Please give a citation that evolutionary psychology skeptics do not believe that humans have instincts. I don’t think anyone believes that humans are without instincts. The question is in how those instincts are expressed and how much we know about them.
It’s pretty much an inherent part of the position, if you aren’t claiming “God did it”. If evolution hasn’t shaped our minds then we pretty much can’t have instincts; there’s nowhere for them to come from.
Oh, it has been a common attitude for decades; it was outright dogma in the Stalinist USSR.
A common objection to the big bang theory is how can one make predictions (and therefore do science) on the past?
The answer is that of course we can make predictions whenever there is data new to us, regardless where it comes from. A hypothesis about how humans lived in the past could indeed be used to make predictions about experiments today.
Ad-hoc explanations based on guesses about our past isn’t science of course. But that’s not inherent to EP.
I think this is the nub of it. I don’t believe that EP is trying to state that women are, or should be, some kind of 1950s stereotype.
But such depictions of EP have tainted it in the minds of many.
However I dispute the suggestion of a rich tapestry of gender relations.
So many threads casually cite examples of cultures where male and female sexual inclinations are reversed, and they never stand up to scrutiny.
Male and female sex drives are different, on average, in a way that crosses cultures.
Oh yeah there are PILES of Stalinists hanging around.
One can acknowledge that humans have instincts while also seeing how those instincts are expressed in the context of their environment, and realizing that it’s not a particularly direct like from ourselves to our cave-man ancestors.
Were there not Tibetan women who married several brothers? Do the Woodabe not have male beauty pageants, wehre women pick out men for a year long temporary marriages? Are our own college campuses not pretty much a whole lot of people, male and female, going at it without too many worries? Are there not cultures that practice radical female oppression, cutting off sexual organs, binding their feet, and/or confining them for life?
How does the difference between Yemen, where girls are often married off at 12, secluded for the rest of their life, and murdered for the slightest hint of sexual misconduct and my life today, where nobody bats an eye if I decide to stay single until 30, get satisfaction out of booty calls, and live entirely independently, not suggest a “rich tapestry of gender relations?” That all covers a hell of a lot of ground.
What we do is a remarkable consistency in gender relations in agricultural societies, which the vast majority of societies we care about are or recently were. Indeed, most variation in sexual relation comes from non-agricultural societies, such as our own. That isn’t to say all non-agricultural societies are bastions of equality- they are not. But there is a lot of variation out there, and you can find at least one example of any configuration you can think of somewhere.
According to Wiki Kahneman’s most highly regarded work appears to be more
mathematical and economic than psychological , although I will accept that
economics includes a psychological component.
That does not mean that economics has much if any more of a legitmate claim
than psychology to the exalted title of Science. I don’t know about you, but the
subprime shit and its consequences cost me a pretty penny 2007-8, and I do not
remember any economists (or shrinks) being anything but competely useless.
For them to miss something so big makes me wonder if there is anything
important they really have a handle on.
Who is this professor, what principles did he apply, when did he apply them,
and how much money did he make?
Since we have drifted off into economics I take it you are unable to offer anything
of medical significance, which is what I meant to focus on. If this professor of your
can cue me in on how to safely recoup my 2007-8 losses I would certainly consider
that to be significant!
I do not accept that psychology is anything close to being a equal partner with neuroscience.
Wait a minute - who says you can’t make predictions based on the past? Of course you do - that’s when the events that generated the data occurred. In astronomy, the events occurred a very long time ago, even if the observations are being made now.
Are you seriously comparing physics and astronomy to psychology and sociology? For that matter, are you conflating a hypothesis with a datum?
How people behave and how they structure their societies vary a lot, over time and over the world. Maybe - maybe - information about the past could be used to develop theories about current practices, but there is a major issue - we don’t have any data, not on an evolutionary scale.
Any theories we have earlier peoples and societies say more about us than them.
I’m not saying that, I’m saying that’s a mistake people often make, a mistake people in this thread are making.
:rolleyes:
And saying that certain hypotheses are verboten says a lot about us too.
even sven, I’ll have to come to your point in the (GMT) morning, because it’s going to require a more considered response. But the broad picture is, we’ve covered examples like the Tibetan women before on the Dope. And their sexual predispositions are far less dissimilar to westerners than some would have you believe.
Also, note that I’m talking in terms of dispositions, drives etc. I’m not claiming (nor would most proponents of EP) that all actions will have a clear correlate in our evolutionary past.
And by all accounts no one involved likes it; the motivation is economic.
Could you cite where evolutionary psychologists - the actual academics doing the research and not somebody trying to sell a book or news article - claims that human behavior is like 1950s America? Could you cite the primary material that claims that it is adaptive for men to prefer blondes? How about the virgin one?
You have listed here a huge amount of variation in behavior and imply evolutionary psychology is a failure because an argument that does not exist (1950s EP) cannot explain it all. Even if you said it was a failure or pseudoscience because it could not provide adequate explanations for that variation described in the quote, then your argument is not much different than colonel’s which boils down to: It didn’t answer every question to everything I can think up, therefore it’s a failure!
I can guarantee you that evolutionary psychologists and those in related fields would attempt to theorize about the behavior you are listing in all its apparent myriad forms, but unlike you or the discipline’s critics, they’d start by clearing up which of the behaviors you are describing are fulfilling which roles.
Evolutionary psychologists know that humans mate outside of ovulation which is pretty rare for animal behavior. Mating serves more purposes than procreation. So your list, to an evolutionary psychologist, is conflating issues of controlling paternity with mating for social affiliation with an even more interesting question across all species: how do ecological circumstances alter parental care and breeding strategies?
They address those questions separately, apply theory, test hypotheses, all separately and slowly over time.
The logical result of this separation, classification, and division of labor is a quite logical question that you might hear from individual subgroups of evolutionary psychologists: Are men, across cultures, concerned with paternity? The answer would be yes.
Sorry, but I cannot resist comment on this unwitting self-parody.
So, after years (decades?) of research, evolutionary psychology is finally able to confirm
that men are concerned with paternity? Gee thanks, fellas. Where would we be without you?
You’re right, science should never spend time on things that are considered to be common knowledge.
I think you just inadvertently make my point.
A major chunk of our social organization is economic in origin.
EP, and psychology in general, is about drives, motivations, dispositions etc. Obviously when applying that to people’s actions you have to consider society / culture, and I don’t know anyone that would seriously dispute that.
The difference between male and female sexual inclinations is evident worldwide. It’s painful when people try to find counter-examples. It does appear to be something fairly fundamental…like fear of heights.
But note that fear of heights does have genuine counter-examples; there are plenty of societies that live on mountainsides / trees / cliffs. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that FoH is innate nonetheless.
So psychology and what people actually do are two different things.
I am a clinical psychologist and a university professor… in my view, EP is a bit different from other sub-fields within psychology. Psychology has a hard time defining itself as an ‘empirical science,’ since we have no strictly empirical way of ‘defining the human mind.’ In order to do ‘empirical research,’ we need to first come up with some way of defining the mind… does the mind work like a computer? does it come pre-programmed? how much of it is malleable? and so on… we usually do not see it this way, but we must necessarily do a bit of philosophy (rational thought) to get the ‘empirical’ ball rolling.
I am very critical of how evolutionary psychology goes about defining the mind and recently posted a lengthy article critiquing the field from a neurobiological perspective. I would love to have others read and provide comments:
I started looking at it but it is quite a long paper.
Can you summarise any of your points here?
I read your article. I echo Mijin’s request for a summary. It is a long article presented from a theoretical standpoint with all the jargon terms coming along with it. It’s not accessible to everyone and although public accessibility may not be your intention, it certainly is being presented that way. That said, the quoted section of your post does get to the point well, but it should be put into layman’s terms.
On to your article:
My reading of your article can be summarized exactly as you have it above. I think you succeed in making the point that how we conceptualize the mind is not necessarily what we might expect when we address the biology.
You fail to show how evolutionary psychology is different from other fields of psychology in this respect. In psychology in general it is common and valid to define constructs which are essentially how we think of or conceptualize a behavior. A construct can be anything humans might do such as learn, remember, become angry, become happy, etc. Humans also prefer certain mates, are afraid of things in the environment, find stimuli aversive, join groups, forage and eat and so on. Measurement of these concepts is tested by assessing validity and reliability. You are correct that these concepts of the mind do not validly address the biology. Neither does any other major branch of psychology except neuroscience, and it is not a problem in the slightest bit.
To give an example of how I understand your argument, we may not predict the combination of behavioral changes that occur after lesions of the hippocampus or its acetlycholine inputs if we take a modular view. Hippocampal lesions and genetic variation causing morphological differences in hippocampal structures lead to a variety of behavioral alterations: (1) spatial learning and memory; (2) declarative memory; (3) anxiety; (4) aggressiveness toward males and females. An evolutionary psychologist may be interested in the importance of human variation in these behaviors separately without ever realizing they share at least one neurological basis. Does this negate analyzing these behaviors as specific adaptation to specific problems in the environment? No. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed by neuroscience and evolutionary neuroscientists of the future. Your attempt to turn this into a criticism is one that can be validly applied to any branch of psychology, but the point of the criticism is certainly not valid. Now the flexibility with which these behaviors can adapt and change over time may be impinged by separate selective forces acting on the same architecture and that is an extremely interesting question of evolutionary biology and quantitative genetics.
We don’t need an exact mapping of function in the brain to conceptualize the patterns of this functioning. So their conceptualization, if Tooby and Cosmides’ conceptualization of the mind is truly the generally accepted one in evopsych (which I question but I do not know enough to really get into it), may be invalid in terms of the biology but it’s valid in terms of behavior patterns. Further, and importantly, they hypothesize and test these constructs in a scientifically rigorous manner. Yes you may find the “just so” reasoning here and there but even your blondes citation has an abstract that says there is some misunderstanding in summarizing the conclusion (that men prefer not blondes specifically but younger looking women). That sort of analysis does not hold up to scrutiny and if not to hypothesize and scrutinize then what purpose does science serve?
Lastly, you sort of negate the acceptance of nature and nurture by evolutionary psychologists. I sincerely doubt they ignore nurture. In fact, my understanding of evolutionary psychology is an attempt to understand the patterns of human behavior, adapted for the Pleistocene or whatever, in the modern environment. Going back to your first example, you discuss our reflexive withdrawing of our hands from the hot stove. This reflex of avoiding painful stimuli was around long before primates much less humans. Evolutionary psychologists are interested in how such a reflex evolved and how it comes to be observed in our modern environment because it clearly did not evolve to protect us from hot stoves. Addressing another criticism, you say evolutionary psychologists ignore culture yet they are examining these potentially adapted behaviors in a cultural context and I have not seen a single respected example of this type of work that does not do so. The same is true for any other major environmental input.
Summary
In essence, going back to what I quoted from you above, I think you are unfairly criticizing a scientific discipline on a point of theory you think it should address. So you view the discipline as flawed because it does not address the problems you think are important. Your essay considers why your criticisms may actually not apply to evolutionary psychology as it currently is conceived but you follow up all such statements with an attempt to minimize their importance.
I think you should change the tone of your essay to reflect how evolutionary psychology could be improved with more interfacing between genetics and/or neuroscience but this fundamentally flawed approach lacks value.
Finally, as a geneticist, I find the inclusion of this person Ehrlich’s pondering on our genetic load for traits to be a bit silly. Maybe to see your criticism of evopsych in a different light: To a geneticist, Ehrlich’s conceptualization of the kinds of information our genes hold is silly and not based in empiricism.
The field of clinical psychology has changed dramatically since the 1950s, particularly in the last ten or 20 years as the emphasis has shifted to empirical results. While a large number of lisenced psychologists are happily practicing useless bullshit, there is a growing movement of empirically-based psychologists who focus on scientifically supported treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, Interpersonaly Therapy, ACT and more. These have relatively robust treatment outcomes in comparison to other treatments, like say (grinds axe) psychodynamic therapy. It has been increasingly difficult for the woo-woo crowd to gain respect within the field. The next generation of psychologists are firmly in the science camp.
From my own perspective we are embroiled in something of a culture war between the snake-oil peddlers and the scientisits. Long-time practitioners who regard themselves as experts while using no evidence-based treatments are very, very reluctant to let go of old ways of practice. They also hate the fact that most research indicates you could train a person with a Bachelor’s degree to do the same job with equally effective results. Hell, one Behavioral Activation workbook I know of has been shown to improve clients WITHOUT any therapist at all. How threatening is that? Many are entitled to use methods that in my opinion are completely unethical. Clients generally assume that therapists know what they’re doing but that’s not true at least half the time. It’s not wrong to say that there are some major problems in the field.
However, when you look at the relatively dismal rates of recovery for clients, consider also that the problem is not the lack of empiricism but the lack of proper implementation. Generally the more structured and rigorous the intervention framework, and the better trained the clinician, the better the outcome. That’s why at a research clinic you are going to see far better results than a community health clinic, even if the treatment framework is the same. For example, at a research clinic where I received treatment for an anxiety disorder, meaningful symptom reduction occurred in about 90% of clients. That is very high even for an evidence-based intervention. The best a good therapist might hope for is about 1/3 in the real world. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but we haven’t exactly cured cancer yet either. Doesn’t mean that chemo is worthless.
Yes
- Evolution is based on natural selection.
- Natural selection is based on Nature selecting
- There is no rational ultimate ‘logical’ basis for what Nature chooses.
- A hidden ultimate idea the human brain works according to some view misinterprets rule #3
- Let the 40 years of non-scientific illiterate gentlemen, papers and theories, arguments and strife begin.
I think you just inadvertently make my point.
A major chunk of our social organization is economic in origin.
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Irrelevant. The pro-EP side has seldom if ever* claimed that everything people do is hardwired by evolution; that absolutism is a feature of the other side, who generally insist that everything is determined by culture. The point isn’t that they are acting according to economics; the point is they don’t like it. Why? Because it goes against their inborn human nature - and if that human nature doesn’t come from evolution, where doe it come from? And if you don’t buy EP, then what force or process is preventing it? EP should be true, going by everything we know about evolution. Claiming that EP isn’t real is claiming that humans have some sort of exception from evolution.
- I’d say “never”, but presumably some guy somewhere has said so.