Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology

by Richard C. Francis

Much of the evolutionary biology that has grabbed headlines in recent years has sprung from the efforts of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists to explain sexual features and behavior--even differences between how men and women think--as evolutionary adaptations. They have looked to the forces of natural selection to explain everything from the mimicry of male mockingbirds to female orgasms among humans. In this controversial book, Richard Francis argues that the utility of this approach is greatly exaggerated. He proposes instead a powerful alternative rooted in the latest findings in evolutionary biology as well as research on the workings of our brains, genes, and hormones.

Exploring various sexual phenomena, Francis exposes fundamental defects in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which he traces to their misguided emphasis on "why" questions at the expense of "how" questions. Francis contends that this preoccupation with "why" questions (such as, "Why won't men ask for directions"?) results in a paranoiac mindset and distorted evolutionary explanations. His alternative framework entails a broader conception of what constitutes an evolutionary explanation, one in which both evolutionary history, as embodied in the tree of life, and developmental processes are brought to the foreground. This alternative framework is also better grounded in basic biology.

Deeply learned, consistently persuasive, and always engaging, this book is a welcome antidote to simplistic sociobiological exegeses of animal and human behavior.

Genres: Science

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 29, 2003

About the author

Richard C. Francis is a writer who has a PhD in biology from Stanford University. He is the author of Why Men Won't Ask for Directions. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Francis takes an in-depth look at the difference between what he calls (riffing on John Maynard Smith) the difference between why-biology (or teleological explanations) and how-biology (or non goal-oriented changes). Riffing on Aristotle, this can be seen as the difference between final cause and proximate cause explanations. Or adaptationism, especially in a hard-core form, and neutralist stances.

The book is overall a mixed bag, almost infuriatingly so at times.

The last chapter, "Darwin's Temptress," is far and away the best. He goes after Evolutionary Psychology quite well, notably exposing weaknesses in the thinking of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

By the end of this chapter, I was almost ready to give the book a four-star rating. BUT, before the start of this chapter, I was quite ready to give it a two-star rank instead.

As noted in my review of David Buller's "Adapting Minds," I distinguish between Ev Psych the quasi-metaphysical theory of biosocial development and ev psych the more legitimate study of evolutionary origins and causes of human mental attributes and differences in their development.

Francis, in a challenging book with plenty of high points and low points alike, does not. Hence the three-star rating.

Let me look at the high points of the final chapter before pointing out what I see as the more notable errors of reasoning earlier on.

In discussing Dennett, Francis points out how he has shifted his embrace of "stancing" from seeing it as a viable bridge between folk psychology and more materialist approaches to study of the mind in his earlier books, to being more disingenuous about it later. By "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Francis says "his stance stance had become disingenuous ... let[ting] him claim allegiance to the materialist natural scientists, without actually having to act like one." I think there's a fair amount of insight there.

Francis also notes that the algorithmic view of the mind (whether fully modular or not) championed by Dennett (and Tooby/Cosmides, et al) is clearly a top-down, design-driven version. I had always disagreed with this algorithmic idea; I now understand why.

He faults both Dennett and Dawkins for being such hard-core adaptationists that their support for design as the explain-all almost goes full circle back to Bishop Paley and his untenable watchmaker analogies.

Dawkins gets faulted in other ways. Most notable of these is defending Paley's emphasis on design to the point of dismissing Hume's CRUSHING destruction of the argument from design in general. Dawkins goes so far as to overlook Hume's contribution to antimetaphysical thought in general; Francis points out his claim that not until Darwin was it intellectually reasonable to be an atheist.

Having read much of Hume, I'd have to call Dawkins' claim pure rubbish.

But, somewhat unfortunately, 10 chapters in the book come before this one.

Here's a few problems.

First, on page 49, Francis clearly only allows teleological explanations in evolutionary biology to operate at one, overarching level. He doesn't say why teleology, or even quasi-teleology, couldn't operate at, say, the individual genus level.

Second, on page 50, he says how-biology can be seen as both a competing counterexplanation to why-biology and a complementary explanation, specifically re sex change among certain fish. But, especially as we get closer to his take on evolutionary psychology and its dealing with the human mind, his emphasis seems to be ENTIRELY on the competing rather than complementary half of that sentence.

While decrying that many evolutionary psychologists seem to have social or political axes to grind, he neglects that people as strongly opposed not just to Ev Psych, but a fair degree to ev psych as well, including perhaps people like himself, have their own axes to grind.

Along with this (and this book is three years old, but not THAT old) he seems dismissive of people such as feminist psychologist, philosophers, etc., who report sex-based human mental differences of a nature, both depth and breadth, along with the number of them, that they can't all be dismissed as socially conditioned.

A few more specific critiques.

Page 140ff, he claims that, in songbirds at least, ev psychers all seem to claim that the hippocampus' function is primarily about spatial memory. Well, I don't know about songbirds, but I've NEVER seen that claimed about the hippocampus in mammals.

Page 161. A sexually dimorphic trait need not be *antagonistic* against the sex that doesn't have it. Rather, it just needs *enough additional evolutionary pressure* in the sex that does have it. Since the body naturally switches off one copy of each chromosome pair in the non-sex chromosomes, it's easy to postulate that functioning control genes for the actual coding gene(s) for a sexual dimorphism, say antlers in males, could cause the male copy of the particular chromosome to always turn on in males and the female copy to always turn on in females. I'm not a geneticist, so I don't know HOW likely that is; but, from the point of logic, there's nothing to contraindicate it.

Page 168. It's a straw man to call Dennett a "reformed behavioralist ... a behavioralist with a computationalist veneer." Given that his academic study is in philosophy, not psychology, referring to him as ANY sort of behavioralist in trying to trace out the intellectual history of both Ev Psych and ev psych is less than enlightening. Given that this philosophy study, at the graduate level, took place in England with the analytic philosophy muse Gilbert Ryle, the computationalist label is certainly understandable, but it should be further seen as removing himself from the behavioralist fallout as it played out.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, this is not the type of book that I had expected! Naively, I had assumed, given the title, that this would be about debunking the "male vs female brain" paradigm, by debunking some its core tenets rooted in so-called sociobiology. Well: it wasn't. In fact, it's a debunking of sociobiology itself, but without making any reference to the pink/blue brain model, and without making any reference to human biology either unless when dealing with female orgasm (e.g. if our sexual behaviours have evolved solely motivated by the need for reproduction, then adaptationists have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to its mere existence indeed!) and a quick dismissing of testosterone as supposedly being a 'T-Rex' hormone (e.g. by using congenital adrenal hyperplasia to nail in the point: spatial and mathematical skills have nothing to do with hormones). I didn't expect that, but then eh! I read it so, was it bad?

It deals mostly with animals (non-human, that is) behaviours and physiological features, but not animal behaviours and physiological features that I would personally find enthralling and engaging. Quite frankly: I (personally) don't really care about why some fishes would change of sex; why males yet from a same specie would engage in different behaviours to mate; or, why female hyenas have male-like phalluses. All in all, then, I was quite bored while reading this, and, the fact that it's quite heavy on biological terms and jargon didn't help. Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to the author for having me to brush up on my knowledges when it comes to evolutionary biology (a topic that I was really interested in a few years back...) but it was nevertheless tedious to go through. And indeed, I was about to give it a 2 star rating...

In the end, though, I set up for a 3 star rating. Why? Because, boring examples and tedious jargon aside, his main arguments in regard to sociobiology shine through. Outlining the difference between asking 'why?' questions and 'how?' questions, he is very good indeed at pointing how sociobiology (and its friend evolutionary psychology) fails to take far too many factors into account when looking for 'why?' explanations (e.g. taxonomic history; environmental impact on biology etc.) to be of relevance. More to the point, he actually argues (in my opinion, successfully; but then again, he was preaching to a convert already...) that the adaptationists' stance in asking 'why?' can be grossly misleading, in that it reflects a teleological thinking which can dangerously flirts with reductionism (e.g. going back to CAH, then, the idea that men are supposedly 'hardwired' to be better at visuo-spatial skills than women and thanks to androgens during foetal development...).

This was the wrong book to pick for me, and I struggled keeping interested. Nevertheless, if you can pull through it then it will be worth it in the end: sociobiology (and evolutionary psychology!) are grounded in fallacious thinking indeed.

[Sophia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really well written book that walks the reader through different approaches to evolution, making it quite clear what exactly consists of a strong answer, and what is a weak one. This lets the reader walk away knowing not just a collection of facts about exotic fish, but also decent criteria for interpreting new data.

While I give this 5 stars, I did not necessarily agree with everything being said, or specifically, how it was said. The author systematically explains why proper evolution studies must always take into account the "how" of the process and not just the adaptive potential. I think at times he is a little too critical towards adaptationists, and could maybe try a little harder to recognize the kind of approach they take. While he uses examples such as peacock feathers and transgendered fish to point out the inadequacy of "why" questions when the explanation lies in the "how", there are many, obvious, instances in which asking "why" is still the right question, like why do giraffes have long necks.

That being said, despite him taking an awfully long time to get to the point of the title, I think he did a very systematic, thorough job of explaining his point, and by doing so, reveals how truly artificial his "opponents" line of thought could be. This whole book is essentially a systematic criticism towards those scientists who try to explain biological phenomenon based on their adaptive "use", while under the flawed assumption that since everything evolves, everything must be useful. He insists that evolution can only be understood through the history of each species, and their biology, whereas sociobiologists and co. try their best to find answers in just-so stories. I find this book to be a very important criticism to such an approach, especially when applied to human behavior, which is becoming more and more popular, but remains as unscientific as ever. This culminates in many evolutionary psychologists trying to explain gender differences through evolution, and not the more obvious candidate of culture.