Complex Numbers

Drawing Conclusions

It might be that we're interpreting history wrong. Not to mention prehistory.

What the caves are trying to tell us  
Whatever they once said to their authors, they scream their message of no message across the millennia to us now.

Every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave, and show them something unspeakable.

Pervert.

Plenty of caves would do, but let’s take him to the Cueva de la Pileta in Andalucia, Spain. There, we’ll push him into one of its huge, damp, cool cathedral-halls of fractured rock, where the darkness and the vastness of empty space seem to press themselves tightly against your skin, close and clawed and ancient. We know that there were people here, some 20,000 years ago. They left their millstones and their axe-heads; they left walls blackened with soot from fires that went out eons ago, leaving traces across a chasm of time that could swallow up the entirety of recorded history four times over. They left the bodies of their dead. And they left marks on the walls. The people who lived in this cave 20,000 years ago, people who lived lives it’s impossible for us to even imagine, are still trying to talk to us.

Oh. Never mind.

Were our ancestors just playing, with a child’s hesitancy, at the perilous game of turning bits of pigment into an abstract form beyond space and time? Or had they, long before we realized, found a way to make dead objects speak?

Not coherently.

Anyway, the article goes on to relate those cave drawings to thoughts on evolutionary psychology, which I've ragged on in here before because, at least in its popular version, it's extraordinarily unscientific.

Evopsych combines every unscientific pop-science trope that makes people feel smart for believing in bullshit: a fetishism of geneticism and evolutionary processes, a refusal of diachronicity, and a dogmatic insistence on the cosmological principle that blankets the universe and its past in crushing sameness.

It's one thing to appreciate science. It's another thing entirely to misuse it to bolster one's own biases. We saw it with eugenics, as people cited so-called science to enshrine their self-appointed genetic superiority; we saw it with quantum physics with mystics claiming it proved Eastern philosophy or some such. And we see it all the time with evolutionary psychology.

It works like this. You start with a vague stereotype about the failings of other people that you’d like to lend some scientific heft — to take Damore’s example, the idea that “women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men.” You note that this behaviour is not particularly useful in an environment where just about everybody has to feign interest in some kind of tedious nonsense just so they can feed themselves; it’s not, in evolutionary parlance, an adaptive trait. But humans are no longer biologically evolving; if people are behaving in this way, it must be because these traits evolved to be advantageous in what’s called the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness:” an assumed, theoretical environment of pure biological utility which is supposed to have existed in the Pleistocene, the hunter-gatherer era stretching from two and a half million years ago to just ten thousand years short of the present, the age that produced those strange markings in the caves of Europe. This environment, it’s assumed, was exactly the same for everyone, and those primitive plains still haunt our perceptions today. If women aren’t making as much money programming Google gadgets to collect data on every aspect of our lives, it must be because evolution once gave men the skills needed to throw a stick at a reindeer, while women were stuck with the traits for childrearing and patience.

The obvious and glaring problem with these "theories" is not just that they beg the question (in the original sense of the phrase), but that males and females aren't different species, and we all have traits from both parents.

In scientific terms, this is bullshit. None of its accounts are testable or disprovable; evopsych is, for all its pretensions to rationality, a collection of just-so stories.

As I've been saying.

The real social danger of this sort of thinking is, as far as I can tell, related to the naturalistic fallacy. If, for example, you assume that every individual of a species must reproduce in order to advance the species, you end up marginalizing asexuals, homosexuals, and even people like me who make a conscious choice to avoid having kids. It completely bypasses the true nature of humanity -- we don't rely on genetic evolution, but on social evolution, which is a lot faster.

Why is pink associated with girls and blue with boys? Ignore the fact that as recently as the 1920s the gender-color identification went the other way around; it’s because women evolved to spot pink-colored berries in the forest, and men evolved to hunt between the open plain and the wide blue sky. Why is there still a gender wage gap? It’s not the fault of our own society; it’s the fault of the Stone Age.

Yep. You can come up with bullshit "evolutionary" explanations for just about anything.

The next part of the text goes back to focus on the cave paintings, with a brief history of what people thought about them (spoiler: it usually reflected the in-vogue philosophies of the times). It's fascinating, because it gives more insight into the thinking of modern scholars than into the cave-dweller mind. As is appropriate.

Within the mainstream, many theorists quietly assume that the caves served some kind of religious or proto-religious function. Their location deep in the bowels of the earth might have brought to mind some connection with a shamanic underworld or spirit realm where the animal-gods move in eternal masses.

Or -- and bear with me here -- they demonstrate survivorship bias. It could be that prehistoric humans drew and painted everywhere: cliffs, trees, each other, animal skins, the ground, as well as in caves, but only the caves could preserve the art for thousands of years. I've also often been suspicious of "It was a religious thing," because, well, how do we know that except by comparison to recent history?

Fortunately, the article addresses that, too.

Of course, as a writer, I have my own bias: the idea that the symbol (be it representational art or its successor, the written language) stimulates a mental connection to the object it represents. In a sense, the picture becomes the pictured. This is a reflex in humans. If I show you a picture of a duck, you're may be just as likely to go "It's a duck!" as you are to go "It's a picture of a duck." At base, it's neither; it's a collection of pixels or paint on canvas or precise patches of pigment on photographic paper.

What we call something doesn't always reflect its reality. We interpret it as a duck, though, and for most purposes, that's all that matters. But drill down far enough, and you're left with quantum uncertainty and the squiggles of wave functions; pull out far enough, and you can't see it at all.

For me, it's meaningless to search for meaning beyond the personal. We can't even agree on the meaning of something that happened 20 years ago; how can we possibly hope to come to a consensus on what is a thousand times older than that?

Still, this doesn't mean we should stop trying. If there is meaning to life, it's in the trying, not the success or failure. We're making our own cave drawings now, and maybe whatever's around in 20,000 years will put their own spin on things.