That’s not true. I recall a study where infants were tested for their reaction to the images of spiders, which was attempting to test the idea of humans having a biological aversion to spiders. There are certainly some conditions where a test like that would provide useful data.
Um, lots of people do. Haven’t you ever heard people use “it’s natural” as an excuse? You’ve never heard people decry “artificiality” or “unnatural behavior”?
I don’t see what is confusing. She wants the man who is most likely to pass on his genes for the father of her children; she wants the man who is most likely to provide for her and her children for a husband/mate. The two aren’t the same thing.
Der Trihs and I aren’t really disagreeing - he’s just saying something more nuanced (and correct) than I am. Since female mammals face high reproductive costs (pregnancy, risk of childbirth, nursing, etc), they face selection pressures to mitigate those costs. There are a few ways to do that. One is to be selective in whom one mates with - an ideal mate will have both good genes and a willingness to serve a caretaker role for offspring. However, cheating can be a good strategy - if you’ve got a mate that’s taken on a caretaker role for your children, and that role is pretty stable, then why not nip off and try to get another set of genes for your offspring? Not even necessarily a “better” set, whatever that would mean - variety confers a survival benefit in itself.
The other piece of this point is the idea that if we say that certain amoral behaviors can be shown to be innate to human beings, then it opens a giant can of worms as to how we deal with people who do those things.
To use the current example, if having multiple sexual partners is something we’re programed to desire, does that mean we can’t judge people as harshly who cheat on their spouses? Does it mean we should condone it? So much of society is about postponing and/or tempering immediate desires and gratification, do we really want to talk about the fact that we expect humanity to act contrary to its nature in many circumstances, or do we just want to say that people who do “bad” things are broken?
Society floats on dangerous seas, and evolutionary psychology certainly rocks the boat. Anything that questions the purity of free will in all but the most benign situations is dangerous.
Well, I can see why EP might be a bit controversial, if contradictory results can be derived from identical data.
As to why not “nip off,” getting caught comes to mind. After your mate has killed you for screwing around, no genes will get passed on.
Lots of people. Go to the grocery store and look for “natural” or “all-natural” labels on packaged foods. You’ll find a fair number of them. Those wouldn’t be there if there weren’t a lot of people who think that “natural” (however you define natural) is good.
You get into the whole “are people basically good or bad” can of worms with evolutionary psychology, too. If evolutionary psychology finds some undesirable behavior (like rape or cheating on your spouse) is natural for humans, that means humans can’t be naturally all good but corrupted by society, modern living, or what have you. The only choices left are that humans are naturally bad or a mix of good and bad.
You get into trouble when you look at good things humans do, too. Some people think that a heroic act is somehow less heroic if the doer benefits somehow from it. Saying that a mother would do anything to save her child because that child carries her genes doesn’t sound as heroic to a lot of people as it would if she saved the child because she’s a good person.
Not necessarily, unless your mate kills you and all your children. If your children survive, your genes get passed on. It might even be to your advantage in that scenario to have children that your mate doesn’t know about…
It’s not contradictory; it’s just that there are multiple strategies towards the same goal. It’s no more contradictory than it is contradictory for one nation to negotiate for a supply of “X”, and for another to go to war to get “X”; the goal of getting “X” is the same in both cases no matter how different the strategy.
But were they tested for aversion to a bunch of other stuff, as well, including completely made-up creatures (both scary-looking and non-scary-looking)? That so-called “biological aversion to spiders” could be a much more general “aversion to things with which we are not familiar”. Spiders are pretty weird looking (as are bugs and snakes), so it’s not really surprising that humans would have a sort of primordial aversion to such critters (while not sharing similar aversion to creatures which look more like us: cats, dogs, monkeys, bears, etc.). But to state that this somehow demonstrates that we specifically have a biological aversion to spiders is a perfect example of the aforementioned over-reaching.
Anne Neville Yeah, that all sounds like a primitive authenticity fallacy. If Evolutionary Psychology throws down against primitive authenticity then ultimately it’s a good thing. The idea that EP is diminished by wacky theories proposed by Evolutionary Psychologists is also a non-starter because the vast majority of theories proposed in any field are wacky and straight up wrong. That’s the point of the scientific process. Lots of theories, and then we investigate them and find out which ones have some merit. It seems to me that the controversy is the same controversy that follows any attempt to judge the humanities by objective criteria.
I never made the claim that the test demonstrated we have a biological aversion to spiders. I was debunking the claim Nametag made, that evolutionary psychology couldn’t provide any real verifiable data. I gave an example of a study where a possible result could potentially be a falsifiable, testable claim. Your response is what’s over-reaching, here. Do you honestly agree with Nametag, that there’s no possible value to be found in studying evolutionary psychology?
I suspect that the main reason it gets a bad rap is that there is no obvious ways to test many theories proposed by this discipline.
The same of course goes for many of the sub-disciplines of anthropology, by psychology already has a somewhat tenuous grasp on being considered scientific - adding a layer of evolutionary theory makes it all the more speculative and difficult to test.
Nature or (cultural) nurture? It is obvious that evolution plays its role in forming our natures, but is that evolution physical or cultural, or a mixture of both? As two scientists, get three or more answers. 
The results of the “test”, as you described it, would have been meaningless. That is why I questioned it.
I am of the opinion that unless EPists can first demonstrate that a given behavior is adaptive, their methods are misguided at best, outright useless at worst (after all, an adaptive explanation for a behavior that turns out to be non-adaptive is necessarily wrong). We don’t know enough about the evolution of the brain to make definitive statements about which behaviors are or are not adaptive.
I am not saying nothing good can come out of the field, just that there isn’t very much of it that is good thus far.
Any evolutionary explaination for behaviour has got to be pretty general in nature. Humans behaviour in specific detail observably differs considerably across cultures, yet all humans share a reasonably recent common ancestor.
I’m familiary with sociobiology, one variant/school of which holds that men and women seem to have different sexual agendas because they are hard-wired to, because men, unlike women, can best enhance their differential reproductive success by having sex with as many different partners as possible. But, ITSM, that theory seeks only to explain men’s philandering, not to justify it. (A crucial distinction that, unfortunately, always seems to fade into the background when a scientific theory has any implications seemingly relevant to social relations – as with Social Darwinism.)
I think it’s because EP is more of a “fill in the blanks” theory rather than a predictive one. Its not hard to do Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking once all the data is collected. Just come up with a halfway decent explanation and there you go
The answer to your initial question is “Yes they did.”* Contrary to what the likes of DanBlather apparently believe, experimental psychologists (whose methods and interests have very little in common with those of Freud or Jung) are generally not idiots, are well aware of the need for experimental controls, and are careful to rule out any remotely plausible alternative explanations of their findings that they can dream up. If they don’t do that, and also rule out any alternative explanations that referees can dream up, their articles will not pass peer review. If you are not an expert in the field, you can be about 98% sure that any alternative explanation that you can dream up while hanging out on a message board will have been thought of, and ruled out, by the scientists who have probably been working on the issue for months on end.
*Rakison, D.H. & Derringer, J. (2008). Do infants possess an evolved spider-detection mechanism? Cognition, 107, 381-393.
That said, I think there is a problem with a lot of evolutionary psychology that has not yet been brought out in this thread. For the most part, EP theories and explanations rely on the assumption that the mind is highly modular, with different modules for dealing with different "subject matter": that, for instance, our mechanisms for finding and choosing a mate have evolved separately from, and do not significantly interact with, our mechanisms for finding food, or the mechanisms that enable us to write Limericks or do differential calculus (whatever those may have originally evolved for). However, apart from the fact that it makes dreaming up EP theories a lot easier, there are only quite weak reasons for thinking that the mind is modular in this way, and some fairly good reasons for thinking it is not (or not to anything like the degree that EP usually assumes). It certainly does not seem to be that modular. It seems to me that, whether I am thinking about how to pull chicks or about calculus, a lot (I don't say all) of the mental resources I am bringing to bear (e.g., visualization, language, logic) are the same in each case. Certainly thinking about one distracts me from, and interferes with, thinking about the other. (Also, what **Malthus** says, above.)
Even if the mind is not modularized in this "topical" way at all, it is still worthwhile to ask how its various capacities (such as for perception, visualization, language, logic, empathy, etc.) have evolved. However, that is not what "evolutionary psychology" as it is now practiced, is mostly about. People do study the evolution of mental capacities, but it is hard going, and it rarely leads to sexy stories in the popular media.That study does nothing to assuage my concerns. The authors came to their conclusion of “evolved fear reaction” based solely on how long a 5-month old stared at various pictures. And the pictures they used ranged from “idealized spider”, to “stylized spider” to “random assortment of spider pieces”, to “pictures of real spiders”. They did similarly with flowers. They did not do this with imaginary fanged monsters, or, say, similarly-shaped octopus or starfish. In other words, they were looking for a very specific reaction to a very specific type of creature, claiming that said reaction was an evolved response. While the “visual template” part of their findings may have some merit, the conclusion that “fear of spiders” is an evolved response has not, in any way, been demonstrated by this study.
And I’m not convinced that spiders have been so terribly dangerous to man throughout our evolution such that we had a need to evolve a “fear reaction” to them in the first place. If anything, we had far more to fear from assorted felids during our evolution, but we now voluntarily keep them as pets, yet run screaming from creatures that, for the most part, pose little to no threat to us at all.
The spider thing could well be cultural - in South America, tribespeople like to eat the abdomens of large spiders (which most of us would find utterly revolting). Likely our hunter-gatherer forebearers would have done the same. Most large spiders are not particularly dangerous to people - some species protect themselves from large (mamalian) predators by using itching hairs, not a fatal bite.
Which is all fine and well, but fails to explain why humans would need to evolve a spider-specific recognition template. And the paper doesn’t even do a very good job of demonstrating that we have done so, in my opinion.
Hey, I’m agreeing with you. The fact that some folks are filled with disgust at the very idea of spiders while others view them as a tasty snack pretty well demonstrates that we are not equipped with an evolved “spider template”, or if we are, that it is easily overcome by local circumstances. If we were so equipped, we’d all react more or less the same towards spiders, I’d assume.
I guess one could test that theory by testing the infants of those in “spider eating” cultures for their reactions towards spiders.