The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Evolutionary Psychology
Loren Michael
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This has come up in a few relatively unrelated threads over the past week or two, and it seems to send people whom I would typically find myself agreeing with into what appears to me to be hysterics.
Having just read The Moral Animal, which sells itself as an introduction to, forgive me for not having it in front of me, "the new science of evolutionary psychology", or something like that, I would have expected to, I dunno, see what the huge controversy is. But book seemed sound to me, so I'm still at a loss as to how evo-psych is as lacking of content as people are suggesting it is. The author, Robert Wright, involves himself in a host of other pursuits, and he's never struck me as a crackpot, either.
So.
What's up with evolutionary psychology? I think it seems nifty. Why shouldn't I?
Having just read The Moral Animal, which sells itself as an introduction to, forgive me for not having it in front of me, "the new science of evolutionary psychology", or something like that, I would have expected to, I dunno, see what the huge controversy is. But book seemed sound to me, so I'm still at a loss as to how evo-psych is as lacking of content as people are suggesting it is. The author, Robert Wright, involves himself in a host of other pursuits, and he's never struck me as a crackpot, either.
So.
What's up with evolutionary psychology? I think it seems nifty. Why shouldn't I?
Loren Michael on
0
Posts
In a combination of over-eagerness to find evidence of evo. psych. and general, old-fashioned misogyny, a lot of stupid things have been claimed in regards to the behavior of men and women and that behavior's alleged evolutionary basis. The hypothesis that alway comes up is that men are naturally predisposed to cheating, and that's just the way things are, so women should just accept it.* Or that women have a natural handicap in learning math because in the prehistoric (read: mythical) hunter-gatherer environment, women pursued chores that didn't require that kind of reasoning. These claims are offensive and for the most part without merit.
So that's where evolutionary psychology gets it bad reputation. But those idle, gender-biased ideas are to evolutionary psychology as most self-help books are to psychiatry. They're "pop evo.psych." Serious evolutionary psychology tends to concern itself more with the shape of human societies as a whole, and how we got that way. The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, for instance, has written many books comparing the altruistic behavior of troops of chimpanzees to similar behavior in humans, and hypothesizes that human notions of morality are an evolved trait. I expect that de Waal and Robert Wright (author of the Moral Animal) would agree on many things.
So yeah. It has its good points and bad points.
*Bonus points for committing the naturalistic fallacy.
People seem to be rejecting the entire field, not just individual crackpots and misogynists and whatnot, and I don't get that.
The crackpots get published in Psychology Today and the science section of Time Magazine. Most serious evolutionary psychology is relatively inaccessible to the general public. Therefore, most people's exposure to the field comes only through the crackpots and misogynists, and since that's all they see they think that's all there is. You'll see that change as more and more of the serious scientists--the ones who didn't rush out to get media attention for their underdeveloped pet theories--start to publish their finished, scientifically sound findings.
We could do an entire thread on the naturalistic fallacy and whether or not it even is a fallacy. Philosophers get touchy when scientists start poking at "their" territory (morality).
I doubt this, because certain applications of EP are documented and factual. It's generally only the wacko nonsense tacked on to the side that get people's gears grinding.
It seems like the crackpots are the only ones getting attention that's the trouble.
That is exactly right.
Someone in one of the last threads called evolutionary psychology a "bankrupt field." I thought that was a remarkably stupid thing to say.
Pretty much.
People get all up in arms about it, and are eager to dismiss the entire field out of hand. I pointed out why this was a ridiculous thing to do, but not many accepted that reasoning.
But it combines two of the most difficult fields in academics with a very small research value; I mean, really, you're not going to get much money for discovering where in evolution animals picked up the reaction to baby features.
It's not nearly as interesting for most people as a T-Rex, nor as useful in day to day life as cognitive therapy, so you get a lot of fringe people involved.
And then people start acting like the field ITSELF is at fault, and that's just going to drive respectable people away all the more.
edit: Psychology Today and Time have people read scholarly journal articles then present a distilled form of them to a writer who then writes the articles for the magazine.
So. Yeah.
Not the best source.
Pokemans D/P: 1289 4685 0522
There's nothing wrong with the study of evolution as it relates to human behavior, per se. The problem is that people who adopt the label "evolutionary psychology" often find an evolutionary basis for a given behavior when other hypotheses are more reasonable. Researchers in other fields (such as anthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience) are open to the notion that certain behaviors gave our ancestors a selective advantage, but they don't necessarily jump straight to that conclusion as soon as they see a behavior that appears ubiquitous.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Thank you.
I actually wouldn't consider it much of a science, more akin to something like sociology which isn't the strictest of sciences either, but can still make valid and interesting observations and explanations about the way things work.
So dont dismiss it out of hand, but dont accept it completely either, basically.
But the research articles that they choose to summarize are always the ones that they think will sell the most issues of their magazine, which is invariably the most sensationalistic research. Sensationalism and crackpottery go hand and hand.
For instance, one of the more damning things against the common notion of Social Darwinism is the measurable benefits of cooperation in a chimp or baboon troop, which goes counter to the whole "Survival of the biggest asshole" thing.
The most damning thing is the naturalistic fallacy. Going from "is" to "ought". I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of ways to be an asshole and get ahead ina myriad of ways- sometimes you're a nice dude and you get fucked. The problem with social Darwinism isn't that it doesn't "work" in a fashion, it's that the justification for doing so is kind of retarded, or nonsensical, in the context of the naturalistic fallacy.
Also, and I wish I had the book with me now, The Moral Animal used a ton of anthropological studies of current shit that's going on, or was going on in very recent memory.
I am currently making my way through Nonzero.
Anyone who knows anything about evolution should be aware that a whole lot of what happens is pure dumb luck. Sometimes your ass just ends up catching a cold and being wiped out.
Ultimately, evo-psych has no use value except for telling little anecdotes. Whether cavemen used to give blow jobs as a way of social bonding really isn't important.
That's just a natural consequence of seeing evolution as a philosophy rather than an event.
Uh... I don't think evolution is something that happens at the level of the individual, per se, so no to the first part.
And that's kind of a gross oversimplification of evolutionary psychology. Explaining why we act and feel in the ways that we do strikes me as rather somewhat important.
Thanks, Cat, for touching upon one of my pet peeves. (I think you agree with me, at least :P) I think that people have a horrid tendency to equate pre-modern people as retarded at best, savage animals at worst. In terms of psychology, I don't think humans, from an emotional standpoint, have progressed very far, and intelectually we are not vastly superior either.
You could have fricking unicorns evolve in a valley. But if the breeding population gets hit by a pyroclastic flow, they're not doing any better than the dodos.
Mn. Evo-psych mostly has to do with WHEN we picked up behaviors, and whether they're biological.
But really, the important distinction is WHETHER the behavior is biological or not. When you picked it up is just fascinating trivia, UNLESS you pull that golden age shit where you want to try and be like the cavemen.
Ah, okay, sorry about that. In that case, I would suggest that the unicorns were not exceptionally responsive to that magnitude of change. "Luck" I think only comes into play when you have a vested interest in the well-being of a species.
Can't the same criticism be leveled at evolutionary biology? I mean, who cares about our ancestors and what impact they had on our lives today? And why should we care?
People in the last few thousand years I'd argue are practically identical to us, but further back, not so much. Thing is, we have no way to assess those differences and their impacts.
Far as I can tell, its always about making excuses for the status quo.
That's a fair criticism, but my admittedly limited reading (one, single book that is more than ten years old) gave no indicator of that problem.
It just seems like people who complain about a paucity of usefulness of a scientific pursuit don't really grasp how science is ultimately useful.
Most of it is purely a matter of curiosity, for actual scientific-types.
As Cat mentioned, most of the rest of it has to do with 'cism and the like.
In terms of both social development and evolutionary development the modern human age is laughably short.
No, you're missing the point. A large part of evolution is luck. Whether a population survives what's thrown at it can easily have nothing at all to do with their reproductive fitness. If they live in an isolated valley and a freak flood wipes them out; if the reef they live on succumbs to a bleaching event, if the deep-sea vent they live on stops emitting vapour, if a staple food supply disappears due to climatic change, there's often going to be insufficient time and genetic flexibility within a population for them to adapt. Short timeframe changes and isolation effects are easily as powerful as natural selection, and some argue those forces are actually more important.
There's also the fact that evolution is by no means a "perfect" process. Just because we have traits doesn't necessarily mean there is a reason or use for their existence.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Are you being sarcastic?
Which is kind of beside the point that pop-sci magazines can be pretty silly regardless of genre >.>
Actually I really like de Waal because his ethology is very careful, and he readily admits the degree of speculation in his books. That's the thing about his work; the similarities between chimps and humans are so many, and the ability to create essential models of basic behaviours from captive chimpanzees is fantastic, but the links you draw to human evolution are still entirely speculative. It's like Galen chopping up pigs to work out the anatomy of the nervous system- there's a lot you learn but you're still running too far ahead of yourself not to trip over the fact that you're elbow deep in a pig not a person.
That's why Chimpanzee Politics is a better book than Inner Ape.