Boilerplate for Peer Reviews of Human Evolutionary Storytelling

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/boilerplate-2023-11-22 (image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boile)

Were you invited to review a paper that argues for a particular evolutionary explanation for some aspect of human existence?  Maybe this will help.

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This is a review of what is known about [...] in many species of extant animals, with the goal of supporting an argument for an evolutionary explanation for [...] in humans, now, based on speculation about hominin natural history.

The expert details about the biology and physiology and behavior known from different species and how it compares with that known in extant humans is illuminating and important to review and share. 

However, the evolutionary argument follows in a well-worn tradition (for so many facets of human existence) which need not be carried on into the future as if it’s science.

Evolution is true. Evolution is falsifiable and never has been. Everything alive, including humans, evolved and is always evolving. Science can investigate and describe natural history thanks to what remains of the past.

But positing possible unknowable aspects of the past, replete with social behavior, cognitive capacities, emotional states, and reproductive success (or failure) of hominin ancestors, and including assumptions about what they inherited from their ancestors and what we inherited from them, with the goal of adding to a complex nest of plausible possibilities in natural history (or, often, with the hope of winning out with the most plausible account of natural history) is not actually bringing us closer to the truth about human evolution.   

For example, I could quibble over details of the argument in this paper. I could point out every paleoanthropologist’s alternative interpretation of the evidence for hominin life that is used to build the argument here or I could emphasize that their ideas are only as good as inferences, raising the concern about a house of cards. Or, I could posit that some brand new paper last week actually has a slightly different angle than is reported here and used to build the argument here. And I could ask the author to update or add nuance to the paper and argument, given those developments.  I’m not doing any of that because the fundamental problem doesn’t change: this paper (like the large literature to which it would belong if/when published) is an argument that will never be resolved.

It’s been tradition and normal science to act like we’re getting closer to the scientific truth when scientists or scholars pit alternative evolutionary accounts against one another. So, in the same tradition, some reviewers of this paper might offer up a different account and ask why it wasn’t considered or ask the author to include a discussion that considers it.

Like, why not X? A reviewer might say they could see this paper going the same way, using the same evidence from across species to build up to an argument about hominins that leads to X.

I could see a reviewer who offered such an alternative asking, how would the author respond to that possible and plausible alternative? And that might start a conversation that might or might not make its way into the paper.  An alternative might complicate the argument in the paper but it certainly wouldn’t be able to topple this paper. The existence of an alternative idea wouldn’t be grounds for rejection.

The point is, the paper’s ideas and any alternatives may be plausible but there is no systematic way to choose one over the other or to choose what to include in a complex story and what to exclude, or to know what the main pressure was over all or at any given moment in the past. Because we cannot know the truth about the evolutionary causes involved in, the social and emotional lives of, the reproductive successes and failures of, and whether it’s based in the inherited biology of our ancient hominin ancestors. And because we cannot know the true account of natural history in those terms, no matter how simple or complex, then there is no way to measure how close our speculations are to the truth and then to choose the account that’s the closest.

These are unknowable causes being argued for. The account offered here is not falsifiable. To be clear, the author does not claim the argument is falsifiable or testable or verifiable. So its unfalsifiability is not a secret. And it needn’t be because arguing over unobservable, unfalsifiable evolutionary causes in ancient history is fair play in science and has been at least as far back as Darwin.

But we all know that evolution is true, now. Offering plausible accounts began as a way to build that truth before there was much hard evidence. Now that there is, we don’t have to prove that evolution is true by speculating about the unobservable and unknowable as if it’s science anymore. We can leave that to fiction and science fiction.

So what’s the value of doing the storytelling as if it’s science? Some might believe that there is some benefit to people’s lives if we know the evolutionary causes that brought about the human condition. But this is not apparent or obvious to me. What would be the benefit? Would it outweigh the cost of pretending that storytelling is science?

For now, there is no apparent reason for why the storytelling should go on.  The scientific investigation of all that contributed to all that is reviewed in this paper regarding [...] in extant animals is brilliant important and will hopefully continue to advance. But the evolutionary account that is provided cannot actually be scientifically investigated and so my rejection of it as science will not, I hope, be misconstrued as a rejection of science. To the contrary. I think that to protect science and to support its advancement, we should leave the storytelling game to history. We can carry on knowing that evolution is true while also knowing what we cannot know about how and why it occurred in our ancient ancestors.  So much of science’s achievement so far has been discovering what we cannot know about evolutionary processes and causes in the past. Are we supposed to ignore all that scientific progress?