Just-so story

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A just-so story, also called the ad hoc fallacy, is a term used in academic anthropology, biological sciences, and social sciences. It describes an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice or a biological trait or behavior of humans or other animals. The use of the term is an implicit criticism that reminds the hearer of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology (where they are known as etiological myths — see etiology).

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[edit] Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories

This phrase was popularized by the publication in 1902 of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, containing fictional and deliberately fanciful tales for children, in which the stories pretend to explain animal characteristics, such as the origin of the spots on the leopard.[1]

[edit] Evolutionary Biology

[edit] Darwin's Whale story

Some consider evolutionary biology as presenting origin accounts similar to Kipling's Just-So Stories. e.g., in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin originally gave an example of a bear transforming into a whale sized creature.

In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.[2][3][dead link]

Darwin deleted this from later editions. Modern cladistics places the whale as being most closely related to the hippopotamus; however, Darwin's idea is perfectly illustrative of how the whale might have come to pass.

[edit] Lamarckian Just-so stories

Because of some Just-so stories' extravagant nature, burlesquing the Lamarckian theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits", the phrase "just so story" has acquired the meaning, in evolutionary biology, of an unnecessarily elaborate and speculative evolutionary explanation that, while it may fit the facts, lacks any empirical support. e.g.,[4]

"Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance."

[edit] Evolutionary biology critiques

Scientific reviews refer to Just-so stories for narratives failing scientific rigor. e.g.,

Wade’s explanations commit various well-known errors, such as equating correlation with causation and extrapolating from individual traits to group characteristics….The book has many internal inconsistencies, and one can easily find contrary evidence or readily construct alternative ‘just so’ stories that invoke the same genetic scenario and the same kind of reasoning.[5]

[edit] Evolutionary psychology

Many of the claims of evolutionary psychology that certain human traits were naturally selected for because of the environment humans lived in thousands of years ago are criticized as modern just-so stories. e.g.,

Flanagan does give a just-so story about how consciousness could have evolved through natural selection, but just-so stories run counter to his very simple methodological suggestion --- use all the information one can get from any science that seems relevant to the task at hand; otherwise, wait until the data is available. Just-so stories aren't very scientific. Indeed, as long as we are allowed to spin arm-chair theories, why not consider consciousness to be a phenotypic free-rider, like the chin, such that no Darwinian story is going to explain its purpose, since it does not have one. [6]

[edit] Criticism and misuse of the term "Just So Story"

Many hypotheses that have been labeled by critics as "just so stories" are in fact empirical questions, and are potentially falsifiable. Or, the hypotheses are sufficiently plausible that they are taken seriously by experts in the field.

For example, in cosmology, string theory as yet has no empirical evidence to support it. Yet it is seen by many cosmologists as mathematically plausible, and it may be empirically falsifiable in the future given new research tools.

Critics of evolutionary psychology have sometimes used the term "just so story" as a derogatory way of describing alternative hypotheses which need empirical evaluation, but which are plausible and are taken seriously by knowledgeable experts. Leda Cosmides noted in an interview:

Those who have a professional knowledge of evolutionary biology know that it is not possible to cook up after the fact explanations of just any trait. There are important constraints on evolutionary explanation. More to the point, every decent evolutionary explanation has testable predictions about the design of the trait. For example, the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is a byproduct of prenatal hormones predicts different patterns of food aversions than the hypothesis that it is an adaptation that evolved to protect the fetus from pathogens and plant toxins in food at the point in embryogenesis when the fetus is most vulnerable – during the first trimester. Evolutionary hypotheses – whether generated to discover a new trait or to explain one that is already known – carry predictions about the nature of that trait. The alternative – having no hypothesis about adaptive function – carries no predictions whatsoever. So which is the more constrained and sober scientific approach?

Further, some hypotheses that have been labeled as "just so stories" by misinformed critics do indeed have some empirical support. See Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology by Edward H. Hagen, and books by Segerstråle (2000) [7] and Alcock (2001)[8].

The generation of plausible hypotheses is one part of theory creation and evaluation in normal science.

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Rudyard Kipling, How the Leopard got his Spots in JUST SO STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN, 1902
  2. ^ Darwin, Charles, On The Origin of Species, 1859, London, John Murray, 1st Edition, CHAP.VI, 184 DIFFICULTIES ON THEORY.
  3. ^ Origin of Species 1st Edition, Chapter VI, pg.84
  4. ^ Remembering the Evolutionary Freud Allan Young Science in Context (2006) 19: 175-189 Cambridge University Press
  5. ^ Weiss, Kenneth M. & Buchanan Anne V.; In your own image Nature 441, 813-814 (15 Jun 2006)
  6. ^ Hardcastle, Valerie Gray and Pruim, Peter E. 1993, PSYCHE, 1(2), December 1993
  7. ^ Segerstrale, Ullica (2000). Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  8. ^ Alcock, John (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[edit] See also

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