Evolutionary Psychology

Not going to contribute much, but my favourite Evo Psych 'fact' is that women like pink because they picked berries. Completely ignoring the fact that pink was for a long time a male colour, up until half a century ago.

While understanding the background of variious biopsychological elemnt of humans is interesting, most of evolutionary psychology is based on rather broad stroke guesses about prehistorical humans. And most of the time, it's not something that's really relevant to this day and age. Being adept at big game hunting doesn't really prove anything when most of us might live our entire lives without once seeing the animals we get our food from.

I blame Hard on Soft Science.

Social gendering may be an inevitable source of error, but that doesn't mean we can't examine the role innate biological differences may have had in this. I would think that analysis of biological differences would already be taking social gendering into account, if only because the two subjects are so interconnected anyway; I doubt such gendering would have even come up if not for there already being noticeable differences in the first place.

To dismiss talk of innate differences by saying we do not know if they may be a self-fulfilling prophecy leads nowhere.

The problem with evolutionary psychology is that it's pretty much inherently unfalsifiable. You can't even do experiments.

My take on the subject is that it's a valid field of research but that it's still too young. There is no established mechanism for seperating inherent traits from cultural traits as far as I know. We don't really know enough about it to draw conclusions. The other problem is if it leads to results that are culturally not wanted. I think the worst critics of that field of subject would largely support it if certain conclusions would vehemently agree with them. Bias is not only a problem with researchers but also with people who judge the validity of the research.

I don't think the concept in itself is unfalsifiable. I think a more interesting starting point than the male vs female stuff would be to look at the development and dynamic of children growing up. Analyzing common or even universal traits of the behaviour of children. Once you got this down you could try to make predictions how children react to a different environment. Which would allow testing if it's wrong or correct => falsifiability

I think ~50 years from now on it will be a more established and well criticized field of science. It just needs time.

I pretty much agree. Evopsych has the potential to become a legitimate field of study, but it isn't really one yet.

My feelings on EP are mixed. On the one hand, I think it's stupid to claim that humans evolved to have no mental sexual dimorphism. On the other hand, these differences are evidently small enough that they don't impede an egalitarian technological society, and such a society would probably evolve them straight back out in not too many generations.

The problem with evolutionary psychology isn't that it's too young. It's been around since at least the beginning of the 20th century, predating cognitive psychology, which has a pretty good track record.

I can't exactly say what the problem is, though I think part of it has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology at all, and more to do with the awful, sensationalist studies being the ones most likely to get picked up by the press, since it's a lot easier to sell hyperbolic, controversial bullshit.

The best evolutionary psychology book I've read so far is How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker. There are two principles which he uses to explain human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective: the computational theory of mind, which compares the brain to a supercomputer built to help the body survive and reproduce; and reverse engineering, which looks at what we have now and tries to extrapolate from that what it evolved to do. I found you get the best results when you know a little bit about artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology before you start reading the book, but all the same it is accessible if you haven't.

One of the more interesting chapters was Good Ideas, in which he explains how the way we think shows evolutionary influences. A good example is when he considers logical fallacies: if you think the brain is a sort of truth-finder organ, your best explanation for why people still make such mistakes is that they don't have all the information available, or are being lied to, or have a problem with the way they think. But in that case, why do we make mistakes in chains of reasoning rather than in whether the premises are true or not? One answer is that, at least in the original environment, fallacies actually weren't fallacies at all, but were heuristics that did well enough to match the modern environment (similar to the principle behind Optimal Foraging Theory).

The Gambler's Fallacy, for instance, would not have been a fallacy precisely because the conditions aren't met - events don't occur independently of each other, or they aren't fair, or it really is more likely to expect a change after a long period of stability (such as with weather patterns). People are more likely to believe something is there, even if it really isn't, than to believe something isn't there when it really is, because in the foraging past the costs of running away from the occasional imagined predator (a slight expenditure of energy) would have been less severe than the costs of failing to notice an occasional predator (wounding or death), and unless you don't know a predator is there for certain, you have to make a choice.

Given how successful evolutionary biology has proven to be, and notwithstanding the general public's majority opinions, I think it's only a matter of time before evolutionary psychology becomes a prominent and respected subject in its own right, perhaps even integral to modern culture.

edited 28th Oct '11 7:10:05 AM by BlueChameleon