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More EvoPsych Banalities

Jenny Diski comments on another absurd EvoPsych just-so story. Let's cut to the chase:

Evolutionary psychology holds out no hope for the human race. It offers no expectation that we can learn, or develop beyond pre-determined survival advantages and disadvantages. Worse than that, it tells half-truths about the past and then uses them to determine the present. Even if it were true it would be so dull, so intellectually bereft, that we might as well all curl up and go to sleep until the dusk of time.

I quite agree that such work is rather striking evidence of how science is emptied of the spirit of discovery when in the hands of intellectual hacks.

I say this as someone keenly interested in evolution as a scientific theory. I think it has much to offer the social sciences. But, sadly, it is often used as a appallingly bad metaphor rather than a real biological process, and the result is always the same. It is simply bad science.

adaptive denial

i enjoy the insinuation that if true, it should be appalled. how weak minded would one have to be to avoid understanding adaptive behaviors for fear of not being able to rationally overcome them.

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