I think the berries one I posted above is a fair enough example of the type of thing I mean.
The problem with claims made by people calling themselves Feminists is that they have already made their minds up, and then cherrypick things to prove their case.
This is not science.
True, but nobody is saying feminism is a science. Let’s keep this discussion focused on evolutionary psychology, not feminism.
Forgive me for jumping in on a topic I don’t know much about, but it appears to me that there’s three separate arguments here:
- Men prefer to mate with younger women
- This preference has evolved over time, and
- Men with this preference had or have an evolutionary advantage over men who don’t.
The examples you cited can prove point #1, but I don’t see how anyone can prove points 2 or 3. And without either of those points, all you have is a collection of observations and experiments about human behavior, which is also called sociology.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing I mean - people prove their observations, and then act like it proves their theory.
I think it’s worth mentioning that even if you disagree with a lot of the claims being made by self-described evolutionary psychologists, the field as defined by the topic just CAN’T be nonsense. Humans evolved and the evolution of the brain was a really important part of that. Many of the constraints that shaped the evolution of the brain affect current brain structure and function. I can’t imagine how this could be disputed. Seeing as this relationship certainly exists, the study of it (per se) can’t be a pseudoscience. But people (even most people in the field) can certainly do bad evolutionary psychology.
But it seems like a lot of the claims which can be made by evolutionary psychology are either so vague as to be useless, or so specific as to be unprovable.
Maybe it’s a social science like sociology, but I have yet to see any claim made by evopsych as a theory that can be proved empirically.
The paper is not the one discussed in your news article. The paper is also “correspondence” which is possibly not peer-reviewed or rigorously peer-reviewed. On the top right of the page you can link to the HTML full article. I want to show you something about the structure of the abstract and the article itself.
An abstract is meant to be a summary of a full article. It’s their so that the prospective reader knows whether to read the article or not. Every full article, even correspondence has a structure of (1) Introduction, (2) Methods, (3) Results, (4) Discussion, (5) References. The introduction introduces the background and rationale for performing the study. The method describes how the study was done. The results gives the outcome of the data in isolation from any opinion. The discussion addresses the relevance of the results to the background and rationale provided in the introduction and then can become the author’s craziest speculations. It’s the opportunity for a scientist to let their hair down.
So an abstract typically has 5-10 sentences:
(1) 1 -2 sentences from the introduction, usually specifying the hypothesis tested
(2) 1 -2 sentences about the methods
(3) 1 -2 sentences for the important results
(4) 1 -2 sentences about the discussion
Notice where the “hunter-gatherer” sentence is in the abstract? The last part of the last sentence. When you look at the full article (thankfully free) you see that they never mention hunter-gatherer until the end of the letter and it’s not the rationale for doing their study. Their main rationale is looking at gender differences in preference.
So that is why I do not take such after the fact statements as “just so stories”. They are just-so stories. I agree with you there, but they’re the unhindered thoughts of a researcher.
It looks that way but I find it interesting that no publication information is provided. This could just be the university’s public relations department advertising a student’s results. I could be wrong but I don’t think its a peer-reviewed source and like I just said, it’s probably the crazy speculations of the authors in the latter part of their discussion.
Some of this could also be unseasoned graduate students or undergraduate researchers feeling pressured to contextualize their findings in some big popular field of research. It’s something I found very annoying.
A sociologist might argue that men are socialized to prefer young women. If it were the case then the pattern would be adolescents preferring their own age with continuing disparity between the male’s age and female’s age, on average, as men grew older. That’s not what happens though. The three results show that males consistently prefer females that are of maximal fertility. The real hard part for people to understand is that these mechanisms by which we might be making judgements concerning mating are not perfect and that their are other factors involved which helps to explain why 60-year old males are mating with 40-year old females on that island but not 22-year old females.
So sociologists would not propose that life history strategies influence male mate preference. Ethologists would do that, and the implicit, frequently tested hypothesis in ethology is this class of behaviors evolved over time. They would propose that culture and learning are the only factors influencing mate preference. Psychologists would be more accepting of biologically-based arguments and evolutionary psychologists would take the extra step to utilize theories concerned with the evolution of behavior patterns developed from behavioral ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology and the like. I hope that explains the difference between sociology and psychology to you.
All that I said really only addresses point #1. Point #2 is more complicated. I doubt any satisfactory evidence can be obtained to support the idea specifically for humans. Our best attempts are model organisms and how sexual compatibility drives the evolution of populations into species. Sexual compatibility refers to everything from matching numbers of chromosomes to penises and vaginas that work together to get the perm and egg to the right place. As humans evolved, males must have had to adapt their behavior to mate with females of maximal fertility…
Leading to point #3 which requires lots of modeling and testing. A simple thought exercise would serve to get you started: Which males will sire more offspring? The males that adjust the preferred age to maximally fertile females or always try to mate with females their same age? How about males that always tried to mate with females 10 years older than themselves? To some extent this could be testable y looking at males who put differing amounts of energy into mating with females at maximal fertility and see how many children and grandchildren they have on average. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were already studies like this.
On the other hand, sociologists would never propose this model, would never test it, and would not even consider it.
This discussion is as much about how scientists frame and perform research than anything else. Due to this I want to say something about “prove”. No modern scientist says their findings “prove” anything. They say their data supports the hypothesis, the test of which tested a theory.
That’s the pattern you see in the studies.
Your criticisms of their interpretations are fine, but they’d be better if you presented a testable hypothesis that explains why the behavior occurs in the pattern that it does. If not, then the supported evolutionary psychology theory is the best one available.
But I don’t see how looking at male choices now can give you any information about human 100,000 years ago, or proto-humans 500,000 years ago, or 2 million years ago, when our psychology would have been evolving. At best, you’d be documenting modern behavioral patterns, recording their effectiveness, and then doing a whole heap of speculating.
I understand any time you get into archaeology there’s going to be a fair amount of speculation, but there’s a difference between saying “I think this dinosaur was a plant eater because he has cow-like teeth,” and, “I think Og preferred younger women because” when we really have no idea if Og preferred younger women in the first place.
Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you know it’s not the one discussed? I followed the reference back from each one and that’s the eventual link I found. My longer quote in the follow up is from the full text of the article.
Your point about it not being published is a good one, and is very much part of what I’m trying to get at. The authors of the paper I linked made speculations about the reasons for the results they found which they based on evopsych. You’re right in saying that it wasn’t the main point of their paper, and was presented as a hypothesis, but the media jumped all over it and published “OMG, Women like pink proven, because they gathered berries.” But a lot of what get’s published (in general newspapers) in evopsych is like this. Hence my suspicion of the whole field.
If you could point me to some evopsych results which are generally accepted by the scientific community, I’d be grateful. Because all that ever filters down to the mainstream seems to be ridiculous.
Actually, to be more specific, if you could point me to an evopsych study where they have evidence in support of their actual hypothesis (as opposed to evidence to support the behaviour upon which they base the hypothesis) I’d be very interested.
I think it’s a lot like etymology.
In the hands of professionals using rigorous methods, it can yield some really interesting results. It’s pretty amazing, for example, how they can trace pre-historic population movements by looking at how languages languages relate to each other.
But in the hands of most people? 90% of it is bullshit, and the bullshit factor has a direct correlation to how “cute” the story is, and how much it supports some political point you are making. If someone tells you that “posh” means “port outward, starboard inward” you can be pretty sure it is just something someone made up. Same with evolutionary psychology. For the most part, it’s just modern mythology for the scientific age, but without the testability of science.
Of course we have instincts, and those underly everything we do. That’s not up to question. Nobody credible believes in a “blank slate.” The question here is not “Do we have instincts” but “How capable are we of drawing meaningful connections between our actions in modern society and those human instincts.”
I would argue, not very. Instincts are playing telephone with Google Translate. You start out with a real, solid input (instincts). But then this gets put through all of these filters (largely economic/environmental). These filters operate according to logic and rules, and have a direct relation to the initial input. But you can’t run a phrase through fifteen languages on Google translate and end up with someone you can reasonably trace back to the original input. Likewise with instincts- they are there, we see their effects, and they operate according to very real rules. But we can’t take a look at something we do and trace much of a line to an instinct any better than we can guess that “Eat more often, I told him to go” is “My dog ate my dinner and I made him go away” run through a few languages on Google Translate.
Why do I believe this?
One is the sheer variability of human society. For any given trend, you can find the opposite trend somewhere. You can find polyandrous societies, societies where women aren’t marriageable until they’ve popped out a kid or two, vegetarian societies, societies that love cities and societies that hate cities. You can find a society that practices just about any behavior you can think of. And when you look at it, there is usually an obvious economic reason why. You find polyandrous societies, for example, in harsh highlands with little arable land. In order to keep family farming plots from being subdivided past the point of sustainability, sometimes women will marry a set of brothers, keeping the parcel of land in one useful piece.
If the “exceptions” are pretty obviously guided by economic/environmental factors, why would you think that the “rule” is somehow free of that? Indeed, if you look at most evolutionary psychology claims, you can usually find a much more direct explaination that doesn’t go back to cavemen. I remember someone came on here saying that women wore sexier clothes during ovulation (true) because they are programmed to try to attract mates at peak fertility (not proven.) I quickly pointed out that if the researchers had ever bothered to ask a woman, they would have realized that wearing thick, dark frumpy period clothes for a week makes you really excited to slip on a miniskirt afterward. Sure, the caveman instinct might still be in there, but it is not proven and it is likely far more complex than a straight line.
Heh, this is actually very true. Not to mention that after a full week of wearing “period clothes” I’ve usually exhausted my supply of big baggy things to wear 
And why I want evidence for the hypothesis as opposed to evidence for the result, so many times there’s an alternative explanation for whatever the researchers are claiming which just gets overlooked as soon as reporters get hold of what they think will make a good story.
No worries.
They are not trying to determine what was happening with humans 100,000 years ago. As you said, that’s archaeology.
What they are doing is examining whether patterns in human behavior fit with models and theories developed from the study of how nonhuman animals adapt and evolve to their environment. Its applying that perspective to modern human behavior patterns.
It’s really just a logical application of animal behavior to human behavior. We’ve been studying animals for centuries to learn more about human physiology and behavior and now evo.psych. people are using what we know about the evolution of animal behavior to understand human behavior.
That’s really all there is to it and much of the popular press and common understanding of the the discipline is just very unfortunate.
I used the following to make that judgement: (1) The sample sizes were different. (2) The populations were different. (3) The universities were different; (4) The results and conclusions were different. I think you linked to an article that was referenced by your original news article but its one that got results in the same pattern; it’s not the study that was the subject of the article
The part below all the “***” in my first post to this thread states why I think there is so much inaccurate information about evolutionary psychology out there. I questioned whether the short paper had met with peer review because I’d be surprised if they allowed that discussion piece through. At the same time, researchers need to be free to speculate in their work. Researchers need to get their ideas out there even if they do not stand up to scrutiny.
Well, there is the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. I give you that link because the names listed as editors and consulting editors have probably made very good contributions to the field.
Also, I suggest you look up the book Homicide by Daly and Wilson. I know there is a free chapter of it on Google books or scholar. In it, they specify a number of hypotheses they tested concerning patterns of homicide. These hypotheses were developed from kin selection. The authors know how to write and present the work and it’s their work more importantly.
Also, the article I linked you too earlier is filled with good citations.
One reason people might think evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience is its misuse in the popular media. The advice columnist Amy Alkon seems to include some specious reference to it in every answer with a reference cherry picked from some book or other.
I had a psychology professor like that. I got the better of him ironically enough, using logic.
You seem to be confusing psychology with psychiatry, and the subset of psychologist doing therapy with the entire field. Whatever you think of that, much of psychology is experiment driven and as rigorous as you can get when dealing with people. If you want to get published in most journals you had better have statistically significant results.
Science is not merely the cataloging of things which have or do exist.
Science is based on observing measurable phenomena; theorizing on the cause of a phenomenon; devising experiments to test the theory; observing and measuring the results of the experiment; revising the theory and devising more experiments.
The problem most people have with evolutionary psychology and other disciplines described as pseudoscience is the observable and/or measurable requirement(s). No-one knows, or will ever know, what the individuals who left footprints in the Rift Valley were thinking.
The actual problem with evolutionary psychology is the assumption there is an innate difference in male and female psychology. That may be true - I doubt it; I suspect a minor shift in a bimodal distribution, with more tailing to the right, but I digress - but I cannot figure out an experiment to test the theory.