We can simply replace the word and continue on.
However, the conflation of biology with what can be explained by natural selection also narrows the scope of biological explanation.
Nesse writes: “The body is not shaped for maximum health or longevity; it is shaped for maximum transmission of its genes” (38). The health and longevity of organisms are biological ends. Many biological functions seem to be explicable in terms of their contribution to these biological ends.
Yet evolutionary explanations cannot allow that service to these biological ends explains any biological functions or behaviors unless that health or longevity contributes to the further end of reproduction, and reproduction of genes at that.
It is a question whether evolutionary psychologists succeed in explaining in such narrow terms.
Take for example, Nesse’s account of anxiety:
“Why does anxiety exist at all? The general answer is obvious enough: individuals with a capacity for anxiety are more likely to escape from dangerous situations now and to avoid them in the future.”
Nesse argues that natural selection has, over generations and generations, led to a greater preponderance of individuals higher in anxiety (trait neuroticism) as a result of their greater tendency to survive longer and reproduce. Those with hypophobia (disordered low levels of anxiety) tend to die before reproducing at a greater rate.
There is a narrowness in this kind of biology. After all, it is not allowable to hold that individuals possess traits because they lead toward biological flourishing of individual organisms or communities. Traits can only be explained by their tendency to increase the chances of reproduction of organisms possessing those traits. This means that if a trait compromised the life-expectancy of females past age 50, without affecting reproductive fitness, it would not be selected out. Accordingly, any biological feature that appears to increase the health of an organism past reproductive age is left unexplained - unless, of course, it contributes to the chances of kin to reproduce, possessing the same genes.
It is, indeed, possible to push evolutionary explanations pretty far. Rob Henderson writes about “The Grandmother hypothesis,” according to which the biological purpose of post-menopausal women is to contribute to raising their grandchildren, increasing the spread of their own genes.
Nesse writes that even “genetic variations that decrease an individual's survival and reproduction can nonetheless become more common if they benefit relatives who have some of the same genes.” (32) So explanations in terms of natural selection can extend quite far.
Nevertheless, even the most robust evolutionary explanations only explain the tendency for certain genotypic traits to preponderate in a population. They do not explain the coming-into-being of the trait, or capacity, or organism in the first place.
After all, plenty of other species reproduce successfully without involvement of grandparents. The involvement of grandparents only makes sense against the background of human beings’ prolonged development, which in turn only makes sense against the background of human beings’ large brains, which in turn only makes sense against the background of our inhabiting “the cognitive niche.” But the world existed for ages and ages without any inhabitants of the cognitive niche - why is there an organism (a “rational animal”) that inhabits such a niche at all?
Again, natural selection explains why, given a certain kind of organism, certain genotypic traits preponderate over generations. It does not explain why certain kinds of organisms exist in the first place.
5. A naturalistic worldview does not taint evolution psychology. A divinely-designed reality taints evolutionary psychology.
Those concerned about the worldview of an author might worry that a naturalistic worldview would taint the observations of evolutionary psychologists.
But I don’t think we should worry about this. In fact, I don’t think it’s we who should worry; it’s the evolutionary psychologists who should worry that a divinely-designed reality will taint their biological observations and theories.
After all, as we have seen, explanations in terms of natural selection fail to explain the arrival of the fittest, the coming-into-being of the particular kinds of organisms that exist. Natural selection only explains drift of genotypes and phenotypic characteristics over time, given an extant biological kind.
Yet the temptation to offer biological explanations is rarely constrained by the limited capacity of natural selection. The reality of biological purpose, in fact, divine design, is too prominent to ignore.
The inescapability of theology rears its head at the beginning of Nesse’s book. Nesse notices that his task is all but a kind of theology. In particular, evolutionary psychology is an exercise in secular theodicy, the problem of evil. Why are our bodies and minds ordered imperfectly as they are? And why are we adapted so poorly for modern life?
Nesse writes:
“Why did natural selection leave our bodies with traits that make us vulnerable to disease?
“The question is new, but it is close to one of the oldest questions. Why is life so full of suffering? Debated in religious and philosophical contexts for millennia as the problem of evil,’ answers have proved elusive.”
This is but one of the ways in which the divine origin of nature seeps through the evolutionary cracks. Biological function is another one. Only tricks of language keep evolutionary thinkers from seeing divine design. They will wonder at the adaptations of natural selection; they will applaud the wonderful design of something else; they will mourn the difference between what we are and what we could be.
In all this, the divine origin of biology shines through. God ordered our biology for survival in an ancestral, post-lapsarian environment. His work is praiseworthy even when and where it exhibits trade-offs and what we might perceive as imperfection.
6. Replace “Evolution” with “God”
Finally, then, another simple principle for reading evolutionary psychology while creationist: Replace “evolution” with “God.”
The adjective “evolutionary,” as we discussed, can be replaced with “biological.” But when you encounter the noun “evolution,” especially as the subject of an intentional verb, it can replaced with the word “God.”
For example, if a sentence says, “Evolution equipped us with xyz,” translate as, “God equipped us with xyz.”
Henderson writes, “Evolution, then, favored individuals who avoided being viewed as social outcasts.” Translation: “God favored individuals who avoided being viewed as social outcasts.”
And: “Wrangham states that evolution has made the killing of outsiders pleasurable.” Translation: “God made the killing of outsiders pleasurable.”
To each of these phenomena, we can ask why? But the findings of evolutionary psychology ultimately reveal God’s design choices concerning our psychology.
And while some of our minds’ features puzzle us, given their fitness for a state of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” the complete picture is one that is quite remarkable.
Nesse writes:
“If the mind were a machine, we would praise its designer to the heavens for creating the most extraordinary device in the universe.”
And while he continues, “But…there was no designer,” we have reason to demur.
Further Reading
As an act of praise to the mind’s designer, I encourage you to read some works of evolutionary psychology. Perhaps start with Rob Henderson’s Substack, or Nesse’s Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, or Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast. For deeper reading, check out Henderson’s secret reading list.
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I actually find it fascinating to listen to evolutionary psychologists, and marvel at their naivete.
First of all, they seem totally ignorant of how many of the things that they say 'evolved to do this' would work equally well with 'God designed to do this'.
The second is how much their language doesn't fit their thesis. "The pre-elephant saw that it needed a longer trunk to reach higher leaves' or some such. As if! They use design and intention language throughout their prose, tho it contradicts their thesis. I just heard a podcast with Dawkins and he did this continually.
7. Realize that much of evolutionary psychology consists of providing an explanation that is plausible, which is not the same thing as substantiating an explanation. Then realize that scholarly domains that depend on getting others to believe your plausible claims, beyond all hope of ever proving them true, are inferior domains of scholarship, the kind of domains that usually end up with enforced conformity to a "consensus" opinion.
For example, evo-psych proposes that men are attracted to young women because they are fertile and have years of fertility left. But I can come up with other plausible conjectures, even a different evo-psych conjecture: In ancient societies, females were matched up with males not too many years after puberty, so if any male tended to prefer 30 year old women, he would find himself pursuing women who were already matched up, leading to his violent death.
There is also the possibility that aesthetics are involved. Maybe young skin looks better than older skin, and evo-psych has nothing to do with it.
Has anyone identified a gene or group of genes responsible for this male preference? Of course not.
Mere plausibility is a weak basis for any "scientific" field.