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Not sure about psychology, but the comparative method is also used in linguistics to reconstruct dead languages.
by weberc2 8y ago
Not sure about psychology, but the comparative method is also used in linguistics to reconstruct dead languages.
- jessaustin 8y agoThat's true, and this linguistic work is in some sense "between" the hypothesized evopsych work and the rigorous work we see with genetics. When the geneticists tell us that a particular population underwent a bottleneck at a particular point in time, they're probably correct about that. Linguistics is like genetics in that, because of writing, experts have something physical they can study to infer how languages have evolved over time. Perhaps something similar might someday be used to see how non-linguistic mental processes have evolved over time, but at this point it's difficult to imagine what that might be. Psychology itself is on a fairly tenuous footing as a science, so it's hardly a sufficient foundation for whatever has been envisioned by evopsych enthusiasts.