This is in response to alterego, who wanted a thread solely on the topic. He began with an argument about the evolutionary basis for religion. I answered that there was no evidence for his theory and ample evidence against it. The debate will, I hope, be continued here.
I made my stance on evolutionary psychology known in this thread, that stance being that it’s a load of crap. The main points being:
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Any child can tell the difference between traits we choose and traits we don’t choose. Eye color, hair color, height, shape of nose, number of legs: these things are inherited, and no amount of will can change them. On the other hand, behaviors such as mating habits, intellectual life, and emotional attachments result from our choices. We can (and often do) choose to change our minds about all those topics. Since our genome remains the same throughout our life, this can’t be explained by our genes.
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None of the genes in question have ever actually been found. Thousands of scientists at numerous labs all over the world have poured billions of dollars into matching genes with traits. The genes for numerous physical traits have been found, as have some genes for brain structures, but none for the traits that evolutionary psychology demands.
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Evolutionary psychology assumes that genes can do anything. If you can imagine the behavior, there’s a gene for it. But genes are not magic. They are bits of DNA that encode for proteins. There’s no explanation for how a protein would create the very precise behaviors that evolutionary psychology demands.
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Lastly, those who say we’re evolved to do certain things can’t agree on what we’re evolved to do. Ask ten different theorists and you’ll get ten different and contradictory lists of traits that we inherited from our caveman ancestors, with ten different stories for how those traits came about.
The main response in that thread was on the issue of human universals. Certain traits are universal, and thus can only be explained by a common genetic heritage. As I see it there are three basic ways to establish a human universal.
A) Make it up. One such instance is recorded here.
No evidence is offered that this is a human universal. It’s merely stated and supposed to be accepted at face value.
B) Take a survey, usually quite small, of a certain group in an industrialized nation in the 21st century, and declare that the results of the survey prove a human universal. This article, for example, looks at a case where color preferences were traced back to our caveman ancestors. Women like pink because cavewomen picked berries (which are red, not pink) and men like blue because cavemen liked looking at the blue sky. This was determined by polling 200 young adults in England.
http://www.badscience.net/2007/08/pink-pink-pink-pink-pink-moan/#more-518
The result is not universal in either time or space. In other countries, such as China the “girls prefer pink, boys prefer blue” idea did not prevail at all. In fact, the opposite holds true. And as recently as the early 20th century, pink was the color for tough, manly men in England as well. So again we have a human universal that isn’t universal.
C) Lastly, some people take an official list of human universals. This one seems to be popular on the internet.
http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
No information is given about the methodology behind the list. We’re just supposed to accept this as a list of human universals, and apparently believed that the only possible explanation for this is a common genetic heritage coming from our caveman ancestors.
Most things on the list, if not all, fall into one of two categories. There’s the things that result from straightforward logic, and there’s the things that aren’t universal. In the first category we have things such as the number two, the color black, medicine, antonyms, child care, etc… These things either exist in the physical world or are logical responses to the facts of human existence. (Children cannot care for themselves and thus need care, for instance.) Others, such as magic or gender roles, are not universal among humans.
So in short, I am not convinced by the human universal “proof” and I still see no evidence that human beliefs, preferences, and behaviors are shaped, in whole or in part, by genes.
Genetics play a larger role than most people think. Evolutionary psychology is 90% bullshit. It has many valid results, but the reasoning for the results is often misapplied or speculative.