In What Way Is the Unfinished Mind Unfinished

Robin Fox has written a provocative article that takes a new look at an old failing, prejudice. Essentially, his argument is that prejudice is not so much a failing as it is an heirloom from the environment of evolutionary adaptation (i.e., the Pleistocene era). Fox argues that natural selection favored individuals (actually, genotypes) capable of making and acting on quick decisions under conditions of uncertainty (i.e., prejudiced individuals) over those who acted more slowly based on pure induction (i.e., logical individuals). Thus, according to Fox, agonizing over our natural tendency to be prejudiced will lead only to a black hole of philosophical despair. Instead, Fox recommends that we "build on human nature to bring about a self-correcting mechanism," "make the unfamiliar more familiar," and "revise our stereotypes in a more favorable direction." Fox presents some rather intuitively appealing arguments in favor of a "naturalness of prejudice" position. At first glance, it certainly makes sense that a quick (prejudicial) response to a stranger would have been more likely to assure survival in the environment of evolutionary adaptation than a slow (logical) one. But maybe it is only the unfinished mind that inclines toward quick agreement with Fox's arguments, just as it quickly agrees that the target in Kahneman and Tversky's (1982) research cannot be a farmer. A more careful look at Fox's analysis reveals how the light of reason can inform intuition. In particular, the blurring of several important conceptual distinctions may have contributed to Fox's "naturalness of prejudice" conclusion. The first distinction obscured in Fox's analysis is between an adaptation and adaptive. An adaptation is a mechanism shaped by natural selection in ancestral environments because it served some specific function that promoted survival (i.e., reproductive success) in that environment (Symons, in press). In contrast, adaptive refers to how "fitness promoting" a mechanism is in its current environment. What is important about this distinction is that an adaptation may or may not be adaptive today. As Symons (in press) stated, "To claim that a trait is an adaptation is to make a claim about the past. " In contrast, to claim that a trait is adaptive is to make a claim about its effect on survival and reproduction in a particular environment at a particular time-and nothing more (Dunbar, 1988; Irons, 1979). Fox claims that prejudice is an adaptation-that is, a mechanism handed down from our evolutionary past. However, he offers no evidence to support this claim. Instead, he treats the adaptation hypothesis as an assumption in his analysis. Now consider the evidence that would be necessary to support the hypothesis that prejudice is an adaptation. At the very least, evidence would be needed from comparative studies of evolutionary convergences and divergences and from studies of phenotypic design (Curio, 1973; Dawkins, 1986; Mayr, 1983; Symons, 1989, in press; Williams, 1985). Does such evidence exist in the case of prejudice? But perhaps it is so "obvious" that a quick prejudicial response would have been adaptive in the environment of early evolution that no evidence is needed to support the prejudice-as-adaptation hypothesis. For example, do we really need to verify empirically that prejudice is universal (i.e., it can be found in all cultures) or that it has been with us since the beginning of time? Such evidence would hardly be front-page news. Symons (in press) offered two rejoinders to the obviousness argument. First, he noted that the supposed obviousness of an outcome is never a good reason to neglect the empirical study of a question. Moreover, what is viewed as obvious varies from culture to culture and within cultures over time. For example, it was considered obvious to slave traders that Blacks were not human, much less equal to Whites. Second, Symons stated that so long as social scientists persist in embracing cultural explanations, even seemingly obvious findings based on evolutionary psychology will be significant. In his view, evolutionary psychology is useful to social scientists, not because it typically inspires startling or counterintuitive hypothesis, but because it leads to questioning the basic assumptions about human nature that are implicit in traditional social-scientific research and theory. But there is a third reason for insisting on evidence to support Fox's claim that prejudice is an adaptation. It is possible to generate an alternative and competing hypothesis from the evolutionary perspective. In particular, one could hypothesize that natural selection favored individuals (actually genotypes) who approached unfamiliar others rather than attacked or avoided them. Such individuals may have been more likely to acquire superior mates (e.g., the hybrid vigor produced by outbreeding) or the material resources needed for reproductive success (e.g., novel skills present in the out-group). This is somewhat analogous to hypothesizing an "6exploratory drive." The point is that more than one intuitively plausible but competing hypothesis can be generated from an evolutionary perspective. Without evidence, there is no way to evaluate the merits of these hypotheses. But suppose for the sake of argument, that Fox's claim that prejudice is an adaptation is true (i.e., there is empirical evidence to support this claim). What does this tell us about prejudice today, particularly in modern industrial societies? Probably, very little. It certainly does not tell us that prejudice is adaptive today. Recall that an adaptation is necessarily a statement about the past. One might be tempted to address the adaptiveness question by correlating individual differences in prejudice with reproductive success. Presumably, if prejudice is adaptive today, then more prejudiced individuals should outreproduce less prejudiced ones. But for reasons that are beyond the scope of this commentary, such correlations would be remarkably uninformative about the adaptive value of prejudice today (e.g., Hailman, 1980; Symons, in press). Thus, even if we grant Fox his assumption that prejudice was fitness promoting in the environment of evolutionary adaptation (i.e., an adaptation), we still do not know whether prejudice is adaptive today. In fact, one could argue that environmental conditions have so changed since the Pleistocene era that prejudice is now maladaptive. Today's environ-