Kaj_Sotala comments on Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 January 2013 06:09AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 01 January 2013 08:45:09AM *  3 points [-]

Robert Kurzban clarifies the concept of the EEA (mostly by quoting various excerpts from Tooby & Cosmides). I think this is an important post for people to check out, given how often the concept of EEA is referenced on this site.

In 1990, Tooby and Cosmides wrote (p. 387):

The concept of the EEA has been criticized under the misapprehension that it refers to a place, or to a typologically characterized habitat, and hence fails to reflect the variability of conditions organisms may have encountered.

From this it can be seen that even in 1990, they were taking pains to defend against the possibility that careless readers might take them to be saying that the EEA is to be thought of as a time and a place. Instead, they characterize it this way (pp. 386-387):

The “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA) is not a place or a habitat, or even a time period. Rather, it is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations, weighted by their frequency and fitness-consequences.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 01 January 2013 05:03:37PM 3 points [-]

I find the matter unclarified. Given the large variability of the Pleistocene climate and habitat (that Kurzban mentions), what does the quoted definition of the EEA mean? "A statistical composite...weighted by frequency and fitness-consequences" looks pretty much like a time and a place -- just an average one instead of one asserted to be the actual environment, habitat, and social structure over the whole Pleistocene. Both concepts ignore the variation.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 03 January 2013 04:18:53AM *  0 points [-]

Did you read the whole post? I thought it was relatively clear - if I had to summarize it in my own words, I guess I'd say something like "the EEA is not a specific physical or temporal location, but rather those properties in the environment of the organism which have stayed invariant over very long periods". It doesn't "ignore" the variation, it's specifically defined via the complement of the variation.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 January 2013 07:58:33PM 0 points [-]

It doesn't "ignore" the variation, it's specifically defined via the complement of the variation.

I really don't see what distiction you are drawing there.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 January 2013 06:10:56AM *  0 points [-]

Not sure we're talking about the same thing, so probably better to ask, what do you mean when you say that it ignores the variation?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 January 2013 10:22:41AM 1 point [-]

what do you mean when you say that it ignores the variation?

It leaves it out. Explicitly saying "I am going to include only what did not change" is still ignoring whatever did change.

Comment author: tut 03 January 2013 06:40:33PM 0 points [-]

Variation is a feature of the environment, which itself makes certain demands of creatures that live in it. This is not taken into account by just taking the average of everything. If you have one foot in a pot of boiling water and the other in a pot of ice water is not the equivalent of having both feet in a pleasantly hot bath. Even though the average temperature will be about the same.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 January 2013 06:12:26AM 0 points [-]

True, which is why the EEA is more complicated than just an average. Like it said in the post:

These invariances can be described as sets of conditionals of any degree of complexity, from the very simple (e.g., the temperature was always greater than freezing) to a two-valued statistical construct (e.g., the temperature had a mean of 31.2 C. and standard deviation of 8.1), to any degree of conditional and structural complexity that is reflected in the adaptation (e.g., predation on kangaroo rats by shrikes is 17.6% more likely during a cloudless full moon than during a new moon during the first 60 days after the winter solstice if one exhibits adult male ranging patterns).

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