Evolutionary psychologists¡¯ thought is that, for at least some of our behaviors, they believe that we have¡ªdare I use this term¡ªhard-wired cognitive structures that are operating in all of us contemporary human beings the same way they did for our ancestors on the savannas. The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring¡ªthe cognitive structure of the brain itself¡ªis not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn¡¯t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance¡ªthat our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors¡¯ brains. The sameness in how our brains work is on account of genetic selection for particular modules that are still functional in our environment today. [Editor¡¯s note: These ¡°modules¡± refer to the idea that the brain can be divided up into discrete structures with specific functions.]PZ Myers's writeup on Pharyngula:
The matching problem is really the core issue that evolutionary psychologists have to show that they can meet: that there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors; that they¡¯re working the same way then as now; and that these modules are working the same way because they are descended from the same functional lineage or causal lineage. But I don¡¯t see any way that these charges can be answered.
I also appreciate this bit. One of the common insults that Evolutionary Psychologists deploy is that their critics believe that humans only evolved below the neck, which is nonsense. One can accept that the brain is an evolved organ without believing in the narrow, specific, and oddly improbable premises demanded by Evolutionary Psychologists.The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag:
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Not that any of this will have any effect on EP at all ¡ª that¡¯s a field that relies more on an emotional belief that they can study the past entirely by imposing their desired conclusions on weak data. Smith, on the other hand, has a strong understanding of logic and recognizes where these Evolutionary Psychologists have made a huge leap beyond what the data entails.
But the classic evopsych douchebag, like Miller, absolutely wants to believe that humans are still in thrall to the same psychological forces that shaped our behavior much earlier in Homo sapiens evolution. At the same time, he wants to allow for the idea that some people have obviously evolved to be smarter, like guys who donate DNA to eugenics projects.Men have always used 'Science' to explain why they're better than women:
Miller's work is a more erudite version of a lot of what you see in the pickup artist (PUA) and men's rights scenes. In both groups, the common sense belief is that sexuality is based on a very old game that isn't terribly different from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to an anthropologically inaccurate cave. Other kinds of human relationships aren't much better. I guess you could say that evopsych douchebags are the academic version of pickup artists. They throw you negs on Twitter, but only if you're a potential Ph.D. student.
Many ideas embraced by this ex-Google employee are based largely on the so-called conclusions of evolutionary psychology, a field premised on the idea that our psychological traits are the product of the same natural selection that shaped early human evolution. In practice, evolutionary psychology has been used to justify everything from rape to claims that certain groups of people are inherently more intelligent than others. It has also been criticized for shoddy methodology, ignoring cultural context, and ¡°leaping to conclusions on inadequate evidence.¡± Evolutionary psychologists have tried to use their science to determine the best way to seduce women, which they think can be gamed out like Battleship.[Previously]
¡®Social Darwinism¡¯ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin¡¯s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start¡ª¡®Darwinism¡¯ was always intended to explain human society.--Darwin / Adrian Desmond, James Moorep. xxiThe rejection of evolutionary psychology necessarily entails the rejection of evolutionary theory in general. And where does that rejection leave us? In the hands of the creationists? Perhaps. Or perhaps it will force the development of a new approach to biology in which life is understood not as the interplay of random mutation, competition and speciation, but rather as an orderly and necessary system.
This leaves the impression that because (in her view) EP hypotheses cannot be tested, they are therefore false, and that because (in her view), a domain-general learning system can be tested it is more likely to be true.If EP hypothesis cannot be tested, they are not even science, so true or false is only of passing interest.
Due to the costs associated with being cuckolded, men¡¯s infidelity detection system may have been designed to overestimate the likelihood of their partner¡¯s future infidelity....ever heard of partible paternity. Was there a genetic defect in the "infidelity detection systems" of men in ~70% of pre-contact Amazonian cultures?
When biologists give ultimate explanations of nonhuman animal behavior it is generally the case that those animals are still living in, or have been living in until very recently, an environment that is similar to the environment where the behavior evolved. In such cases, it is trivially true that the behavior under consideration as well as the proximate mechanisms underpinning that behavior are identical to a corresponding behavior and the mechanisms that underpinned it in the EEA. We can see this in the case of vervet monkeys. Whatever the nature of the selection process, it is reasonable to infer that because producing and consuming alarm calls enhances vervet fitness in the present by helping them to avoid predation, it was selected for this effect in the past. In contrast, applying this principle in the human case is problematic, because the circumstances of contemporary human life are, in many important respects, quite different from those in which our species evolved. This makes extrapolation from the present to the past particularly challenging. To succeed, ultimate explanations of human behavior must draw on some other method for establishing the existence of strong vertical homologies.An example I can think of off the top of my head is the foxes that were domesticated in the Soviet Union. As far as I know, the best explanation we've got so far for their much gentler and friendlier behaviour is neoteny. How would you even classify that in terms of this schema, though? Did they evolve a "friendliness module"? Or did they extend an already existing "friendliness module" from childhood into adulthood? Or did they extend a general more-positive-about-everything tendency from childhood into adulthood? Or...?
Consider, for example, how University of Glasgow psychologist Gijsbert Stoet explains the persistence of the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields:posted by clawsoon at 4:55 AM on May 14, 2020 [15 favorites]People are often guided by their unconscious desires. In the stone age, it was useful for men to be hunters and women to look after babies, and nature has helped by encoding some of these skills in the hardware of our brain. That still influences how we think today.I have to say that none of the many mathematicians and scientists I know do their research in a way that brings to mind a caveman chasing a bush pig with a spear, but of course things may be done differently in Glasgow.
Peter's theory of mutual aid came to him in the most unlikely of places. To follow in the footsteps of his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, when he was twenty years old, Kropotkin began a series of expeditions in Siberia. At that point, he was already an avowed evolutionary biologist¡ªone of the few in Russia¡ªand a great admirer of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Fifty thousand miles later, and five years the wiser, Kropotkin left Siberia a Darwinian. But he was a very different kind of evolutionary biologist: a new species of sort. For in Siberia, Kropotkin had not found what he had expected to find. Though still in its early gestation period when Kropotkin began his journey through Siberia, evolutionary theory of the day advanced that the natural world was a brutal place: competition was the driving force. And so, in the icy wilderness, Peter expected to witness nature red in tooth and claw. He searched for it. He studied flocks of migrating birds and mammals, fish schools, and insect societiesposted by Space Coyote at 10:36 AM on May 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
Not everything is selective!They will grind their axe against the stone of selective advantage until all that is left is a rusty nub, insisting Marx-like that history foretold! But no serious evolutionary biologist in the world believes that absolutely every trait is selected for, and evopsych refuses to accept that.
If each of these is one in a million, then all these multiplied creates a statistical impossibility masquerading as the driving force behind biology. No appeal to ¡°deep time¡± can salvage this. It makes a thousand monkeys on a thousand computers producing Shakespeare seem like a sure bet.
- Is there a mutation?
- Is it beneficial?
- Is it transmissible?
- Does it operate in concert with other mutations to create an expressed trait?
- Is it selected?
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posted by snofoam at 11:28 AM on May 13, 2020 [3 favorites]