[FRIAM] Goal and Function (in the context of Evolution)

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Nifty, eric.  Nifty.  

 

n

 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2021 8:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Goal and Function (in the context of Evolution)

 

EricC, What again is the connection between goal orientation and function
in the evolutionary theory literature? All I can remember, from this
summer when we were discussing it, is that it was a way to distinguish
those things selected-for from the spandrels.

 

Great connection! 

 

The evolutionary function of a behavior or body structure is the reason it has been selected for. (<Gould kicks in the door> "If it has been selected for!" <me> "Yes, yes, we are covering that on the other thread just fine.") So, for example, it may be that getting access to protein and calcium is important for being a successful Irish Elk, and evolution favors both males who get lots of protein and female who select males who get lots of protein. 

 

But what do female Irish Elk know about protein consumption? Answer: Nothing. Despite millions of years of evolutionary pressure, neither gender of Irish Elk has even a rudimentary grasp of amino-acid chemistry. So, evolution needs something else to latch onto. Something detectable. It turns out that antlers are made of mostly excess protein. So if you are good at making big antlers, you are de facto good at getting excess protein. 

 

As a result of that, you have female Irish Elk walking around with the goal of nabbing the male Irish Elk with the biggest antlers. And "goal" is used there in the psychological sense - the female will seek out the male with the largest Antlers around, varying behavior as necessary to achieve that end. That the female's behavior is directed at getting to the male with the largest antlers is an experimentally verifiable (or refutable) aspect of her behavioral design. No dualism here, just an objective description of how the female's behavior varies across circumstances to keep her headed towards a particular end point.  

 

We can do experiments where we artificially enhance the antlers of males who are (apparently) sub par at protein collection, and thereby show that females are responding to antler size, not protein collection ability itself. And, by deduction, any male that evolved a way to grow huge antlers on less protein would be able to exploit that goal, without fulfilling the function. 

 

Many perennial confusions in efforts at creating an evolutionary psychology come from not distinguishing those two concepts cleanly. It would be a significant mischaracterization of the situation to say "The female is trying to get the male who is best at getting protein." The female is trying to get the male with the biggest antlers. We have females who are currently trying to do that, because in the past, such a preference has functioned to produce young elk who were, on average, better at getting protein than the competition. You can't talk coherently about evolution or about psychology without keeping those things separate. 

 

P.S. Those of you who are fans of recently-extinct mega fauna know I shouldn't be talking about Irish Elk in the present tense, and that none of the experiments above have been done in that species... though similar experiments have been performed in countless others. I'm not sure why Irish Elk popped into my mind, but that's what I had to work with. That species went extinct a few thousand years ago, and had the largest antlers of any deer species ever, coming in at around 90 pounds (40 kg). There is much speculation that the ridiculous antler size was due to sexual selection run amuck, and that overgrown antlers contributed to the species extinction by making it hard to avoid predators (including humans).

 

 

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