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seabeyond

(110,159 posts)
9. do you have the fainist idea how much you sound like an evo babbler???
Thu Jul 26, 2012, 03:22 PM
Jul 2012

Like the textbook marketing sidebar, this was not something I originally planned to discuss, so I'm dashing this off in my final hour guestblogging. Forgive the brevity. Those of us who are critical of evolutionary psychology (EP) are often accused of being anti-evolution and/or anti-psychology. Many of us are neither. That's because evolutionary psychology isn't really evolution and it isn't really psychology. It's more of a philosophy of science applied to human traits and behaviors. It's part of a range of ideologies that can trace their roots to eugenics: social Darwinism, sociobiology, behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology. All of these are part of what Nancy Ordover calls the "bio-psych merge" in her book American Eugenics. They are all attempts to graft hard science onto soft science in order to legitimize it, often undertaken by people with backgrounds in soft science. To me, EP proponents' touchiness about criticism often feels like an inferiority complex, psychologists who hate being lumped in with social sciences (especially anthropology). And in my experience, they are often touchier and more humorless than the feminists and postmodernists with whom they disagree most frequently.

Evolutionary psychology is at its worst (but most entertaining) when they create these imaginative after-the-fact "just so stories," making unfalsifiable claims that are not based on the data collected. For instance, one EP paper said women's brains developed to prefer pink because their brains specialized with trichromacy for gathering fruits:

... these underpin the female preference for objects 'redder' than the background. As a gatherer, the female would also need to be more aware of color information than the hunter. This requirement would emerge as greater certainty and more stability in female color preference, which we find. An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and 'empathizers.'


* This kind of stuff appeals to people because it reaffirms what they already believe to be true: women are passive, nurturing care-givers who stayed at home or gathered berries. Never mind that pink didn't get canonized as a girl's color until recently (Answers to Inquiries, Our Continent 1882). That's why this is such a good example of the problem with EP. Some often-believed tenets of evolutionary psychologists:
Computational mind (the brain is more like a computer than a biological organ)
Determinism (biology is destiny)
Fatalism (free will/choice is an illusion)
Consciousness (subjective awareness deludes us into thinking we have free will)
Reductionism or essentialism (race and gender are concrete, not socially constructed, can be reduced to their genetic essence, and are quantifiable)
Intelligence is definable and measurable
Sexual selection should focus on benefits for the individual organism
The "function" or "purpose" of life is to make more life
The __ gene: The gay gene, the god gene, etc.


There's significant evidence that gene expression is not as clear-cut as these ideas suggest, and brain plasticity makes it difficult to prove that this or that part of the brain developed to address this or that adaptation. Clearly, genetics play a role in who we are. But it doesn't do any good to explain away phenomena like rape, altruism and other puzzling behaviors with unsupported statements that devolve into fanciful imaginations regarding their origins.

http://boingboing.net/2010/01/11/whats-wrong-with-evo.html


Should Evolutionary Psychology Evolve?

The field, however, is quite controversial. Proponents tend to explain every aspect of the human psyche through evolutionary adaptation, whereas opponents often express the criticism that these are ‘just-so stories’. Between these two positions, of course, many more moderate ones are possible. Now, a publication in PLoS Biology argues that evolutionary psychology itself should adapt to the knowledge gained from new findings in a variety of fields, ranging from evolutionary biology to cognitive neuroscience. Firstly, the authors identify the four basic tenets of evolutionary psychology.

*

Continuing, evidence is presented that there has been substantial genetic change in human beings, even in the last 50,000 years. There is even evidence suggesting that recent human evolution has been affected by human-induced changes in the environment (such as diet, or living conditions). These rapid changes are a challenge for the gradualism, as interpreted by evolutionary psychologists.

To challenge the idea of universalism, the authors cite evidence stressing the ‘malleability’ of the human brain, meaning that experience affects neural circuitry and gene expression in that remarkably complex center of the nervous system. The influence of development is equally stressed, as is the view that the human brain is built through continuous interplay between the individual and the environment. Gene-culture coevolution is also mentioned, signifying that cultural practices could have influenced selection pressures on the human brain.

Finally, massive modularity is questioned, through the existence of domain-general mechanisms (such as associative learning, which is fairly widespread in the animal kingdom), and through the broad involvement of diverse neural structures in many psychological processes.

http://www.science20.com/curious_cub/should_evolutionary_psychology_evolve-81112

________________________-

dont even pretend you do not know there is a lot of controversy with evo babble. and that scientists calls them out.

Science, no, ideology yes. hifiguy Jul 2012 #1
Uh, yeah... I can read, thanks. redqueen Jul 2012 #5
Peer-reviewed science is what it is. hifiguy Jul 2012 #6
Do you understand what those words mean? redqueen Jul 2012 #8
I certainly do. hifiguy Jul 2012 #10
Her methodology is sound I'm sure. redqueen Jul 2012 #12
There is no abusive language and the parallel is appropriate. hifiguy Jul 2012 #17
" you sound like a climate-change denier?"" I am being thoroughly civil here." ah, no. seabeyond Jul 2012 #14
do you have the fainist idea how much you sound like an evo babbler??? seabeyond Jul 2012 #9
The one and ONLY pont I made in post #1 hifiguy Jul 2012 #13
you have made it clear since it made "peer-reviewed academic journal" it is valid. seabeyond Jul 2012 #15
Your statement is faith-based hifiguy Jul 2012 #18
you would be wrong, but dont let that stop you. nt seabeyond Jul 2012 #19
How do you infer Evo? One_Life_To_Give Jul 2012 #2
This part: redqueen Jul 2012 #3
totally amazing tying evo babble to this when from the day girls and boys are born they are taught seabeyond Jul 2012 #11
Actually it is not hard to imagine an experiment hifiguy Jul 2012 #22
there is plenty of documentation that challenges this. you obviously did not read any of it. to me, seabeyond Jul 2012 #23
Actually, I read that link, and most of the comments. hifiguy Jul 2012 #24
unilaterally attack Evolutionary Psychology is to deny that there is any part of human behaviour seabeyond Jul 2012 #25
Jeezus. hifiguy Jul 2012 #26
i can say the same right back at you. so why bother? i have no desire to converse with a person seabeyond Jul 2012 #27
I "throw out insults" hifiguy Jul 2012 #34
I am also having trouble seeing any assertion about natural behavior or evo-psych MadrasT Jul 2012 #4
In addition to the comment quoted in post three, there's this... redqueen Jul 2012 #7
Ahhhhhhhhh MadrasT Jul 2012 #35
evo babble dismisses all of history for the first moment in time. they ignore conditioning, nurture, seabeyond Jul 2012 #16
Explain this: pscot Jul 2012 #28
see... this is exactly the crap i am talking about. you define it thru this period of time seabeyond Jul 2012 #29
Peer reviewed it may be ismnotwasm Jul 2012 #20
there are many explanations about the issues with evo psych. here are 6 major, not even the minor seabeyond Jul 2012 #21
Like clockwork... redqueen Jul 2012 #30
this would be a never ending process we do with women. but hell, lets not consider seabeyond Jul 2012 #31
I guess that writer at iO9 had no problem seizing onto the evo psych angle. redqueen Jul 2012 #32
"the media is probably a prime suspect." seabeyond Jul 2012 #33
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