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> Bo Winegard is an American hereditarian psychologist[2], nationalist[3] and pseudoscientist[4] associated with the online "race realist" community.[5] He writ

> Bo Winegard is an American hereditarian psychologist[2], nationalist[3] and pseudoscientist[4] associated with the online "race realist" community.[5] He writes discredited racialist pseudoscience articles for the right-wing online magazine Quillette[6][7][8] and surrounds himself with white nationalists, but complains if he is labelled one. What are some specific claims that Winegard makes that you consider false?

eesmith 7y ago
I think most of evolutionary psychology is made of just-so stories not based in evolution, anthropology, or history. See https://evolution-institute.org/why-evolutionary-psychology-probably-isnt-possible/ https://evolution-institute.org/why-evolutionary-psychology-... - "Why Evolutionary Psychology (Probably) Isn’t Possible" with the underlying paper at https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?shared_access_token=ZBkIZa1YiuE0LQx8Ahma9fe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6oc4laM4TmJijVKMoolnjpDhDOnhV8TTTUcQLqNu74B-gNKznqYTlhLGXnnYrIM4MaBSV38YtYwukwnpokq9XnfTUGyB6mvKA-zVrAg-MXHA%3D%3D https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?sh... "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?". Literally the first paper of Winegard's I read was http://dro.dur.ac.uk/28942/1/28942.pdf http://dro.dur.ac.uk/28942/1/28942.pdf which says in the abstract: > Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. The "therefore" hides a deeply incorrect assumption, which is present throughout evolutionary psychology. To answer your question, I consider the inference to be false. Quoting the first of the two links I gave: > It’s not sufficient to assume that the required identities are obvious. They need to be demonstrated. Solving the matching problem requires knowing about the psychological architecture of our prehistoric ancestors. But it is difficult to see how this knowledge can possibly be acquired. We do not, and very probably cannot, know much about the prehistoric human mind. Some evolutionary psychologists dispute this. They argue that although we do not have access to these individuals’ minds, we can “read off” ancestral mechanisms from the adaptive challenges that they faced. For example, because predator-evasion was an adaptive challenge, natural selection must have installed a predator-evasion mechanism. This inferential strategy works only if all mental structures are adaptations, if adaptationist explanations are difficult to come by, and if adaptations are easily characterized. There is no reason to assume that all mental structures are adaptations, just as there is no reason to assume that all traits are adaptations. We also know that adaptationist hypotheses are easy to come by. And finally, there is the problem of how to characterize traits. Any adaptive problem characterized in a coarse-grained way (for example, “predator evasion”) can equally be characterized as an aggregate of finer-grained problems. And these can, in turn, be characterized as an aggregate for even finer-grained problems. This introduces indeterminacy and arbitrariness into how adaptive challenges are to be characterized, and therefore, what mental structures are hypothesized to be responses to those challenges. This difficulty raises an additional obstacle for resolving the matching problem. If there is no fact of the matter about how psychological mechanisms are to be individuated, then there is no fact of the matter about how they are to be matched. Indeed, standard evolutionary theory has a term - spandrel, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology) - for things which are a side-effect of adaptive selection for some other trait, rather than the main selective effect. The "therefore" in Winegard's paper does not acknowledge that "tribal" may be a spandrel, so is therefore a false assumption.

eesmith 7y ago

I think most of evolutionary psychology is made of just-so stories not based in evolution, anthropology, or history. See https://evolution-institute.org/why-evolutionary-psychology-probably-isnt-possible/ https://evolution-institute.org/why-evolutionary-psychology-... - "Why Evolutionary Psychology (Probably) Isn’t Possible" with the underlying paper at https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?shared_access_token=ZBkIZa1YiuE0LQx8Ahma9fe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6oc4laM4TmJijVKMoolnjpDhDOnhV8TTTUcQLqNu74B-gNKznqYTlhLGXnnYrIM4MaBSV38YtYwukwnpokq9XnfTUGyB6mvKA-zVrAg-MXHA%3D%3D https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4?sh... "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?". Literally the first paper of Winegard's I read was http://dro.dur.ac.uk/28942/1/28942.pdf http://dro.dur.ac.uk/28942/1/28942.pdf which says in the abstract: > Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. The "therefore" hides a deeply incorrect assumption, which is present throughout evolutionary psychology. To answer your question, I consider the inference to be false. Quoting the first of the two links I gave: > It’s not sufficient to assume that the required identities are obvious. They need to be demonstrated. Solving the matching problem requires knowing about the psychological architecture of our prehistoric ancestors. But it is difficult to see how this knowledge can possibly be acquired. We do not, and very probably cannot, know much about the prehistoric human mind. Some evolutionary psychologists dispute this. They argue that although we do not have access to these individuals’ minds, we can “read off” ancestral mechanisms from the adaptive challenges that they faced. For example, because predator-evasion was an adaptive challenge, natural selection must have installed a predator-evasion mechanism. This inferential strategy works only if all mental structures are adaptations, if adaptationist explanations are difficult to come by, and if adaptations are easily characterized. There is no reason to assume that all mental structures are adaptations, just as there is no reason to assume that all traits are adaptations. We also know that adaptationist hypotheses are easy to come by. And finally, there is the problem of how to characterize traits. Any adaptive problem characterized in a coarse-grained way (for example, “predator evasion”) can equally be characterized as an aggregate of finer-grained problems. And these can, in turn, be characterized as an aggregate for even finer-grained problems. This introduces indeterminacy and arbitrariness into how adaptive challenges are to be characterized, and therefore, what mental structures are hypothesized to be responses to those challenges. This difficulty raises an additional obstacle for resolving the matching problem. If there is no fact of the matter about how psychological mechanisms are to be individuated, then there is no fact of the matter about how they are to be matched. Indeed, standard evolutionary theory has a term - spandrel, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology) - for things which are a side-effect of adaptive selection for some other trait, rather than the main selective effect. The "therefore" in Winegard's paper does not acknowledge that "tribal" may be a spandrel, so is therefore a false assumption.