Uhh we studied wolves in captivity and learned all we need to know about every single psychological mentality of every vertebrate in the wild including humans. Educate yourself /s
“Do your research!”
Total beta question /s
This is my favorite pseudoscience to shit on. Fundamentally the big problem with it is that there are too many layers of conplexity between psychology and evolution. You can’t ignore genetics and neuroscience if you want to look at how psychology is affected, IF it’s even possible.
I have a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, and while I was a grad student the department-wide punching bag of choice was ev psych. Every year we all lobbied for more guest speakers from that subdiscipline so that we could wine and dine them before their lectures and then devour them in Q&A. Such easy prey, but so little meat on the bones. 🤷♀️
I’m kinda glad this is so heavily contested, because I thought I was some kinda “science denier” for being annoyed that there was some “bEcAuSe OuR aNcEsToRs” explanation for everything.
- Altruism? “CaveBros died without bros.”
- Faith? “Simple explanation of complex universe make ape happy.”
- Complex reasoning? “CaveBros threw selves off cliff or poked predators otherwise.”
- Love? “CaveGals selected for strong sensitive CaveBros.”
(Disclaimer: I’m being intentionally facetious and making these up in an attempt to be funny. This is likely because my ancestors wouldn’t get beaten with sticks if they made funny joke, the funnier ones got to reproduce, but the trait may have diluted over eons, you tell me.)
I respect the desire to understand us, but I also think there’s a subset of people that want to reduce the complex beauty of humanity to cold, mechanical, precictable, reproducible determinism.
They’re easily spotted when they say things like “The concept of the soul is stupid, we’re just a bunch of furless lab accident monkeys that started using tools in an uncaring universe and love is just chemicals mixing because monke needed to maek moar monke.”
I feel like this stance is prized by the types that want to mind-control the world’s humans with ads, or State coercion, or corporate culture. The same types that enthusiastically rave about one day merging all human consciousness with some giant FacebAmazOogleFliX Ai or something. The same types that have no problem leveraging technology to reduce art, poetry, storytelling, relationships, down to algorithms and claim “There’s no difference.”
It disrespects the absolute mind-blowing wonder of humanity and our understanding of it, usually to appear smart or edgy for personal gain. And I’ve personally had enough of it.
THEY are the science deniers! I’m so glad their reign is coming to an end. Their foundational text is hilarious: Oh, the brain is “massively modular.”
Wow, how much modularity qualifies as massive? How about medium modularity? Why not a minimally modular brain?
(By this point in the questioning, the Evolutionary Psychologist has already fled back to his lab where he’s running a study that surveys 12 self-proclaimed incel undergrads to determine what all woman wanted in the Pleistocene.)
I think the other important point to add is that evo psych in popular discourse is rarely used to explain alone. Instead it seems to always lead into the naturalistic fallacy as an explanation for why the world can’t or shouldn’t be kinder, more humane, or less authoritarian. Add on to this that the people making these arguments are usually pretty out of touch with the actual archaeological record about their supposed environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and it’s not at all surprising that whatever legitimate insights it may offer are buried under a mountain of bullshit.
YES!!! 1000x yes!!
It’s an “appeal to authority” argument that’s usually used to justify a cynical and brutal, often fatalistic worldview:
- “Mankind is doomed to destroy itself”,
- “Someone always needs to be in charge, because humans are wired to organize around strong influential figures.”
- “Humans need to always have an enemy to unite against or else they’ll turn on each other.”
- Social darwinism culls “the unfit” who can’t thrive in the “free market.”
- Homo-Economicus
If they’re not a deeply depressed edgy teenager who had a bad church experience once, I find that usually this perspective will be espoused by someone who will use it to justify why they, or people like them, should be in charge of “the masses.” (You get a Bingo if they start bringing up “wolf packs” lmao)
They just want to be able to claim they’re objectively correct. “My view is just science, you can’t argue with science!”
I think it does a lot of damage when people internalize the idea that we’re all just some kind of hungry animals in a zero-sum gladiatorial arena.
BTW love your username+domain :). It’s really refreshing hearing from other intelligent folks who see the good in what we are and what we can be, rather than try to justify the worst of humanity as a “natural constant.”
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
“We studied 10 Americans and generalized the findings to all humans”
“We studied 10
AmericansUndergrads and generalized the findings to all humans”10 undergrads from an intro-to-psych class that held the specter of an A grade above their head to convince them to participate.
Honestly I think a lot of the worst evo psych takes don’t even get as far as hypothesizing or evidence. They fail at the first hurdle of “identify something about the world”. It’s the classic Freudian error of never once asking “hey wait is everyone like this or is it just me?”
There’s the pseudoscience, then there’s the useful stuff. Natural selection is a good rational for human cooperation, for instance, and can be a way to explain why we have a conscience and feel guilt, etc… You know, apes together strong.
Of course, it’s also still hypothetical, but it’s at least better than the philosophical/metaphysical way we explain why we behave ourselves. Just wish the good stuff wasn’t drown out by people with dumb takes.
The problem is there isn’t anything “useful” for understanding humans [in evolutionary psychology]. Yes we can come up with plausible evolutionary justifications for behavior like cooperation, but they are basically untestable and useless for predictions.
Edited to clarify I mean specifically evolutionary psychology.
There’s game theory in human behaviour, very testable and useful.
it’s perfectly usable for predictions, basic evolutionary psychology tells me that humans are hilariously deeply programmed to be social, and knowing that gives you the confidence to make use of it.
Just like monkeys grooming each other, we humans can simply give small gifts or go out of our way to do something nice, and that will create trust between people extremely quickly with barely any effort.
I gave an old dusty xbox to a neighbouring family with kids and that was a significant enough gift that their dad basically instantly classed me as a friend and a few weeks later he came over with homemade pierogis.Just thinking about our evolution and looking a bit at recorded history kinda provides a user manual for being human, honestly.
I agree with your sentiment about positive social interactions being important.
But the thing is, and I think that’s what the poster you were replying to meant, that you need zero knowledge about evolution to notice that. Everyone notices it in daily life. Scientific studies give us evidence about our social nature. If we didn’t know about evolution, the conclusion would still be the same: we are deeply programmed to be social. If the same conclusion is reached with or without a specific piece of information, then that information is useless for predictions, like the previous poster said. Or are you in all seriousness telling me that the reason you gifted your XBox to a kid was that you have an understanding of evolution??? And without that understanding, you wouldn’t have thought of making that gift?
Yes, that is precisely what I was attempting to say. Thanks
There’s probably some link between human genetics and psychology. It makes sense knowing how other mammals work. However the studies are overwhelmingly so flawed and irreproducible that the entire field can be dismissed
“I think, therefore it is true.”
Is shitting on evolutionary psychology the meta in this community?
Like many things, people hate it because of its associations with other things. They will happily throw it out even if it has good uses. Here have some spicy examples:
Some people experience gender dysphoria and may benefit from medical intervention? Nah it got abused by ideological idiots so it must always be bad. Karl Marx says workers must arm themselves? Nah guns are bad, I know this because rightoids like them.
They will happily throw it out even if it has good uses.
Your comment is passive aggressive criticism without any substance. I’m going to challenge you to back up that claim. Name the good uses.
Bad by association and the hivemind are my faves, I particular enjoy:
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“Evolutionary psychology is inherently bad, useless, and only stupid people could have such thoughts. Science as I understand it is the only valid way of thinking.”
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“Dosing a population with fluoride via tap water is inherently a 100% good thing and to question it implies ones utter stupidity, drugging a population this way with any other substance would be unthinkable though.”
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“Guns for civilians have no use other than school shootings, no good person should want a gun they must be banned.”
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“Boomers caused all of our problems, despite the fact that I also willingly participate in all the harmful systems that caused these problems.”
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So that’s what’s going on. I had a feeling everyone dunking on it didn’t actually know anything about psychology. Glad to know it’s just pettiness.
