Evolutionary Psychology

[tmhjdg]

Hello all - long time reader of FSTDT here, first time poster. I'll get right to it now...

Evolutionary psychology. For a while now, I've been seeing comments here and there (on FSTDT and elsewhere online) disparaging the field. For the life of me, I cannot see where this might stem from. It just must be bad luck (or bad search results), but I cannot find any decent discussions (or original flame thread that started it all) about it by "lay people" online. Just a lot of off-hand remarks about how it is bunk science.

As a soon-to-be graduate of physical anthropology, with some of my most well-respected prof.s being evolutionary psychologists, I'm a little irked, but strangely so. Evo-psych, as I understand it, is a boon to atheism, skepticism, and just generally taking a scientific perspective in the world. It has helped me to strength my stance against scientific illiteracy in the world. So what does, presumably, everyone else have a problem with?

I'm ready to receive all your complaints against the field (if, indeed, you have any)...what's your problem with evo-psych?

[Old Viking]

I have a hell of a time spelling it.

[Osama bin Bambi]

FYI, the comments on the mainpage aren't really representative of the forum.

The thing that irks me most are the sexists who use evo-psych to justify their bullshit (i.e., "Women were the gatherers and men were hunters, so that's why women shouldn't stray from the kitchen.") That's why "evo-psych" is used as an insult meaning "pseudoscientific." I don't think that's a flaw of evo-psych itself, mind you, but it is very easily misrepresented by those who are not well-informed in it and fraught with potential for damaging interpretations. In my opinion, using anything evo-psych comes up with as proof that a moral code or social norm is right is bound to fail because it is a naturalistic fallacy.

[Smurfette Principle]

Here's why evolutionary psychology is generally dismissed as bunk.

[The Right Honourable Mlle Antéchrist]

The biggest issue with evolutionary psychology is that it's impossible to test a good chunk of the hypotheses made by its proponents. I'm not saying that this is always the case, but all too often, it turns into speculation being promoted as fact. Additionally, it's incredibly difficult to separate innate psychological traits from those instilled by our upbringing.

As an aside, I wish Vene was still on the forums. He was good at summing up the issues plaguing evolutionary psychology.

[Undecided]

Here's why evolutionary psychology is generally dismissed as bunk.

I beg your pardon, but those points are criticisms of the naturalistic fallacy and the people who are afflicted by it, not evolutionary psychology per se. I think everybody can agree that "good" is not "fit".

Frankly, I don't know enough about evolutionary psychology to have a developed opinion on it, but the Wikipedia article suggests that evolutionary psychology is plagued by cultural bias and a paucity of information about how human evolution happened.

[tmhjdg]

Thanks for your replies everyone (I actually forgot that I posted this until now!).

It sounds to me like ev-psych has just gotten a bad rap not because there is anything wrong with it per se (aside from our lack of a time-machine, but that plagues everyone), but because people happened to jump on it because of some huge jerks. Maybe ev-psych 10 years ago wasn't as clear, but now the first thing all the prof.s I had say to a new class is that "in science, when we say 'should,' we mean we expect something to be the case - we aren't saying what 'ought' to be the case."

Maybe it was that way before, maybe there were some jerk prof.s (there always are)...but mine were the complete opposite of sexists/racists/etc. In the end, you shouldn't justify anything "because we evolved that way," especially when we don't have the big picture down yet.

P.S.: If anything, if I were forced to enact a draconian sexist law based on ev-psych, I'd enact one limiting men, not women! But only men who test so high in testosterone level. Those guys are jerks. (Read "are" as "tend to be at the population level.")

[Random Gal]

As an aside, I wish Vene was still on the forums. He was good at summing up the issues plaguing evolutionary psychology.

It seems like a lot of the resident experts have disappeared. I'm still here, but my work hasn't involved human evolution and I've never really studied psychology much. From what I understand, though, we don't really understand enough about early human cultures to draw psychological conclusions from them.

[Fpqxz]

Here's why evolutionary psychology is generally dismissed as bunk.

I beg your pardon, but those points are criticisms of the naturalistic fallacy and the people who are afflicted by it, not evolutionary psychology per se. I think everybody can agree that "good" is not "fit".

Frankly, I don't know enough about evolutionary psychology to have a developed opinion on it, but the Wikipedia article suggests that evolutionary psychology is plagued by cultural bias and a paucity of information about how human evolution happened.

>2012
>thinking some blog on Tumblr has any value to any debate

You know, Smurfette, you would probably get more respect around here if you didn't do stuff like linking to Tumblr as if it provided "evidence" of anything.  At least Wikipedia tries to be neutral and well-sourced.

NOTE:  I am neither defending nor criticizing evo-psych, but I do think it is a field which is very much in its infancy and without a lot of testable hypotheses or adequate mehodology.  And besides, we still haven't completely figured out the physiochemical workings of the brain itself yet anyway.

[MaybeNever]

You know, Smurfette, you would probably get more respect around here if you didn't do stuff like linking to Tumblr as if it provided "evidence" of anything.  At least Wikipedia tries to be neutral and well-sourced.

The particular article she linked isn't particularly insightful - among other things, it says that evolutionary psychology is bad because it is "sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist bullshit", which is great but kind of begs the question - but the problem you have with it is that it's on Tumblr? Dude, forest for the trees.

[The Illusive Man]

There is a whole lot of unnecessary anger in this thread. I will provide a better example for the sake of being informative. Every single quack and hack just loves to use their own warped pseudoscience version of evolutionary psychology to further an agenda. Overtime their efforts have utterly destroyed any perception that it is legitimate science.

Example:
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/313504/boss

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

[TheReasonator]

We shouldn't dismiss an entire field just because of how some people try to skew the information.

Evolutionary psychology makes sense both in relation to physical and social evolution.
If you have a psychology that helps increase your chances of procreation then what ever genes contributed to it will be more likely to be passed on, and any social or cultural knowledge that contributed to it would also be more likely to pass on. It's true that a great deal of it is speculation, but that's how science starts. You start with a hypothesis, people talk about the hypothesis, and then some more interested people go out and run tests, and it can either be debunked or turn into a credible theory.

Instead of dismissing it as bunk if someone tries to use it to support discrimination bring up the fact that evolution by definition involves change, so just because something was beneficial a very long time ago doesn't mean it still is. Also, even though women did tend to do the gathering and men the hunting there's evidence that at least at first this dynamic caused women to have more power in their respective communities. It wasn't until interactions (both war and trade) between tribes that lived distantly from each other became very important that men started getting into power. But note that this would then change the whole psychosocial dynamic. Women who were able to adapt their psychology towards more hunting and more long-range travel would've had certain advantages over women who didn't, although as this became competition between the sexes men started to favor women who didn't have this adaptation. In this day and age most men probably wouldn't want a stay-at-home wife. I certainly don't. Then the finances are all on me. Too much pressure. I also want a wife who is intellectually stimulating, not a passive woman who does what ever I say and has no opinions of her own. This seems to be how most men these days feel, which is a selective pressure towards more assertive women. Men don't want to marry bimbos any more.

Evolutionary psychology can explain a great deal of mental conditions, such as ADHD (the hunter brain theory), autism (brain type is more adept for what would be required if one were living either in solitude or in a small group), and even schizophrenia (suggests a vigilante survival strategy suited to an environment with constant threats and dangers).