To clarify: before anyone jumps down my throat *cough The Cat and Mr^2*, I think pretty much any statement one makes about 3 billion people will be incredibly inaccurate.
That said, I think evolutionary explanations for human behavior, not male or female behavior, are fascinating and a worthy area of study.
Feral touched on this before, but the main flaw with evopsych is that we actually have no fucking clue how 'cavepeople' lived. A decade or two ago they were all making arguments about hunters and gatherers and declaring that men were x way because they spent all day wandering the plains poking things with pointy sticks while women sat around picking fruit. Now, the story's changed, and it seems pretty much all of a tribe's nutrition was garnered from women's work, which included both gathering and small-animal hunting and trapping. Apparently the men only took off to kill something big on special occasions. And yet... and yet, you never see an evo psych proponent standing up and declaring that this means that there's a gene that makes men shiftless layabouts in non-emergency situations, or something similarly unflattering to the things they declare about the essential nature of women. The narratives they construct are always, without fail, designed to reinforce traditionalist prejudices about gender. You will never see them declare females superior at anything besides man-trapping and squeezing out kids.
It's natural for people to avoid or make fun of things they perceive as ugly or unattractive. Or just different. From a evolutionary standpoint, early homnids would be much more likely to have to worry about starving to death than being too fat, so I'm dubious that this is some special social construct to protect society from fatties.
Evo psych is just one of those things where the useful possibilities are obscured by utter dipshits who get popularized by the media. Fortunately, that doesn't stop people who study human behavior in relation to other primate behaviors, and so forth.
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This concept is fairly absurd. I mean, shit, SUMOS.
If there's anything biological, its the reaction to things that differ from one's own environment.
If a fatass shows up where people are starving, or a stick figure shows up where people need to grow their own blubber to survive winter, people will be creeped out in both cases.
Feral touched on this before, but the main flaw with evopsych is that we actually have no fucking clue how 'cavepeople' lived. A decade or two ago they were all making arguments about hunters and gatherers and declaring that men were x way because they spent all day wandering the plains poking things with pointy sticks while women sat around picking fruit. Now, the story's changed, and it seems pretty much all of a tribe's nutrition was garnered from women's work, which included both gathering and small-animal hunting and trapping. Apparently the men only took off to kill something big on special occasions. And yet... and yet, you never see an evo psych proponent standing up and declaring that this means that there's a gene that makes men shiftless layabouts in non-emergency situations, or something similarly unflattering to the things they declare about the essential nature of women. The narratives they construct are always, without fail, designed to reinforce traditionalist prejudices about gender. You will never see them declare females superior at anything besides man-trapping and squeezing out kids.
I call bullshit.
Eh. I think your reading has been limited. I'm reading, again, The Moral Animal right now, and I haven't seen any traces of those kinds of biases.
That's a minority of the research in the field nowadays. Trust me, it's much better than it used to be.
Earlier in the thread I drew a parallel between evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. This was deliberate - where EP is now reminds me of where psychoanalysis was in the 1950s and 1960s. In attempting to distance themselves from prior decades' (warranted) criticism a number of luminaries in the field turned to more rigorous applications of psychoanalytic thought, turning to experimental design and direct observation of behavior. And some of those people developed some very useful and verifiable models of behavior.
However, as techniques got more rigorous and thinking got more mature, they started to break away from the assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. That people who called themselves psychoanalysts used non-Freudian techniques to analyze psychology does not mean that the framework proposed by psychoanalysis was defensible.
Likewise, EP is in a phase where it is maturing, but it hasn't quite shuffled off the pseudoscientific pupa of its earlier stage of development.
Evo psych, when done right, is the study of inherited behaviors.
The question remains: why would a researcher call himself an evolutionary psychologist? Why not call himself a cognitive psychologist, or a neuroscientist, or even a neurogeneticist? These disciplines look for inherited foundations for modern behavior, too.
The difference? Cognitive psychologists do not assume that an evolutionary basis for a given behavior exists before they start looking. Evolutionary psychologists do. They engage in déformation professionnelle of the worst sort. They're given theoretical hammers and told to, "Go! Find some nails!"
But if you don't, then the study of them carries no negative connotations in and of itself.
My beef is with EP as a paradigm. According to Cosmides & Tooby's "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer," these are the fundamental questions of EP:
1. Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work?
2. What kind of information is being processed by these circuits?
3. What information-processing programs do these circuits embody? and
4. What were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?
This set of questions assumes the following (in no particular order):
1. Any behavior must have a discrete set of "circuits" dedicated to it.
2. These circuits must have presented a selective advantage in a hunter-gatherer context.
First off, even if they find that a particular behavior granted a selective advantage (which is often a dubious conclusion at best), that doesn't necessarily mean that it's in any way hard-wired. Behaviors are passed down culturally as well as biologically - behavioral evolution should follow a model that is closer to Lamarck than Darwin.
Secondly, EP ignores the amazing flexibility of the human brain. There's no reason to believe that hard-wiring happens at the level of individual behaviors. Hard-wiring may occur in terms of temperament, or competitiveness, or visual information processing; but to say that specific practices like cheating and mate-poaching are hard-wired is a leap of logic. If we want to show that there's a hard-wired area of the brain for language processing, we can put somebody in an fMRI, give them a bunch of tasks, and watch how certain areas of their brain light up for language-processing tasks but not for tasks not involving language. But no similar experiment that can be done with many of the mate-selection and economic behaviors that EP concerns itself with. So the practice ends up looking a lot like somebody attempting to understand the flow of logic in a computer program in terms of how the integrated circuits were designed. They're glossing over an entire level of abstraction, and making implicit assumptions about the processes at work in that all-important middle layer.
Dismissing an entire field is so much easier than weighing each of its contributions against a standard of science.
Hey, if a particular EP researcher can engage in rigorous study without committing himself to the assumptions I criticized above, the more power to him! Unfortunately, those people don't tend to call themselves EPs.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The Cat: I got one of my APA journals in last week, but I haven't read it yet. I promise that you're being exposed to the popular, controversial stuff rather than the commonly accepted stuff. There was a psychology prof. at a school down the street from me that offered up these evo psych articles on homosexuality and why it was wrong, and this was only two years ago that he did it, and the articles were about three years old at the time. Yeah, the bad stuff's still out there, but it doesn't get published in most reputable journals. He had to dig them out of a conservative political quarterly.
Feral: Most every behavior can be tracked down to a "circuit" level. We still have much, much deeper to go into the brain, but we know what most behaviors look like in a very general sense. We also know that certain parts of our brains evolved different from other animals because we had to adapt to a different way of living, most notable tool use and language. It's not hard to progress from looking at our brains to see how we evolved in our own unique way to seeing how our evolution has changed our behaviors. Yeah, some people have been mysoginist dicks about it, but we are progressing.
You're right in suggesting that it's been misapplied, though. At least, right now. No reasonable psychologist is uni-theoretical anymore. These aren't the old days, and even evolutionary psychology has its place among, not apart from, cognitivism, humanism, etc. It can explain some things better than other things can, especially when you're talking neuro, so it is a useful field. Just because people fucked up Darwinism to adapt it to their own superiority desires doesn't discredit it when it's appropriately applied.
I think it's possible for some people to be genetically predisposed to be fat, just the same as some are predisposed to be thin. I think a lot of the hype around the obesity epidemic is a case of "correlation=causation".
While it is true that it is possible to lose weight, diets can really do a number on a person's metabolism. Trying to lose weight could just end up making the person even fatter in the long run.
It's my personal belief that people should focus not on dieting, but on living a healthy lifestyle. If weight loss accompanies it, so be it. If not, they must be genetically predisposed to their weight.
I think it's possible for some people to be genetically predisposed to be fat, just the same as some are predisposed to be thin. I think a lot of the hype around the obesity epidemic is a case of "correlation=causation".
What are you saying here? That people aren't eating more and doing less?
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we shouldn't assume that all fat people are lazy slobs who sit on their ass and eat all day. I'm also not saying that people who are genetically predisposed to be fat have some glandular disorder. I'm saying that for some fat people, their healthy weight is heavier than average (this doesn't apply to the morbidly obese, however).
Also, I don't believe that I lead a healthy lifestyle. I'm sedentary for most of the day, I drink at least two sodas a day, and I rarely eat healthy foods. However, I stand at 6 feet and weigh 145 pounds. My blood pressure is near perfect. Not only that, but my dad weighs almost 250 pounds and has an even healthier blood pressure than me. In fact, he IS a couch potato most of the time: he'll often eat half a bag of chips while laying around watching TV. The only exercise he gets is work and weight lifting once in a few weeks. To further illustrate my point, my mom weighs 120, and her blood pressure is dangerously high, even though she does cardio fairly often.
Weight isn't a very reliable factor for determining a person's health. Skinny people can be unhealthy, and fat people can be healthy. It's not so black and white.
You might wanna get your cholestrol counts before you start declaring sedentary people who eat like shit healthy. Because just given those factors, they arn't by any sort of rigorous standard.
If you're fat, you dont do shit, and you dont eat well, you are not healthy. Period.
Same goes for if you're not fat, dont do shit, and dont eat well.
geckahn on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited July 2007
My blood pressure and cholestrol levels have dropped considerably by losing weight. Well, that, and I eat fast food about once a month (at most).
I just don't see how someone being 20 pounds overweight can be healthier.
That said, I think evolutionary explanations for human behavior, not male or female behavior, are fascinating and a worthy area of study.
Why not the latter as well?
It's easier to be yelled at for the latter.
This whole field is intensely political, and even though I'm sure there's a good scientific basis for some of its conclusions, my understanding is that it all comes out of extrapolations from a history we aren't too keen on.
I used to be super fat. I lost a shit load of weight, and I guess you could say I'm now "skinny". I wouldn't want to insult someone based on the fact that they're obese. However, when I see 150 kilo people walking around with a bag of chips under the arm, a can of coke in one hand, and a hot dog in the other hand, it really annoys me. Maybe I'm just being arrogant, but it seems as if some of these people just don't give a shit about their health, one iota.
Also, on the subject of skinny people who sit around and eat shit food all day. I could guarantee you, the majority of those people will have huge problems later on in life (unless you've got some crazy Winston Churchill type genetics (the guy was fat and lived an unhealthy lifestyle, but lived to be super old)).
Being skinny =/= healthy.
I used to be super fat. I lost a shit load of weight, and I guess you could say I'm now "skinny". I wouldn't want to insult someone based on the fact that they're obese. However, when I see 150 kilo people walking around with a bag of chips under the arm, a can of coke in one hand, and a hot dog in the other hand, it really annoys me. Maybe I'm just being arrogant, but it seems as if some of these people just don't give a shit about their health, one iota.
Well maybe they don't. Other than the obvious physical effects of being obese there's not much indication that something's going wrong with your body until something big happens. Sure they may labor when walking up stairs or going for long walks, but it's more and more likely that they can take an elevator or drive. I'm looking at the evolutionary psych stuff, but one variable they seem to ignore is technology.
Malkor on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
No disputing that. I've actually worked with weights as of late, since my job requires a ton of heavy lifting and hauling.
Being skinny isn't something I'm advocating, I'm just saying that if you can get your BMI to as low of a fat level as possible, there really isn't an excuse for not doing it. Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
There tends to be a rather large correlation though. Sure the skinny guy who eats like shit may not be in perfect health but he's almost always a good bit healthier then the fat guy who eats like shit.
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
True that is the advantage americans have. If the world's entire food supply dissapeared, we'd still be around when most of the world has died from starvation. Perhaps our government is subliminaly having us prepare for that time.
Snarfmaster on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
Right.
You forgot that theres a few million right here in the Amurica's who are doing it because Cosmo tells them they're too fat.
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
Right.
You forgot that theres a few million right here in the Amurica's who are doing it because Cosmo tells them they're too fat.
anorexic = / = underweight.
That's like using fat to mean morbidly obese.
Leitner on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
That depends heavily upon what you mean by underweight and overweight.
Being 10 pounds overweight is a much better state than being 10 pounds under. Hell, you could DIE from being 50 pounds underweight since your body has turned to eating itself for nourishment as a last-ditch effort for you to spread your DNA, while there are people in this world half a fucking ton overweight and they're still alive and kicking.
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
Right.
You forgot that theres a few million right here in the Amurica's who are doing it because Cosmo tells them they're too fat.
Actually, you make a great point, I've never really thought about it before.
Seriously underweight people die much faster and younger than seriously overweight people. Every now and then I hear about young girls starving themselves to death, and these girls are only around 18 years old.
Maybe the fatties have an a slight advantage after all
Dublo7 on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
Right.
You forgot that theres a few million right here in the Amurica's who are doing it because Cosmo tells them they're too fat.
anorexic = / = underweight.
That's like using fat to mean morbidly obese.
Not really. Anorexia is a psychological disorder that causes people to become underweight. It has nothing to do with their actual weight. People have died from starvation from being anorexic.
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
That depends heavily upon what you mean by underweight and overweight.
Being 10 pounds overweight is a much better state than being 10 pounds under. Hell, you could DIE from being 50 pounds underweight since your body has turned to eating itself for nourishment as a last-ditch effort for you to spread your DNA, while there are people in this world half a fucking ton overweight and they're still alive and kicking.
What? Being underweight to the point of your body cannibalizing itself is probably more dangerous then being incredibly fat. Undwerweight doesn't refer to that. Underweight is the guy in IT who could maybe hit the gym more and eat more because he's a hundred twenty pounds or what have you. There are far fewer side affects to being underweight then there are in being overweight.
That's a minority of the research in the field nowadays. Trust me, it's much better than it used to be.
Earlier in the thread I drew a parallel between evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. This was deliberate - where EP is now reminds me of where psychoanalysis was in the 1950s and 1960s. In attempting to distance themselves from prior decades' (warranted) criticism a number of luminaries in the field turned to more rigorous applications of psychoanalytic thought, turning to experimental design and direct observation of behavior. And some of those people developed some very useful and verifiable models of behavior.
However, as techniques got more rigorous and thinking got more mature, they started to break away from the assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. That people who called themselves psychoanalysts used non-Freudian techniques to analyze psychology does not mean that the framework proposed by psychoanalysis was defensible.
Likewise, EP is in a phase where it is maturing, but it hasn't quite shuffled off the pseudoscientific pupa of its earlier stage of development.
You do not have sufficient data to back up such a parallel.
Evo psych, when done right, is the study of inherited behaviors.
The question remains: why would a researcher call himself an evolutionary psychologist? Why not call himself a cognitive psychologist, or a neuroscientist, or even a neurogeneticist? These disciplines look for inherited foundations for modern behavior, too.
Every scientist, in every field, starts with a hypothesis. If there is no evidence for a certain behavior having an evolutionary basis, the hypothesis will not be supported. Your argument is worthless.
Good science would look at massive cross-cultural studies to support their hypothesis. And there is an incredible amount of evidence suggesting human behaviors have evolutionary bases. If you assert otherwise you're doing nothing other than declaring, by fiat and for political reasons, that humans are completely different from every other animal. That's utterly inane. The evolutionary study of animal behaviors is an uncontroversial field. I wonder why?
But if you don't, then the study of them carries no negative connotations in and of itself.
My beef is with EP as a paradigm. According to Cosmides & Tooby's "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer," these are the fundamental questions of EP:
1. Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work?
2. What kind of information is being processed by these circuits?
3. What information-processing programs do these circuits embody? and
4. What were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?
This set of questions assumes the following (in no particular order):
1. Any behavior must have a discrete set of "circuits" dedicated to it.
2. These circuits must have presented a selective advantage in a hunter-gatherer context.
First off, even if they find that a particular behavior granted a selective advantage (which is often a dubious conclusion at best), that doesn't necessarily mean that it's in any way hard-wired. Behaviors are passed down culturally as well as biologically - behavioral evolution should follow a model that is closer to Lamarck than Darwin.
That's not what you're claiming. Scientists know that many behaviors are cultural. You're making the scientific claim that all behaviors are cultural. There is no evidence for that, and a wealth of counter evidence in the animal kingdom.
Secondly, EP ignores the amazing flexibility of the human brain. There's no reason to believe that hard-wiring happens at the level of individual behaviors. Hard-wiring may occur in terms of temperament, or competitiveness, or visual information processing; but to say that specific practices like cheating and mate-poaching are hard-wired is a leap of logic. If we want to show that there's a hard-wired area of the brain for language processing, we can put somebody in an fMRI, give them a bunch of tasks, and watch how certain areas of their brain light up for language-processing tasks but not for tasks not involving language. But no similar experiment that can be done with many of the mate-selection and economic behaviors that EP concerns itself with. So the practice ends up looking a lot like somebody attempting to understand the flow of logic in a computer program in terms of how the integrated circuits were designed. They're glossing over an entire level of abstraction, and making implicit assumptions about the processes at work in that all-important middle layer.
Evo psych does not ignore the flexibility of the human brain when done right. I get the feeling you guys are going by the popularized crackpots of the past 30 years. It's a shame. Confirmation bias and all that.
You can make assumptions on underlying, evolved behavior and instincts by their universal presence in wildly disparate cultures. People who go above and beyond and make idiotic claims are not doing science, and I would love it if we could leave the crackpots out of a conversation. Nothing you said applies to the good, solid science people do studying human behavior.
Dismissing an entire field is so much easier than weighing each of its contributions against a standard of science.
Hey, if a particular EP researcher can engage in rigorous study without committing himself to the assumptions I criticized above, the more power to him! Unfortunately, those people don't tend to call themselves EPs.
So you're dismissing my point because A) It doesn't matter, It's not true, or C) Nobody cares?
Because all three implications are bad ones to make, in my view.
It's a way bigger problem than the obesity in North America, but that's besides the real point to be shown here: It serves to illustrate that people continually waste their affluence here as others become emaciated to the point of death elsewhere, and don't give a second thought about it.
That, in a nutshell, is what gets me.
Gunner2150 on
0
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
That depends heavily upon what you mean by underweight and overweight.
Being 10 pounds overweight is a much better state than being 10 pounds under. Hell, you could DIE from being 50 pounds underweight since your body has turned to eating itself for nourishment as a last-ditch effort for you to spread your DNA, while there are people in this world half a fucking ton overweight and they're still alive and kicking.
What? Being underweight to the point of your body cannibalizing itself is probably more dangerous then being incredibly fat. Undwerweight doesn't refer to that. Underweight is the guy in IT who could maybe hit the gym more and eat more because he's a hundred twenty pounds or what have you. There are far fewer side affects to being underweight then there are in being overweight.
Underweight means underweight. Adding the poundage to the front of how much underweight describes said condition in more detail.
I'm not sure exactly why you're getting on me for not using exact medical terms, I thought saying "30 pounds underweight" would suffice. Since you seem to know the proper names of all the different weight stages, I'd prefer to be informed of such a thing so as we can discuss the subject at hand rather than banter back and forth about semantics.
It's a way bigger problem than the obesity in North America, but that's besides the real point to be shown here: It serves to illustrate that people continually waste their affluence here as others become emaciated to the point of death elsewhere, and don't give a second thought about it.
Got any stats for that? Because whilst anorexia may quickly kill more people I have a sneaking suspicion the number of anorexic vs the number of obese tips far more to one side. Anyway I'm not dismissing that anorexia is not worth worrying about, how did you get that from my post?
Evolutionary psychology is not a scientific approach. They don't develop falsifiable hypotheses which they then attempt to test using experimental or observational data. They take existing data and try to construct narratives about it based on incomplete information. In this way, it's basically a pseudoscience - no matter the behavior, they can construct an arbitrarily complicated and circuitous evolutionary explanation for it.
A lot of evo psych I've seen, particularly in animal behaviour, has moved a long way from this approach, but there's still a huge wall in that you just can't do the science any way but backwards. Human evo psych that I've seen is generally shithouse though. But so much fun to come up with.
It's a way bigger problem than the obesity in North America, but that's besides the real point to be shown here: It serves to illustrate that people continually waste their affluence here as others become emaciated to the point of death elsewhere, and don't give a second thought about it.
Got any stats for that? Because whilst anorexia may quickly kill more people I have a sneaking suspicion the number of anorexic vs the number of obese tips far more to one side. Anyway I'm not dismissing that anorexia is not worth worrying about, how did you get that from my post?
Sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's not what I was talking about.
It was actual undernourishment due to impoverished conditions versus the obesity here.
If animal behaviors have an evolutionary basis, which is undisputed, why does that not offer an incredibly strong argument for some human behavior having an evolutionary basis? If we acknowledge that, why is the study of it not a valid field?
Answer: it is, the crackpots and political tools notwithstanding. What we know about the Pleistocene is admittedly slim, but we do know several things: women had children, we lived in groups, we were hunter gatherers. This is what was the case, so far as we know. Attacking the field due to lack of knowledge, when any good EP theory would involve only those things we are fairly sure of, is vacuous and disingenuous.
Posts
That said, I think evolutionary explanations for human behavior, not male or female behavior, are fascinating and a worthy area of study.
And, surprise, that's evolutionary psychology too.
I call bullshit.
That's a minority of the research in the field nowadays. Trust me, it's much better than it used to be.
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This concept is fairly absurd. I mean, shit, SUMOS.
If there's anything biological, its the reaction to things that differ from one's own environment.
If a fatass shows up where people are starving, or a stick figure shows up where people need to grow their own blubber to survive winter, people will be creeped out in both cases.
Eh. I think your reading has been limited. I'm reading, again, The Moral Animal right now, and I haven't seen any traces of those kinds of biases.
And if you think about it or watch a stand up routine, that is the essence of most of the comedy.
Please. Everything I've read in the past year related to that field has been in that vein.
Earlier in the thread I drew a parallel between evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. This was deliberate - where EP is now reminds me of where psychoanalysis was in the 1950s and 1960s. In attempting to distance themselves from prior decades' (warranted) criticism a number of luminaries in the field turned to more rigorous applications of psychoanalytic thought, turning to experimental design and direct observation of behavior. And some of those people developed some very useful and verifiable models of behavior.
However, as techniques got more rigorous and thinking got more mature, they started to break away from the assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. That people who called themselves psychoanalysts used non-Freudian techniques to analyze psychology does not mean that the framework proposed by psychoanalysis was defensible.
Likewise, EP is in a phase where it is maturing, but it hasn't quite shuffled off the pseudoscientific pupa of its earlier stage of development.
The question remains: why would a researcher call himself an evolutionary psychologist? Why not call himself a cognitive psychologist, or a neuroscientist, or even a neurogeneticist? These disciplines look for inherited foundations for modern behavior, too.
The difference? Cognitive psychologists do not assume that an evolutionary basis for a given behavior exists before they start looking. Evolutionary psychologists do. They engage in déformation professionnelle of the worst sort. They're given theoretical hammers and told to, "Go! Find some nails!"
My beef is with EP as a paradigm. According to Cosmides & Tooby's "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer," these are the fundamental questions of EP:
This set of questions assumes the following (in no particular order):
1. Any behavior must have a discrete set of "circuits" dedicated to it.
2. These circuits must have presented a selective advantage in a hunter-gatherer context.
First off, even if they find that a particular behavior granted a selective advantage (which is often a dubious conclusion at best), that doesn't necessarily mean that it's in any way hard-wired. Behaviors are passed down culturally as well as biologically - behavioral evolution should follow a model that is closer to Lamarck than Darwin.
Secondly, EP ignores the amazing flexibility of the human brain. There's no reason to believe that hard-wiring happens at the level of individual behaviors. Hard-wiring may occur in terms of temperament, or competitiveness, or visual information processing; but to say that specific practices like cheating and mate-poaching are hard-wired is a leap of logic. If we want to show that there's a hard-wired area of the brain for language processing, we can put somebody in an fMRI, give them a bunch of tasks, and watch how certain areas of their brain light up for language-processing tasks but not for tasks not involving language. But no similar experiment that can be done with many of the mate-selection and economic behaviors that EP concerns itself with. So the practice ends up looking a lot like somebody attempting to understand the flow of logic in a computer program in terms of how the integrated circuits were designed. They're glossing over an entire level of abstraction, and making implicit assumptions about the processes at work in that all-important middle layer.
Hey, if a particular EP researcher can engage in rigorous study without committing himself to the assumptions I criticized above, the more power to him! Unfortunately, those people don't tend to call themselves EPs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Feral: Most every behavior can be tracked down to a "circuit" level. We still have much, much deeper to go into the brain, but we know what most behaviors look like in a very general sense. We also know that certain parts of our brains evolved different from other animals because we had to adapt to a different way of living, most notable tool use and language. It's not hard to progress from looking at our brains to see how we evolved in our own unique way to seeing how our evolution has changed our behaviors. Yeah, some people have been mysoginist dicks about it, but we are progressing.
You're right in suggesting that it's been misapplied, though. At least, right now. No reasonable psychologist is uni-theoretical anymore. These aren't the old days, and even evolutionary psychology has its place among, not apart from, cognitivism, humanism, etc. It can explain some things better than other things can, especially when you're talking neuro, so it is a useful field. Just because people fucked up Darwinism to adapt it to their own superiority desires doesn't discredit it when it's appropriately applied.
While it is true that it is possible to lose weight, diets can really do a number on a person's metabolism. Trying to lose weight could just end up making the person even fatter in the long run.
It's my personal belief that people should focus not on dieting, but on living a healthy lifestyle. If weight loss accompanies it, so be it. If not, they must be genetically predisposed to their weight.
What are you saying here? That people aren't eating more and doing less?
Also, I don't believe that I lead a healthy lifestyle. I'm sedentary for most of the day, I drink at least two sodas a day, and I rarely eat healthy foods. However, I stand at 6 feet and weigh 145 pounds. My blood pressure is near perfect. Not only that, but my dad weighs almost 250 pounds and has an even healthier blood pressure than me. In fact, he IS a couch potato most of the time: he'll often eat half a bag of chips while laying around watching TV. The only exercise he gets is work and weight lifting once in a few weeks. To further illustrate my point, my mom weighs 120, and her blood pressure is dangerously high, even though she does cardio fairly often.
Weight isn't a very reliable factor for determining a person's health. Skinny people can be unhealthy, and fat people can be healthy. It's not so black and white.
If you're fat, you dont do shit, and you dont eat well, you are not healthy. Period.
Same goes for if you're not fat, dont do shit, and dont eat well.
I just don't see how someone being 20 pounds overweight can be healthier.
Particularly since this case implies this presence of parasites.
It's easier to be yelled at for the latter.
This whole field is intensely political, and even though I'm sure there's a good scientific basis for some of its conclusions, my understanding is that it all comes out of extrapolations from a history we aren't too keen on.
Also, on the subject of skinny people who sit around and eat shit food all day. I could guarantee you, the majority of those people will have huge problems later on in life (unless you've got some crazy Winston Churchill type genetics (the guy was fat and lived an unhealthy lifestyle, but lived to be super old)).
Being skinny =/= healthy.
No disputing that. I've actually worked with weights as of late, since my job requires a ton of heavy lifting and hauling.
Being skinny isn't something I'm advocating, I'm just saying that if you can get your BMI to as low of a fat level as possible, there really isn't an excuse for not doing it. Underweight people are actually worse off than overweight people.
There tends to be a rather large correlation though. Sure the skinny guy who eats like shit may not be in perfect health but he's almost always a good bit healthier then the fat guy who eats like shit.
Sadly, that's mostly because the majority of underweight people live in 3rd world, poverty stricken, mine-infested countries and probably pay monthly dues to a local warlord so their village doesn't get massacred...
That depends heavily upon what you mean by underweight and overweight.
True that is the advantage americans have. If the world's entire food supply dissapeared, we'd still be around when most of the world has died from starvation. Perhaps our government is subliminaly having us prepare for that time.
Right.
You forgot that theres a few million right here in the Amurica's who are doing it because Cosmo tells them they're too fat.
anorexic = / = underweight.
That's like using fat to mean morbidly obese.
Being 10 pounds overweight is a much better state than being 10 pounds under. Hell, you could DIE from being 50 pounds underweight since your body has turned to eating itself for nourishment as a last-ditch effort for you to spread your DNA, while there are people in this world half a fucking ton overweight and they're still alive and kicking.
Seriously underweight people die much faster and younger than seriously overweight people. Every now and then I hear about young girls starving themselves to death, and these girls are only around 18 years old.
Maybe the fatties have an a slight advantage after all
Not really. Anorexia is a psychological disorder that causes people to become underweight. It has nothing to do with their actual weight. People have died from starvation from being anorexic.
What? Being underweight to the point of your body cannibalizing itself is probably more dangerous then being incredibly fat. Undwerweight doesn't refer to that. Underweight is the guy in IT who could maybe hit the gym more and eat more because he's a hundred twenty pounds or what have you. There are far fewer side affects to being underweight then there are in being overweight.
You do not have sufficient data to back up such a parallel.
Every scientist, in every field, starts with a hypothesis. If there is no evidence for a certain behavior having an evolutionary basis, the hypothesis will not be supported. Your argument is worthless.
Good science would look at massive cross-cultural studies to support their hypothesis. And there is an incredible amount of evidence suggesting human behaviors have evolutionary bases. If you assert otherwise you're doing nothing other than declaring, by fiat and for political reasons, that humans are completely different from every other animal. That's utterly inane. The evolutionary study of animal behaviors is an uncontroversial field. I wonder why?
That's not what you're claiming. Scientists know that many behaviors are cultural. You're making the scientific claim that all behaviors are cultural. There is no evidence for that, and a wealth of counter evidence in the animal kingdom.
Evo psych does not ignore the flexibility of the human brain when done right. I get the feeling you guys are going by the popularized crackpots of the past 30 years. It's a shame. Confirmation bias and all that.
You can make assumptions on underlying, evolved behavior and instincts by their universal presence in wildly disparate cultures. People who go above and beyond and make idiotic claims are not doing science, and I would love it if we could leave the crackpots out of a conversation. Nothing you said applies to the good, solid science people do studying human behavior.
They do. You are uninformed.
Because all three implications are bad ones to make, in my view.
It's a way bigger problem than the obesity in North America, but that's besides the real point to be shown here: It serves to illustrate that people continually waste their affluence here as others become emaciated to the point of death elsewhere, and don't give a second thought about it.
That, in a nutshell, is what gets me.
Underweight means underweight. Adding the poundage to the front of how much underweight describes said condition in more detail.
I'm not sure exactly why you're getting on me for not using exact medical terms, I thought saying "30 pounds underweight" would suffice. Since you seem to know the proper names of all the different weight stages, I'd prefer to be informed of such a thing so as we can discuss the subject at hand rather than banter back and forth about semantics.
Got any stats for that? Because whilst anorexia may quickly kill more people I have a sneaking suspicion the number of anorexic vs the number of obese tips far more to one side. Anyway I'm not dismissing that anorexia is not worth worrying about, how did you get that from my post?
A lot of evo psych I've seen, particularly in animal behaviour, has moved a long way from this approach, but there's still a huge wall in that you just can't do the science any way but backwards. Human evo psych that I've seen is generally shithouse though. But so much fun to come up with.
Because setting out to prove it right would already show inherent bias, when science is supposed to be something that can't be biased.
You set out to see if the hypothesis is true.
Sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's not what I was talking about.
It was actual undernourishment due to impoverished conditions versus the obesity here.
If animal behaviors have an evolutionary basis, which is undisputed, why does that not offer an incredibly strong argument for some human behavior having an evolutionary basis? If we acknowledge that, why is the study of it not a valid field?
Answer: it is, the crackpots and political tools notwithstanding. What we know about the Pleistocene is admittedly slim, but we do know several things: women had children, we lived in groups, we were hunter gatherers. This is what was the case, so far as we know. Attacking the field due to lack of knowledge, when any good EP theory would involve only those things we are fairly sure of, is vacuous and disingenuous.