That reminds me of what I added to Uncyclopedia’s section about evolutionary psychology:

There is mounting evidence that evolutionary psychology may be an innate urge built-in to the brains of all human beings. It would have met the need, in our cave-dwelling ancestors, for an spurious position of authority to retreat to in the attempt to justify their most comfortable habits, thus imparting a genetic advantage of some kind yet to be made up.

If we think about fitness landscapes (rather than geographic ones), evolution will push a population towards a local maximum, as Eliezer Yudkowsky said. My point is that that evolution is slow. I was not claiming that the minimum standard is static, and I don’t think RBH was either. Because of the process you describe, the minimum standard will rise slowly (slowly because evolution is slow).

There was a time when ecology (my field) was focused on finding equilibrium rules for communities based on how natural selection would drive populations in a community in an unchanging environment. This generated a lot of fascinating math, and a lot of conundrums. Those challenges have largely been resolved by pointing out that environments do change. The organisms that survive and reproduce over the long run need not be the very best ones at each moment in time. The genetic lineages that persist are the ones that fail to perish under the full range of ecological conditions that the community experiences.

At any moment in time, the population is at a point which satisfices, a point at which the individuals that are not fit enough to survive and reproduce have little or no presence. The survivors were not (all) optimal, they are what was sufficient in that era. Predators, prey and other biological resources will adapt to that new population (Red Queen), but not instantly. The population will have to adapt to that new status quo, but it will not respond instantly, nor will its response be rapid. No doubt it has to keep running just to stay in one place, but that place will almost certainly not be optimal at any given point it time, and the population is not trying to stay in one place. It has to shift as the fitness landscape shifts.

A mutation that boosts fecundity (as in your example) means more infants competing with one another and with parents. In good years, that isn’t a problem. In harsh years, it might mean that none of the offspring grow up and produce more than two offspring (depending on the details of the organism’s life history). There is some optimal number of offspring in any given population and any given environment. When scientists measure fecundity in British great tits, they do not find it matching their modeled optimum, and environmental variability is the answer I recall them giving. I don’t have the reference handy, but now I have to look it up and blog it.

With regard to your question about “spandrels” above: I don’t see the word itself in the literature much, but the concept definitely comes up in conversation. I wasn’t around before the spandrels paper, but I’m told that people are less apt to insist that every feature of an organism must be adaptive than they had been. I couldn’t say how much of that results from the spandrels paper and how much reflects the greater appreciation for environmental stochasticity I described above, as well as the neutral (and nearly neutral) theory in population genetics. Those theories led to research which showed that a major fraction of genetic change is not due to selection, so the major advances in molecular biology all build on an understanding that adaptation is not the only way to explain biological data.

In addition I would note that any mutation that appears and increases fitness will be expected to become more common, independently of any sort of “minimum standard”. Imagine a population of aesexual beings in an unlimited resource environment. Each reproduces itself above the replacement rate (it has two children before it dies). A mutation appears that causes 5 children to be had. This mutation will become more common even though the previous norm could be said to be “satisficing”.

Put slightly differently, evolution moves a population to a point which is fitter than anything around it, but not necessarily to the fittest point. Which is to say, it satisfices.

Say a class of explanations is common among scientists in a particular field. Is that a forceful arguement that other scientists in that field who reject those explanations are deceiving themselves?

But what I’m really interested in is self-deception, which I believe does exist in some situations. At a minimum, for self-deception you need a single person with two separate parts, where one part believes a proposition, and the other part disbelieves it, and neither part knows what the other part believes. This is like the familiar dual self situation which appears in self restraint and other forms of self control, except that in self deception the two selves don’t know about each other, while in self control they do know about each other.

1. ‘With a little thought we can come up with functional explanations for people’s behavior.’

2. ‘People reject such explanations.’

3. Conclusion: People must be built to self-deceive about their behavior — they think it is not functionally explainable when it actually is.

By the same logic, and equally true premises:

1. With a little thought we can come up with non-functional explanations for people’s behavior (random mistakes, spandrels, changing environment).

2. People disagree with such explanations.

3. Conclusion: People must be built to self-deceive about their behavior — they think it is functionally explainable when it actually isn’t.

It seems that the fact that we can ‘with a little thought’ come up with a class of explanations for some phenomena, and that ‘people reject such explanations’ should not necessarily make us “…have to conclude…” that those people are deceiving themselves.

What else would be needed to make us ‘have to conclude’ that people are deceiving themselves?

Ok, now suppose we have that. Wouldn’t we need to have some additional information to ‘…have to conclude…’ that people’s tendency to deceive themselves is ‘built in?’

And what would that be?

I suspect that the huge confusion between “functional” versus “optimal” (or as I would put it, between a product of cumulative optimization pressure versus the global maximum) is the fault of the insufficiently-damned Stephen J. Gould, whose deliberately dishonest crackpot pseudoscience is still thought by his many innocent victims to be the leading edge of evolutionary biology.