Everyone hates evopsych

AJAlkaline40

There seems to be a lot of hate for evolutionary psychology on this board and I was curious as to why that is exactly. I've never heard or read any serious criticisms of the field, so I'm interested in hearing what people have to say in opposition to it.

Personally, I feel it makes a good bit of sense logically, but I have to claim ignorance to the sheer amount of solid evidence that supports or refutes it. I have the feeling (non-substantiated) that a lot of people who hate evopsych primarily suffer from a misunderstanding of what it really suggests (which is understandable).

There are two major points of confusion, I think. The first is quite important, and has to do with the difference between "ultimate" and "proximate" causes. An ultimate cause would be the ultimate reason that a certain behavior was selected for evolutionarily, while a proximate cause is why the organism themselves perform the action. For instance, having sex produces children and thus is crucial to reproductive survival, that would be the ultimate cause, however people don't have sex because it passes on their genes, people have sex because it feels good, that is their proximate cause. The proximate cause and the ultimate cause don't have to be the same, and often are better off not being the same in the interest of natural selection. Evopsych looks ridiculous if you don't recognize this distinction, as saying things like "humans choose a mate who has the best genes to pass on to their shared offspring and is most likely to be able to protect and nurture those offspring so that the genes will survive" is ridiculous, if you don't recognize that the statement doesn't refer to their proximate causes, but rather the ultimate causes of their behavior, the proximate explanation would be "people fall in love with other people who are attractive, kind, protective, and nurturing".

The second point of confusion would be that our behaviors would have evolved in a very different environment than we now live in. For the majority of human evolutionary history, we lived in small bands of hunter gatherers. This was a very different situation than the sprawling metropolises we now inhabit. Our genes should be optimized for surviving in that sort of situation, which means they do not always benefit us in this situation. Saying something like "but our behaviors often don't convey a reproductive advantage to us so they couldn't have evolved" makes the fallacy of assuming that our behaviors are tuned for the world that we now live in. I think you'll find that many of our behaviors that convey no such advantage in the current world actually would've helped us out quite a bit in the distant past.

Anyway, please discuss, I'd like to hear some arguments in opposition.

MrMonroe

I don't hate on it, but it bears mentioning that psychological traits are quite different from physical ones, primarily in the fact that acquired psychological traits can be passed on while physical ones can't. While there's certainly a lot of human behavior that can be explained by saying "it worked ten thousand years ago," we've also changed a lot in those thousands of years exactly because human behavior is so pliable compared to animals that don't build civilizations.

MikeMan

Feral, The Cat, and I have had some long and detailed debates on this manner here.

We came to some sort of agreement.

Basically there's a lot of laziness with evo psych, there's a lot of overblown claims, and there's a lot of small studies in specific countries or cultures extrapolated to the entirety of humanity and thrown back millions of years in a big causal chain with little basis for doing so.

But then again there is good work being done in the field: good, controlled studies conducted in many many countries and cultures. It's just few and far between.

The media doesn't help matters because every little claim or preliminary result is portrayed as "SCIENTISTS FIND THAT MEN SHIT MORE THAN WOMEN AND HAVE DETERMINED THAT THIS IS A RESULT OF THEIR HUNTING AND GATHERING LIFESTYLE LEADING TO EVOLVING MORE SENSITIVE BOWELS WHILE THE WOMEN STAYED AT HOME AND NURSED" and that doesn't help anyone.

AJAlkaline40

Actually, I have to more or less agree with that. However I would put much more blame on the media than actual scientists. I feel that in general evopsych scientists are far less prone to overblown statements and making tenuous links between unrelated phenomena than the people who attempt to simplify their statements are. By the very nature of the field you have to make very nuanced claims, and I think these nuanced claims almost never really survive media rape.