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That is not at all what I meant. What I meant was that there is no reason whatsoever to presuppose that every existing phenotypical quality is adaptive.
by pron 9y ago
That is not at all what I meant. What I meant was that there is no reason whatsoever to presuppose that every existing phenotypical quality is adaptive.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoThe article is simply asking, essentially, "Since depression is so common, what if it is adaptive? What if there are circumstances under which depression actually improves your odds of survival, even though that seems counter-intuitive?"
- pron 9y agoI understand that, just as I understand that there is value in religion, but that doesn't make it science. Yet evolutionary psychology poses as science. All of evolutionary psychology is "can we come up with an interesting interpretation to present quality X as adaptive?" Interesting, maybe, but not science.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoAh. Okay. I agree that most psychosocial stuff is on not very solid ground. To put it nicely, it is more art than science. Where I basically disagree is that this makes it not worthwhile to pursue and inherently inferior to religion.
- rwnspace 9y ago>not science. That's a brave position. I think it's not exactly Freudian dream theory. Though the 'just-so stories' characterisation can be fair... Saying that, behavioural biology is without question a scientific endeavour, with obvious connections to both evolution and human psychology - is that well-grounded evo psych or is evo psych poorly-grounded behavioural biology?
- pron 9y agoIt's not Freudian dream theory (which the virtually most psychologists happily agree is not science), but it's not experimental psychology, either. Unlike dream theory, though, it still claims to be science. I agree that the question is a scientific question, but there is a difference between a scientific question and a scientific endeavour. If we don't have the science to answer a scientific question (e.g. about multiple universes) we call our thought experiments and hypotheses pure speculation; we don't try to present them as carrying any sort of scientific validity.
- Bjartr 9y agoPopulations trend towards the reduced expression of phenotypes which are maladaptive. I don't think it is then unreasonable to presuppose (as a starting point for further investigation) that commonly expressed phenotypes might represent beneficial adaptation, especially when to our intuition the opposite would be true.
- pron 9y agoSaying that something is not maladaptive and saying its adaptive are two very different things.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoI failed to see the difference. Would you please explain? Sounds to me like "not short" vs "tall". Subjective, and people may map different sections of a spectrum into each expression, but again, they may not.
- pron 9y agoThose are not the only two options. Maladaptive traits decrease the frequency of the carrying allele over time (as they hurt chances of survival+procreation), and even assuming that we're not catching a maladaptive trait in the process of being weeded out, its mere existence does not mean it's actually adpative, i.e., helping survival and procreation rates and increasing in frequency. Even assuming that the trait is mostly genetic, it can be neutral, it can be a common maladaptive mutation, and it can be a "net-positive" maladaptive side effect of an adaptive trait -- this is especially likely in a complex organ as the brain, which we know very little about. Assuming that a particular high-function brain behavior is adaptive just because it's there is therefore a stretch, even if it's reasonable to assume it's not severely maladaptive.
- Bjartr 9y agoCorrect of course. I sent a long time deciding if I should extend my part or not to cover that distinction, but I'd felt I'd said enough.