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Evolutionary Psychology: It Would Be a Great Idea
I'm all for evolutionary psychology. After all, evolution is one of the great achievements of science. Psychology (and sociology and anthropology) should be informed by biology, just as they should obey the laws of chemistry and physics. I'm all for evolutionary psychology. I just wish someone would develop one.
What passes for evo-psych now is just discredited sociobiology is a cheap tuxedo. Evolution is a biological process, not a metaphor. I don't think it is too much to ask that proponents of a scientific evolutionary psychology understand evolution. Nor do I think it is too much to ask that any scientific theory be based on empirical data and not elaborations of stereotypes and just-so stories that appeal to those stereotypes.
Like I said, evolutionary psychology — it would be a great idea.
I've just finished reading the chapter on evo-psych in Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography. It is a thorough and amusing fisking of the testosterone-fueled musings of Evolutionary Psychology. Angier, a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, splendidly reduces this pseudo-science to its essence:
In the Darwin-o-gram reckoning of human nature, a stereotype is not an intellectual pitfall to guard against; it's an opportunity! What is a stereotype if not an expression of a potentially universal truth, which means it could be the signpost of an adaptation, a trait that might have conferred selective advantage on those who bore it? All of which merits further exploration by the distribution of a questionnaire to a couple of hundred willing college students to see whether or not they believe the stereotype to be true.
This currently fashionable dreck is bad science in the service of boorish sexism. Thank goodness for astute, eloquent writers such as Angier for exposing EP for what it is. It will be all but impossible to create a real evolutionary psychology as long as this self-satisfied, intellectually lazy version is holding court in the social sciences.
- By Professor Shortell at Jun 4 2008 - 6:48pm
- Professor Shortell's blog
- 3538 reads
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. -- IWW
In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged. -- Bertrand Russell
Let us strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest. -- Denis Diderot
It's not that no one sees the straight line to Doomtown we've been on since Reagan, it's that there's big profits in it. The most superficially Christian and Other-Worldly-Yearning nation in the developed world is the one most likely to kill you for your shoes. -- Doghouse Riley
The true purpose of education is to try to foster in students a kind of critical cosmopolitanism, such that they learn, among other things, to question any notion that one’s nation or tribe is favored by God or destiny. -- Michael Bérubé
It is not enough to decry the existence of the Spectacle. We intend to use both art and theory as a battering ram against Capitalism and its false opposition, tribalism, in all of its mystical forms. We believe it is possible to move beyond the inexcusable savagery of everyday life. -- The Anti-Naturals
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