Cultural practices and beliefs can simply be universal because it is the most stable form that "works". — schopenhauer1
Nothing in humans is that automatic. There is an element of learning everywhere and throughout all human behaviors. — schopenhauer1
They see what they want to see in it, and provide "just so" conclusions to justify their hunches. — schopenhauer1
these conclusions gain popularity and are broadcasted widely, leading people to act upon them as if they were natural — schopenhauer1
I'm not sure that was a critique of evolutionary psychology rather than of a critique of the idea of human nature, and maybe even of psychology tout court. — Srap Tasmaner
We're going to need a journal for these. Perhaps we should put some effort into testing them, or formalising the methodology a bit... But the name...the name — Isaac
I've also made many empirical observations of my own. — wonderer1
Eek, that doesn't seem like good science. — schopenhauer1
No, it's not science. It's just living in the world and paying attention. — wonderer1
Understandable, I think understanding human motivation and the human condition is valid. I do it all the time. Evo-psych basis for things is harder to prove. — schopenhauer1
my point isn’t some crazy outlier — schopenhauer1
No of course not, but why should you care if it's an outlier? You're an anti-natalist, for chrissakes. Outlier is where you live. — Srap Tasmaner
(I was ever so slightly teasing you about the list because it's obviously a real mixed-bag, even to someone as ill-informed as I am. Some of what's on there is clearly going to be a defense of the ideas you were attacking. Some of it is notoriously, let's say, "motivated" attacks, not taken seriously by anyone, I think, rather like the drubbing sociobiology took mainly from stuffy humanities types. It's nothing like evidence that evopsych is a disreputable field or a field in crisis or something. Might be, but that list would have nothing to do with it.) — Srap Tasmaner
that last sentence kind of contradicts what you're saying — schopenhauer1
Anyways, I think it's fine as a discipline. However, I see it really straddling the line. It's not just a field of study. It's underlying premise is that various behaviors, some very specific ones, can be traced back to processes that are hard to prove. — schopenhauer1
I meant the list as a whole -- some of the stuff on the list might be cogent critiques that are crucial to the future development of the field or even its collapse. I wouldn't know. But some of what's on there is definitely not that, so the list as a whole is not, say, evidence that the field is disreputable or something. That's all I meant. — Srap Tasmaner
we have some pretty solid ideas about how evolution works — Srap Tasmaner
Cultures and languages also evolve, and the mechanisms are quite similar — Srap Tasmaner
I think the big takeaway from the last hundred and fifty years of biology and psychology is that we are not nearly so different from other animals as we used to think. We're still trying to figure out just what is and what isn't different about us, and evolutionary psychology is the obvious terrain for whatever fights we have about it. — Srap Tasmaner
Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. — Anthony Gottlieb- It Ain't Necessarily So
This was no straw man. The previous year, Robert Trivers, a founder of the discipline, told Time that, “sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.” The sociobiologists believed that the concept of natural selection was a key that would unlock all the sciences of man, by revealing the evolutionary origins of behavior.
The dream has not died. “Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature” (Oxford), a new book by David Barash, a professor of psychology and biology at the University of Washington, Seattle, inadvertently illustrates how just-so stories about humanity remain strikingly oversold. As Barash works through the common evolutionary speculations about our sexual behavior, mental abilities, religion, and art, he shows how far we still are from knowing how to talk about the evolution of the mind. — Anthony Gottlieb- It Ain't Necessarily So
Eh, evolution related to physical artifacts, and biological systems, even perhaps cognitive systems. But more complex behavior? Much more of a grey area. — schopenhauer1
Are we just going to do another round of the endless consciousness debate in this thread? — Srap Tasmaner
"Science still hasn't explained it, so it's not biology." That's a crap argument. Science is hard, and it takes a long time, and people need to deal. Why is everyone so intent on second-guessing science? Why all the armchair quarterbacking? Just say thank you and let them do their work. — Srap Tasmaner
But if no one ever tests the biology-first approach, we're not going to learn much. — Srap Tasmaner
We didn't evolve a preference for French Roast coffee (or some other inferior slop). What we evolved was the capacity to metabolize caffeine and feel slightly stimulated. The same goes for quite a few psychoactive chemicals.
One could go on for hours citing examples of what capacities we did not and did evolve.
The thing to avoid in thinking about evolved psychology is that we didn't evolve specific preferences -- houndstooth over plaid; vanilla over strawberry; antinatalism over pronatalism. What we evolved was the ability to prefer, and manage preferences. Etc. Etc. Etc. — BC
A study of attitudes toward casual sex, based on surveys in forty-eight countries, by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, found that the differences between the sexes varied widely, and shrank in places where women had more freedom. The sexes never quite converged, though: Schmitt found persistent differences, and thinks those are best explained as evolutionary adaptations. But he admits that his findings have limited value, because they rely entirely on self-reports, which are notoriously unreliable about sex, and did not examine a true cross-section of humanity. All of his respondents were from modern nation-states—there were no hunter-gatherers, or people from other small-scale societies—and most were college students.
Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species. American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens. The relatively few experiments conducted in non-Western cultures suggest that the minds of American students are highly unusual in many respects, including their spatial cognition, responses to optical illusions, styles of reasoning, coöperative behavior, ideas of fairness, and risk-taking strategies. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia concluded recently that U.S. college kids are “one of the worst subpopulations one could study” when it comes to generalizing about human psychology. Their main appeal to evolutionary psychologists is that they’re readily available. Man’s closest relatives are all long extinct; breeding experiments on humans aren’t allowed (they would take far too long, anyway); and the mental life of our ancestors left few fossils. — Gottlieb
Most people don't have a problem attributing crow and dog psychology (their behavioral abilities) to evolution, What else would it be? — BC
It's easier to do animal evolutionary psychology. There are much easier ways to point to programming. Obviously as you move to complex social animals such as ourselves with language and strong sense of self-awareness, and conceptual cultural transmission, that becomes rapidly difficult to discern as to what is evolutionarily selected (if that is even the case), or what is cultural. There used to be an idea towards the beginning, as you were alluding to, like humans evolved a swiss-army knife module system. That seems to be out of favor. — schopenhauer1
strong sense of self-awareness — schopenhauer1
conceptual cultural transmission — schopenhauer1
Are we just going to do another round of the endless consciousness debate in this thread? — Srap Tasmaner
No. — schopenhauer1
But is it [ human behavior? ] amenable to science is the question. — schopenhauer1
Probably evolved capacities. — BC
Neurobiological research does not support the assumption by evolutionary psychologists that higher-level systems in the neocortex responsible for complex functions are massively modular.[23][24] Peters (2013) cites neurological research showing that higher-order neocortical areas can become functionally specialized by way of synaptic plasticity and the experience-dependent changes that take place at the synapse during learning and memory. As a result of experience and learning processes the developed brain can look modular although it is not necessarily innately modular.[23] However, Klasios (2014) responds to Peters' critique.[25] — Criticism of Evolutionary Psychology Wiki
"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."[43][44] — Chomsky
Steve Stewart-Williams argues, in response to claims that evolutionary psychology hypotheses are unfalsifiable, that such claims are logically incoherent. Stewart-Williams argues that if evolutionary psychology hypotheses can't be falsified, then neither could competing explanations, because if alternative explanations (e.g. sociocultural hypotheses) were proven true, this would automatically falsify the competing evolutionary psychology hypothesis, so for competing explanations to be true, then evolutionary psychology hypothesis must be false and thus falsifiable.[48] — Wiki
But is it [ human behavior? ] amenable to science is the question.
— schopenhauer1
But that is exactly the endless debate about consciousness here. — Srap Tasmaner
Noam Chomsky argued:
"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."[43][44]
— Chomsky — schopenhauer1
I don't even like evolutionary psychology that much, but I like less lazy hack jobs that purport to take down an entire field of investigation because you've had a bit of think about it and reached your own conclusions (in that exact field no less) without having done a shred of research beyond a misunderstanding of a Wikipedia article.
It seems your beef with evolutionary psychology amounts to little more than that it reaches conclusions that "don't seem right" to you. Well put your big boy boots on, read the material and engage with the criticism. — Isaac
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