Home » Blogs » Professor Shortell's blog

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.

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.

  • By Jesse (not verified) at Jun 5 2008 - 4:40pm
  • reply

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.

  • By Professor Shortell at Jun 6 2008 - 1:49pm
  • reply

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <img> <blockquote> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.