Science

DreamGypsy

(2,252 posts) Mon Sep 10, 2012, 04:08 PM Sep 2012

The Just So Stories of Evolutionary Psychology...

An article in the latest New Yorker - It Ain't Necessarily So - presents some very interesting and entertaining perspectives on, and criticisms of, evolutionary psychology. The article was a very good read.

Here are some random teasers:

Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labeling any trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. When it comes to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed.

snip

This (human) mind is regarded as a set of software modules that were written by natural selection and now constitute a universal human nature. We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone. Work out what those apps are—so the theory goes—and you will see what the mind was designed to do.

snip

The exception is the differences between men and women: evolutionary psychologists are greatly concerned with sex, and with women’s bodies. Barash speculates at length on why women don’t have something similar to chimps’ bright-pink sexual swellings to advertise their most fertile time of the month. There are several ways, he thinks, in which female hominids could have boosted their reproductive success by concealing their time of ovulation.

snip

It’s not inconceivable that in a hundred and fifty years today’s folk wisdom about the sexes will sound as ridiculous as Darwin’s. It will surely look a bit quaint. Sexual mores can shift quickly: American women reared during the nineteen-sixties were nearly ten times as likely as those reared earlier to have had sex with five or more partners before the age of twenty, according to a 1994 study. As for women’s supposedly inborn preference for wealth and status in a mate, one wonders how much can be inferred from behavior in a world that seems always to have been run by and for men

Enjoy the article. A DU search revealed some other threads on evolutionary psychology, so hopefully we can get some good discussion going.

Thanks for your time.

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The Just So Stories of Evolutionary Psychology... (Original Post) DreamGypsy Sep 2012 OP

Good article. longship Sep 2012 #1

longship

(40,416 posts)

1. Good article.

Reply to DreamGypsy (Original post)

Mon Sep 10, 2012, 06:09 PM

Sep 2012

Evolutionary psychologists are fighting a real battle. They are undoubtedly correct that the brain -- human or otherwise -- is an evolutionary development. It is also probably true that behavior is at least partially congenital.

But biologists are very uncomfortable with this explanation as well as the specific explanations by evolutionary psychologists.

Human behavior is extraordinarily complex. To connect genetics to behavior is -- to put it mildly -- a messy affair.

Richard Dawkins -- no wilted lily on evolution -- even states the same. It is, at best, a dodgy science. But here's the take-away. It almost has to be true, something Dawkins even admits simply because the brain is itself an evolutionary developed organ.

The Moonshine in evol psych is that anybody has any idea of how behavior works in context of evolutionary biology. If we knew that, our society might be better off. But heaven help us all if this comes to be solved and humankind plunges again into social Darwinism.

A good, and thoughtful, read.

Happy to R&K

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