This topic has recently come up in another thread & deserves its own thread, rather than getting lost there.
It started with KN asking CharlieM: “Are there really such ‘Darwinian extremists’ or are you just making them up?”
I responded: “The list of Darwinian extremists in SSH is considerable, not that it’s likely anyone here is even aware of this, such that they could come up with a list themselves.” http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/what-mixture-of-design-and-evolution-is-possible-as-the-idm-collapses/comment-page-24/#comment-279711
So far, we’ve seen only a couple of names there (Daniel Dennett & David Barash – both not psychologists, and Tooby & Cosmides, the latter who are indeed key figures in the ’emergence’ of eVopsych, in the wake of the sociobiology scandal), and no one here has yet shown much familiarity with this ‘subfield’ of psychology. If it’s in fact so badly wrong-headed, then why not say more specifically why and how?
KN asked: “is evolutionary psychology still popular? I don’t know any philosophers who have much respect for it.”
So I sent quick links to recent papers published in “eVopsych”. The philosophers are of course largely unimportant here. It’s the psychologists who matter most on this topic, and what we see is atheist and agnostic psychologists, not religious psychologists flirting with and sometimes openly adopting eVopsych. Why is that? Does it perhaps have anything to do with the requirement of first accepting ideological naturalism as a precondition for accepting eVopsych?
In my view, as I wrote in the other thread, “eVopsych might be among the most atheist- or agnostic-dominated fields in the history of the Academy. … Every single work of eVopsych I have come across either explicitly or implicitly promotes atheism or agnosticism.”
Yet KN replied: “On the face of it, I’m less persuaded that religion or lack thereof plays a determining role. But maybe?”
Yes, it’s quite obvious when taking a closer look than just the face of it (which is also quite obvious). Why then is not a single self-labelled “evolutionary psychologist” an Abrahamic monotheist? If anyone here can locate one, then we’ll be able to discuss the exception. A challenge laid down for the “skeptics” here at TSZ! I’ve looked around the world and haven’t found a single one, though there are Abrahamic monotheists who have adopted and accept one or a few elements of eVopsych, just not as a whole.
BioLogos once attempted to promote eVopsych via Justin Barrett and the push-back from everyone there gave it the biggest thrashing I’ve seen at BioLogos. The presumptuous quasi-eVopsych experiment went no further there.
KN called eVopsych “pseudo-science” and said “I quickly gave up on it and haven’t paid it any attention since.”
Allen Miller wrote: “EP is simply ‘story-telling’, lacking [that] rigour.” … “Stick me on the ‘atheists disinterested in evolutionary psychology’ pile. There are, I think, areas of our behavioural repertoire shaped by evolution, but that’s a long way from presuming to say which they are.”
Ah, so the problem is primarily the presumption, rather than the application of “evolution” to psychology?
KN notes: “There’s a difference between claiming that some general feature of human beings — say, culture or language — is a result of natural selection and saying that we can specify which traits of modern humans were the result of long-past selective pressures.”
Yes, I agree. And I don’t think one should use “natural selection” for culture or language, but rather “human selection”, thus diverging from Darwin and taking up anti-Darwinism with A.R. Wallace, who afaik coined the term “human selection.” Culture and language are predominantly about human selection (largely purposeful, goal-oriented, plan-like; i.e. teleological), not merely “natural selection” (lacking ‘agency’ – don’t get distracted by this) on the biological or organic level.
KN loosely claims: “I would say that evolutionary explanations are good for [some] inquiries and not good for others.”
Could he please be more specific: which inquiries are “evolutionary explanations” not good for? Does this mean psychology as a field is “not good” for “evolutionary explanations” or rather that he really believes “some evolutionary explanations are allowed” in psychology too? If the latter, what distinguishes when such evolutionary explanations in psychology are “good” or “not good” to use?
The topic suits well when people are honestly and openly grappling with the thought of “things that don’t evolve”. I don’t currently have time for more. That’s enough to get it started.
You can count me as among those who disagree with Evolutionary Psychology.
I’m not sure that I know anybody who agrees with EP. I mostly see disagreement. I guess Jerry Coyne agrees with it, though I’m not sure how much agreement there is. He is a friend of Steven Pinker.
I have never thought of EP as distinctly pro-atheist, though it has long been clear that psychology is mostly not pro-Christian.
I’m inclined to mostly disagree with that.
As I would use the terms, human selection would suggest explicit selection. But most changes in culture and language are statistical effects of human behavior, and not a result of explicit selection.
Yes, cultural changes do often start with explicit attempts to change the culture. And many changes may depend on human choice. But most of those explicit attempts result in only temporary fads and die out after a while. “Natural Selection” seems an okay term for those that survive.
In biology, change also depends on changing behavior of the organisms. I think Gould has explicitly said that agency (of the organisms) is a requirement for natural selection.
@ Gregory
Not sure whose voice is speaking in your OP. Your formatting doesn’t make it clear whether you are quoting people and if so from where.
Context matters! 😉
Is it possible to disagree with evolutionary psychology? I think you could make a decent case for saying the output of studies under the heading of evolutionary psychology has been a bit crap so far. At some point, if results continue to be unproductive, won’t funding dry up and people choose more useful avenues for research?
At last, Gregory finds something about evolutionary theory that he can disagree with.
Next stop, full blown IDism. I’m sure you’ll be welcomed at the DI with open arms. 🙂
That what I meant.
Yes, in principle, evolutionary psychology is something that could be studied. In practice, most of what I have seen is pretty bad.
ROTFL. Thanks, Mung. No embrace for IDist idiocy yet. Seattle double-talking duplicity & disrespect Uber Alles! They’re at least “allies” against mindless eVopsych. But so is KN!!
Are you learning yet?
Alan Fox,
How about provide some evidence? There’s lots out there to find. Your mere opinion/posturing matters little. Just another nobody voice on an apostate’s blog that pays for you as sole “Admin” here to continue to feel irreligiously relevant. Please show us the actual “crap” in eVopsych, instead of just hinting at it. Can you?
I have tried to read some explanations of evolutionary psychology, which seems on the whole to be saying that human psychology has been the product of evolution just like our physical characteristics. If this is a roundabout way of saying our brains, as part of our bodies, have evolved, then there’s nothing new here. If the claim is that our psychology is highly modular, I’m not sure what this means. I know specific locations in our brains produce predictable symptoms when stimulated. But it’s been well understood for many decades that different parts of the brain have different specialties.
From what I can tell, the biggest problem with evolutionary psychology is that it suffers from a dearth of clear operational definitions essential to perform testing. And until it can be tested, it remains a fuzzy notion lacking a core idea.
I’m sure I can dig up a few papers whose methodology and conclusions have been mocked.
Are there papers that have sound methodology and useful conclusions?
It’s not something I can get excited about, true.
Errors of fact: not sole admin, not paid.
What would be more interesting would be to find something bearing fruit. Something useful.
Ethical issues are a barrier to experiments on humans. What was that experiment where some students were prisoners and some were guards?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Blimey! There’s a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to criticism of evolutionary psychology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology
@Gregory
I don’t think anyone feels like defending evolutionary psychology here. But perhaps you can clarify several of your other claims.
I do not understand why that would be. Once a theist accepts that humans are the product of evolution, yet still shaped according to God’s plan, there is no reason to reject the idea that aspects of human behaviour can be understood from past selection on heritable variation for those behaviours.
Sounds like you are just reporting a gut feeling. I don’t see why anyone would advertise their denomination in their profession, so it is most likely you just missed them. You need the results of a survey or such, to raise your claim above mere guesswork.
What does “human selection” mean? Are you saying that the capacity for language and culture are not adaptive or did you just mean to say that language and culture, once established, change largely by human whims? The latter would be uncontroversial.
Always.
Maybe not. Gregory may be presuming, perhaps correctly, that TRUE Christians would profess their faith while writing about anything from math to turtles. I read plenty of books both fiction and nonfiction, and as far as I can tell the authors’ religious convictions don’t come through in any visible way. But I’ve read commentary on various aspects of society and culture from a century ago, and the layer of pious morality is sometimes too thick to grasp the subject matter. Gregory may be pining for the days when 2+2=4 because of his god’s will.
Good to see no serious support for “evolutionary psychology”. But if that fails, what about the rest of “evolution”?
The whole “evolution” structure crumbles in exactly the same manner: not one scientifically supported claim. I must have flagged dozens and dozens of them, and haven’t bother with “evolutionary psychology” just because it’s so damn ridiculous.
What makes “evolutionary psychology” different than other “evolutionary” claims?
The idea of “modularity” (see here) that matters for evolutionary psychology is far more than just general cortical localization.
It’s a specific claim about the kind of computational architecture that minds have: the core idea is that minds are not general-purpose problem-solving devices but rather a collection of domain-specific modules that have been refined through natural selection to generate optimal or near-optimal solutions to specific problems. So there might be one module that’s “designed” to look for the most emotionally stable life-partner, and another module that “designed” to look for the most sexually available person, and those modules will generate different results because they are performing different computational operations. The “modules” that a mind has depend on what problems the organism needs to solve.
The idea behind evolutionary psychology is that our “modules” were basically set in stone during the long prehistory of human evolution, hundreds of thousands of years ago. So if we want to figure out which modules we have and how they work, we have to look at the “environment of evolutionary adaptation” (roughly, upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers) and which modules were selected for at that time, to solve those problems.
The problem with evolutionary psychology thus defined — and this is a fairly textbook-standard characterization — is that it isn’t actually possible (see “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” (Smith, Biological Theory 2020). (It’s behind a paywall but I can send a copy to anyone interested. I would obviously never ever suggest that someone use Sci-hub.)
Her central argument is that evolutionary psychology cannot avoid circular reasoning when it comes to identifying the present-day modules that supposedly got hard-wired due to ancestral selective pressures — they imagine a Just-So story about what the ancestral environment was like, then use that to decide which modern behaviors are due to modules, and on that basis argue that we know which modules are hard-wired because of their evolutionary credentials.
There’s also a much deeper problem, which is that’s completely unclear how much modularity there is, or even if there’s any at all. The more we learn from neuroimaging, the more clear it is that many different parts of the brain are involved in many different tasks. I share Michael Anderson’s complaint that our beliefs about localization of function are basically a computational version of phrenology, and we don’t yet fully know what a post-phrenological cognitive neuroscience would look like.
And that’s even assuming that there’s a reliable correlation between what the brain is doing and what voxels are being shown on the screen to the neuroscientist. We think there is, but then there’s the dead salmon problem.
If Smith is right (and I think she is), it’s biggest problem isn’t a dearth of operationalization but outright circular reasoning.
If I’m understanding KN correctly, “evolutionary psychology” doesn’t rest on any direct observations or even accurate predictions. Instead it rests on the claim that psychological modules evolved to solve specific problems — but the only way we can reconstruct these problems is by analyzing the modules they selected for!
As an analogy you might understand, it’s like saying the Bible is the word of God, and we know that because the Bible says so – and the Bible is infallible because it’s the word of God!
Evolutionary psychology has a bad reputation because most outsiders, like myself, tend to see it as merely trying too hard to explain almost everything as if there must be an evolutionary advantage for it.
However, there’s good and bad science anywhere and everywhere. There’s evolutionary psychologists that go beyond the mere claims to testing hypotheses and rejecting the wrong ones. With psychology being involved, which is quite complex, straightforwardly falsifiable hypotheses are hard to pose. There’s always one detail or another.
Anyway, there’s a very interesting mix between psychology and neurobiology where evolutionary questions can have huge impact. I’m not sure if they’re there yet, since there’s a huge amount of terrain to advance in the physiology before proper evolutionary questions / hypotheses / explanations can be proposed with clarity and potential.
So, I would not call evolutionary psychology a pseudoscience. I’m not a fan, but, as things advance it might become truly insightful and, thus, interesting.
That’s my claim — or more precisely, my endorsement of Subrena Smith’s conclusion to her argument.
To be clear, I am not opposed to evolutionary hypotheses in explaining neurobiology or cognitive psychology. On the contrary! I am opposed to the specific version of that project which calls itself “evolutionary psychology” .
Here’s the final paragraph of Smith’s article, with which I am in firm agreement (just so there’s less ambiguity about my own position). I have taken the liberty of underlining the passages that are most salient to me. Here she elaborates on a distinction between “evolutionary psychology” and “Evolutionary Psychology”.
“Evolutionary Psychology rests on three pillars: the massive modularity hypothesis, the claim that modular structures evolved as adaptations to recurrent challenges in the EEA, and the tacit assumption that mental structures can be individuated and so license claims about strong vertical homologies. These three components, taken together, are inconsistent with the competing hypothesis that evolution fashioned the human mind as a domain-general or modestly modular learning system. On this view, the architecture of the human mind (whatever it turns out to be) was selected to be adaptive and malleable, rather than fixed and instinct-like. It supports a view of human nature that is less nativist than the version that is proffered by Evolutionary Psychologists. Importantly, this competing hypothesis is immune from the criticisms that I have developed here, chiefly because it does not reduce the mind to an array of domain-specific systems and require that these be homologs of ancestral systems. It is also well-supported by recent work in developmental biology indicating that it is the case that the behavioral repertoires (even of invertebrates) are often highly malleable and
driven by learning (West-Eberhart 2003; Menzel and Benjamin 2013). However, a research program of this sort — one that restricts itself to scientifically justifiable claims about the phylogenetic origins of human psychology, and that gives developmental plasticity and learning their due — is
unlikely to have much utility for explaining the specifics of human behavior biologically. It is likely to be less contentful than Evolutionary Psychology precisely because it makes no attempt to extend fine-grained adaptationist explanations to domains where they cannot be applied.
Kantian Naturalist,
Was it you, KN, who recommended Steven Mithen and his The Prehistory of the Mind : A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science to me a while ago? That kind of encapsulates the optimism, possibly unfounded, at the time it was written that developments in this new (in 1996 when the book was written) interdisciplinary field would yield results.
Alan Fox,
Yes, I think Mithen is an interesting example here. Though even by that time, the modularity craze was beginning to die down. Mithen’s central theoretical innovation in that book is built on Karniloff-Smith’s 1992 Beyond Modularity. Karniloff-Smith argues, contra Fodor, that we have a capacity for combining representations generated by different modules. Mithen argues that this gives us a powerful way of interpreting the archeological record.
Thing is, I’m not sure Mithen’s claims are really fine-grained enough to run into Smith’s criticisms. All that Mithen needs for his argument is the idea that we have distinct modules for “folk psychology” (attributing intentional agency to people and animals), “folk biology” (understanding basic teleological or purposiveness in living things), and “folk physics” (understanding basic mechanical principles).
The capacity to combine representations from these different modules explains why we can come up with new cultural practices. For example, combining the output from folk psychology with the output from folk biology allows us to imagine beings that have psychological attributes but weird or non-existent biological attributes (ghosts, spirits, gods). The capacity to combine representations from folk biology module and folk physics module gives us the idea of using parts of animals for their mechanical properties (bone and antler in tool-making).
So I’m not sure how committed Mithen was to strong modularity, and how much his claims depend on it. His modules look pretty much like Dennett’s stances (intentional, design, and physical). But we can make sense of those as ways of embodied interaction with the social and physical environments without any claims about the underlying cognitive machinery, modular or otherwise.
Yes, that’s a good way of describing my objection to EP. It seemed to me that EP was based on assumptions that go too far in the direction of biological determinism.
Psychological determinism, anyway.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that evolutionary psychology made political enemies out of leftists and progressives. Gregory thinks it is salient that none of the evolutionary psychologists are theists. I think it is salient that none of them are sympathetic to radical social criticism. Pinker wrote a whole book (The Blank Slate) using evolutionary psychology to attack the Left.
Kantian Naturalist,
Is it more “using evolutionary psychology to attack the Left” or using eVopsych to try to provide a new basis for Leftist political ideology? It won’t help to leave Peter Singer out of this, as if his views aren’t being circulated, even if not too many people accept his blatant misanthropy via species egalitarism. There’s anti-human exceptionalism running through this discussion among some, and it would not surprise me if KN was indeed an anti-human exceptionalist, species egalitarist also.
Just links on a busy day:
https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1999—-02.htm#:~:text=A Darwinian left would:&text=Accept that there is such,what human beings are like;&text=Reject any inference from what,to what is ‘right’;
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3109/a036882?journalCode=pusa
And some recent push-back (though they haven’t managed to get Jordan Peterson to untangle his eVopsych dependencies yet):
https://quillette.com/2018/10/17/what-good-is-evolutionary-psychology/
https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/
https://quillette.com/2019/04/08/what-explains-the-resistance-to-evolutionary-psychology/
https://quillette.com/2020/01/13/an-evolutionary-explanation-for-unscientific-beliefs/
Wasn’t it called “artificial selection”? https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_30
Erik,
That too. Wallace coined / wrote of “human selection” later as non-Darwinian.
http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S427.htm
This is very hard to follow. Erik’s link is concerned not so much with people but with improved strains of various domestic animals and plants. “Artificial” selection is distinguished from “natural” selection depending on whether humans control the selection environment.
Gregory’s link points to a long essay which seems to form a basis for what became eugenics – that is, selectively breeding people to improve the baseline of the stock. There is a presumption embedded in that essay that people have solid and reliable means of identifying good people and bad people, healthy people and unhealthy people, smart people and dumb people. And that by carefully breeding the good, healthy, smart people together, humanity can be improved.
I see several difficulties with this. First, we have proven to be really lousy at developing reliable metrics for goodness, healthiness and intelligence. We don’t even have any consensus on what these terms refer to. Second, all of these attributes are nearly impossible to extract from social and cultural backgrounds. Third, to the extent these attributes are determined by environment, they can’t be logically conserved by breeding programs.
Finally, I can’t see what either artificial or human selection as described has to do with evolutionary psychology. It would be a neat trick to try to breed out of the human stock such evils as greed, sloth, or apostasy.
I’ve never been impressed by Singer as a philosopher. He’s done some OK work in applied ethics but the conversation has really moved past him. I’m teaching some of his work from Animal Liberation this week and I’m always struck by how sloppy and shallow it is.
Anyway, Singer isn’t an evolutionary psychologist so I’m not seeing the relevance.
From “What Good is Evolutionary Psychology?, I got as far as this:
then gave up. I’m not going to waste my time reading something so stupid.
Though at least I got a chuckle from this part of “What Explains the Resistance to Evolutionary Psychology?:
This is much like the Marxist who uses Marxist logic to explain that the critic of Marxism is just an apologist for the bourgeoisie or the psychoanalyst who suggests that someone refuses to accept psychoanalysis because of an unresolved Oedipal conflict.
If memory serves those are the examples that Popper uses to show that Marxism and psychoanalysis fail as sciences because they cannot be falsified.
And neither does the rest of “evolution”. Exactly my point.
Then if you have something that does rely on direct observations and accurate predictions it will naturally displace “evolution”. Easily in fact.
We can simply compare and contrast the predictions of both and it’ll be clear to fair minded observers which was most accurate.
After all, it will be easy to replace something based on nothing with something demonstrably based on something.
Do you have that something? If so, what are it’s predictions? What direct observations can be made for that something?
There’s no need to reply. I’m just taking the piss. I know you don’t have squat.
Could we not talk about the evidence for or against evolution in this thread? It’s been done to death countless times in countless threads in TSZ and countless other sites, books, articles, podcasts. No one is going to change anyone’s mind. It’s a pointless and stale debate that always ends exactly where it begins. I’d much rather talk about something that’s not quite so painfully boring.
quite so.
Agreed. Let’s keep the focus in this thread on “evolutionary psychology”. Thanks.
I don’t understand why would this be called “anti-Darwinism.” You’re just saying that you don’t think that the concept of natural selection applies. I agree. Why would we call that anti-Darwinism? I’d call it something other than Darwinism at worst if I insisted on talking about Darwinism at all.
However, I think that what troubles you is the metaphorical use of “Darwinian” for “evolutions” other than that of life. I truly don’t see the problem though, but if you don’t like it, fine by me.
I know you said “largely,” which means “not-always,” and I see that you said “don’t be distracted by this,” which might refer to the “agency” or to the whole preceding part. However, I’m still going to say it: I doubt that a lot of our cultural and language evolutions are goal-oriented or purposeful. I think they’re plagued with lots and lots of accidents. In this sense I’d agree that Darwinism as metaphor might not work. Maybe “Kimurism” or “Ohtaism” would. Muahahahahahaha!
Besides Nonlin cannot understand the language you are all using.
Entropy,
You’re a natural scientist, if I recall correctly, yes? It makes sense, then, that you are not familiar with the disciplinary language of psychology, a social science. Is that a fair assessment for people to make?
It’s fairly well-studied & recognized in HPS. Read Wallace after Darwin died. His “spiritualism” (not traditional religion), including flirtations with the occult, made it impossible for him to accept the ideological “naturalism” of Darwin’s agnostic worldview. As a person who believed in the “spiritual”, in addition to the “material”, he expressed a need to push back against the “Darwinist” approach. Yet he was professionally a “naturalist”, without ideologically accepting that “nature-alone” without spiritual realities.
Recall what Darwin himself suggested, far outside of his disciplinary competency, not unlike how Dawkins proposed “memetics”:
Empty speculation or really a genius social scientist who happened to become a naturalistic invalid (having eaten sometimes disgusting things!) promoting science only, while refusing to publicly discuss religion, which he admitted he was quite confused about?
Forget about Darwin. The main issue is exaggeration of ‘evolution’ into SSH. ‘Evolutionary’ social science itself is built on atheism/agnosticism; there’s really no getting around that, which is evident looking at all of the proponents of that idea. Darwin was indeed a terrible (isolated in Down, England) “sociologist”, that is, unless you’re a proponent of Mathusianism, which is where he got his key idea from. And Darwin was clearly a “racist” in the current meaning of the term. Who here would say otherwise?
The 3rd & 4th generations have already passed.
Entropy,
Not if the topic is human beings and culture, which it is. The number of atheists who trust biologists to do their sociology & culturology for them is frankly astounding!
Yes. I’m a natural scientist and a scientist by nature. Why would this have any importance? You missed the point entirely. Here’s it is:
A metaphor is just that, a metaphor. It intends to get us to understand something by similarity, but it’s not intended to claim it as a fact that something is exactly something else. Therefore, if a metaphor doesn’t help or apply, then we simply don’t use it. There’s no need to call such nonuse “anti-Darwinism” because it isn’t. It’s just not using a metaphor that doesn’t help. Unless you want to advertise some kind of hatred towards Darwin, even if you have to misuse it. But that would make you what you despise. Someone who adheres fanatically to some ideology.
That’s stretching it too hard. Don’t hurt yourself with that ideologism of yours. Using a metaphor is not forcing an ideology, it’s just using a fucking metaphor.
Memetics is a very interesting suggestion, and it works very well. Are you saying that no ideas are spread without having any merit other than being catchy?
As per Darwin, what’s so wrong about speculating about the reaches of his discoveries? I would have speculated as much and more. Well, maybe I’m not as smart. I suspect you perform quite an undue amount of twisted eisegesis on Darwin.
The guy was talking about understanding where our capacities come from. It’s evolutionary history. Not about the babble that most self-proclaimed “evolutionary psychologists” entertain themselves with. I agree with you that it’s mostly crap. But studying the origins of our faculties certainly involves evolution. Our faculties are biological after all.
No, it isn’t. It’s just attempts at explaining some stuff. Not very well though.
I cannot know that. I never read any work on sociology by the guy.
Holy crap Gregory. You are truly troubled. What the hell is Mthusianism to you? Are you saying that it is not a fact that not all offspring survive and reproduce? because that’s what Darwin took from Malthus, the simple math showing that survival-all-the-way-to-reproduction is limited.
He was a racist in his recognition that humanity had diverged into somewhat distinct populations, which is true whether we like it or not, whether we think that’s politically correct to mention or not, it’s still true. He was a racist in talking about other people’s in the terms used by his contemporaries and his particular society. But he was not a racist in imagining that whites had a true superiority against other peoples. So, no. Not in the current meaning of the term.
Anyway, metaphor is not ideologism. Not using a metaphor should not be ideologism either.It’s just not using the fucking metaphor.
Besides I was semi-jocking, it’s a fucking metaphor! I’m not equipped to do your sociology or cultorology for you. Not for anybody else either. I’m free to speculate if I want to. After all, our humanity is ours to explore, and why would we not be curious? As long as we recognize that we’re speculating, what are we to be afraid of?
I do understand that the metaphors work for some aspects, of course, not for others. I stop at how I see culture and language evolve. From that to imagining that I can explain why you are so obsessed that you read things into the texts and metaphors that are not there by invoking some natural selection mechanism there’s a huge difference. I wouldn’t even try.
Anyway …
OK, for the sake of discussion let’s regard “evolution” as allele changes between generations, as a purely biological matter. We’re not supposed to be talking about that.
Now, “evolutionary psychology” seems to be making a biological claim, that aspects of the human mind evolved along with physical characteristics. This seems straightforward, if we regard the mind as the output of the brain, and regard the brain as composed of physical characteristics subject to selection and drift. And I think we’ve established that there’s no good empirical evidence for the claims of evolutionary psychology, because we can’t reproduce the environments which presumably selected for those psychological characteristics. It’s circular and not testable.
I have no problem with the study of culture and society, and I think the sheer variety of these things over the world and over time is pretty fascinating. Mentally I lump these studies in with economics or politics, as fields excellent for producing interesting case studies, but not so good at predictions. Maybe a prediction that every generation will regard the following generation as going to the dogs?
But in all of this, I can’t find a hint of atheism. I spent many years studying these topics (as well as engineering and math – I was a professional student for a while) and never in any of the many texts I studied was there any mention of religion or lack of religion, UNLESS the text was explicitly concerning some aspect of religion. Even then, the author’s faith (if any) wasn’t in evidence.
So I am astounded myself to learn that “atheists” trust biologists to do studies of culture or sociology. Not that I trust sociologists to do that great a job, but where religion fits in, I have no idea. Perhaps you see your world through religious filters, and where religion is irrelevant you project “atheism”?
Right here, I think, is the basic problem. I presume that you know enough mathematicians who aren’t obvious atheists but MIGHT be, to conclude that math itself is built on atheism/agnosticism – look at all the mathematicians who aren’t obviously religious!
No, social science is NOT built on atheism. Offhand I can’t think of a single human discipline that is. Atheism isn’t even a thing, it’s a term coined to denote LACK of a thing. What atheists believe is as varied as what Americans believe, but moreso. Socialist/cultural views rest on the society and culture being examined. Religion is only a small part of all that, and one need not be religious to notice that.
Interestingly, ‘meme’ is itself a meme.
You’re evilly talking about things beyond your field of expertise you blasphemer! You atheist secularist Darwinist Dawkinist evolutionist Einstenist evilist you!
I think there’s an important difference between inquiries into the evolutionary explanation of widespread, seemingly unique human characteristics and the kind of fine-grained hyper-adaptationist explanations (really pseudo-explanations) of specific cultural traits.
Among the former, I would include recent work by Kim Sterelny (The Evolved Apprentice), Robert Boyd (A Different Kind of Animal), Joseph Heinrich (The Secret of Our Success), and Cecilia Heyes (Cognitive Gadgets).
One prominent theme that unites these researchers (and others!) is the idea that there is something genuinely unique about human beings that really does make us different from the non-human animals. (Traditionally this emphasis has been regarded as a residue of theology.) Specifically, there is something about how human beings cooperate in building unique forms of culture, and that human culture depends on specific cognitive and affective abilities not found in other extant species.
So the question for these researchers is not how to deny human uniqueness but how to explain it, with the proviso that the explanations be empirically testable claims about underlying causal processes.
Arguably the only one.
Eggsactly!
I do have direct evidence “evolution” is a failed idea. As presented. And it’s curious you all agree “evo psycho” fails as a subset, yet you think there’s still hope for the rest of the crazy story.
Then shut down TSZ? Because there is no other point to it.
Not really. I’m learning a lot when dissecting the craziness. And for sure others do to. I can almost feel it, “the crazy gene” of “evolution” that is. 🙂
Nonlin.org,
Maybe you could come up with a list of proponents of evolutionary psychology that you could share here? This would show more familiarity with the people involved than you have demonstrated so far. Let’s stick to focus on eVopsych here. There’s more than enough for you to poke holes in eVopsych, and it would add (at least a bit of) credibility if you could identify and quote others, rather than just mocking & down-talking based on lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the topic.