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This is my favorite pseudoscience to shit on. Fundamentally the big problem with it is that there are too many layers of conplexity between psychology and evolution. You can't ignore genetics and neuroscience if you want to look at how psychology is affected, IF it's even possible.
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
"We studied 10 Americans and generalized the findings to all humans"
"We studied 10
AmericansUndergrads and generalized the findings to all humans"10 undergrads from an intro-to-psych class that held the specter of an A grade above their head to convince them to participate.
at least use the same species, jeez
But also culture is influenced heavily by our evolution, but also also our evolution has been shaped by our cultures, and oh god it's all spiraling in on itself
the problem IMO is just that people try to force more detail out of studying this than can sensibly be had, basically all i'm confident in concluding from evolutionary psychology is that humans are inherently social to an absurd degree, and contrary to what a lot of people want to believe people do not suck, they just end up doing bad things due to circumstances.
Pepole are inherently good and we need to take care to dismantle the societal structures that make us be not good.
I'm kinda glad this is so heavily contested, because I thought I was some kinda "science denier" for being annoyed that there was some "bEcAuSe OuR aNcEsToRs" explanation for everything.
- Altruism? "CaveBros died without bros."
- Faith? "Simple explanation of complex universe make ape happy."
- Complex reasoning? "CaveBros threw selves off cliff or poked predators otherwise."
- Love? "CaveGals selected for strong sensitive CaveBros."
(Disclaimer: I'm being intentionally facetious and making these up in an attempt to be funny. This is likely because my ancestors wouldn't get beaten with sticks if they made funny joke, the funnier ones got to reproduce, but the trait may have diluted over eons, you tell me.)
I respect the desire to understand us, but I also think there's a subset of people that want to reduce the complex beauty of humanity to cold, mechanical, precictable, reproducible determinism.
They're easily spotted when they say things like "The concept of the soul is stupid, we're just a bunch of furless lab accident monkeys that started using tools in an uncaring universe and love is just chemicals mixing because monke needed to maek moar monke."
I feel like this stance is prized by the types that want to mind-control the world's humans with ads, or State coercion, or corporate culture. The same types that enthusiastically rave about one day merging all human consciousness with some giant FacebAmazOogleFliX Ai or something. The same types that have no problem leveraging technology to reduce art, poetry, storytelling, relationships, down to algorithms and claim "There's no difference."
It disrespects the absolute mind-blowing wonder of humanity and our understanding of it, usually to appear smart or edgy for personal gain. And I've personally had enough of it.
I think the other important point to add is that evo psych in popular discourse is rarely used to explain alone. Instead it seems to always lead into the naturalistic fallacy as an explanation for why the world can't or shouldn't be kinder, more humane, or less authoritarian. Add on to this that the people making these arguments are usually pretty out of touch with the actual archaeological record about their supposed environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and it's not at all surprising that whatever legitimate insights it may offer are buried under a mountain of bullshit.
YES!!! 1000x yes!!
It's an "appeal to authority" argument that's usually used to justify a cynical and brutal, often fatalistic worldview:
- "Mankind is doomed to destroy itself",
- "Someone always needs to be in charge, because humans are wired to organize around strong influential figures."
- "Humans need to always have an enemy to unite against or else they'll turn on each other."
- Social darwinism culls "the unfit" who can't thrive in the "free market."
- Homo-Economicus
If they're not a deeply depressed edgy teenager who had a bad church experience once, I find that usually this perspective will be espoused by someone who will use it to justify why they, or people like them, should be in charge of "the masses." (You get a Bingo if they start bringing up "wolf packs" lmao)
They just want to be able to claim they're objectively correct. "My view is just science, you can't argue with science!"
I think it does a lot of damage when people internalize the idea that we're all just some kind of hungry animals in a zero-sum gladiatorial arena.
BTW love your username+domain :). It's really refreshing hearing from other intelligent folks who see the good in what we are and what we can be, rather than try to justify the worst of humanity as a "natural constant."
THEY are the science deniers! I’m so glad their reign is coming to an end. Their foundational text is hilarious: Oh, the brain is “massively modular.”
Wow, how much modularity qualifies as massive? How about medium modularity? Why not a minimally modular brain?
(By this point in the questioning, the Evolutionary Psychologist has already fled back to his lab where he’s running a study that surveys 12 self-proclaimed incel undergrads to determine what all woman wanted in the Pleistocene.)
I have a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, and while I was a grad student the department-wide punching bag of choice was ev psych. Every year we all lobbied for more guest speakers from that subdiscipline so that we could wine and dine them before their lectures and then devour them in Q&A. Such easy prey, but so little meat on the bones. 🤷♀️