“Your idea is silly, and mine isn’t” isn’t science.
Your objection is basically that my story isn’t cute enough. That may be true. It won’t sell books. But it have every bit the same amount of evidence as the speculation in the paper.
Not quite, because the fact of the sex-specific blue-eye preference wasn’t known before their study.
How does that account for brown-eyed males and females and blue-eyed females having no such preference?
I certainly agree that their hypothesis is in no way proven by this one experiment, but I’m having real trouble thinking of a different hypothesis that accounts for all the data from their experiment. It seems to me that it’s worth exploring further.
Go back a couple (or a few) hundred years, and one could say the same for the distribution of marine fossils.
Maybe blue eyes are more “tribal” than brown eyes. Maybe men are more tribal than women. Or, maybe it doesn’t account for it at all. But then, neither do the results of the experiment “specifically suggest the presence of a male adaptation for the detection of extra-pair paternity based on eye color”, especially since there’s no established link between sex and eye color. So how does this “male adaptation” only manifest itself in blue-eyed males?
Well, yes, it is — the acceptance of any scientific explanation could be reconfigured as an instance of “this idea is silly but others are not”. Quick, why do we believe in evolution by natural selection rather than biblical creation? It’s not because evolutionary theory makes predictions that creationism doesn’t. For whatever evidence you throw at Joe Preacherman, he could always conjure up a modification of creationism that “explains” the evidence just as well.
(As you did for the gentlemen-prefer-blue-eyes hypothesis, I note.)
Scientific methodology, conceived very broadly, involves making predictions and attempting to falsify them. But there are an uncountably infinite number of strictly different hypotheses that can explain any given empirical phenomenon. The fact that you can conjure up some silly alternative explanation proves nothing — if you have a problem with the authors of the paper in question it’s not that.
Hardly. There are thousands upon thousands of animal species that act upon instinct, with no scientific explanation for how they have those instincts besides evolution. That’s not speculation. Evolutionary psychology is just admitting that the same mechanisms that apply to other species apply to us; the people who are making a wild hypothesis that has no evidence are the anti-EP people who claim that we are uniquely beyond the effects of evolution.
Let’s look at two things.
One is the Higgs Boson. For years, people have inferred that a model of the universe where the Higgs Boson exists is true. They’ve been able to make predications based on it’s existence, and most everything seems consistent.
Still, they are spending millions of dollars and tons of manpower to finally detect it. Why? Because while the theories are nice, until they can come up with something concrete, it’s pretty much still speculation. If EP scientists start pinpointing this stuff n a structural or genetic level (as in finding the actual genes, not just saying “Oh, well, for sure those genes must be there”) that is a different game. But just writing some likely sounding ideas in a paper isn’t a scientific process, nor is it comparing it to other less likely sounding stuff and deciding it wins.
The other thing to think about is the malarial swamps. For hundreds of years, well in to the age of science, we really did believe swamp gas caused malaria. Again, we made predictions based on that- and they came true! If you go to a swampy area, you are likely to get malaria. If you drain the swamp, everyone stops getting malaria. If you close your windows (to keep the bad air out) you stop getting malaria. Millions of dollars were spent draining swamps.
It was actually quite a fight for the guy who held the mosquito theory to get any ground. It turns out that there are thousands of variations of the malaria-carrying mosquitos- some who carry the disease and some who don’t- that were indistinguishable from each other at the time. So this guy was trying to tell people it was mosquitos, and they just said “Yeah right. Draining the swamps works every time, but your silly mosquito theory is full of holes. For one, people in area XXX with that species of mosquitos get tons of malaria, and people in area YYY with that species of mosquito never get it.” His theory wasn’t as cute as the swamp theory, and didn’t fit as neatly. It also wasn’t very useful for the land developers benefiting off of swampland drainage.
In other words, theories can sounds good, pass the smell test, and be used to make predictions- and still not be right.
FWIW, I think my “racism” theory could have legs. We all know that in societies that practice male inheritance consider the male line to be the one worth preserving. For example, in modern China it’s socially not okay for a man to marry a foreigner. It’d be an insult to the thousands of generations that held together your family line. But Chinese daughters aren’t considered as important a part of the family (traditionally, they were seen as belonging to their future husband’s family and just kind of on loan to their family to be brought up). Thus, even in modern China, a woman who marries a foreign man doesn’t get anywhere near the flak. So it’d make sense that blue eyed men would be more interested in carrying on the “family line,” whereas women never really had that expectation put on them- they always knew they’d be the vessel for some other family line.
What is wrong with you? “Blank slaters” are, as I have said over again in plain words, not a popular force. There are ways to be critical of EP without denying that humans have instincts. For example, there is my opinion that human instincts are too messily enmeshed with social and economic factors (and are indeed a part of the ever changing landscape) to be neatly separated. They are there. They ultimately underlie behavior. But our daily life is not prone to pat one-line explanations.
Again, if gender roles are so darn set, then how have they gone through such rapid and overwhelming change in the past few decades. In the last century, China has gone from foot binding and child marriage to Shanghai international grobe-trotting female executives. Basically the whole world has seen the same transformation. Women are happily waiting until later to have children, avoiding marriage, and generally not acting according to theory. What gives?
Wrong. What is necessary to do science is to make testable, surprising predictions. There is no inherent requirement to go to a genetic level, or a neurotransmitter level, or whatever.
In fact, to insist on such a requirement is very bad form because it adds an unnecessary principle: reductionism.
In any case, what form would such a proof take? Can you give an example of genetic data that would support EP for you? Or is this like the information requirement of Creationists?
Sounds like pretty good science to me. In some alternate reality where this was as far as we could probe, it would certainly be a useful observation.
In our reality we can continue doing science and find whether it is correlation or causation, and whether it is swamp gas specifically or something else associated with swamps.
Essentially you’re saying let’s not even start down this route, because I don’t like it.
Yeah! So let’s stop doing science, and listen to what’s in our hearts.
Well, EP says the same thing. Even an instinct as simple as fear of heights has to sit within the reality that some people are apparently comfortable at high heights, and even whole societies can live high above the ground.
It’s a straw man that EP denies cultural and societal influences.
OTOH, you (now) say you’re comfortable with the idea of instincts, but then go on to give examples of phenomena you again think have cultural causes.
Do you think that our sexuality has any instinctive aspect? Is an attraction to those that look superficially healthy instinctive?
You are being disingenuous. I have, from my very first post, said this, and you know that.
Yes, looking for a superficially healthy mate is instinctive. How this comes out is not.
I was thinking about the “gentlemen prefer blondes” example. In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, people react to blondes with a sense of revulsion. Why? Blondness is associated with extreme youth and extreme malnutrition. Black people with massive nutritional deficiencies will develop blonde hair. So thinking about a blonde sexually brings up the same feelings as thinking about a sickly toddler sexually- revulsion.
So, gentlemen do not prefer blondes. The premise is very ethnocentric, considering there is a huge chunk of humanity that reacts to blondes with something that may be instinctual revulsion.
Futhermore, and my real point here, is that I don’t think African-Americans have any real problem being sexually attracted to blondes. So what we have is a mix of forces- a instinct driven preference for healthy mates combined with a situational way that is expressed.
None of this, of course, would be uncovered by running tests on American college students, which is where the vast majority of psych findings come from.
So what I’m saying here is that Fun Facts like “men prefer blondes because blah blah blah” are just not reality. But saying “Certain men raised in certain environments prefer certain blonde, which we theorize is because this fundamental drive is being expressed in these complex ways” isn’t as fun. I’m not sure why the resistance- even medicine would be the first field to tell you that environment makes a difference in how and if genes are expressed.
The opposite is true as far as I can tell.
Look at the thread title. We aren’t talking about being critical of it, we are talking about denying it completely. Which pretty much leaves you with the “blank slate” and the “God did it” theories.
And if you also admit that human instincts derive from evolution like with every other species, then that’s evolutionary psychology. Denying evolutionary psychology requires that you reject the idea that instincts exist, deny that they come from evolution, or both.
To be honest, I don’t even remember. It’s been a long thread, that’s been dormant for various periods. If I’ve incorrectly attributed something to you, I apologize.
I disagree. I suspect that things like attraction to clear skin are instinctive, and while they could be overridden (as with everything), are going to be manifest in all cultures. And I think we can go a lot further, but clear skin is a good place to start.
So let’s do the science and work out which it is.
FTR I think “gentlemen prefer blondes” is on the weaker side of EP. The data per discussion ratio is particularly poor.
Who knows, the hypothesis may be true, as a generalization, but I’d want to see more data.
Within reason. And that is all I, or EP, are saying.
Once again, EP is not saying you can directly map all modern behaviour to our evolutionary past. Just drives / tendencies / instincts.
Why do you keep focusing on only half of what was written? First, I am about 50% convinced of Darwin Finch’s reasoning that the authors go too far in their explanation, but I haven’t had time to read the whole article. So I just think yours are silier (<– probably not even a word) than theirs at the moment.
Yours are actually terrible for these reasons:
(1) They do not address all the data. None of your ideas addressed all the variables: eye color, gender, and preference pattern. They usually only addressed one at a time.
(2) Nowhere else in the animal kingdom has the mechanisms you described ever been observed. On the other hand, social behavior in mammals is shaped by concerns over paternity in a variety of patterns. I don’t know how many of these are phenotype based, but you have to wonder when the single most common thing said to new fathers is “That baby looks just like you!”.
(3) The authors explanation for their data via this concern over paternity needs a lot of work, but it is debatable how bad their work is. Yours are just bad and obviously so. Even if you played the gentlemen prefer blondes trick and I read of your ideas in a journal like Behavioral Ecology I would be intensely doubtful and wonder who you knew to get it published.
You’ll get a long way in understanding the work if you just keep repeating to yourself: female mammals are assured of their maternity but male mammals can always doubt their paternity. In fact, your racism idea from the later post is more about paternity than it is about racism. Are there any human cultures where the female isn’t the gender that is passed on to the next family, tribe, or culture? In humans and chimpanzees it’s usually the female.
So there was evidence that the flood happened in other species? I’m not saying that an eye color preference has been observed in other species like the one described in the study, but they are going on something more sound than this analogy.
At that point, then, if the flood had predictive power and there were no other, better theory to explain events that also showed predictive power, the idea of a global flood would have to sound pretty good. It would be decent science.
Decent science does not always produce correct results. It just does so most of the time. Decent science also knows that its results may be overturned by later findings–especially if the current results are very preliminary.
I think the work with eyes is very preliminary, and certainly more work needs to be done before the hypothesis becomes an established theory, but that doesn’t make it bad science. It just makes it early science.
Maybe blue eyes are more “tribal” than brown eyes. Maybe men are more tribal than women. Or, maybe it doesn’t account for it at all. But then, neither do the results of the experiment “specifically suggest the presence of a male adaptation for the detection of extra-pair paternity based on eye color”, especially since there’s no established link between sex and eye color. So how does this “male adaptation” only manifest itself in blue-eyed males?
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Maybe the results with the blue eyes will never be replicated and it was just a fluke or bad study design.
The way I see it, the authors’ conclusion might have been warranted if they performed a two-part investigation:
- Does eye color affect mate choice?
Conclusion, based on the experimental setup provided: Yes; blue-eyed males disproportionately choose mates with similar eye color when compared with blue-eyed females, brown-eyed males, or brown-eyed females.
So, that’s an interesting finding. Now, let’s find out why!
- Why does the eye color of one’s partner appear to matter more to blue-eyed males than to other folks?
At this point, experiments can be formulated to determine a possible reason. That reason could be anything from coincidence (there’s no particular reason - it just happens that the blue-eyed male sample from part 1 all happened to have a blue-eyed female fetish or something), to social, to biological (which, in turn, may or may not be an evolved trait). So, there are lots of directions in which this investigation can proceed at this point.
It does, therefore, strike me as bad science for the authors to jump immediately to an adaptive explanation when others had not been ruled out (or even considered). OK, maybe not bad science, so much as sloppy science.
The adaptive explanation seems to me to be, again, preliminary. I agree that more research should be done, and to the extent that the researchers are resting on their laurels, I agree that they’re not doing science well. We may be in substantial agreement: do you agree that, given what we currently know, the adaptive explanation is the most reasonable one, but that we really ought to try to find out more?
The study’s discussion section does address some other possibilities, including a race-based explanation, but discards all the alternatives they can come up with because of conflicts with their data or with previous research. I do think it’s reasonable to say, “Given what we know, here’s what’s probably going on; let’s keep looking into it.”
Actually, I don’t agree that the adaptive explanation is the most likely. For it to be a generic male adaptation, I’d want to see the gene or genes responsible for the behavior to be identified (and I’d want a better explanation for why it only seems to manifest in blue-eyed males). For it to be a specific blue-eyed male adaptation, I’d want to see the link between sex, eye color, and this behavior that allows all three traits to be heritable together. I’d also like to make sure it’s actually a biological phenomenon; not to Godwinize this thread or anything, but you may recall a time when blonde hair and blue eyes were considered “superior” traits - could this be a subconscious cultural holdover from that sort of thinking among blue-eyed males? Is the tendency more pronounced among blonde-haired, blue-eyed males…?
I disagree philosophically with EP in general because of its Adaptationist origins. I’m not an Adaptationist (that is, I do not subscribe to this school of thought).
I’m not sure I agree that we must identify the necessary gene: at this point, gene identification is a fairly new science. Do we need to hold off on all thought about adaptive genetics until the mechanisms are better understood, or may we make initial theories, knowing that technological improvements may obviate them?
Definitely not a Godwinization, but they do somewhat address this. If it were a case of Aryan supremacy, why wouldn’t very white brown-eyed males also prefer blue-eyed females?
If this reason is true, we should expect men with any recessive phenotype to be drawn to women that share the same. Do red-haired men show a preference like that? Do blonde men prefer blondes more than brunnette men do?
For this theory to be true, blue-eyed men would have to have instinctual knowledge that their eye color is recessive. That’s the only way the man could subconsciously know that shenanigans are afoot if he mates with a blue-eyed woman but gets a brown-eyed child. How likely is this kind of instinctual knowledge? I find it very implausible.
Also, by what process would this preference be selected for? Would blue-eyed men with a blue-eyed preference reproduce more often than blue-eyed men without a preference? Seems to me that this would be counterintuitive, if this is the case.
A more plausbile theory is that blue eyes are fawned over in Western society. Like blonde hair, it’s an esteemed trait because it’s different and associated with Euro purity. Also, like blonde hair, society treats blue eyes as an indicator of beauty. Beauty standards are more often applied to women than men.
A man with blue eyes shows a preference towards blue-eyed women because 1) his mom probably had them and he spent a lot of time looking into her face with Oedipal admiration, 2) he’s programmed by society to associate blue eyes with beautiful women.
A blue-eyed woman doesn’t show a preference. Why? Although the blue eyes of her father might have made a Electra complex impression on her, she’s not indoctrinated with messages that make her associate blue eyes with virile masculinity. If anything, she may see blue-eyed males as “pretty” and therefore, not attractive in a manly way.
Brown-eyed men don’t show a preference because, in spite of social programming that causes blue eyes to be extolled as beautiful, the love he has for his brown-eyed mother cancels out that bias.
Brown-eyed women don’t show a preference because neither social programming nor parental bias is in play.
I think this reaction you’re talking about has something to do with how rape appears to be of so much interest in the EP field to begin with. I mean, like what makes rape so special that it even needs EP analysis? We see rape in the animal world. At the same time, we see animals engaging in murder, theft, and deception. Many of the same behaviors that we pathologize in humans are practiced in nature. And yet I don’t see anyone using EP to explain why, for instance, domestic violence is so prevalent. Or child abuse. Or war.
“Rape is a reproductive strategy” is a statement that makes it seems as though rape exists because it’s supposed to exist, by nature’s decree. “Murder is a form of population control” is just as profound, though. Will you find EPs who find it necessary to point this out? I haven’t.
This was accounted for and rejected by their data. As for your next post, first you need to show that EP has any such compulsion, as opposed to it being an obsession among those who hate EP.