
Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology - doener
https://gizmodo.com/this-philosopher-is-challenging-all-of-evolutionary-psy-1842248835
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tgv
Is this serious? Or is this a "I don't like evolutionary psychology, so I'm
going to throw the problems of the entire field at it"?

The matching critique doesn't make any sense to me, because it's a fundamental
assumption behind evolutionary psychology, from which it derives hypotheses.

But this quote:

"Now, one of my major charges with evolutionary psychologists is that they go
to the ordinary folks, college students, and they ask them questions about
such intimate things like their sexual behavior. We know that people are
wanting to not be honest about such matters, and, of course, evolutionary
psychologists are aware of this. The second issue is that the answers given to
these sorts of questions are then generalized to humanity in general."

also disqualifies clinical, educational and social psychology.

For a much more thorough critique of social sciences, see Tal Yarkoni's
upcoming paper "The generalizability crisis" (in BBS, I believe).

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tannhauser23
She's explaining why she doesn't think the "fundamental assumption behind
evolutionary psychology" is valid - that is a wholly legitimate critique.
After all, "shape of a person's skull informs his mental and emotional
characteristics" is a fundamental assumption of phrenology, but we certain
argue against it.

~~~
tgv
But we only can argue against it, because we can verify it isn't true.
Hypotheses generated by the phrenological assumptions simply don't hold. Heck,
even astrology can be tested.

She's free to attack shoddy papers, of course: the harder, the better, I say.
But that doesn't disprove anything.

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Dumblydorr
Her main premise is the that the matching problem can not possibly be solved.
This problem is that we think our brains have matching regions and matching
behaviors to our very ancient, hunter gatherer ancestors. Her contention is
that we can never study these ancient minds and behaviors, so we can never be
certain of any evolutionary psychology.

Is that summation adequate? She is not well known, I haven't read her
dissertation, just the interview on gizmodo, not exactly the best science
website.

~~~
commandlinefan
> not exactly the best science website

The first link in the article goes to another gizmodo article titled "the rise
of the evolutionary psychology douchebag", so I'd add "not exactly the least
biased website" to that as well.

~~~
Chris2048
> We at Gizmodo have long rolled our eyes at the often-nonsensical conclusions
> that some people come to when employing evolutionary psychology theory

And what qualifies the thoughts of "We at Gizmodo"? Writers at a pop-tech
buzzfeed-a-like that became possessed by the ghost of Gawker?

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randallsquared
Surely the hypothesis about modules as discrete physical structures is not
central to the idea that genes influence psychology? If you accept that genes
control some aspects of psychology through effects on the brain and the
construction thereof, then evolution can select for psychological features.
Lack of rigor is an important thing to call out, of course. Also, if I'm wrong
and the whole field depends on some specific model of how genes influence the
brain, then that would be interesting, but she doesn't seem to be arguing that
directly.

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throwaway894345
This would have been a more interesting article if they had people from the
evo psych camp respond to the claims. It seems like Gizmodo wanted to do a
"Boom!" takedown of evo psyche ("We at Gizmodo have long rolled our eyes at
evolutionary psychology..."). Anyway, the philosopher purports to address a
fundamental flaw in the evo psyche framework/theory, but she seems to be
simply taking issue with methodological issues: she alleges that evo psyche
draws broad conclusions about all of humanity by interviewing a few college
students--effectively she seems to allege that the field lacks rigor (which is
odd because she also disclaims that individual evo psychologists are serious
thinkers). If her characterization is accurate, this is indeed a real problem,
but it's not a flaw in the framework and it hardly feels deserving of the
sensational headline or the disparaging, condescending tone of the article (to
be clear, only the Gizmodo editorializing comes off as
condescending/disparaging; the philosopher is quite a lot more
polite/reasonable).

~~~
jacknews
I agree, she has a point, but then evolutionary psychologists don't only use
'made up' behaviors from imaginary cavemen in their extrapolations, but actual
observed behaviors from other species, such as chimpanzees.

I think this is where we enter the twilight zone.

We have a story featuring a quite attractive and strong-looking colored woman,
apparently challenging the evolutionary narrative, which has all too often
been used to justify racial oppression.

Good for her.

But who is actually pushing this story?

Gizmodo is all about clicks and 'engagement'

Are they, really, trying to champion, or ridicule, this research, do they even
care?

IMHO the research seems flawed, but in any case, regardless of where we came
from, we should just get on with the fact that we are all going forward,
together.

~~~
throwaway894345
> But who is actually pushing this story? Gizmodo is all about clicks and
> 'engagement'. Are they, really, trying to champion, or ridicule, this
> research, do they even care?

I'm not really sure, but it smells fishy. What are lay people supposed to make
of this article? We aren't qualified to evaluate the philosopher's critique
and there is no counterpoint presented. Why should we trust her position over
the other, presumably larger group of experts? Gizmodo was pretty transparent
about its own biases in the first couple of paragraphs. Seems like this
article could be reduced to the headline, "Publication finds expert to
reinforce its own priors".

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diffrinse
I gotta say I'm surprised at the shallowness of the interpretations here. Very
hasty stuff.

Her speech is very humanities academic and this being a casual interview she's
not in a rush to lay it all out in one paragraph. She's claiming we haven't
eliminated a number of possibilities about how brain structure works and how
that transmits over generations. Concretely, (a) we don't know just how
plastic the brain is and whether the brain someone has today has identical
locations for behavioral responses to someone in the past _across the board_ ,
(b) we don't know if cultural behavioral selection dictates brain structure
transmission over generations; and (c) we don't know if behavioral control
locations (what she's calling "modules") don't _move_ over generations
regardless of the questions about cultural selection:

>We know that ancient humans avoided predation, for instance. What exactly
they did is something evolutionary psychologists have to show. Did our
ancestors avoid predation because they were good at hiding in bushes or
because they were running? Evolutionary psychologists would say that the
better explanation is that they were running. But the fact that they ran to
avoid predation and the fact that we have the disposition to run when we’re
endangered still does not establish that there’s a singular module doing both
of those jobs.

These are real questions because we know the brain is plastic and it's not a
bone, so unlike paleontology they have no physical evidence to base their
speculation on the past on.

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danaliv
Here's the paper, no paywall:
[https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?sh...](https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?shared_access_token=ZBkIZa1YiuE0LQx8Ahma9fe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6oc4laM4TmJijVKMoolnjpDhDOnhV8TTTUcQLqNu74B-gNKznqYTlhLGXnnYrIM4MaBSV38YtYwukwnpokq9XnfTUGyB6mvKA-
zVrAg-MXHA%3D%3D)

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commandlinefan
Her entire premise seems to be "it's impossible to know for sure what happened
in the past, so there's no point in speculating about it". This... doesn't
seem very academic to me.

~~~
jasonpeacock
The problem isn't that we're speculating about it, the problem is that we're
basing (scientific) assumptions about current behavior on speculations about
past behavior which has no evidence to support it.

~~~
commandlinefan
So... "it might be wrong, therefore it's definitely wrong"?

~~~
jasonpeacock
More like "there's no evidence that supports it, so why are we assuming it's
right?"

There's no way to test any of their theories, and there's no historical
evidence to support them. It's more like religion than science.

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jacknews
Sometimes I think we live in a hall of mirrors.

~~~
EVdotIO
It almost seems deliberate to make things as subjective and opaque as
possible. You know who else operate in this way? Grifters

Sure, there are tons of over simplifications or extrapolating data which
support narratives in evolutionary psychology, especially on the pop psych end
of things. The humanities are full of ideology in search of evidence. But
this... modules of thought? That has to be some of the dumbest reductionist
pigeonholing I've heard in a moment. Let's completely throw out what we know
about neurology, endocrinology or biology as a whole, because... it makes me
feel uncomfortable?

We are getting conned folks.

