SINCE the post I did a few weeks back, in which I said that,among other behavioral sciences anthropology was a pseudo-science most honestly considered to be in the same category of human story telling as other more honestly presented forms of lore, and I included that most epic of pseudo-scientific programs of creating Just-so stories and calling it science, natural selection, I read this bit of such lore from today's Guardian with a gelid eye.
Perhaps I should stipulate that I'm talking mostly about "science" as that is taken among the general public, the scribbling profession of journalism but not infrequently among professional scientists and so-called scientists, too.
Human evolution and exploration of the world were shaped by a hunger for tasty food – “a quest for deliciousness” – according to two leading academics.
Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.
Some of the most significant inventions early humans made, such as stone tools and the controlled use of fire, were also partly driven by their pursuit of flavour and a preference for food they considered delicious, according to the new hypothesis.
“This key moment when we decide whether or not to use fire has, at its core, just the tastiness of food and the pleasure it provides. That is the moment in which our ancestors confront a choice between cooking things and not cooking things,” said Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. “And they chose flavour.”
Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food – and that’s why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.
Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.
“Having a big brain becomes less costly when you free up more calories from your food by cooking it,” said Dunn, who co-wrote Delicious: The Evolution of Flavour and How it Made Us Human with Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist.
However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. “Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens.”
Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. “In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past,” said Dunn.
Lost in that web of story telling is the fact that not a single bit of it is based on actual observation of anything like a representative sample of the human and immediately pre-human populations to see if any of these speculations are proven to anything approaching the standards that science is constantly asserted to require.
The surviving record of fossils and artifacts is certainly not large enough to represent a sample of our ancestors of the period in question and I would bet that the professional interpretation of them, the resolution of them as a "snapshot" of even the moments in prehistory that they potentially could be asserted to be, is at least to some measure not uncontroversial or stable enough to have any guarantee of not being overturned.
The mere plausibility of a story is not sufficient to base science in, there have been lots of plausible sounding stories, especially those invented in the supposed scientific study of evolution and the human species, which are sooner or later rejected as everything from wishful thinking to racist bias to outright fabrication and fraud.
I'd ask you to consider how often these kinds of claims are full of hedging and conditional constructions, some of them probably fair such as "Some scientists think" which only points out that others don't think or may not think, which doesn't strengthen the claim that what they're engaged in has the supposed solidity of the best science.
Others point to how speculative this whole thing is, "which was probably adopted a million years ago," "are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage." The only way to know if a proposed scenario did confer an "evolutionary advantage" would require an extremely complex and accurate survey of the species in question DURING THE CRUCIAL PERIOD IN WHICH THAT ADVANTAGE IS SUPPOSED TO CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR OF THE MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION, one which proves that those individuals who adopted the change of behavior, in fact, left more surviving offspring for a number of generations than those who didn't and, probably hardest to prove of all, that there is a heritable biological substrate that leads to the behavior in question. If there is no heritable biological substrate to the behavior, "natural selection" as defined couldn't enter into the question. Which doesn't bother me much if it's faced honestly because I think natural selection is the mother of all Just-so stories that should have been scrapped in the 1890s.
Of course, absolutely none of that is possible in the lost human and direct pre-human past because behaviors of that kind are extremely difficult to research and verify among living human populations now, one of the reasons that ALL OF THE SO-CALLED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES demand that they be exempted from even the first requirement to do that, have a randomly selected sample of the human population of sufficient size to represent the human population. I would love to know which of the myriad of studies asserting the demonstration of an "evolutionary advantage" to some contemporary, observable (though not necessarily uncontroversially defined and described and observed) human behavior which has an accurate count of offspring directly attributable to the alleged behavior which demonstrates such an "evolutionary advantage."
I don't have any idea whether or not Robb Dunn and Monica Sanchez have come up with an accurate description of a component of evolutionary change in the human population, all I know is that what they've produced is not science in any way comparable to the reliable, demonstrated and durable discoveries of physics, chemistry, some of the more modest claims of physiology and other aspects of biological science or other areas of science which can make direct observation and conduct honest measurement and analysis of what they study. I think everything about how evolution happened is a mix of everything from the actual differences in reproduction due to genetic and other biologically heritable conditions to sheer dumb luck and its opposite to non-biologically determined preferences and happenstance. I doubt all of evolution could possibly be due to adaptations, I tend to doubt most of it has been or that in different species and population there has even been a constant character to what made things as they are now. If they had presented what they're doing as lore and not as evolutionary science I'd have no problem with what they're doing, though I'll bet they'd find their funders wouldn't like that type of honesty. I'd wish that The Guardian and other media would note the real nature of it, though science reporting is almost never done with that level of honest disclosure.
I might disclose that, seeing his picture, I believe I've met Robb Dunn, though the person who would have introduced us is no longer living so I can't ask her. I have nothing in particular against him or his colleague, I just wish they'd be honest about what they're doing. Though I doubt they will because they want their funding to continue.
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