HERRAMIENTAS PARA EL CONTROL Y LA MEJORA DE LOS SISTEMAS DE GESTIÓN DE CALIDAD DE LA LECHE

Rhinoceroses have a big horn at the end of their noses. That may be their most distinctive feature. But they also have thick, coarse, wrinkly hides. How did the rhinoceros get his skin? An author with a Nobel Prize (in literature) provided the following explanation about one hundred years ago: Once upon a time—the author’s explanation really does begin with those four words—

there lived in the region of the Red Sea a Parsi who loved to bake. One day he baked himself an enormous biscuit. But before he could eat the biscuit an ill-mannered rhinoceros came along, frightened the Parsi, knocked over his stove, and ate his biscuit. The Parsi was not happy. Then, exactly five weeks later, a heat wave struck the area. Everyone took o√ his clothes to bathe in the sea. The rhinoceros took o√ his skin, which buttoned underneath, and also went into the water to bathe. In those days, the rhinoceros’s skin was smooth and fit snuggly around his body. But as the rhinoceros was bathing the Parsi had an idea. From his house he collected a basket of breadcrumbs—for he never swept out his house. As the rhinoceros was bathing, the Parsi rubbed the breadcrumbs all over the inside of the rhinoceros’s skin. When the rhinoceros emerged from the water, he put his skin back on. But, naturally, his skin began to itch. (Here the author explains that the rhinoceros felt as you would if you were lying in a bed that happened to be sprinkled with breadcrumbs.) The rhinoceros scratched, but that only aggravated the situation; he lay down on the ground and rolled around, trying desperately to stop the itching. But all this did nothing but cause his skin to become calloused and wrinkly. Finally, he ran over to a palm tree and rubbed himself against it mightily. But still, this only caused his skin to become that much more calloused and wrinkly. And

that is why today rhinoceroses have bad dispositions and calloused, rough, and wrinkly skin.

Rudyard Kipling provided this explanation of how the rhinoceros got his wrinkly skin, as well as other explanations (including one for how the leopard got his spots, and one for how the camel got his hump), in a series of children’s stories published at the beginning of the last century.^∞ For almost a century, Kipling’s Just So Stories have been delighting children—and adults who allow themselves to be delighted by such tales. But these stories have also become something of a rhetorical weapon of belittlement in the hands of opponents of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it is almost impossible to read an account critical of evolutionary psychology without sooner or later coming across the claim that the explanations that evolutionary psychologists o√er for whatever human adaptation is currently under study—adaptations, for example, like those for spatial ‘‘reasoning’’ that I mentioned in the previous chapter—are nothing more than ‘‘just so stories.’’ This phrase is repeated so often in the anti–evolutionary psychology literature that Kipling’s estate should at least get some copyright royalties for its incessant use. I suspect the reason that the phrase is used so often has much to do with its rhetorical power. It provides a nice counterweight to the portentous sounding activity of ‘‘reverse engineer-ing’’ that evolutionary psychologists insist they practice.

Reverse engineering, as the phrase is used by evolutionary psychologists, builds on the metaphor of the mind as a computer—or rather, as an in-formation-processing and computational device. Although the phrase may sound formidable, reverse engineering is simply what one does when one knows the function of a machine but does not quite know exactly how the machine is designed to carry out that function. As Pinker explains, ‘‘Re-verse engineering is what the bo≈ns at Sony do when a new product is announced by Panasonic, or vice versa. They buy one, bring it back to the lab, take a screwdriver to it, and try to figure out what all the parts are for and how they combine to make the device work.’’^≤ The point to emphasize here is that for reverse engineering to work, one must assume that each and every aspect of the machine under study has a purpose. One must, in other words, take a teleological approach to the artifact in question. Daniel Dennett makes this point clearly in a description of reverse engineering that sounds not unlike the description o√ered by Pinker. Only the company names are changed:

When Raytheon wants to make an electronic widget to compete with General Electric’s widget, they buy several of GE’s widgets and proceed to analyze them: that’s reverse engineering. They run them, bench-mark them, X-ray them, take them apart, and subject every part of them to interpretive analysis: Why did GE make these wires so heavy? What are these extra ROM registers for? Is this a double layer of insulation, and, if so, why did they bother with it? Notice that the reigning assumption is that all these ‘‘why’’

questions have answers. Everything has a raison d’être; GE did nothing in vain.^≥

Note Dennett’s last sentence, and recall the quotation in chapter five by Kant, emphasizing that when biologists dissect plants and animals in order to investigate their structure they must follow the maxim that nothing in such a creature is gratuitous. Of course, because reverse engineers must always em-brace this maxim, those who would wish to fool reverse engineers have a powerful tool to use. They could simply design a feature of the machine that has no purpose at all—or rather, whose purpose is to fool reverse engineers into thinking that its purpose is other than to fool reverse engineers. Reverse engineers might spend considerable time and e√ort attempting to understand the purpose of the given feature. As odd as this might sound, Dennett draws our attention to at least one practical application of this idea. Suppose you wished to construct a fake antique table. After first making the table appear the required age, what if you then drilled a hole right through the left edge of the table? The would-be purchaser of this ‘‘antique’’ might well look at that hole and reason that the table in question must really be an antique, used for some unknown purpose, since no one drills a hole in the top of a table for no purpose at all. Even if the would-be purchaser could not figure out what this hole could possibly be for, the maxim that nothing about the table’s design is gratuitous might lead him or her to be fooled by your fake table.^∂

Fortunately for evolutionary psychologists (and biologists), nature cannot attempt to fool those who study it. But this does not mean that reverse engineering is without di≈culties for evolutionary psychologists. In fact, there are two distinct but related challenges faced by the theory of evolutionary psychology as it attempts to explain the human mind. The first challenge is to say precisely what survival and/or reproductive problems presented them-selves to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This task obviously involves recon-structing the very distant past. The temptation in so doing is to tell ‘‘just so stories.’’ The second challenge faced by evolutionary psychologists involves

deciding exactly what aspects of the mind constitute discrete features that require an explanation in the first place. As we shall see, this is often more di≈cult than it sounds. But let me begin with a discussion of the first chal-lenge. When evolutionary psychologists speak of the ‘‘adapted mind,’’ they are, as I have repeatedly said, referring to the mind of our hunter-gatherer ances-tors. These ancestors lived in what geologists call the Pleistocene epoch. Given the glacially slow pace of human evolution, this epoch accounts for all of the significant evolution of the modern human brain. Importantly, the time pe-riod under consideration here is no more recent than one hundred thousand years before the present. As Pinker explains, ‘‘According to the standard time-table in paleoanthropology, the human brain evolved to its modern form in a window that began with the appearance of Homo habilis two million years ago and ended with the appearance of ‘anatomically modern humans,’ Homo sapiens sapiens, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.’’^∑

It is important to pause and note the scientific and rhetorical significance of this claim. You might think that this claim supports a bad ‘‘biologically deterministic’’ view of humans. It seems to suggest that we are now essentially what we were one hundred thousand years ago. Many individuals, and per-haps many intellectuals on the cultural left especially, seem to want to reject this view because it might imply that modern humans are somehow ill-equipped to meet the demands of modern (read, egalitarian and politically correct) culture. In particular, this view might imply that men are not natu-rally equipped to be stay-at-home dads or that women are not natunatu-rally equipped to face the competitive pressures of the business world. Of course, this implication would seem to follow only if, in the ancestral environment, men were not likely to be stay-at-home dads and women were not likely to be as competitive as men. These assumptions about the ancestral environment could be wrong, and everything does ultimately hinge on a determination of what selection pressures were faced by our ancestors in the Pleistocene. But, just to hedge their bets, many of those on the cultural left might be tempted at least to embrace an alternative view which held that evolution operates at a much more rapid rate than evolutionary psychologists like Pinker claim.

When compared to the above ‘‘biologically deterministic’’ view, this alter-native view might seem preferable, insofar as it can be seen to eliminate the split between ancestral desires and modern duties. We know that the roles of women and men in modern societies have been ‘‘evolving’’ rapidly over the course of the last, say, two thousand years. Indeed, these roles have been

‘‘evolving’’ especially rapidly over the course of just the last two hundred years.

As these roles have ‘‘evolved,’’ the way in which women and men think about, and relate to, one another must also have changed. If evolution has worked rapidly enough to incorporate these changes into the psyche of modern hu-mans, we could believe that those who resist such changes—those who still think that women have no business in the workplace or that stay-at-home dads are the weak victims of feminist propaganda—represent not the majority but rather the few who have not ‘‘evolved.’’ They are the ‘‘Neanderthals’’

among us. This alternative view may be quite appealing to those who think that the cultural right is populated largely by these unevolved Neanderthals.

But notice how easily this alternative view plays directly into the hands of racists. If evolution really does proceed at a very rapid rate, then while uals in modern societies might now be well fitted for those societies, individ-uals who evolved in premodern societies might be naturally ill-fitted to live in modern societies. One might call this the Pat Buchanan theory of evolu-tion and cultural competence. During the 1992 presidential campaign, then-candidate Pat Buchanan made the following statement on ABC’s ‘‘This Week with David Brinkley’’: ‘‘I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?’’^∏

This little bit of occasional election prose functions as a perfect example of what rhetorical theorists call an enthymeme—a purposefully incomplete argu-ment whose meaning can be ‘‘constructed’’ in various ways by various au-diences with various viewpoints. Thus liberals might note with no small irony that of course it would be di≈cult for Virginians to assimilate a million Zulus, because many Virginians are, after all, racists. But Buchanan supporters will hear the quotation di√erently. They may note the context of the quotation—a discussion of immigration policy in America—and they may nod approvingly at Buchanan’s insight that, since evolution proceeds fairly rapidly, it is obvious that those in ‘‘less evolved’’ societies like primitive Africa would have a more di≈cult time assimilating into contemporary American society than those in

‘‘more evolved’’ societies like modern England. We could therefore expect—

Buchanan supporters will conclude—that Zulus displaced to a ‘‘modern’’ soci-ety would ‘‘naturally’’ face problems that their ‘‘modern’’ counterparts would not face—problems like finding a job or perhaps even understanding how to live from day to day. Notice that even if you believe that the ancestral

environ-ment was an Edenic place to which we should all strive to return, and even if you believe that the society of the twentieth-century Zulus better matches that Edenic ancestral environment than the society of twentieth-century Virginia, you have still conceded Buchanan’s point about di√erence. But conceding that point is plainly racist.

Having said this, I grant that there may be some confusion about this example, given the way I am using the phrases ‘‘more evolved’’ and ‘‘less evolved.’’ One might argue that, if evolution proceeds at the same rapid rate for all individuals on the planet, then Zulus would be no less evolved than

‘‘modern’’ Europeans; they would simply be di√erently evolved. More specifi-cally, Zulus would be especially well evolved to live in the environment of twentieth-century (now twenty-first-century) Africa, and Englishmen would be especially well evolved to live in ‘‘modern’’ Western society. The point, cultural relativists might insist, is that there is no reason to claim one society is

‘‘more’’ or ‘‘less’’ evolved or advanced than another. Zulus may not be par-ticularly good at juggling family and career, as modern society seems to de-mand, but we ‘‘modern’’ individuals cannot do their tricks either.

But I would argue that embracing this view is still racist insofar as it concedes the point about di√erence. That concession alone is all Buchanan supporters need to make their argument. But I suspect that such Buchanan supporters—at least the sophisticated ones—would also wish to go further with the argument. They would wish to argue, based on the factors a√ecting the speed of evolution (as discussed in chapter five), that Zulus might actually be less evolved than modern individuals, because Zulus faced fewer and less varied selection pressures than were faced by modern individuals, particularly after the invention of agriculture. The point, Buchanan supporters would insist, is that life really is slower and simpler for the Zulus.

So it does all come down to a question about the speed of human evolu-tion. Interestingly, one can concede the (perhaps obvious) point that modern Western society is more advanced than Zulu society, and still escape embrac-ing racist views, if one also insists (as do most of the younger evolutionary psychologists) that human evolution is very slow. This would allow one to argue that all of our ‘‘modern’’ advances are built on the foundation of a hunter-gatherer psyche. There is a rhetorical power to this argument. For one thing, it provides a ready explanation for our ‘‘modern’’ problems. They are, in a word, maladaptations. But more generally, this argument allows evolu-tionary psychologists to insist that humans the world over share the same

basic, stable, human nature. Such insistence functions as a sort of rhetorical

‘‘insulation’’ against the charge of racism. Many evolutionary psychologists—

and, again, particularly the younger ones—are sophisticated enough to appre-ciate the rhetorical fact that the mere accusation that a particular theory is

‘‘racist’’ is usually enough in modern culture to doom the entire theory. This explains, I think, why evolutionary psychologists are so adamant about the slow pace of human evolution. Thus the editors of The Adapted Mind write,

The few thousand years since the scattered appearance of agriculture is only a small stretch in evolutionary terms, less than 1% of the two million years our ancestors spent as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. For this reason, it is unlikely that new complex designs—ones requiring the coordinated assembly of many novel, functionally integrated features—could evolve in so few generations.

Therefore, it is improbable that our species evolved complex adaptations even to agriculture, let alone to postindustrial society. Moreover, the available evidence strongly supports this view of a single, universal panhuman design, stemming from our long-enduring existence as hunter-gatherers. If selection had constructed complex new adaptations rapidly over historical time, then populations that have been agricultural for several thousand years would di√er sharply in their evolved architecture from populations that until re-cently practiced hunting and gathering. They do not.^π

Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom provide empirical support for this claim by looking to the similarity among all human languages. Pinker and Bloom note that ‘‘all languages are complex computational systems employing the same basic kinds of rules and representations, with no notable correlation with technological progress: The grammars of industrial societies are no more complex than the grammars of hunter-gatherers; Modern English is not an advance over Old English.’’^∫

But even if we assume that the mind and psyche of modern Homo sapiens did not evolve significantly during the last one hundred thousand years—let alone the last ten thousand—that still does not answer our original question:

Just what was life like back in the Pleistocene? Geo√rey Miller provides a good first approximation of an answer to this question in The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature:

A fairly coherent picture of Pleistocene life has emerged from anthropol-ogy, archeolanthropol-ogy, paleontolanthropol-ogy, primatolanthropol-ogy, and evolutionary psychology.

Like other social primates, our hominid ancestors lived in small, mobile

groups. Females and their children distributed themselves in relation to where the wild plant food grew, and clustered in groups for mutual protec-tion against predators. Males distributed themselves in relaprotec-tion to where the females were. Many members of each group would have been blood relatives.

Group membership may have varied daily and seasonally, according to op-portunities for finding food and exploiting water sources. . . .

During the days, women would have gathered fruits, vegetables, tubers, berries, and nuts to feed themselves and their children. Men would have tried to show o√ by hunting game, usually unsuccessfully, returning home empty-handed to beg some yams from the more pragmatic womenfolk. Our

During the days, women would have gathered fruits, vegetables, tubers, berries, and nuts to feed themselves and their children. Men would have tried to show o√ by hunting game, usually unsuccessfully, returning home empty-handed to beg some yams from the more pragmatic womenfolk. Our