Navigation
User login
About This Site
If you would like to register an account at WWDD? send an email to webmaster AT shortell DOT org with your name and email address. Anonymous users can post comments, but with restrictions.
Best viewed with Firefox. (If you aren't using Firefox, what is wrong with you? At the very least you should upgrade to IE 7.)
Recent blog posts
Recent comments
- "Sick" is relative. Also
38 weeks 1 day ago - More evidence
40 weeks 2 days ago - LOLbservational selection
40 weeks 3 days ago - Additional details
40 weeks 4 days ago - Again, you're being too biased in favor of humans
40 weeks 4 days ago - Nonsense
40 weeks 4 days ago - You are too biased in favor of the human race
40 weeks 4 days ago - What a Silly Question
40 weeks 4 days ago - And......?
40 weeks 4 days ago - The Main Point
40 weeks 5 days ago
Agitate!
- Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
- P.E.T.A.
- Skeptic's Dictionary
- Free Inquiry
- Art Conspiracy
- Infoshop
- Village Voice
- New York City Free Press
- Institute for Anarchist Studies
- Anarchists in NYC
- Left Turn
- NYC Independent Media Center
- NeverCalm.com
- Adbusters
- Work Less Party
- TomPaine.com
- Carnival of the Godless
- B.A.R.F.
- Air America Radio
- Secular Coalition for America
Guardian Unlimited
Inside Higher Ed
Scientific American
- If Darwin were a sports psychologist: Evolution and athletics
- Sushi chef, restaurant charged with serving whale
- Researchers Gain New Insights into the Mystery of Thalidomide-Caused Birth Defects
- A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator
- Floor Plan: Linoleum May Be Green, but Is There an Ecofriendly Way to Keep It Clean?
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
- 2923 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
All content on this site is copyright © by Professor Timothy Shortell, unless retained by the original owners. No infringement of rights is intended or implied. Contact: webmaster AT shortell DOT org
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
Smartest Blogs in North America
Sites I Read
DISCLAIMER: For those readers a little slow on the uptake—you know who you are—please keep in mind that the messages I post to this weblog reflect my own views as a private individual and do not represent any institution or organization with which I might be affiliated. Messages posted by other authors express their views and not necessarily those of the management. For the comments policy, consult the terms of use.
Dangerous Theorizing!
Electronic Frontier Foundation
- FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge
- EFF and Sheppard Mullin Defend Wikipedia in Defamation Case
- Congress Must Investigate Electronic Searches at U.S. Borders
- Betrayed MSN Music Customers Deserve More from Microsoft
- EFF Report: FBI Slowed Terror Investigation with Improper NSL Request
London Review of Books
New York Mets
Syndicate
Evolution should probably be
Evolution should probably be in the background for every psychology paper written, separating the studies that do and do not include evolution is probably just an effort to include it more often.
I think the big problem with the 'just-so' crap I've read frequently is that it's stuck in an adaptionist ideal, that for some reason every human trait evolved because it improved fitness. But that's far from the case.
Just-so Crap
You are correct. There is a very loose tendency to see everything as adaptive. This tendency is enabled by the lack of empirical data about the environment of evolutionary adaptation, otherwise knows as the Stone Age. Almost anything can be made to sound plausible about why some contemporary behavior was adaptive in the EEA. Women prefer pink? Well that's because women, as gatherers in the EEA, were selected to find edible berries, which happened to be reddish. Etc. It is all remarkably lazy twaddle.
The main concern in current EP, just as in sociobiology, is sex differences. The most popular story — that men are oversexed and polygamous and women are the opposite — is contradicted by almost all of the actual empirical evidence, and especially, primate studies. But the story is based on a powerful stereotype, so it has traction.
The ubiquitous cultural taboos about female sexuality should be sufficient evidence to silence the stereotype; there would be no need for so many sanctions against female promiscuity or, even, sexual enjoyment, if not for the fear that women seek sex just as men do. (You could argue that all religions are just fancy edifices to justify male control of female desire.)
That so much EP is devoted to justifying this stereotype against the empirical facts is very revealing of the fundamentally unscientific nature of the current perspective.
reply
There are a number of areas in which philosophical work on evolutionary psychology will be fruitful.There are huge numbers of empirical hypotheses that bear on our conception of our moral psychology that demand philosophical scrutiny includes a survey of a wide range of such hypotheses. Also, work on moral psychology and the emotions can be drawn together via work on evolutionary psychology and related fields.
az spas
hello
Very good article thank you...
Literature Throughout the Ages
Is there really an evo-psych? Has human nature really changed? Read the literature throughout the ages, fictional and non-fictional. The reason why some of them remain timeless is because it can still be applied today. As for stereotypes, well, that seems like an entirely different matter since it's linked with evo-psych (a subject matter deserving of an entire volume all by itself).
--------
OliviaB.
Seattle DUI lawyer
reply
Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them.
marirea sanilor
Post new comment