EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY IS EVOLUTION

I have had some thought about evolutionary psychology or social biology over the give and take during the Easter week end. This should be treated as rather strange because I am a long retired pathophysiologist trained in physiological chemistry and pathology with an orientation toward metabolic disease in animals. Above all else, I consider myself a biologist. This background generates such thoughts as two rootlets side by side in soil; one rootlet has the capability of absorbing the mineral potassium and concentrating it in the cells of that rootlet, the other rootlet does not have that ability; it acquires the potassium (K⁺) it must have to live by simple diffusion. I have no compunction against using the term greed for the one rootlet in comparison to the other. If the rootlets are in a situation where potassium is scarce and given that it is needed to survive, I feel free to say that one plant is “better adapted” to one environment while the other is not. By an equal measure, I jump over the artificial barrier between physical being and mental being and judge animal behavior in human terms and place behavior squarely in the field of genetics; plants act like plants, insects act like insects, dogs  act like dogs, cats act like cats, and people act like people.

Everyone agrees that cats have different “personalities” from dogs and one dog has a different personality from the next dog; although, to accept that statement as fact we readily accept the idea that the word ‘personality’ can some how apply to animals at the risk of getting into the inane argument that people are not animals. Some object to this but more people object to the idea that rootlets can be greedy and plants have personalities—it seems a bridge too far.

What I am saying is that biology is chemistry and by extension, genetics is chemistry, and we are chemistry. There is a move in genetics to direct us away from the simplistic of Mendelian genetics of dominate and recessive—the crude concept of gross genetic units and refine inheritance as the synergistic integrations of 3.3 billion DNA nucleotides and leaping from there to a churning mass of molecules operating as a whole. This we identify as individuals; a plants, a worm, an insect or dog, cat, horse, cow, pig, sheep, goat, or person—a complex of chemical reactions each functioning in thermodynamic equilibrium with all others—mind boggling compared to a gene for this and a gene for that.   

This has led to whole gene association studies to find variants across everyone to find those in the multiplicity of gene common to a trait, or in this case a disease as a trait. The computer has given us the power—perhaps a curse really—to search for single nucleotides variants that are different between different people; something a geneticist refers to as a SNPs or snips. There are roughly ten million in a human genome; thus, a young researcher can be guaranteed of find some, thus fulfill the promise of his research clever grant. The search is for single nucleotides or molecule  that is different and not those cloudy things Greg Venter laid bare, the genes or haplotypes with all of their regulator trimmings that relate to their remote expression as proteins.  What scientists are finding is that there are many, the only way to sort them out is to judge, which ones scientists commonly find with each disease trait, and then determining which ones matter with the caveat that most of them do not matter; it is a polymath’s dream world but a chemist’s nightmare. Some remarkable successes have justified the continued search: individual response to drugs, susceptibility to toxins, risk in developing disease, and provides hope in unraveling complex diseases.

This entire line of intellectual attack leaves open the question how did genes in DNA develop in the first place. Geneticists seem to be looking for some mythical base line sequence of DNA bases that gave rise to all species. They keep working back in time in a relative sense, this occurred before or after that based on the nature of the differences and on an assume rate of mutations. They realize that huge block of DNA were repeated and or exchanged with other blocks and realigned even within phyla, genera, and species but fall silent on the subject in the pre-biotic world. The answer seems obvious; it was indisputable; it was a random world. Sequences of DNA bases formed, were stable, and were random and existed in a world of random chemical milieu; a massive complex and summed dilute thermodynamic equilibrium suffering the torments of environments. Of course, double stranded DNA has a melting point and single stranded DNA was not stable and was formed and reformed. The classic sequence “evolved”; → → → DNA →RNA →Protein. The “RNA world hypothesis” is slowly fading from view. We know about ribosomes, spliceosomes, and the churning RNA world of DNA transcripts.

Physical being and behavior evolved, mindlessly and chemically. We can comfortably  look at greed, fear, gregariousness, hierarchy dominance, tropisms, first as deterministic, with Herbert Spencer’s interpretation of Darwian logic as natural selections, which gave direction to chemical reactions; spectacularly, the direction was in defiance of entropy—no more, no less. In truth, behavior as a product of evolution makes more sense then does physical growth; greed is easier to explain than five fingers.       

Evolutionary psychology is evolution.

The question here is, could some of the roughly 10,000,000 variants geneticists are finding be associated with behavior genes? In other words, when did the variants stop becoming “normal” evolution and start becoming “abnormal” variants? The answer is irrelevant; however, it does point out that biologists missed the significance of behavior for a few centuries, now we have to wait and see if they are smart enough to recognize  that fact  or will they continue to disparagingly label evolutionary psychologists as a pseudo scientists. Of course, evolutionary psychologists have to start acting like scientists and stop making thing up—girls inherit a liking for pink; OMG. 

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