Evolutionary Psychologist Tooby Kept Teaching Falsehoods About Brain Programs

For twenty years the Edge Foundation seemed to exist mainly to publish an annual survey in which a group of people (mainly scientists) were asked some Annual Question, and wrote their answers at length.  These annual surveys were published in book form between 1998 and 2018, and you can read most of them for free on this page of the Edge Foundation's site.  For years most of the financial contributions that funded the foundation came from Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire who committed suicide in jail after being charged with the sex trafficking of minors.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008, but he continued for quite a few years before and after that conviction to mingle with scientists and high-tech luminaries at exclusive social events such as dinner parties and cocktail parties, as his sex crimes continued.

What we usually got in the yearly books answering the Annual Question were a group of people advancing an Epstein-friendly view of the world, by which I mean any viewpoint which would not trouble Jeffrey too much as he continued his predatory sex crimes (which seemed to have started long before 2008).  Typically humans would be depicted as accidental piles of chemicals rather than souls or bodies that are mysteriously arising marvels of biological organization. It was as if each of the 100+ essays in each book had been carefully chosen to avoid anything that might make Jeffrey Epstein uncomfortable.  Although occupation-wise the authors were a fairly diverse group, the books were a very monochrome affair, with almost no writers deviating from the Official Party Line of modern academia.  One of the worst examples of the Epstein-compatible viewpoints was the following appalling statement by biologist Richard Dawkins for the 2006 Annual Question:

"But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment."

During the twenty years in which the Annual Question books were being published, we seemed to have heard scarcely a peep from any professor along the lines of "I don't want to participate in some book series mainly financed by a child-abusing sex criminal."  During the same period, the contributors to the Annual Questions were marketed as some kind of brilliant elite.  

At the Edge.org site we had many a writer teaching the most morally appalling nonsense. At the site one well-known Darwinist biologist in America taught the morally destructive doctrine of determinism, the nonsensical claim that humans lack free will. I can imagine Jeffrey Epstein reading such writing with a smile on his face, thinking that he is not really to blame, no matter how many kids he rapes, on the grounds that his atoms made him do it. 

Now the Edge.org site has apparently run out of funding, and has no more annual survey questions. Its 2018 Annual Question survey was the last of its series of questions.  At the site we have no mention of how it was funded most notably by a man now universally regarded as a notorious sex criminal. There's an About page on the site, which makes no mention of Jeffrey  Epstein. There is a grand bit of hogwash in which the often immoral and often nonsensical writings of those at Edge.org are hailed as some type of sublime wisdom. It's some "the scientists will take over philosophy" rubbish. We read this: "The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. "   But we have scant evidence at Edge.org that the scientists contributing were suited for such a task.  The page boasts that its writers "create their own reality."  But isn't it better for a scientist to study reality as it exists, rather than making up some reality that you invented?

Now as the first article on the front page of Edge.org I see a tribute to the late John Tooby, who the site calls the founder of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is a  cesspool of junk science that someone like Jeffrey Epstein probably was a big fan of. The idea behind evolutionary psychology is that you try to explain the human mind and human behavior by claiming that evolution made us act such and such a way so that we would survive better and reproduce more in the state that humans existed before civilization.  

Evolutionary psychology is one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason."

In the document "Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology" we get some examples of the falsehoods and nonsense taught by John Tooby. He taught the fictitious idea that the human mind consists of "programs" that govern our behavior. No such programs have ever been discovered. On and on Tooby goes, misspeaking over and over again, claiming programs in the brain. In the 63-page document, he uses the word "program" 193 times. An example of his deceit comes on page 13, when he states, "These causal relations between information and behavior are created by neural circuits in the brain, which function as programs that process information." The claim has no basis in fact. No one has ever discovered the slightest trace of anything like a computer program by examining brain tissue or neural circuits.  Below are some more similar falsehoods told by Tooby:

• Page 17: "The programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended (Advances 2 and 4)." The claim is completely fictional. The human brain consists of elements such as neurons, dendrites and synapses. No one has ever found anything like a program in a human brain. Like almost all human cells, neurons contain DNA. But DNA and its genes are not any type of program. A gene merely tells what amino acids make up a protein, and it is false to claim that DNA is any program for behavior. 
• Page 19: "The brain is fantastically complex, packed with programs, most of which are currently unknown to science." No one has ever discovered any type of program in a human brain. 
• Page 20: "When an organism reproduces, genes that cause the development of its design features are introduced into its offspring." Genes do not explain how there occurs the progression from a one-celled zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vast organization of a human body. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Neither DNA nor its genes "cause the development" of a human body or a human mind. Saying genes "cause the development" of a human body is as false as saying that bricks and pipes and wood beams cause the construction of a large apartment building. 
• Page 21: "Genes are the means by which functional design features replicate themselves from parent to offspring. They can be thought of as particles of design."  This was a fiction. Genes do not specify the design of any human body or any organ or any cell or any organelle of any cell. 
• Page 25: "The human neural architecture is a complex functional system, composed of programs whose design was engineered by natural selection to solve specific adaptive problems." No one has ever discovered any type of program in a human brain. Brains consist of neurons, dendrites and synapses, not programs. The phrase "engineered by natural selection" is a doubly deceptive phrase. The mere "survival of the fittest" effect of so-called natural selection is not actually selection, and is not any engineering effect. The bodies of organisms are replete with abundant engineering effects, which are not explained by any unguided chance processes such as so-called natural selection. As the botanist Hugo de Vries stated,  "Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." ( "The Mutation Theory. Volume II, page 609. )
• Page 26: "The neural programs that allow humans to acquire and use spoken language are adaptations, specialized by selection for that task (Pinker, 1994; Pinker & Bloom, 1990)."  A brain has no programs. No one understands the origin of language.  It is false to claim that the ability to speak a language is an adaption. 
• Page 34: "Genes are regulatory elements that use environments to construct organisms." Another glaring falsehood. Genes do not construct organisms or any of their organ systems or any of their organs or any of the cells of such organs or any of the organelles of such cells. Genes do not have any specification of such things. 
• Page 36: "Some neural programs were designed by natural selection to take in substantial amounts of environmental input (e.g., the language acquisition device) whereas others were designed to take in less information (e.g., the reflex that causes the eye to blink in response to a looming figure)." Here we have a triple abuse of language befitting a deceiver like Tooby. First there is a false claim that there are neural programs. Then we have a use of the misleading term "natural selection" which does not refer to any actual selection ("selection" being a term meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Then there is a reference to an imagined blind, unconscious effect (so-called "natural selection") which is described as designing things, as if a blind, unconscious effect had planning and imagination abilities. 
• Page 52:  "Again, a superordinate program is needed that coordinates these components, snapping each into the right configuration at the right time. We have proposed that emotions are such programs (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000b; Tooby, 1985; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a)."  Utter nonsense. Emotions are not programs.  The nonsense in the quote is repeated endlessly by Tooby. 

This 63-page document suggests Tooby was no real scholar of the brain. In the document he makes no mention of synapses, only one mention of the word "neuron," and only one mention of DNA. What Tooby mainly does is just make stuff up, acting like an armchair reasoner too lazy to get up and read up on the things he is pontificating about.  To read 40 quotations by scientists and doctors disputing claims about genes made like the ones Tooby made above, see my post here. Tooby's document has 45 uses of the words "genes," 10 uses of the word "gene," and 91 uses of the word "genetic." But nowhere does it refer to amino acids, suggesting Tooby had no understanding of the correct nature of a gene, which is a list of the amino acids used by a protein. In the document his misstatements about genes are as huge and frequent as his misstatements about brains. 

Showing a complete failure to understand the lack of any real intelligence in computers, Tooby laughably states, "The greater the number of functionally specialized programs (or subroutines) your computer has installed, the more intelligent your computer is." No, actually your computer has no real intelligence, and your computer does not become more intelligent when you download more software. 

What is it that a brain would need to have to be actually running something like a computer program? It would need all of these things:

(1) Something like a CPU and a system capable of transmitting information as reliably as in a computer. The brain has no such things. Synapses do not reliably transmit information, with a signal being transmitted with less than 50% likelihood over each synaptic gap of a chemical synapse. 

(2) Something like an operating system, something like UNIX or Windows or MS-DOS. The brain has no such thing. 

(3) Something like a programming language, required for program to be written. The brain has no such thing. 

(4) Something like application programs, written in such a programming language. The brain has no such thing. 

What are the outputs of computer programs? Effects such as the rearrangement of pixels on a computer screen. Such effects do not resemble the outputs and main aspects of a human mind, which are things like understanding, consciousness, experience, aspirations, beliefs and emotions, things which do not match any outputs of a computer program. Computers and their programs are not conscious, have no real understanding, and do not have mental experiences or beliefs. 

So saying the mind does what it does because the brain has programs is like saying your toaster can fly to the moon because your toaster is a moon rocket. Your toaster has none of the things it would have to have to be able to fly to the moon. 

Tooby's false teachings are shown not just by the fact that brains have none of the programs that Tooby claimed that brains have. The false nature of his teachings is shown by the fact that humans do not behave as if they were under the control of a program or programs. A computer program typically offers a limited set of responses that can occur given some inputs. For example, an "if/else" statement typically divides responses into two possibilities. What is called a "switch" statement can offer a wider variety of possible responses, but it is only a limited set of possible responses; and any one input always produces the same output. Humans, on the other hand, may respond in an unlimited variety of ways, in some particular situation or facing some particular stimulus. And human responses are not predictable, unlike what you typically have in a computer program, where the output is completely predictable from an input. Brains do not store programs, and people do not act in a way suggesting control by some program or set of programs. 

For more on the sordid nature of evolutionary psychology, see the long article "Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology."