As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Evolutionary Psychology
BloodySloth
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Evo Psych has been brought up several times in a few running threads these past couple days, so to avoid any further derailment of other worthwhile discussions, I'm giving it its own thread.
BloodySloth wrote: »I'm not sure I understand the hate here for the entire field of evolutionary psychology, but then that might be because I'm fairly uninitiated. Obviously a lot of the claims made by some evopsychers are completely unverifiable and sometimes downright sexist/racist, but the basic principle that human behavior is shaped by evolution just as is the case for all other animals seems sound.
The problem with evo psych is that it's basically nothing more than backward projecting current cultural mores onto a past supposedly filled with grunting, red-in-tooth-and-claw 'cave men' with supposedly unrestrained sexual behavior.
This would ignore the fact that, in hunting-gathering groups keeping the population down is usually a big priority, as opposed to spreading your seed hither, thither and yon - which would raise the population of the group higher than the local landscape could support. Nobody ever thought having lots of kids was a good thing until agriculture made it possible, and we can prove this by studying modern hunter-gatherer groups. By the time we hit the Agricultural Revolution all our evolving was essentially done.
Evo-psych people usually are totally ignorant of even basic cultural anthropology, which is kind of annoying. I've never heard a convincing explanation, for instance, regarding matrilineal societies where inheritance is transmitted through the mother and nobody really cares who the "real" father is (in some groups, women are even encouraged to have multiple partners during pregnancy, with the belief that this makes the baby stronger).
Pretty much everything we, in our society, do can be ascribed to culture and being taught to think in a certain way from birth, because for every "evolutionary" rule we can usually find a culture that is an exception to that rule.
...
I agree with you that culture develops in response to external and internal forces and varies widely based on what those forces are.
The problem with evo psych is that it generally infers a very specific set of cultural practices to be universals, usually related to sex-related behavior. Men being predisposed to be as promiscuous as possible - usually one of the tenets of the evo psych position - would obviously be a very bad survival strategy in an arid desert region with very limited food resources, and would inevitably result in either starvation or infanticide.
In any case, I really think if we really want to evo-psych it up we should start a new thread. Skyghene has a pretty good discussion going on here and I don't want to derail it. I won't be able to participate because I'm going to be away from internet for a while but I'm sure there's people on here that'd join in.
BloodySloth on
0
Posts
Cite please.
Infanticide has been pretty common throughout history. Like, really common.
It is bascilly the sketchiest part of psychology in some ways, and psychology as a field already has plenty of bad studies done across all fields.
PSN: Corbius
I think also that a lot of these problems are partly a consequence of it being a relatively young field.
And here I was thinking that psychology had something to do with the scientific method.
Evo Psych, my best friend. Here is a long, pre-prepared rant from yours truly on the subject
tl;dr- memetics, dogg
Dealing with misconceptions and misunderstandings just takes so much time and laying down other stuff that very few people will deal with it. I used to write huge essays in forums but I got tired of being dismissed immediately as sexist/racist or whathaveyou.
Though recently I've become a fan of memetics, which does change the whole picture considerably.
Evolutionary psychology isn't "explaining away thousands of years of ever-complicating human culture" though. It's saying that there's a human nature genetic influence as well as a cultural influence.
PSN: Corbius
Sex is a political topic so people tend to bring out the knives.
There's also the fact that hunting-gathering bands tend to be substantially more egalitarian in structure than, for instance, an agricultural village or whatever; division of labor, both between the sexes and among them, is more fluid, decisions are usually made by a group, etc. It's difficult to accumulate wealth (and, in turn, status and authority over other people) when everything you possess can be carried on your back. So, it poses the question of how one male would gain access to all these mates, siring lots of offspring, while the other males in the group didn't do anything about it.
that doesn't change my argument in the least, and is a silly appeal to authority as he is not a practicing evolutionary psychologist; he just likes the idea
Frankly, I just pulled that idea from some of the immediately harsh and dismissive criticism I've heard from some on these boards. My understanding of the whole field is fairly rudimentary, I've only read stuff like the application of kin theory to human relationships and basic stuff about altruism.
Why is sex the only thing people want to discuss in relation to evo psych though?
I can't find cites this very second, but when I was in grad school we were reading some fascinating stuff about cognitive applications of evo psych that had NOTHING to do with sexual behavior.
PSN: Corbius
The point is to have as many opportunities in genetic offspring as possible, not to have the biggest family possible. Extras can be killed off. The point is that guys have the capacity to fire and forget, 'cause they could, theoretically father like 900 kids a year. A woman could do like 1 1/6, so she necessarily has more of an investment in individual children.
EDIT: So no, you're totally wrong that there's no evolutionary advantage to having as many children as possible regardless of ability to provide.
Pinker subscribes to the notion as well.
I am unclear how you go from this general principle to making specific cause-effect claims. It does not strike me as very scientific. How in the world would you put this kind of speculation to the test?
That doesn't mean that there's any evidence for it, archaeological or otherwise. It's basically a thought exercise and personally I don't think that has much scientific validity.
In any case, I have to abdicate this thread because I've got a lot to do tomorrow and I'm going to be offline for several days, so everybody have fun with it.
My biggest problem is the expansion of the early ancestral environment to the current (meaning nearly all of recorded history) state of the human species.
A pet theory of mine is that as soon as we began transmitting extragenous information, we effectively removed ourselves from a large portion of natural selective pressures and culture began to evolve exponentially fast in relation to genetics, making behavioral comparisons between current humans and our ancestors basically useless.
Thus my problem with evolutionary psychology.
If this all makes sense?
Ne evolutionary evidence to the genetic logic to having as many offspring as possible regardless of ability to care?
A hypothesis that has no evidence besides its internal logic is pretty much the definition of a "just-so story."
You can construct a nice-sounding, logical evolutionary story about any aspect of human psychology. This doesn't make it true.
Yeah, this is the problem. We can't run psychological experiments on paleolithic populations— and as pointed out, psychological evidence from modern hunter-gatherer societies doesn't support a lot of what is claimed. What winds up happening is people simply pick the guess that best fits their preconceived assumptions, and claim that's science.
Although in fairness, a lot of psychology is like that.
Modern hunter-gatherers are still modern, though. Those groups have necessarily existed for just as long as us internet types, so studying them to get an idea about how our ancestors behaved has its own problems.
A hypothesis with sound internal logic is a good place to start. Calling it a just-so story doesn't make it false, but the simple fact that we can look at any number of nonhuman species makes it pretty clear that, at least in nonhuman animals it's plainly true. Simulations work as well. This isn't just evolutionary psychology, it's basic evolutionary theory.
If we determine that the .7 waist to hip ratio is the most desirable situation in every culture on Earth, then you better be able to show that alternate ratios are related to health issues. If it turns out that men desire lighter hair and higher pitched voices, it better be the case that hair dulls over time and that the voices are higher in the youth.
I'll take a possibly tainted research pool in the hand over two misogynistic preconceptions in the bush.
Essentially, there's nothing theoretically wrong with studying the evolutionary impact on human behavior, but any area of science is only as good as its evidence, and the evidence applied in what passes for evolutionary psychology sucks.
Only once you have isolated and identified sources of variance in our current environment should you be looking at evolutionary theory for answers...ie if there's a universal across every human then sure you can try to make an evolutionary explanation for it. But to determine a universal is much, much harder than people think and requires a shit ton of work before hand.
Assuming universals without first checking to see if they are is logically incoherent. It completely fails even a cursory conceptual analysis. On top of that you can't run experiments on past populations, so you can't test anything you say.
Referring to evolution as a potential explanation for a universal is fine. Using evolutionary theory as your starting point is incoherent. It's broken right off the bat.
The beef that I have is with the particular subdiscipline christened by Cosmides & Tooby in their "Primer" on evolutionary psychology.
Therefore, I'm now going to start calling them Cosmidians.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm not even sure why everyone is going 'ololol, evo-pysch!" on this, it's a pretty basic fact of biology. It influences the behavior of all sexually reproducing animals including humans, those that have the higher investment cost in reproduction (i.e. females) are more picky & less promiscuous then those with a lower investment cost (i.e. males).
More pornography and media is in general is dedicated on selling sex to men because of this. Portraying women in a one-dimensional way in music videos is blatantly appealing to lowest common denominator for males, they do this to make money - not because they have some sort of agenda against women. I'm sure this happens (i.e. portraying males in whatever way appeals to the broadest female demographic) in media specifically targeting female audiences as well, cheap soap operas and literotica for example. edit: I was going to post this in the pornography & perceptions thread but I figured it would derail it too much.
-
I think evo-pysch is pretty baller in general, it's just that it's a lot harder to get to the "why are we doing this?" via biological explanation rather than looking at proximate cultural factors. And also it's much easier to come up with possible explanations via deduction than it is to do so through actual scientific falsification. So it I understand why it gets a lot of heat; people coming up with all kinds of bullshit explanations without there being any research to verify their claims.
STDs would like to have a word with you.
You need to read this over a few times until you understand why what you're saying is [strike]stupid[/strike] batshit fucking loco.
This isn't evo psych any more than "analysis of human behavior through psychology" is "psychoanalysis."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And if you get driven off from your tribe, you die anyway.
It totally works if humans were completely individual creatures who don't interact with each other for reasons other than mating.
Ie it's a theory that doesn't apply to homo sapiens.
Err, what? The reason the guy is sleeping with lots of women is because he has proven himself to be the strongest. In most situations he's the chieftain of the tribe, or at the very least a very renowned, respected, feared warrior. So no, other males aren't "going to kill him/drive him off", mostly because they can't, but also because doing so would put the tribe at a significant disadvantage against other tribes.
The theory stated was not "only the great warrior gets to be promiscuous" it was "it is an advantage for every male to be as promiscuous as possible".
Don't change the theory then tell me I'm wrong. That's not how argument works.
Thats not the mainstream foundation but it is the Dawkins angle.