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Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsi

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

advael 5y ago
I came here to say roughly this, so thank you for saving me the trouble
jeofken 5y ago
Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. But like machine learning, we can never know why life “chose” one way over the other. Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live. The alternative explanation of our psychology would require a supernatural spiritual force, which is even harder to falsify with experiment than evolutionary psychology. So to questions of “why” natural selection chose us who live now to have the psychology we have, can never be answered by experiment. When we can’t find knowledge through experiment, wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method - leaving us with the flawed but but interesting subject of the evolution of our psychology
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  > wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method I would agree, if I saw anyone actually doing this. But every single time I see someone using evolutionary psychology to explain something they already believe in. It might be interesting to start with a blank slate, no assumptions, and work from there to see what sort of psychology you end up with. But that would be a bit like predicting evolution: if you started out with some amino acids the odds of getting to Elvis are ridiculously small. There's no guarantee that if we started with a blank slate we'd end up where we are. There's too many other possibilities, the process is chaotic. Obviously our psychology evolved. But that provides a mechanism, not an explanation. Just like "why are our eyeballs the wrong way around?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". "why is social media so bad for us?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". You can't explain why our eyeballs are the wrong way around, because there were no "reasons" for that. It wasn't a choice that anyone made logically. Trying to provide reasons for it misses the point of evolution completely. Same for our psychology. Trying to reason about it misses the point. It is the way it is because that's a local optimum in the solution space of human-shaped brains.
- propater 5y ago
  "Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live." This is a false dichotomy. Some traits do not provide enough of an advantage or a drawback to be selected for or against. Some traits reach fixation by piggy-backing on an other advantageous trait (either because they are a byproduct or just because the advantageous trait first appeared in a small insular population that shared that neutral trait.) Some reached fixation because, by chance, they got through an evolutionary bottleneck.
  - jeofken 5y ago
    “Selected” doesn’t imply “better”, just that it was included in the set.
insickness 5y ago
While this article contains a lot of hypothesis, evolutionary psychology does have ways of proving conjectures. This includes ethology, the study of animal behavior, and comparison of modern-age cultures to more primitive ones. For example, he's right that higher status individuals experience less stress. In chimpanzees, lower status animals have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They are more often attacked by higher status individuals and need to remain on guard. Lower status chimps are attacked more often by higher status chimps because their hierarchy is party based on physical power (agonic) and partly based on their ability contribute (hedonic).
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  We are not chimps. Our society does not resemble that of chimps. Chimps don't go to work. They don't marry. They don't have mortgages. They don't have churches, or governments, or human rights, or school, or police forces. Chimps don't find themselves awake at 4am worrying about whether they can make next month's rent because a freelance client just dropped them. I can perfectly well believe that lower-status chimps have more stress because they are attacked by higher-status chimps. But in my experience, the person most likely to attack me is not a successful startup entrepreneur, it's some drunk dude at 2am who didn't manage to pull. I've been stressed and not stressed at different times in my life. Being CEO was pretty stressful. Being really poor was really stressful. Being comfortably employed and owning a house was probably the least stressful. There's not even any correlation with my status, let alone causation. Why do we think that chimpanzee psychology has anything to do with human psychology? Do we have any evidence to support that? Saying that "we can prove evolutionary psychology conjectures about complex human behaviours because we can observe simple behaviour in chimps" is circular reasoning. The only thing we have in common with chimps is a relatively recent common evolutionary ancestor.
  - insickness 5y ago
    Indigenous people don't have mortgages. They may not have churches, governments or police forces. They don't find themselves awake at 4am worrying about whether they can make next month's rent because a freelance client just dropped them. But this doesn't mean they don't have the same cognitive mechanisms that you and I have. Animal psychology is a proxy for human psychology just as animal biology is a proxy for human biology, which is why we first test human medicine in mice. There are obvious cognitive similarities between domesticated dogs and wolves in the wild even though there are obvious differences. We can study one to learn about the other. Agreed that being a CEO is probably a high stress job. But I think you nailed it when you said that being poor is really stressful. Saying that lower status individuals experience more stress doesn't mean that some very high status people don't experience more stress. If you're a world-famous rock star or athlete, I'm sure you experience a tremendous amount of stress. But on average, the lower your status, the more powerless you feel, the more stress you experience. You have less control over your life. But I might be wrong. Maybe it's different in humans. If you're not convinced by ethological studies, one could study cortisol levels in human beings and gauge relative status to see if stress correlates. My point being: there are ways to prove evolutionary psychology hypothesis.
tgv 5y ago
It's nearly impossible to verify evolutionary psychology, indeed. I see it more as a way to provide a reason for the existence of certain traits. Because the other options are: it appears out of nowhere or it's an accidental property. It's not rigorous enough to be useful, but then again, psychology almost never is.
coldtea 5y ago
>Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. No, but there's more to thinking and understanding the world than proving...

advael 5y ago

I came here to say roughly this, so thank you for saving me the trouble

jeofken 5y ago

Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. But like machine learning, we can never know why life “chose” one way over the other. Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live. The alternative explanation of our psychology would require a supernatural spiritual force, which is even harder to falsify with experiment than evolutionary psychology. So to questions of “why” natural selection chose us who live now to have the psychology we have, can never be answered by experiment. When we can’t find knowledge through experiment, wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method - leaving us with the flawed but but interesting subject of the evolution of our psychology

marcus_holmes 5y ago
> wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method I would agree, if I saw anyone actually doing this. But every single time I see someone using evolutionary psychology to explain something they already believe in. It might be interesting to start with a blank slate, no assumptions, and work from there to see what sort of psychology you end up with. But that would be a bit like predicting evolution: if you started out with some amino acids the odds of getting to Elvis are ridiculously small. There's no guarantee that if we started with a blank slate we'd end up where we are. There's too many other possibilities, the process is chaotic. Obviously our psychology evolved. But that provides a mechanism, not an explanation. Just like "why are our eyeballs the wrong way around?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". "why is social media so bad for us?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". You can't explain why our eyeballs are the wrong way around, because there were no "reasons" for that. It wasn't a choice that anyone made logically. Trying to provide reasons for it misses the point of evolution completely. Same for our psychology. Trying to reason about it misses the point. It is the way it is because that's a local optimum in the solution space of human-shaped brains.
propater 5y ago
"Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live." This is a false dichotomy. Some traits do not provide enough of an advantage or a drawback to be selected for or against. Some traits reach fixation by piggy-backing on an other advantageous trait (either because they are a byproduct or just because the advantageous trait first appeared in a small insular population that shared that neutral trait.) Some reached fixation because, by chance, they got through an evolutionary bottleneck.
- jeofken 5y ago
  “Selected” doesn’t imply “better”, just that it was included in the set.

insickness 5y ago

While this article contains a lot of hypothesis, evolutionary psychology does have ways of proving conjectures. This includes ethology, the study of animal behavior, and comparison of modern-age cultures to more primitive ones. For example, he's right that higher status individuals experience less stress. In chimpanzees, lower status animals have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They are more often attacked by higher status individuals and need to remain on guard. Lower status chimps are attacked more often by higher status chimps because their hierarchy is party based on physical power (agonic) and partly based on their ability contribute (hedonic).

marcus_holmes 5y ago
We are not chimps. Our society does not resemble that of chimps. Chimps don't go to work. They don't marry. They don't have mortgages. They don't have churches, or governments, or human rights, or school, or police forces. Chimps don't find themselves awake at 4am worrying about whether they can make next month's rent because a freelance client just dropped them. I can perfectly well believe that lower-status chimps have more stress because they are attacked by higher-status chimps. But in my experience, the person most likely to attack me is not a successful startup entrepreneur, it's some drunk dude at 2am who didn't manage to pull. I've been stressed and not stressed at different times in my life. Being CEO was pretty stressful. Being really poor was really stressful. Being comfortably employed and owning a house was probably the least stressful. There's not even any correlation with my status, let alone causation. Why do we think that chimpanzee psychology has anything to do with human psychology? Do we have any evidence to support that? Saying that "we can prove evolutionary psychology conjectures about complex human behaviours because we can observe simple behaviour in chimps" is circular reasoning. The only thing we have in common with chimps is a relatively recent common evolutionary ancestor.
- insickness 5y ago
  Indigenous people don't have mortgages. They may not have churches, governments or police forces. They don't find themselves awake at 4am worrying about whether they can make next month's rent because a freelance client just dropped them. But this doesn't mean they don't have the same cognitive mechanisms that you and I have. Animal psychology is a proxy for human psychology just as animal biology is a proxy for human biology, which is why we first test human medicine in mice. There are obvious cognitive similarities between domesticated dogs and wolves in the wild even though there are obvious differences. We can study one to learn about the other. Agreed that being a CEO is probably a high stress job. But I think you nailed it when you said that being poor is really stressful. Saying that lower status individuals experience more stress doesn't mean that some very high status people don't experience more stress. If you're a world-famous rock star or athlete, I'm sure you experience a tremendous amount of stress. But on average, the lower your status, the more powerless you feel, the more stress you experience. You have less control over your life. But I might be wrong. Maybe it's different in humans. If you're not convinced by ethological studies, one could study cortisol levels in human beings and gauge relative status to see if stress correlates. My point being: there are ways to prove evolutionary psychology hypothesis.

tgv 5y ago

It's nearly impossible to verify evolutionary psychology, indeed. I see it more as a way to provide a reason for the existence of certain traits. Because the other options are: it appears out of nowhere or it's an accidental property. It's not rigorous enough to be useful, but then again, psychology almost never is.

coldtea 5y ago

>Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. No, but there's more to thinking and understanding the world than proving...