Marxism & Evolutionary Psychology

[Comrade #138672]

Originally Marxism was based on behaviorism. Since then psychology has evolved a lot. Now there are sciences such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology that seem to contribute a lot to our understanding of the human mind.

Since Marx accepted the theory of evolution, would he have accepted evolutionary psychology as well? Do modern Marxists accept evolutionary psychology? If not, why not? Does it contradict Marxism in any way? And if it is accepted, how does this contribute to Marxism?

I believe evolutionary psychology can make quite some contributions to Marxism, but I have no idea how popular it is.

[Veovis]

There are, of course, elements to human psychology that can be attributed to our distant ancestors - the problem, I think, is when too much is assigned to evolutionary baggage than is warranted, or when there are no caveats or conditions included.

Take greed for example. We've all heard the "greed is a part of human nature" argument, but the reality is that greed is simply a method of coping in times of scarcity. It's not a feature of human personalities everywhere and at all times.

[Comrade #138672]

Evolutionary psychologists are supposed to be careful about attributing too much to genetics and mistaking by-products for actual adaptions.

Many people think that evolution necessarily means greed because people are supposed to be selfish by their nature. Actually, it has been found that people have evolved (tendencies) to be altruistic towards each other in order to survive. Otherwise it would be impossible to live in a group. Another finding is that people tend to be the happiest in groups with little (relative) inequality.

I think that these findings are in favor of communism.

[NewLeft]

Evolutionary psychologists tend to accept some form of hardwired human nature, simply because they're universal or/and can be found in human history. Can the hypotheses in this field be falsified?

Check out this article from the ISO: (http://www.isreview.org/issues/40/genes2.shtml)
Marxism, Biology and Human NatureHUMAN BEINGS are not naturally violent, selfish, competitive, greedy, or xenophobic, it is not natural for human societies to be organized hierarchically or for women to have lower social status than men, and capitalism does not exist because it uniquely reflects human nature. But to make such claims is not the same as saying—as the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker seems to assume—that the human mind is simply a “blank slate” or that there are no biological constraints on human behavior.1

It is true that in different social and historical circumstances, human behavior and psychology can vary dramatically, just as in different physical circumstances, water can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. But that does not mean that human beings are infinitely malleable or that there are no biological constraints on human behavior. As Stephen Jay Gould once noted, “We would lead very different social lives if we photosynthesized (no agriculture, gathering, or hunting—the major determinants of our social evolution) or had life cycles like…gall midges,” which devour their mothers’ bodies from the inside, and which are in turn eaten by their own offspring within a few days.2

The range of potential human behaviors has limits, and a description of those limits and their basis in human biology and psychology would be a description of human nature. In fact, if such limits did not exist, then it would be possible for there to be class societies in which the majority of the population was socially conditioned to be permanently reconciled to its exploitation and oppression. But the whole history of class societies is a refutation of that idea.

No one was more aware of this than Marx, which is why from his earliest writings he condemns capitalism as inhumane—a society in which most human beings cannot live satisfying lives, engage in fulfilling work, or relate in satisfactory ways to other people or to the rest of the natural world. In other words, capitalism frustrates basic human needs and human nature. In capitalist society,

Labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being;…in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague….

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.3

Biological determinists want us to believe that human talent is naturally scarce so that the hierarchies that exist in capitalist society reflect human nature. By contrast, Marxists argue that capitalism is not natural and that the artificial limits imposed on human development by our current forms of social organization are the real limits to our potential.

Under capitalism, most people lack control over central areas of their lives and are able to exercise their capacity to engage in creative activity only in limited ways, if at all. That results in a vast squandering of human talent. For one small example, think of the large number of gifted artists there are on death rows around the country. These are people who previously had little or no chance to develop these skills, but who flourish once they have the opportunity. The tragedy is that in our society this only takes place in a condemned cell where they await execution.

Examples of this kind could be multiplied many thousand times and are the basis for thinking that under socialism, not only exploitation and oppression would be abolished, but there would be a huge flowering of human creativity. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky put it, in a socialist society,

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane…. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.4
Meanwhile, lets play evolutionary psychology bingo.

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d98/sabotabby/evopsychbingo.jpg

[Ostrinski]

Most of the human nature arguments have premises in evolutionary biology, I'd be wary of it.

[Questionable]

I admit I haven't studied it much, but its adherents tend towards pseudoscience. They can justify any bad thing in society by saying "Well, it's evolution!"

[Kenco Smooth]

Evolutionary psychologists tend to accept some form of hardwired human nature, simply because they're universal or/and can be found in human history. Can the hypotheses in this field be falsified?


Evolutionary psychology isn't the only discipline which to some extent focuses on innate mental properties. Cognitive and developmental psychology have both been pretty heavily nativist since Chomsky and Piaget respectively. Whether or not the hypotheses can be falsified depends on if the researcher is even remotely competent or is a moron. Sadly the latter get a lot of publicity that the former tend not to. So long as evolutionary theories meet the criterion for an acceptable scientific theory, easily falsifiable and capable of providing novel hypothesis and methods of falsification, then they're no less scientific than the most rigorous social explanation.

An example of a good research program in evolutionary psychology is research into survival encoding in memory, built on the observed fact that objects rated for survival relevance are recalled better than pretty much any other kind of rating. The bets explanation here is an evolutionary one.

Given it's perfectly scientific it'd sure be a shame if evolutionary psychology and the works of Marx are incompatible. Thankfully I see no reason the two need to be mutually exclusive.

[Mr. Natural]

As Wecandobetter noted, Marx accepted evolution. I can't find the quotation, but somewhere Marx and Engels stated that Darwinian natural evolutionary (historical) relations closely resembled those of human history. They also opposed Malthusian uses of Darwinian evolutionary competition, and noted that such evolutionary concepts closely resembled capitalist relations.

Darwinian evolution by natural selection and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory (natural selection with random mutation) are an incomplete adaptationist theory as is evolutionary psychology, however. The living systems of life are adapted and they adapt, and current evolutionary theory ignores the major evolutionary phenomena of self-organization and emergence. Thus evolutionary psychology suggests and promotes a mechanical conformity to external laws; it makes life an external affair, while life is internal/external self-organization with emergence.

The living systems of life (people are such systems) internally self-organize to dynamically engage an environment of other such living systems and physical forces. Thus organisms have an internal self-organization that adapts the environment (birds build nests) and an external environment of self-organizing living systems to which living systems must adapt (woodpeckers protect their nests from predators by building them inside trees). Life is a systemic process created by and composed of self-organizing living systems. Life is a bootstrap of self-organizing living systems keeping themselves and the life process going. A living system's internal self-organization actively adapts its surround as it adapts to it. Self-organization is thus absolutely central to evolution, but is missing from evolutionary theory.

As for emergence, it is the phenomenon by which material self-organization at one level generates a "higher level" system with new properties and behaviors. Thus organic molecules autocatalyzed (self-organized) into emergent protocells in Earth's primordial atmosphere, and these protecells further self-organized in evolutionary steps into the higher systemic organization of bacteria, Earth's first true living systems.

Bacteria have emerged into humans through countless evolutionary, self-organized emergences, and cells self-organize into emergent organs, which self-organize into emergent bodies, and these bodies then self-organize into emergent flocks, herds, and social systems. Life is emergent matter that self-organizes into emergent living systems. A simple notation for evolution becomes "s-o/S-O," where the lower case self-organization represents life's internal self-organization, the capitalized S-O represents external, environmental self-organization (natural selection), and the slash represents the emergent systems that result from all this bootstrapped, dynamically interdependent self-organization.

Now back to evolutionary psychology. As it is based in an evolutionary theory that denies self-organization, it must inherently deny human internal agency and promote mechanical social systems of external domination. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory takes much life out of life, and evolutionary psychology will inherently lead, I believe, to taking the life out of the human mind and personality.

I know this has been a load. I've suffered, too. My red-green best.

[blake 3:17]

Originally Marxism was based on behaviorism.

Behaviourism is a 20th century school of thought.

I've enjoyed reading David M. Buss, one of the leading evolutionary psychologists. I'd recommend his book, The Murderer Next Door.

Having been a fairly dogmatic anti-essentialist, I've come to accept that there is something that can be considered human nature. I'm pretty skeptical about certain Marxist denials of it and ideas of perfectibility.

Howard Gardner, the theorist of multiple intelligences, has a pretty good take (or dodge...) when he says human development is 100% nature and 100% nurture.

Are you familiar with Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist?

[Yuppie Grinder]

Mainstream psychological and mental health institutions are tools of class warfare in the hands of our oppressors.

[Mr. Natural]

blake 3:17 referenced Howard Gardner and his observation that "human development is 100% nature and 100% nurture." Gardner's seemingly paradoxical statement is similar to my post's assertion that life is material internal and external self-organization with emergence, which I wrote as "s-o/S-O." I would write Gardner's formulation as "nature/NATURE," or "nurture/NURTURE." These three notations express a life process in which internal organization adapts and is adapted by an external environment of living systems with the same pattern of organization. All three formulations portray life correctly as an organized bootstrap process, and the "Capra's triangle" that I ceaselessly promote successfully models the self-organization of matter on Earth into living systems and the process of life.

Anarchist/communist revolutionaries aim to organize material beings into revolutionary processes (life goes to revolutionary emergences all the time), and I would think revolutionaries would be interested in Capra's triangle, which models such processes for popular understanding and use. Or, perhaps, as has been suggested, I'm one of the biggest bullshitters around.

In any case, I find Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory to be as correct as it is generally neglected. Comrades are encouraged to make the acquaintance of Gardner, who writes clearly for a popular readership and common understanding. Teachers, professors, educational reformers, and consciousness theorists, especially, should be interested in Gardner.

My red-green best.

[Anarpest]

"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will."

tl;dr


Originally Marxism was based on behaviorism.

[citation needed]

[Kenco Smooth]

Mainstream psychological and mental health institutions are tools of class warfare in the hands of our oppressors.

No more than mainstream physics and chemistry are tools of those with wealth and power to exercise the findings of such research.

[Anarpest]

No more than mainstream physics and chemistry are tools of those with wealth and power to exercise the findings of such research.

Oh, come on, they aren't equivalent. Hint: what does psychology study?

[Pirx]

I think evolutionary psychology may not be key to socialism but sure it is key to class struggle. On the one hand there is a universal drive for dominance = will to power and control of resources. Plus the tendency to hand down privileges and legacies to the closest kin (as predicted by kin selection theory), which results in the establishment of enduring dynasties and upper classes (by the way: kin selection even works in North Korea’s WPK).
On the other hand there is something I would call a set of "leftist instincts". First a drive for counter dominance, the resistance against oppression by other dominant individuals. Then a need for cooperation, empathy and an inborn sense of justice and fairness.
The key question for a stable socialist society is how to neutralize dominant and egoistic impulses, which on the long run would lead to the reestablishment of class society. One possible answer: Human plasticity. Can people be socialized to suppress these impulses reliably? But what if plasticity is limited? Is there the possibility of a systemic solution, a constitutional mechanism of mutual control, which can zero out all these individual egoisms? In any case: Reasonable socialism should take evolutionary psychology into the formula.

[Kenco Smooth]

Oh, come on, they aren't equivalent. Hint: what does psychology study?

Behaviour, cognition, affect and how these factors relate to the world and each other.

The most dangerous thing psychology is remotely capable of currently doing is justifying effective prison sentences with no recourse to any semblance of law or fair process. This could easily be done without an effective science of mind though, the advance of it does not increase that risk in itself.

[Anarpest]

Behaviour, cognition, affect and how these factors relate to the world and each other.

So basically people, in a way closely related to sociology. As opposed to subatomic particles.

[Kenco Smooth]

So basically people, in a way closely related to sociology. As opposed to subatomic particles.

The majority of modern psychology really isn't that closely linked to sociology. Regardless I'm not sure what your point is. Our current knowledge of the workings of the atom are much more dangerous than our current knowledge of mind and behaviour.