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.
I’ve been wondering how much evolutionary psychology really depends on massive modularity about the mind.
Subrena Smith argues that EP needs the assumption of massive modularity to generate any hypotheses at all about how to connect current-day cultural practices or behaviors to whatever might have been going on the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) — the upper Pleistocene or whatever.
This has me wondering how much Evolutionary Psychology stands or falls with massive modularity, and what befalls the whole project of EP without that assumption and without some underlying commitment to ultra-adaptationism.
I don’t begrudge anyone having a go at making it work. The challenge is to explain us in evolutionary terms. I think evolutionary explanations work quite well until we start to consider, for example, language. It’s a bit like trying to explain the origin of life. There isn’t enough concrete evidence to decide on competing hypotheses.
(Nor are we capable of understanding ourselves! 🙂 )
Gregory,
Gregory, my advice is don’t feed the troll.
The two biggest potential pitfalls in EP are pan-adaptionism and indirect selection. There is no reason to think that all aspects of human psychology are adaptive, nor that they were adapted to the job we assign to them. The oft cited analogy is the nose didn’t evolve to hold eyeglasses. Features such as the ability to draw pictures may have come about due to adaptations for other activities. Top down approaches are extremely susceptible to these types of errors.
In many of his books and essays, Stephen Jay Gould made this same argument against physical traits as well. He had nothing supportive to say about the “hyper-adaptationists” who presumed that every physical characteristic any organism has must have resulted from selection pressures specific to each one. His position is that some traits are demonstrably selectable (heavy fur coats in cold climates, camouflage and speed in prey species) but the details of physiology aren’t selected, they might be adjacent in chromosomes, or spandrels, or part of “package deals” and came along as passengers.
I think he’d laugh at the notion of selection for specific cultural traits, considering the sheer variety of cultures people have created, and the speed at which cultures can alter, create and discard those traits.
amen. EP is a hilarious embarrassment to any hope of evolutionism being useable in real life.In this case all ideas are replaced by every new gradating class. They can say anything and say nothing persuasive ten years later. As a creationist it helps discredit the term of evolutionism if one needs help. It does need to see evolutionist processes as opposed to free will. anyways its something that should not be given degrees in or employment. I think for any reasons it will implode and is. , a problem in evolutionism, Its speculation to go wild. untestable hypothesis becoming theories over the weekend. Not to be nasty bot like it because its do self evident that its intellectually worthless. Its not science. Carry on folks.
Interesting that, so far, none of us ‘so-called skeptics’ has piped up in defence of EP.
I have, at one time, taught evolutionary biology to first-year psychology students and have David Buss’s “Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind” sitting on my shelf as a result*. There is merit to the idea that certain aspects of human behaviour, like that of (other) animals, can be better understood by considering its evolutionary history. The problem is translating that insight into hypotheses that can be addressed by empirical methods. To overcome this problem the field has adopted several oversimplifying assumptions, e.g. that human behaviour was mainly shaped on the African savannahs. Perhaps it will overcome such growing pains, but in doing so it will have to tone down its ambitions.
*Fun fact: the book has a picture of the current US president in the chapter ‘Men’s Long-Term Mating Strategies’: “Men with status and resources […] are better able than men without status and resources to translate their preferences for young attractive women into actual mating behaviors” 🤣
Too late. They’re multiplying.
Corneel,
Indeed. As I’ve said, I have no problem with the idea that (much) behaviour has a genetic component, with the consequent potential to be shaped by evolution. But the EP approach frequently derided as ‘story-telling’ has problems. Typically it takes the form of hypotheses-dressed-as-factual-results.
Corneel,
Unfortunately the ratio is affected by both numerator and denominator.
Experiments often appear to consist of not much more than questionnaires filled by students hardly representative of general populations.
Yeah. It has been said that the empirical support for the principles of modern psychology rests almost entirely on testing of American college freshmen.
I also heard the original studies on neural plasticity were done on bored rats so we came to the conclusion the brain can change far less the we actually understand it can now.
Hey ho, sometimes it’s two steps back too!
Why? If you like it so much, you go ahead and write the book on this particular nonsense. But it’s a waste of time.
Let’s kill two birds with one stone. What about “sexual selection”? How can that be an independent selection mechanism when it “arises” from the same genes? And why does it work against the population “fitness”? Survival of the “most unfit” to the point of suicidal extinction?
From the Darwinist dictionary:
Sexual Selection – “They select those features because they have been selected to select those features by selected ancestors selecting the same features” – a quote from Circular Logic 101.
Isn’t behavior a bitch?
Nonlin.org,
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. The same genes as what?
You wouldn’t be the first!
That’s a relief! = P
But ‘Darwinism’ implies common descent and logically the ‘same features could not have been selected’ in such a circular manner as you suggest otherwise there would only be a single species and not the many that we actually observe.
Therefore such a contradiction implies an incomplete understanding on your behalf to proffer such a statement as some sort of ‘mic drop’ moment.
The ideology of “memetics” was perhaps the strongest and most widely held single viewpoint among “evolutionary psychologists” (https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Memetics). Funny stuff! Here was a biologist proposing a theory of cultural replication, basing his ideas on an analogy with evolutionary biology.
SNOOZE button on yet another natural scientist speculating about nonsense. The Journal of Memetics collapsed in 2005 because of the “fake science” character of Dawkins’ “term that rhymes with gene”. He sure tricked a whole lot of gullible natural scientists, like TSZ’s Entropy, to follow him though. It displayed Dawkins’ massive pretense in offering a theory of cultural change premised on being “biology-looking.” Yet, sadly, due to the education system’s HUGE gaps, many natural scientists, because they are not trained to think about ideology, astonishingly missed this blatant ideology posing as science, based on misplaced authority.
As for A.R. Wallace’s divergence from Darwin’s teachings about human origins, perhaps it is just not that well known among natural scientists? Here’s one of the key statements pushing back against Darwin’s model:
Regarding the “origin of man”, the key premise of eVopsych is atheism/agnosticism. It is an anti-religious sub-field right from the start. There is no (higher) “Power” possible, since eVopsych is supposed to be “strictly scientific” (just like the DI claims about ID theory). I see no way around that from a sociological perspective as literally to a man or woman, all “founders” of the field of eVopsych are/were atheists or agnostics, and many of them are openly anti-religious. KN’s philosophistic dance with “modularity”, as if that’s what’s most important about eVopsych’s failures, simply isn’t addressing this. Does anyone else think it might have to do with KN’s un-spiritual agnostic naturalism that blocks him from addressing this core feature of the eVopsych initiative?
Re: Malthusianism, yet again we see a natural scientist attacking and mocking a social scientist simply for pointing out what that natural scientist didn’t know about and thus cannot possibly understand, while others do. It’s a pride thing, apparently, that naturalists cannot easily allow themselves to be humble outside of their own specializations, especially if anything to do with morals, values, ethics and indeed, with the “spiritual” dimension of human life is concerned. So when the term “Malthusianism”, which has a considerable track record, is raised, and the natural scientist hasn’t heard that term before, the first reaction is often disbelief, even scoffing. Why is that?
Here’s a rejection of Malthusianism by a “skeptic” too (though this does veer away from eVopsych – it’s a response to a “skeptic” & need not be furthered). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/
Coming back to KN’s statement: “I’m less persuaded that religion or lack thereof plays a determining role. But maybe?” Is it more than a “maybe”, yet? Flint wrote: “as far as I can tell the authors’ religious convictions don’t come through in any visible way.” Maybe he’s just not looking at what’s easily visible once the lens of atheism is removed.
Flint also mis-responded: “No, social science is NOT built on atheism.”
Yet, I had written & stand by this: “‘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.” Why would Flint conveniently miss the term “evolutionary” there?
Let’s look more closely. In their own words, these psychologists admit “the overwhelmingly secular [atheist/agnostic] composition of our lab personnel”. These people deserve credit for being honest about the bias in their own field. It is much more than most evolutionary psychologists will admit about the atheistic / agnostic basis for and bias within their chosen field of study.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027719300617
That said, to the credit of several people here, there’s a whole lot of eVopsych research being dismissed by people in this thread. Amen to that! = )
So, apparently, most of what you’ll find in the links below is JUNK “science”, or in KN’s too often philosophistic terms, “pseudo-science.” Ironically, I fully agree with him this time!
http://aepsociety.org/wordpress/
https://psychology.sas.upenn.edu/evolutionary-psychology
https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/evpsych_programs.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_research_groups_and_centers
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/evolutionary-entertainment/201309/the-origin-evolutionary-psychologist
Notice, that in this article about how to become an eVopsych, when books are recommended, the author starts with Dawkins & Pinker?
Note also that “evolutionary psychology” goes by several different names (formerly “sociobiology”) that hold shared core principles. Not a few people who accept the same ideas, simply don’t wish to be associated with eVopsych. Yet the common atheism, agnosticism and/or anti-religiousity present in the subfield easily gives them away … only if people are looking for what is easily visible.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/evolution-and-human-behavior
https://science.mcmaster.ca/pnb/research/research-areas/evolution-social-behaviour.html
As I see it, it’s the commitment to modularity that drives the rest of the theory, because the core of the theory is that current human behavior can be explained in terms of the outputs of these modules were adaptive in the EEA. And that assumption that then leads to circular reasoning when it comes to solving what Smith calls “the matching problem”. So yes, I do think that the commitment to modularity is what causes evolutionary psychology to fail.
I do think that one of the problems with evolutionary psychology is that they don’t take culture seriously. This is why I’m much more interested in the theorists like Boyd, Heinrich, and Heyes who are talking about how culture itself evolved, rather than people like Pinker or Buss who simply don’t think culture matters.
I think you’re more interested in why some people wanted evolutionary psychology to be true. That’s not uninteresting to me but it’s a bit of a side-quest.
I do think there’s a lot to be gleaned from studying debunked theories of human nature, like phrenology and physiognomy — why were they popular, with whom, for what reasons?
For whatever it’s worth, I learned a lot from Reed’s From Soul to Mind — it’s the only book I know of that tries to tell the story of 19th century thought in terms of how the mind/soul went from being the province of theology to the province of psychology. Though his claim that modern philosophy arose when epistemologists rejected psychology gets a much more nuanced treatment in Kusch’s Psychologism.
I’m not convinced that there IS such a thing as evolutionary social science. Sure, there are some commonalities across cultures, but there are more differences. I can understand “social science” being a study of the peculiarities of different cultures. I may be “blinded by atheism” here, but I don’t see culture as being passed on genetically or biologically. It’s regarded as almost the epitome of pure nurture.
My claim that in my 12 years of college education (taken for the pleasure of learning), religion was explicit only in matters where it was the subject being investigated or discussed. I never even encountered a “Gregory-type” to whom the religion of a text’s author(s) would even be worth knowing.
So I can only repeat, atheism is like NOT collecting stamps. It’s simply not relevant outside of religious discussions, and even then at best serves a control to see how religious people differ.
You are becoming a parody of yourself. I developed computers for a couple of decades. If any of our lab personnel were religious, or atheists, or agnostics, nobody would have known because that’s not something that ever came up in our discussions of computer hardware or firmware. Why should it? Stamp collecting never came up either. If Gregory were an avid stamp collector, he’d likely judge his co-workers as either stampers or NON stampers, and consider those who didn’t collect stamps as biased against stamp collecting. Nobody else would give a shit.
So here’s some advice for Gregory: where religion is simply not relevant to the job, neither belief nor lack of belief is a bias. And yes, religion is entirely irrelevant for nearly all jobs.
(And I have to wonder, why in the world would “these psychologists” grill their lab personnel about their religious faith? And if they found most of their lab people didn’t much care about religion, why would THAT be a bias? Conversely, those who do the grilling about religion ARE showing a powerful bias – they somehow think it’s important. Ordinary people do not.)
Gregory,
Or maybe you see everything through religion-goggles.
You did not pay attention to my question: are you sating that all offspring survives to the point of reproduction? I ask because, again, that’s what Darwin took from Malthus.
Whatever hateful ideas people might have had because of the fact that resources are limited doesn’t make Darwin, or me, an eugenicist. You jumped from “this inspired Darwin and Wallace to come up with the idea of natural selection” to “therefore they were eugenicists.” Again, you read your own version of things into other people’s writings.
Just to be clear, that article doesn’t say that Malthus was wrong about the math. It just describes eugenics as if that and Malthus math were the same. they aren’t.
You keep missing the point, which is quite interesting: Are you saying that there’s no such thing as ideas, etc, spreading because they’re catchy, rather than because they’re useful?
That someone would think of making a whole journal doesn’t make the point of memetics wrong: ideas do spread out of being catchy. I would not start a jorunal out of that. I could not care less if someone did, and I would not be too surprised that the journal collapsed.
Did I start a journal ass-hole? You should pay attention, rather than judge that quickly. Unless you’re saying that there’s spread of catchy ideas, etc, you’re barking at the wrong tree.
It’s a just an observation that not only genes can “compete” for their “own benefit without a benefit to the host”, but also ideas can do that. It doesn’t mean that he proposed a one-and-only-wholesale explanation to cultural change. It doesn’t mean that such is the one-and-only-wholesale explanation to cultural change.
You should look at yourself in the mirror pal. In the meantime I suggest that if you want to refer to me you talk to me and ask me if I have such a position before claiming that I do.
Here’s the whole content on Malthusianism from your comment:
Here you the self-proclaimed social scientist, are trying to teach the natural scientist about natural science. Let’s check:
What’s Darwin’s key idea?
-Natural selection
How is Malthus important for that key idea?
-The math shows that it’s just impossible that all offspring survive to reproduction.
How’s that something a natural scientist would miss unless Gregory came and told him so?
-No way.
What is the proper thing to do?
-Ask if Gregory thinks that the whole offspring does survive to reproduction, I could not care less if Gregory is a social scientist, a priest, or something else.
It’s obvious that there’s some unstated assumptions on your part. I cannot guess them. I am not in the business of guessing them. I see a person, social scientist or not, apparently mistaking reproduction/resources math for social sciences. I see that math just as math with no specific sciences required to understand them. That’s what Darwin took from Malthus towards his key idea. You seem profoundly confused.
Neither math, nor natural selection are outside my own specialization. Your inability to separate the math from the “ideologisms” that you project onto them doesn’t mean that the scientific parts are the very same as the ideologisms that may or may not have been inspired by them. Maybe it’s you who’s not humble enough to learn something that’s outside your field of expertise.
You were not talking about this. You explicitly mentioned Darwin’s key idea. It’s not my fault that you mistake scientific insights for the ideologisms that you cannot stop yourself from projecting everywhere you turn your gaze upon.
You raised the term in the context of Darwin’s key idea. You should not be too surprised that I wasn’t inspired to imagine that you were talking about eugenics, given that eugenics is not Darwin’s key idea.
If you want to have a proper conversation, start by learning to understand context.
Those biased ass-holes founding scientific fields on scientific notions instead of on religious faith!!!!!! The fucking arrogance!!!!!!
Only social scientists would understand how sinful that is!!!!!
For a sociologist of science it is interesting to consider how Darwin’s social position illuminates what he chose to read and take seriously, the social context in which arguments like Malthus’s could take shape and be influential, and so on. And it’s interesting to consider that the point of Malthus’s text was to leverage his authority as an Anglican cleric against social welfare or helping the poor — after all, if we feed and care for the poor, they won’t learn self-control and virtue! One sees people on the far-right making the same argument today against the welfare state. It’s curious that Darwin was influenced by “social Darwinism” avant la lettre.
Kantian Naturalist,
Come on KN. Gregory presented Malthus in the context of “Darwin’s key idea.” Unless you think that Darwin’s key idea is eugenics, rather than, say, natural selection, you’re not helping.
Eugenics is ‘artificial selection’ – breeding. Not NS at all.
Flint,
In short, there are sub-fields known as “evolutionary economics”, “evolutionary anthropology” (not just biological, but also cultural, and also “neo-evolutionary anthropology”), “evolutionary sociology” (and neo-evolutionary sociology), to go along with “evolutionary psychology.” Please don’t think that eVopsych is just isolated as an island of its own. The same ideology runs through all of the “evolutionary social sciences”. I’ve written papers and even published a book about this (2015, which is not available to public in book form, while the papers are available).
I gave a presentation in @2008 here (only because it was hosted at my university, so I didn’t have to travel): https://eaepe.org/
So, is all of the above “pseudo-science” too?
It’s just so difficult when I hear from people, in these conversations, usually natural scientists, who simply haven’t looked and don’t know one way or another, deny the reality of the widespread usage of “evolutionary” thinking – which reflects the “evolutionism” I addressed here before – in SSH. Their denialism doesn’t help the conversation. Dismissing these fields as “pseudo-science” surely hasn’t swayed the 1000s of “theorists” of those “evolutionary social sciences” to stop claiming they have found “evolutionary” solutions to contemporary issues, regardless of them not being able to re-create environments to produce empirical tests. They can’t do that, but they still claim “evolutionary” explanations. Does that have anything to do with ideology … in the social sciences and humanities? The answer should be easy.
My interest in this thread is not about Darwin and I would rather drop him ENTIRELY from the conversation, as said already. My interest here is how atheists, agnostics & skeptics evaluate and react to eVopsych. Thanks to those who don’t keep beating the old Darwin horse.
Nevertheless, since one angry dialogue partner here simply doesn’t have the facts of history right, it might help to read the following from Darwin himself regarding Malthus, whose ideas were crucial to both Darwin and Wallace.
In 1838, Darwin, still not an ‘agnostic’ (that term wasn’t yet coined) wrote:
From his Autobiography, Darwin wrote:
And then just a few years before his death:
The anti-Malthusianism of today wouldn’t reflect well on Darwin and his Hobbes-Malthus inspired conflict thesis.
Do you mean seeing through the eyes of “faith”, rather than the eyes of reason-alone? If so, there are many people who do this, who “perceive” this way, and who also, perhaps it may surprise you, aspire to do this even more in their lives. It doesn’t require irrationality, but rather simply: more faith, trust, hope.
The Indigenous peoples in Canada and Indians who live in India that I’ve met openly and unequivocally accept spiritual realities. Instead, it is “western scientists” who have devolved to insist such “perception” is impossible, according to their worldview presuppositions.
Black Elk, for example said:
Or this, a Crow proverb:
The “western scientific” mindset, considers this language “primitive”, “barbaric” or, in the words of not a few anthropologists, “unevolved.” In such cases, the destructiveness of eVopsych as part of the blatant civilizational discrimination of colonialist “evolutionary social sciences” should be rather easy to see.
Asking doesn’t require “grilling”. Nevertheless, the reason is that they realized it biases their research (just like WEIRD does, as indicated above), since psychology is a “reflexive” field of study, not a “positive” science. The values, beliefs, ethics, and indeed, the origin stories of the individual psychologist inevitably impact their work in one way or another. Psychologists, whether under the spell of ideological scientism or not, should always indicate how their own biases may impact their results, since they too have blind spots, as we all do. It’s the responsible thing to do, though ideologues often want to sneak their ideology in invisibly.
I might not have stated this clearly enough; the difference is that natural scientists, like most of my dialogue partners here, are indeed not trained to understand the differences between work in SSH & work in natural-physical sciences. Thus, they often get this wrong as “outsiders”, simply because they have never learned to think any other way than how they’re trained. Rarely in my experience are natural scientists able to think reflexively, or to “put on” how social scientists think. Thus, here in this thread, we see not a single person admit the rather obvious truth that eVopsych was built with & upon atheistic/agnostic presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions are inescapable from everything that came after it in eVopsych posing as “scientific”. KN calls it pseudo-scientific, and again, I agree. It would just take KN going a step further to accept eVopsych’s atheist/agnostic founding motivation, it’s anti-religious or religion-avoiding approach to reality. Will he address this or continue to avoid it, simply because he hasn’t looked closely at it yet?
Maybe so as a mere “institution,” but personal faith is always relevant. It’s present in every single “job” ever done by a human being in history. It could be a weak faith, or a nearly non-existent faith. But a “faith-less” worker isn’t someone any employer should want to (or even could!) hire. It may be just how we define these terms. Since my dialogue partners here are all either atheists or agnostics, this issue seems to be more about perception, than about mere conceptualization as they are framing it.
When I read McLuhan’s The Medium and the Light in early 2000 I was quite struck and surprised. It was such different language and understanding than how I had been raised in a non-religious loosely Protestant family. Faith was not something one simply sang about on Sundays, but rather was part of a person 24/7/365. It was a way of life, not just a “theory” to be argued about academically.
Here is what McLuhan wrote, which hits like a “reverse perspective” to those overly conceptual thinkers, who are often found in the natural sciences. McLuhan was instead here challenging the way many Protestants think conceptually, rather than perceptually.
See here for more. https://secondnaturejournal.com/passion-and-precision-the-faith-of-marshall-mcluhan/
Again Greggie? Is it that hard for you to actually talk to me and to actually read what I write? For fucks sake:
All you quoted relating to Malthus talks about inspiration towards natural selection from the mathematical side of Malthus, not about eugenics. For the last time, stop projecting your ideologisms/prejudices onto someone else’s writings. Try and read for comprehension. Populations would grow geometrically if resources were enough for that and nothing else got in the way. It doesn’t happen. Therefore not all offspring survives all the way to reproduction. That’s what Darwin took from Malthus. That’s natural sciences, not social sciences. It doesn’t require special training to understand. Got it now? Do you need me to use puppets Greggie the social pseudo-scientist?
ETA:
P.S.
You brought Darwin to the fucking table Greggie!
Evolutionary Psychology is Science. Don’t be a Science Denier.
Not obvious to me, sorry. What are those presuppositions and where do you see those appear in the scientific output of “eVopsych”?
[admin voice]Reminder that members should refer to each other by their display handle.[/admin voice]
Are you sure that was the main point of comparing population growth to resource growth? I mean, practically, death control through war, famine, disease has been an unavoidable element in human existence until the early twentieth century. And reducing the effect of death control without addressing the consequent exponential leap from 2 billion in 1930 to nearly 8 billion today seems to demonstrate Rev. Malthus’ prediction.
I’m sceptical and looking above, I don’t seem to be the only one. I, too, would like to see some evidence that the discipline of evolutionary psychology is built on atheistic presuppositions. Though researchers should adopt an agnostic approach, no presuppositions at all.
I don’t at all deny that there are ideological biases at work in shaping evolutionary psychology — rather, I don’t think that “atheistic presuppositions” are the right way of characterizing that ideology.
Gregory:
No, I don’t mean that. I am simply pointing out the potential for a ‘mote/beam’ situation when someone declares someone else unable to see something ‘obvious’ because of some ideological commitment. It cuts both ways.
It is because Gregory says it is. And he should know, since he alone sees the world with crystal, unlensed clarity.
Allan Miller,
“Sexual selection” has no basis. Not that any other “selection” has any basis either, but let’s play the game… If there were such thing as “natural selection”, it would operate at the gene level only one way, not through two different and independent mechanisms, namely “best fit” and “sexual preference” (aka worst fit).
OMagain,
OK. Irony is not your thing.
This is just gibbering nonsense. Suppose we consider two genes: A and B. Let’s say A is under sexual selection while B is selected by virtue of an effect on running speed. Where’s the conflict in having two different selection mechanisms in operation at the same time, targeting different genes?
Where, for that matter, would be the conflict if the same gene affected both sexual selection and running speed? The fate of the gene in the population would be the resultant of these potentially opposing pressures.
I was making a specific claim — a contentious one, to be sure! — about Rev. Malthus in particular. Malthus argued against poverty relief and famine relief, because he didn’t see poverty and starvation as caused by political decisions.
He saw them as sheer biological facts — if you feed the hungry, you’re going to get more hungry people. He taught at the East Indian Company’s college that the famines already being caused in India as its resources were sucked dry by the British Empire were just what was to expected from people who lack the self-restraint of upper class Englishmen. The British Empire cited Malthus for justifying its inaction during the Great Potato Famine in its first colony, Ireland. He was the apologist for imperial governance.
My source on this: We Are Not the Virus.
Should I be surprised that Nonlin doesn’t seem able to understand what happens when two words are put together like this? This concept has two words, sexual and selection, therefore the basis for such selection would be sexual. A good course in reading for comprehension, conceptualization, defining terms, etc would be good for Nonlin.
Depends on the words accompanying “selection.” Even Nonlin was defending human selection at some time. Short memory I guess. Or things are getting worse with Nonlin’s mind, perhaps due to the quarantines.
Not surprisingly, Nonlin also has difficulty with concepts that try and identify natural phenomena. Nobody thinks that sexual selection and other kinds of selection are necessarily independent. We just have to observe nature to realize that the concepts have to be flexible. Sexual selection can even be considered a subset of natural selection. A subtype. Also, we normally understand that natural selection might not work on genes directly, but on the phenotypes related to such genes.
Poor Nonlin so mentally limited. Why would sexual selection necessarily imply worst fit? In for-the-public documentaries, for example, sexual selection is presented as risky, yet where the risk implies that the individuals are fit enough to take such risks and survive, or have the resources for making a better display than other individuals. Things can be simple, but they can also be complex. There’s no reason why some kind of selection and some other kind cannot go together. Heck, if one is a subtype, the subtype implies the main type. There’s no reason why selection could not involve more than one gene either.
But telling Nonlin these things would be a waste of time. Nonlin cannot understand what happens when two words are put together to build a concept, thinks that scientists invent concepts by mere imagination, rather than to try and describe real situations, imagines that if scientists talk about selections of one kind of another they necessarily intend them to be absolutely distinct and in opposition to each other, all the time. How could I expect her to understand things that are a bit more complicated than that?
I do not understand why Nonlin would choose such a monicker. Nonlin’s thinking could not be more linear.
Sheesh. I think it might be useful for discussion to separate biological evolution (physiological changes from one generation to the next) and “evolution” referring to just about anything that changes over time, which is pretty damn inclusive. Economics, culture, anthropology, these are not “pseudo-sciences” but neither are they biological evolution. Just sticking the word “evolutionary” in front of some discipline doesn’t make it biological.
This is not to say ideas or language or culture or psychology cannot evolve, in the generic sense of changing over time. In most fields outside biology, this sort of evolution takes the form of considering more cases, more details, and more nuances. And in this way most sociological disciplines become more accurate, more comprehensive, and more able to provide useful insights. Natural scientists aren’t denying these sorts of improvement happen, they simply (and reasonably) argue that it’s not biological inheritance or genetics.
The easy answer is, you are equivocating between the generic and biological concepts of evolution. Yes, you can semantically claim that anything that changes over time is “evolving” in the generic sense. But if someone is making a biological claim, that genes are being passed between generations in slightly modified form, this sort of claim needs some sort of relevant evidence. To the extent that evolutionary psychology is claiming that the physical human brain’s abilities and characteristics are being and have been selected for, perhaps for some survival purpose, this needs something beyond even plausible speculation to be taken seriously.
I doubt anyone is going to strenuously argue that cultural changes between generations have nothing to do with ideology. Most of culture IS ideology. And religious doctrines, for better or worse, are to a large degree swept along in the cultural currents. I hope that observation isn’t about to surprise anyone.
Great, we agree there are “ideological biases at work in shaping eVopsych”.
What are those ideological biases, in your view, since you seem to deny, though haven’t stated this directly (“maybe?”) that they include atheism &/or agnosticism? How would you “characterize” the “ideological biases” that you see (after admittedly not having looked at it in a while) in eVopsych? Common labels for brevity’s sake would be preferred here to long explanations (e.g. about modularity).