“Yes, but…”
April 13, 2015 3:43 PM Subscribe
"Second, it is a mistake to pit post-modernism and social constructivism against evolutionary psychology as though they are in an intellectual death match that only one side can win. This tribalistic, us-versus-them thinking isn't helpful to science. Much like partitioning the causes of human behavior into nurture versus nature or culture versus biology or learned versus innate, social constructivism versus evolutionary psychology is a false dichotomy that may feel intuitively correct but should not be utilized very often by serious scientists (exceptions include behavioral genetics studies)."
I don't put a lot of stock in evolutionary psychology but I do know that I can reproduce about 2500 times faster than any woman, and if someone says that millions of generations of that sort of difference doesn't influence our behaviors with respect to mating and courtship then I'd have to say they're literally fucking crazy.
posted by Ryvar at 4:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by Ryvar at 4:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Funny how he didn't ever even give any indication of the size of variance around any of his values of d. Especially after all his verbiage about all the things one has to know about in order to understand evolutionary psychology and how ignorant his audience is, surely one also has to know about statistics? Without any information on variance, I can only assume that these supposed differences he's reporting are like so many other supposed differences between the sexes in human beings, in which the within group variance is much greater than the between group variance.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:27 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:27 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
If every human behaviour was heritable, then my parents would have also been raging alcoholics.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:29 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:29 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
Evolutionary Psychology has some validity BUT it is used SO often as an excuse for (a) personal bad behavior and (b) societal injustice, that it is almost IMPORTANT to discount or disregard its influence.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:55 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:55 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
what? no - go after the bad behaviour and social injustice directly, don't mess with scientific research. That is just as bad a misuse of science as the people who use it as an excuse.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [8 favorites]
localroger, I agree that that particular critique has some legs to stand on, and can be further argued. I always think of Stephen Jay Gould's metaphor of the spandrel—an architectual metaphor describing the space between two arches, an emergent property from two separate design features. As applied to evolutionary biology, the metaphor comes out to be: not every trait needs to be considered as having a fitness that is solely its own, in terms of explaining how it propagates into the species. For example, deleterious-seeming traits may be nested within biological organizations that provide enough reproductive fitness on their own to promote their propagation down generations. What seems harmful or odd could be a side-effect of a solution "evolution" was able to settle upon. Evolution is notoriously messy—it, as much as it can be personified, does not always reach design solution that a perfect designer would reach, just "good enough" solutions for a given environment of selection pressures. On the other hand, some evolutionary psychology studies (not all! but many popular-news-y ones) act as though every facet of human experience is evolutionarily determined on its own and not as a rider on to an evolutionary solution to a different problem that was "good enough" to provide an advantage.
As an aside, my favorite, favorite, favorite evolutionary psychology study I have ever read—and this is perhaps not fair as my own field of study has some bombs—sought to explain male-female differences in behavior in malls. It came to the conclusion that women were, quite seriously, evolved to forage... for shoes.
posted by Keter at 5:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
As an aside, my favorite, favorite, favorite evolutionary psychology study I have ever read—and this is perhaps not fair as my own field of study has some bombs—sought to explain male-female differences in behavior in malls. It came to the conclusion that women were, quite seriously, evolved to forage... for shoes.
posted by Keter at 5:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
To the extent that using the Copenhagen or Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics are useful for constructing models that match experimental data, we should make use of those models, without ever forgetting that they are just different lenses on identical sets of facts.
To the extent that Evolutionary Psychology is useful for constructing models of human behavior that match experimental data, we should make use of that model, without ever forgetting that it is just a different lens for experimental facts... and whenever someone attempts to use Evolutionary Psychology as a tool for discriminating against people or to claim special privileges for one set of people over another, we should make use of the caps lock key to inform them they're being A FUCKING IDIOT AND ALSO A DOUCHE.
posted by Ryvar at 5:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
To the extent that Evolutionary Psychology is useful for constructing models of human behavior that match experimental data, we should make use of that model, without ever forgetting that it is just a different lens for experimental facts... and whenever someone attempts to use Evolutionary Psychology as a tool for discriminating against people or to claim special privileges for one set of people over another, we should make use of the caps lock key to inform them they're being A FUCKING IDIOT AND ALSO A DOUCHE.
posted by Ryvar at 5:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
Richard Dawkins' sentiment from The Selfish Gene applies here:
I would expect at least some evo-psycho results to be valid. After all, if evolution via natural selection can come up with a cephalopod eye or the whole process of caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis, it should also be able to select for certain social behaviors, no matter how chaotically they're influenced by genes.
posted by Rangi at 5:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [7 favorites]
My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true... Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.Maybe some results derived from evolutionary psychology support stereotypes or injustice, but that's a reason to be aware of them and consciously work against them, not to deny that there is any truth to the results. And while some of those results are mistakes or "just-so stories," they're probably no worse than any of the other social sciences, which base their results on "self-report surveys, behavioral field test experiments, [or] ethnographies."
I would expect at least some evo-psycho results to be valid. After all, if evolution via natural selection can come up with a cephalopod eye or the whole process of caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis, it should also be able to select for certain social behaviors, no matter how chaotically they're influenced by genes.
posted by Rangi at 5:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [7 favorites]
Evolutionary psychology is neither written by an biological anthropologist.
I tend to find that the claims made by evolutionary anthropologists tend to be more of the 'boring but important' type, rather than the clickbait that we hear about evolutionary psychology.
posted by elephantday at 5:54 PM on April 13, 2015 [15 favorites]
I tend to find that the claims made by evolutionary anthropologists tend to be more of the 'boring but important' type, rather than the clickbait that we hear about evolutionary psychology.
posted by elephantday at 5:54 PM on April 13, 2015 [15 favorites]
I find that sometimes it is useful to view human behavior as a particle, while at other times, as a wave.
posted by gwint at 5:58 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by gwint at 5:58 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
As an aside, my favorite, favorite, favorite evolutionary psychology study I have ever read—and this is perhaps not fair as my own field of study has some bombs—sought to explain male-female differences in behavior in malls. It came to the conclusion that women were, quite seriously, evolved to forage... for shoes.
My own favorite example of an evolutionary psychology paper cited Bic For Women pens, in all seriousness, as an example of a small luxury good a woman might buy for herself after a rough day. It's been cited by 58 people. You tell me if this is an endemic issue in the field. I've tried to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt repeatedly and engage with it as a reputable field a number of times--I think this discussion was the last time I did it on the internet--and every time I try to engage with things that are marked as solid pieces of work in the field, I find survey questions and hypotheses about evolution without any actual attempts to show evolutionary data.
Note also that "evolutionary psychology" is not the same thing as "the study of the evolution of human behavior and primate behavior." There are a lot of different sub fields with assorted traditions under the intersection of behavior and evolution, and when I say I try to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt I'm referring to people who actually call themselves evolutionary psychologists. I've seen plenty of work on the evolution of humans which touches on human behavior that really is pretty solid--but it's generally not called evolutionary psych, either.
You know, I work at the same university as David Buss, and I'm in our evolutionary biology program. We've got some killer sexual selection biologists and some awesome people working on the evolution of animal behavior, and there's a tight-knit group of labs. And I tell you, I have never once run into an evolutionary psychology student in one of the classes in my evolution department, or in any of our three (three!) seminar series. It's not that they're in another department, either; the paleontology students show up on a considerably more frequent basis despite being located in geology. It has always struck me as such a good illustration of how little evolutionary psychologists care about actual evolution, outside of reading a few papers and borrowing a few concepts. As far as I'm concerned, they care about evolution mainly as a source of hypotheses to frame their poorly-controlled survey studies of undergraduates around.
Of course, no one I have ever met hates evolutionary psychology work more than behavioral ecologists. So there's that.
posted by sciatrix at 6:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [39 favorites]
My own favorite example of an evolutionary psychology paper cited Bic For Women pens, in all seriousness, as an example of a small luxury good a woman might buy for herself after a rough day. It's been cited by 58 people. You tell me if this is an endemic issue in the field. I've tried to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt repeatedly and engage with it as a reputable field a number of times--I think this discussion was the last time I did it on the internet--and every time I try to engage with things that are marked as solid pieces of work in the field, I find survey questions and hypotheses about evolution without any actual attempts to show evolutionary data.
Note also that "evolutionary psychology" is not the same thing as "the study of the evolution of human behavior and primate behavior." There are a lot of different sub fields with assorted traditions under the intersection of behavior and evolution, and when I say I try to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt I'm referring to people who actually call themselves evolutionary psychologists. I've seen plenty of work on the evolution of humans which touches on human behavior that really is pretty solid--but it's generally not called evolutionary psych, either.
You know, I work at the same university as David Buss, and I'm in our evolutionary biology program. We've got some killer sexual selection biologists and some awesome people working on the evolution of animal behavior, and there's a tight-knit group of labs. And I tell you, I have never once run into an evolutionary psychology student in one of the classes in my evolution department, or in any of our three (three!) seminar series. It's not that they're in another department, either; the paleontology students show up on a considerably more frequent basis despite being located in geology. It has always struck me as such a good illustration of how little evolutionary psychologists care about actual evolution, outside of reading a few papers and borrowing a few concepts. As far as I'm concerned, they care about evolution mainly as a source of hypotheses to frame their poorly-controlled survey studies of undergraduates around.
Of course, no one I have ever met hates evolutionary psychology work more than behavioral ecologists. So there's that.
posted by sciatrix at 6:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [39 favorites]
Keter, I appreciate your response but I don't think you're getting me. My objection isn't that I don't think heritability is being interpreted incorrectly. My objection is that I don't think most mental traits are heritable at all. You can draw all the graphs you want about intelligence or ringedness or whatever the fad is today but it's all the same as clocking a roulette wheel. You think you see patterns there but there aren't any.
posted by localroger at 6:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by localroger at 6:11 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
If every human behaviour was heritable, then my parents would have also been raging alcoholics.
I'm pretty sure my parents inherited alcoholism from me, during my teens.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'm pretty sure my parents inherited alcoholism from me, during my teens.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:18 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
But the drive to overcome selfishness is also in the genes, is it not? (Assuming personality or will doesn't exist other than as gene expression of molecular interactions following unfeeling laws of particle physics.)
I think most people believe in "will" even though it's a superstitious belief. I do, at least I hope, there is force within us, perhaps within all life, perhaps even deeper within all matter, that has a spark of feeling, a yearning, a hoping, a drive for something. A sensing and a love to be close to other beings... to love and be loved.... a consciousness...
But I'm also the sort of person who talks to my plants and is friends with the sun, so my advice about scientific theory may be taken with a saltshaker of salt...
I also I get my spiritual lessons from MLPFIM and He Man episodes. For anyone who wants to explore deep profound things like I think about.
A lot of who we are, what we think, and do, is the brute force of unfeeling physics, chains of reactions happening in the cells in our bodies, our bodies coping with that, history from thousands of years of coping with a brutal reality-- but I like to imagine there is at least a spark pushing in the direction our will hopes for-- sometimes more or less than others depending on how much power there is to assert it.
Scientists are boring because they don't believe in the flower spirits or the tree folk, or the cloud people... well they aren't really people and I can't account for whether they're good or not, such a fearsome face one can find in the clouds though occasionally on a pretty day you will see the whispy clouds... they might make the rainbow clouds for you if ask and they like you enough and a big rainbow circle around the sun, but mind you have to wait an hour or so after you ask and you have to give as well as you get. I can tell you how if you're very brave...
And the scientists often don't believe there is more to the human spirit or the earth herself than meets the eye, or to the great purpose buried deep within. None of these scientific philosophies considers who "we" that is going to guide the culture is if cultural patterns are driving all our behavior anyway. You can't change it, it will tell you what to do based on calculated variables of how you were raised. You will change "the culture" only in ways the culture programed you to change it. If you think genes determine everything, then you will perform what unfeeling molecular physics dictates you will think, feel and do. You will learn what science you have been programmed for no reason to perform by a force without feeling. Medical doctors will only care to intervene based on their genetic programing based on unfeeling physics. The idea there is a purpose is a function of unfeeling matter and energetic interactions. Yet out of this abyss of unfeeling there is a feeling of love and it feels real. And it's entirely possible that it is a principles built out of the functions of matter and energy rather purely a function of human organisms that are built on these functions. That the force generates the experience of that force, that the programming the genes have worked so hard to grow over millions of years of heartache, torture, suffering to keep us alive to where we are-- is not so very without will or purpose of it's own.
Love is complex biological and energetic phenomenon that exists in physical reality and can grow if we cultivate it. Knowledge and strength and wisdom are tools needed to carry out it's mission. But if the people seeking the knowledge and power to carry out the mission of compassion that lives within us, and they forget and become cold to that very mission, how can they aid it? It's cold out there in the abyss of knowledge and facts of the functions of this merciless reality. Do not get lost, and forget the wisdom of the heart, or to bring back the treasures from the depth of the abyss to be used for good. The people dissecting cells, playing with the DNA, seeing living beings as unfeeling and meaningless toys for exploitation or discovery, are forgetting that perhaps our cells do not serve our bodies but that our bodies are a united force that's strength is derived from commitment to serve the sacred cells within, each one of them a valuable member of the whole. Not creatures to be tortured just to see what happens with no mercy. Within my cells lays the memories of my ancestors, the wisdom of my sacred elders, the very love that has glowed in the hearts of the people before, the laughter, the sacrifice, the failures, the wrongs, the guilts, the sorrows, the loss the anguish, the unbearable suffering, the hopes and dreams. My genes are alive and they are filled with love, and doing complex and unspeakably powerful feats to keep me alive as they have done for my ancestors before me against a brutal reality where the only god of compassion at present seems to come from within and even the very leaders and healers in charge of caring for the people are doing their best to ignore or even destroy that very force.
The people who are defining what it means to be human for the rest of us, are too often quite out of touch with what it really means to be human.
This has been strange comments with xarnop, enjoy your beans my friends...
posted by xarnop at 6:45 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think most people believe in "will" even though it's a superstitious belief. I do, at least I hope, there is force within us, perhaps within all life, perhaps even deeper within all matter, that has a spark of feeling, a yearning, a hoping, a drive for something. A sensing and a love to be close to other beings... to love and be loved.... a consciousness...
But I'm also the sort of person who talks to my plants and is friends with the sun, so my advice about scientific theory may be taken with a saltshaker of salt...
I also I get my spiritual lessons from MLPFIM and He Man episodes. For anyone who wants to explore deep profound things like I think about.
A lot of who we are, what we think, and do, is the brute force of unfeeling physics, chains of reactions happening in the cells in our bodies, our bodies coping with that, history from thousands of years of coping with a brutal reality-- but I like to imagine there is at least a spark pushing in the direction our will hopes for-- sometimes more or less than others depending on how much power there is to assert it.
Scientists are boring because they don't believe in the flower spirits or the tree folk, or the cloud people... well they aren't really people and I can't account for whether they're good or not, such a fearsome face one can find in the clouds though occasionally on a pretty day you will see the whispy clouds... they might make the rainbow clouds for you if ask and they like you enough and a big rainbow circle around the sun, but mind you have to wait an hour or so after you ask and you have to give as well as you get. I can tell you how if you're very brave...
And the scientists often don't believe there is more to the human spirit or the earth herself than meets the eye, or to the great purpose buried deep within. None of these scientific philosophies considers who "we" that is going to guide the culture is if cultural patterns are driving all our behavior anyway. You can't change it, it will tell you what to do based on calculated variables of how you were raised. You will change "the culture" only in ways the culture programed you to change it. If you think genes determine everything, then you will perform what unfeeling molecular physics dictates you will think, feel and do. You will learn what science you have been programmed for no reason to perform by a force without feeling. Medical doctors will only care to intervene based on their genetic programing based on unfeeling physics. The idea there is a purpose is a function of unfeeling matter and energetic interactions. Yet out of this abyss of unfeeling there is a feeling of love and it feels real. And it's entirely possible that it is a principles built out of the functions of matter and energy rather purely a function of human organisms that are built on these functions. That the force generates the experience of that force, that the programming the genes have worked so hard to grow over millions of years of heartache, torture, suffering to keep us alive to where we are-- is not so very without will or purpose of it's own.
Love is complex biological and energetic phenomenon that exists in physical reality and can grow if we cultivate it. Knowledge and strength and wisdom are tools needed to carry out it's mission. But if the people seeking the knowledge and power to carry out the mission of compassion that lives within us, and they forget and become cold to that very mission, how can they aid it? It's cold out there in the abyss of knowledge and facts of the functions of this merciless reality. Do not get lost, and forget the wisdom of the heart, or to bring back the treasures from the depth of the abyss to be used for good. The people dissecting cells, playing with the DNA, seeing living beings as unfeeling and meaningless toys for exploitation or discovery, are forgetting that perhaps our cells do not serve our bodies but that our bodies are a united force that's strength is derived from commitment to serve the sacred cells within, each one of them a valuable member of the whole. Not creatures to be tortured just to see what happens with no mercy. Within my cells lays the memories of my ancestors, the wisdom of my sacred elders, the very love that has glowed in the hearts of the people before, the laughter, the sacrifice, the failures, the wrongs, the guilts, the sorrows, the loss the anguish, the unbearable suffering, the hopes and dreams. My genes are alive and they are filled with love, and doing complex and unspeakably powerful feats to keep me alive as they have done for my ancestors before me against a brutal reality where the only god of compassion at present seems to come from within and even the very leaders and healers in charge of caring for the people are doing their best to ignore or even destroy that very force.
The people who are defining what it means to be human for the rest of us, are too often quite out of touch with what it really means to be human.
This has been strange comments with xarnop, enjoy your beans my friends...
posted by xarnop at 6:45 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
the size of variance around any of his values of d.
Average is about 6 inches, innately speaking.
But then socially constructed as so much more than that when you get interviewed on radiolab and referred to by Gladwell.
posted by spitbull at 6:56 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
Average is about 6 inches, innately speaking.
But then socially constructed as so much more than that when you get interviewed on radiolab and referred to by Gladwell.
posted by spitbull at 6:56 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
I don't put a lot of stock in evolutionary psychology but I do know that I can reproduce about 2500 times faster than any woman
Without any woman I'm pretty sure you can't reproduce at all. As far as qualifying that, I think you just made your chances sketchy if this was like Thunderdome.
posted by localroger at 7:01 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Without any woman I'm pretty sure you can't reproduce at all. As far as qualifying that, I think you just made your chances sketchy if this was like Thunderdome.
posted by localroger at 7:01 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Second, it is a mistake to pit post-modernism and social constructivism against evolutionary psychology as though they are in an intellectual death match that only one side can win. This tribalistic, us-versus-them thinking isn't helpful to science.
That's like saying that we need not pit an egg against a windshield in some kind of physics deathmatch: it's not said out of some expansive generosity of intellectual spirit or scientific ecumenicalism, but rather as a hasty evasion of defending EP on its own merits.
The fact is, EP is not a science, but a mishmash of badly confused experiments with no strong claims to external validity. Its practitioners base their hypotheses on assumptions that are themselves never tested, but rather assumed, simply because they seem like they would make sense if they were true; then these practitioners compound their error by consistently and without exception failing to consider plausible rival hypotheses, to build falsifiability into their research design, and by never, ever getting anywhere close to identifying empirical causal mechanisms (e.g., gene expression, or really anything biological).
It's junk science. No amount of undeserved credence or disingenuous glad-handing about how the world is big enough that we can all practice our scientific research in it will change the fact the evo-psych is fatally-flawed bullshit.
posted by clockzero at 7:16 PM on April 13, 2015 [11 favorites]
That's like saying that we need not pit an egg against a windshield in some kind of physics deathmatch: it's not said out of some expansive generosity of intellectual spirit or scientific ecumenicalism, but rather as a hasty evasion of defending EP on its own merits.
The fact is, EP is not a science, but a mishmash of badly confused experiments with no strong claims to external validity. Its practitioners base their hypotheses on assumptions that are themselves never tested, but rather assumed, simply because they seem like they would make sense if they were true; then these practitioners compound their error by consistently and without exception failing to consider plausible rival hypotheses, to build falsifiability into their research design, and by never, ever getting anywhere close to identifying empirical causal mechanisms (e.g., gene expression, or really anything biological).
It's junk science. No amount of undeserved credence or disingenuous glad-handing about how the world is big enough that we can all practice our scientific research in it will change the fact the evo-psych is fatally-flawed bullshit.
posted by clockzero at 7:16 PM on April 13, 2015 [11 favorites]
My own favorite example of an evolutionary psychology paper...
Maybe the science is real, but you just happen to be reading papers from shitty scientists. Maybe these papers are being passed around as examples of shitty work, so they're getting more attention than they ever could have gotten if they were, you know, actually good.
It's almost like there's an evolutionary advantage to being laughably bad about evolutionary psychology.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:30 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
Maybe the science is real, but you just happen to be reading papers from shitty scientists. Maybe these papers are being passed around as examples of shitty work, so they're getting more attention than they ever could have gotten if they were, you know, actually good.
It's almost like there's an evolutionary advantage to being laughably bad about evolutionary psychology.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:30 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
I find it so weird that some really smart people completely dismiss all evolutionary psychology because something about it doesn't jibe with their personal worldview.
It's like you're saying, "Evolution can explain everything in the animal kingdom, except the parts I don't like. Pack behavior of wolves? Oh, they evolved that behavior because there was an advantage in their niche in working together. Human behavior XYZ? Oh, that's the work of evil fuckheads."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:37 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
It's like you're saying, "Evolution can explain everything in the animal kingdom, except the parts I don't like. Pack behavior of wolves? Oh, they evolved that behavior because there was an advantage in their niche in working together. Human behavior XYZ? Oh, that's the work of evil fuckheads."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:37 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Maybe the science is real, but you just happen to be reading papers from shitty scientists.
This makes no sense. Bad scientific practice doesn't magically produce good results.
I find it so weird that some really smart people completely dismiss all evolutionary psychology because something about it doesn't jibe with their personal worldview.
This is a straw man. Enumerating the problems with much of evolutionary psychology--that it tends towards just-so stories, that little consideration is given to trying to account for the cultural biases of either the investigators or the subjects (a problem that anthropology has been taking on head-on since its inception) has nothing to do with "personal worldview", other than my personal worldview is that bad science is, well, bad. It also doesn't mean entirely discounting how biology/evolution affects humans.
posted by kagredon at 7:45 PM on April 13, 2015 [10 favorites]
This makes no sense. Bad scientific practice doesn't magically produce good results.
I find it so weird that some really smart people completely dismiss all evolutionary psychology because something about it doesn't jibe with their personal worldview.
This is a straw man. Enumerating the problems with much of evolutionary psychology--that it tends towards just-so stories, that little consideration is given to trying to account for the cultural biases of either the investigators or the subjects (a problem that anthropology has been taking on head-on since its inception) has nothing to do with "personal worldview", other than my personal worldview is that bad science is, well, bad. It also doesn't mean entirely discounting how biology/evolution affects humans.
posted by kagredon at 7:45 PM on April 13, 2015 [10 favorites]
in fact, the very comment you were replying to said
Note also that "evolutionary psychology" is not the same thing as "the study of the evolution of human behavior and primate behavior." There are a lot of different sub fields with assorted traditions under the intersection of behavior and evolution, and when I say I try to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt I'm referring to people who actually call themselves evolutionary psychologists. I've seen plenty of work on the evolution of humans which touches on human behavior that really is pretty solid--but it's generally not called evolutionary psych, either.
so maybe you shouldn't be the one lecturing about being dismissive because someone happened to disagree with you
posted by kagredon at 7:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
Note also that "evolutionary psychology" is not the same thing as "the study of the evolution of human behavior and primate behavior." There are a lot of different sub fields with assorted traditions under the intersection of behavior and evolution, and when I say I try to give evolutionary psychology the benefit of the doubt I'm referring to people who actually call themselves evolutionary psychologists. I've seen plenty of work on the evolution of humans which touches on human behavior that really is pretty solid--but it's generally not called evolutionary psych, either.
so maybe you shouldn't be the one lecturing about being dismissive because someone happened to disagree with you
posted by kagredon at 7:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
Generally speaking, people do not cite shitty papers. Shitty papers sink like a rock, with people not reading them or paying much attention to them. Hence my point that the paper I'd linked was cited, again, 58 times in the three years since it was published--and I've checked up on a few of those citations and they are generally within the field and positive. I've read evolutionary psych papers which were well regarded in their field and been deeply unimpressed by their work when compared to the standards set by the evolution of animal behavior.
Sorry. I think the field has serious intellectual problems--if it didn't I wouldn't keep reading evo-psych papers that appear to be well regarded and coming away unimpressed--and I wish they would go away so that better sub-disciplines could tackle the problem of the evolution of human behavior without getting caught up in the blowback of evolutionary psych. Again: I can think of about half a dozen sub-disciplines which hang out in the intersection of evolution and behavior, all with slightly different traditions, areas of methodological specialty, and tendency to communicate with other sub-disciplines. Behavior genetics, population genetics (depending on the genes in question), behavioral ecology, ethology, anthropology, hell, sometimes even neuroscience and paleontology get at this one. Evolutionary psychology, despite its most noxious claims, does not have a monopoly on this subject.
It's also notable, as I said, for communicating less with other fields focused on this problem than any of the other disciplines I mentioned, at least in my experience. And that communication goes both ways--I mentioned that I don't ever see evolutionary psychologists taking courses from my department? Yeah, well, I also don't see good evolutionary biologists studying behavior reading evo psych papers and going "my, what applicable ideas to our field of research, let's tweak them to apply to a new sub-problem!" Evolutionary psychology is amazingly non-integrative and isolated, academically. More than it has any right at all to be, for a field which is so quick to praise itself for pulling from lots of disciplines.
posted by sciatrix at 7:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [23 favorites]
Sorry. I think the field has serious intellectual problems--if it didn't I wouldn't keep reading evo-psych papers that appear to be well regarded and coming away unimpressed--and I wish they would go away so that better sub-disciplines could tackle the problem of the evolution of human behavior without getting caught up in the blowback of evolutionary psych. Again: I can think of about half a dozen sub-disciplines which hang out in the intersection of evolution and behavior, all with slightly different traditions, areas of methodological specialty, and tendency to communicate with other sub-disciplines. Behavior genetics, population genetics (depending on the genes in question), behavioral ecology, ethology, anthropology, hell, sometimes even neuroscience and paleontology get at this one. Evolutionary psychology, despite its most noxious claims, does not have a monopoly on this subject.
It's also notable, as I said, for communicating less with other fields focused on this problem than any of the other disciplines I mentioned, at least in my experience. And that communication goes both ways--I mentioned that I don't ever see evolutionary psychologists taking courses from my department? Yeah, well, I also don't see good evolutionary biologists studying behavior reading evo psych papers and going "my, what applicable ideas to our field of research, let's tweak them to apply to a new sub-problem!" Evolutionary psychology is amazingly non-integrative and isolated, academically. More than it has any right at all to be, for a field which is so quick to praise itself for pulling from lots of disciplines.
posted by sciatrix at 7:47 PM on April 13, 2015 [23 favorites]
In case you're curious, here are the citations for the paper I mentioned. I am noting a conspicuous lack of pointing and laughing at the terrible work. And it is terrible--I actually deconstructed it in a journal club and found the whole methodology flawed, snarky comment about sparkly pens aside.
posted by sciatrix at 7:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 7:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
Human behavior XYZ is terrible and I wish people would stop doing human behavior XYZ. Sadly, science tells us human behavior XYZ is inevitable, whatever it is.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:01 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:01 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
And yet we accept analyses of primate behavior patterns without argument. Are we arguing for human exceptionalism here? That we are somehow metaphysical and beyond the reach of our own biology, behavior-wise? That our actions defy predictability? Tomfoolery, all of it. We are self-important primate derivatives that want desparately to believe we are special. Spoiler alert: we are not.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
My belief is that evolutionary psychology is not real, but that we are genetically primed to accept "just-so" explanations because they served as an adaptive and conflict-reducing mechanism between rival bands of hunters.
As further proof of this I note that people promoting evolutionary psychology are predominantly male, which is what my theory predicts: just-so explanations had less survival value for women, because foraging did not bring them into as much conflict or contact with other groups of early humans.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:02 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
As further proof of this I note that people promoting evolutionary psychology are predominantly male, which is what my theory predicts: just-so explanations had less survival value for women, because foraging did not bring them into as much conflict or contact with other groups of early humans.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:02 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
For me, the biggest problem with ev psych is the pervasive assumption that everything is heritable.
For me it's that humans are bad at understanding complex systems. Early intuitions often turn out to be completely wrong. Straightforward ideas that result A is because of the behavior of some isolated part X, and changing X will simply and understandably change A, are generally laughably ignorant. So the law of unintended consequences suggests to me me that EP people are going to be pretty awful at guessing the evolutionary benefit of some theorized change across all of fucking human society and history, and supporting this with some questionnaires and brief papers.
In other words what bothers me is I think good scientists would be more humble in the face of the scope of what they are talking about, and how little is known or even knowable. Instead what I see are tiny results extrapolated into universality in way that reminds me most of creation science. Which was also filled with people whining about how you had to take them seriously because sciiiiience.
posted by nom de poop at 10:06 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
For me it's that humans are bad at understanding complex systems. Early intuitions often turn out to be completely wrong. Straightforward ideas that result A is because of the behavior of some isolated part X, and changing X will simply and understandably change A, are generally laughably ignorant. So the law of unintended consequences suggests to me me that EP people are going to be pretty awful at guessing the evolutionary benefit of some theorized change across all of fucking human society and history, and supporting this with some questionnaires and brief papers.
In other words what bothers me is I think good scientists would be more humble in the face of the scope of what they are talking about, and how little is known or even knowable. Instead what I see are tiny results extrapolated into universality in way that reminds me most of creation science. Which was also filled with people whining about how you had to take them seriously because sciiiiience.
posted by nom de poop at 10:06 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
For me, the biggest problem with ev psych is the pervasive assumption that everything is heritable.
For me, the biggest problem with criticism of ev psych is the pervasive assumption that it claims everything is heritable.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
For me, the biggest problem with criticism of ev psych is the pervasive assumption that it claims everything is heritable.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
And yet we accept analyses of primate behavior patterns without argument.
Wait, we do? Someone should tell ChuraChura.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:08 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
Wait, we do? Someone should tell ChuraChura.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:08 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
And yet we accept analyses of primate behavior patterns without argument.
if your analysis of primate behavior pattern failed to take into account the specific environment (wild or captive? In the presence of what kind of resources? Are you looking at a large or small social group?) and appealed to murky, unfalsifiable claims about what evolutionary pressures may have existed in the past, you would be laughed out of the room. The real question is why so many evolutionary biologists feel comfortable doing so with human behavior.
posted by kagredon at 10:53 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
if your analysis of primate behavior pattern failed to take into account the specific environment (wild or captive? In the presence of what kind of resources? Are you looking at a large or small social group?) and appealed to murky, unfalsifiable claims about what evolutionary pressures may have existed in the past, you would be laughed out of the room. The real question is why so many evolutionary biologists feel comfortable doing so with human behavior.
posted by kagredon at 10:53 PM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
As further proof of this I note that people promoting evolutionary psychology are predominantly male, which is what my theory predicts: just-so explanations had less survival value for women, because foraging did not bring them into as much conflict or contact with other groups of early humans.
I know you're kidding Joe, but this actually does point to a real problem - the abuse or disregard of archaeological findings as one of the baseline assumptions of a lot of Evolutionary Psychology.
Why do men hunt in malls and women forage in malls? Well, it's because tens of thousands of years of men hunting and women foraging have selected for innate predispositions to do that kind of resource acquisition (uh, instincts I guess). Sounds reasonable, unless you consider the deep time evidence for men hunting and women gathering (and it must be deep time, since that's the scale that evolution works on, especially in K-selected species like our own). There is such minimal evidence for ancient gender roles in the archaeological record it's closer to "none" than it is to "supports EP". I mean, it may make sense that men hunt and women gathered, that men did (do) the heavy lifting and women hung (hang) around the fire, nursed and gossiped a lot, but the actual evidence for this one way or another is very very slim.
Instead what happens is that people (archaeologists as well as EPs and laypeople too) project those gender roles they are comfortable with onto the past. This is possible since there's not a lot of evidence one way or the other. Finding such roles, these are then used to create a naturalized story of long-term adaptive gender roles. This story is then used to justify the existing gender roles in the present which were projected into the past. So, a little circular as arguments go.
In archaeology, you can always find what you're looking for, and I don't mean that as a good thing.
Yet unlike a lot of what us archaeologists do, Evolutionary Psychology actually matters since it insidiously permeates contemporary discourse in a way which is, if nothing else, deeply, deeply, conservative.
Of course the human brain is deeply shaped by evolution. And of course physical structure of the brain may have some influence on cognition. There is certainly promise in Evolutionary Psychology. But social changes outpace almost any conceivable model of evolutionarily-driven physiological changes. That'd be fine if some fundamental components of human social organization had never changed through deep history. The fact is, we don't know if that's true or not. So from my narrow, outsider's view, one of the foundational assumptions of EP is deeply questionable.
posted by Rumple at 11:03 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
I know you're kidding Joe, but this actually does point to a real problem - the abuse or disregard of archaeological findings as one of the baseline assumptions of a lot of Evolutionary Psychology.
Why do men hunt in malls and women forage in malls? Well, it's because tens of thousands of years of men hunting and women foraging have selected for innate predispositions to do that kind of resource acquisition (uh, instincts I guess). Sounds reasonable, unless you consider the deep time evidence for men hunting and women gathering (and it must be deep time, since that's the scale that evolution works on, especially in K-selected species like our own). There is such minimal evidence for ancient gender roles in the archaeological record it's closer to "none" than it is to "supports EP". I mean, it may make sense that men hunt and women gathered, that men did (do) the heavy lifting and women hung (hang) around the fire, nursed and gossiped a lot, but the actual evidence for this one way or another is very very slim.
Instead what happens is that people (archaeologists as well as EPs and laypeople too) project those gender roles they are comfortable with onto the past. This is possible since there's not a lot of evidence one way or the other. Finding such roles, these are then used to create a naturalized story of long-term adaptive gender roles. This story is then used to justify the existing gender roles in the present which were projected into the past. So, a little circular as arguments go.
In archaeology, you can always find what you're looking for, and I don't mean that as a good thing.
Yet unlike a lot of what us archaeologists do, Evolutionary Psychology actually matters since it insidiously permeates contemporary discourse in a way which is, if nothing else, deeply, deeply, conservative.
Of course the human brain is deeply shaped by evolution. And of course physical structure of the brain may have some influence on cognition. There is certainly promise in Evolutionary Psychology. But social changes outpace almost any conceivable model of evolutionarily-driven physiological changes. That'd be fine if some fundamental components of human social organization had never changed through deep history. The fact is, we don't know if that's true or not. So from my narrow, outsider's view, one of the foundational assumptions of EP is deeply questionable.
posted by Rumple at 11:03 PM on April 13, 2015 [14 favorites]
"For me, the biggest problem with criticism of ev psych is the pervasive assumption that it claims everything is heritable."
That's one of the fair cops that evo-psych has to surmount is exactly that, as evidenced by quotes like these: "For this reason, learning is not an alternative explanation to the claim that natural selection shaped the behavior, although many researchers assume that it is. The same goes for culture. Given that cultural ideas are absorbed via learning and inference—which is caused by evolved programs of some kind—a behavior can be, at one and the same time, ‘cultural’, ‘learned’ and ‘evolved’."
Even though I'm predisposed to dismiss evo-psych, a lot of the criticisms in this thread have been pretty terrible.
"So the law of unintended consequences suggests to me me that EP people are going to be pretty awful at guessing the evolutionary benefit of some theorized change across all of fucking human society and history, and supporting this with some questionnaires and brief papers."
Specifically because much of it is ultimately justified through appeals to increase reproductive rates. Which is fair in some instances — I don't think anyone would argue that there aren't some behavioral or psychological traits that are heritable, nor that there aren't some heritable behavioral or psychological traits that are evidenced through higher reproductive rates. But the persistence of colorblindness doesn't mean that there's adaptive mate selection for colorblindness, even if people disproportionately chose mates for colorblindness.
posted by klangklangston at 11:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
That's one of the fair cops that evo-psych has to surmount is exactly that, as evidenced by quotes like these: "For this reason, learning is not an alternative explanation to the claim that natural selection shaped the behavior, although many researchers assume that it is. The same goes for culture. Given that cultural ideas are absorbed via learning and inference—which is caused by evolved programs of some kind—a behavior can be, at one and the same time, ‘cultural’, ‘learned’ and ‘evolved’."
Even though I'm predisposed to dismiss evo-psych, a lot of the criticisms in this thread have been pretty terrible.
"So the law of unintended consequences suggests to me me that EP people are going to be pretty awful at guessing the evolutionary benefit of some theorized change across all of fucking human society and history, and supporting this with some questionnaires and brief papers."
Specifically because much of it is ultimately justified through appeals to increase reproductive rates. Which is fair in some instances — I don't think anyone would argue that there aren't some behavioral or psychological traits that are heritable, nor that there aren't some heritable behavioral or psychological traits that are evidenced through higher reproductive rates. But the persistence of colorblindness doesn't mean that there's adaptive mate selection for colorblindness, even if people disproportionately chose mates for colorblindness.
posted by klangklangston at 11:07 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
There are two models of heritable psychological traits. One is that humans have drives which are at least influenced by evolutionary processes: examples would be sexuality, or emotional reaction to blood. In this model detailed behaviors arise from the expression of these drives in varying environmental contexts, particularly as these drives come into conflict. I think this is a useful model of primate behaviour. For example in this model menstrual taboo is a context-limited response (for some individuals or societies) to the conflict of the two drives I mentioned.
The evo psych model on the other hand is that entire behavioural 'modules' are inherited. They operate like an information processing system, with environmental inputs transformed into very specific behavioural outputs (such as foraging behaviour). In the evo psych model menstrual taboo is a 'hardwired' drive arising from the reduced fertility during the menstrual phase. They are very keen on the concept of hard-wiring.
So the issue is not are aspects of psychology heritable or not. The issue is how much is 'hardwired' and how much room for adaption and change is there. I think there is an obvious motive for certain groups in society to emphasise the inevitability of modern power structures, and the futility of challenging them. Ironically I think evo psych arises from heritable traits: dominance, aggression, fear of weakness.
posted by communicator at 11:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
The evo psych model on the other hand is that entire behavioural 'modules' are inherited. They operate like an information processing system, with environmental inputs transformed into very specific behavioural outputs (such as foraging behaviour). In the evo psych model menstrual taboo is a 'hardwired' drive arising from the reduced fertility during the menstrual phase. They are very keen on the concept of hard-wiring.
So the issue is not are aspects of psychology heritable or not. The issue is how much is 'hardwired' and how much room for adaption and change is there. I think there is an obvious motive for certain groups in society to emphasise the inevitability of modern power structures, and the futility of challenging them. Ironically I think evo psych arises from heritable traits: dominance, aggression, fear of weakness.
posted by communicator at 11:52 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Evo psych strikes me as an academic strain of the PUA community, only with graphs, peer-reviewed journals, and inappropriate references to Jane Austen novels. Unfortunately, this article, which starts with an anecdote about the speaker shocking -- SHOCKING! -- a female listener with a powerful masculine truth bomb about the SCIENCE of female sexual behaviour, doesn't really improve my impression of the discipline.
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:13 AM on April 14, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:13 AM on April 14, 2015 [6 favorites]
the article does touch on the fallacy that I think most criticisms are based on:
This is a mistake on several levels, not the least of which is that even if evolved sex differences in mate preferences do exist, that does not make them “desirable” or “good” or “inevitable” in any way. Thinking like that is fallacious, it is wrong. Even though humans have likely evolved to be omnivorous, that doesn’t mean we should eat meat.
That is, that there is no moral imperative in the "natural" and the "evolved" - except that you then are left with explaining how values themselves are not evolved. And if the value system itself is merely an artifact of Evolution then claims such as:
"Evolved sex differences are not to be ideologically feared, they are to be scientifically evaluated and, if they exist, knowledge about their special design can be used to more efficiently create the healthy society within which we wish to live."
looks sort of nonsensical - because the wishes themselves must have been created by evolutionary processes - right?
So rather than being pitted against Post-Modernism it is in fact the Evolutionary Psychological model itself that leads to Post-modernist devaluation of all values. Because we are left with no value system by which to judge the efficacy or desirability of any evolved traits. Other than their evolution themselves. ... of wait now EV starts to look a lot like Hegel's famous equivocation..
"the real is rational and the rational is real".
posted by mary8nne at 3:40 AM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
This is a mistake on several levels, not the least of which is that even if evolved sex differences in mate preferences do exist, that does not make them “desirable” or “good” or “inevitable” in any way. Thinking like that is fallacious, it is wrong. Even though humans have likely evolved to be omnivorous, that doesn’t mean we should eat meat.
That is, that there is no moral imperative in the "natural" and the "evolved" - except that you then are left with explaining how values themselves are not evolved. And if the value system itself is merely an artifact of Evolution then claims such as:
"Evolved sex differences are not to be ideologically feared, they are to be scientifically evaluated and, if they exist, knowledge about their special design can be used to more efficiently create the healthy society within which we wish to live."
looks sort of nonsensical - because the wishes themselves must have been created by evolutionary processes - right?
So rather than being pitted against Post-Modernism it is in fact the Evolutionary Psychological model itself that leads to Post-modernist devaluation of all values. Because we are left with no value system by which to judge the efficacy or desirability of any evolved traits. Other than their evolution themselves. ... of wait now EV starts to look a lot like Hegel's famous equivocation..
"the real is rational and the rational is real".
posted by mary8nne at 3:40 AM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
If I'm not meant to eat all of the pastry, why I have a beak?????
posted by moody cow at 4:19 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by moody cow at 4:19 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Huh? Postmodernism is a cultural movement, not science. Same with Social Constructivism. Why are they thrown in with evo psych? They answer different questions.
posted by Ironmouth at 4:39 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by Ironmouth at 4:39 AM on April 14, 2015
Because evo psych is a cultural movement, not science.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 5:33 AM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 5:33 AM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
(Guys, I was trying to hard to pretend this thread didn't exist! And then someone flashed the monkey signal...)
People studying primate behavior must take very detailed account of a variety of forces in order to come to any sort of conclusion about the ultimate (evolutionary) forces driving any set of behaviors. For example, in my dissertation research I am ostensibly looking at aspects of dietary seasonality and diet quality in wild monkeys. In addition to my detailed feeding data, I have to keep track of what is fruiting when, what other species are eating at the same trees, when do we have predation occurring, what social behavior is happening, when are babies being born and surviving or dying, etc. etc. etc. Behavior and evolution of that behavior is so complex that even though I am doing twelve zillion things and collecting data on a bunch of different potential things impacting the choices my animals are making, every time I've submitted a grant people say "Well, have you considered including x, y, or z so you get a more complete picture of this situation?" and I know that no matter what, I'll never be able to input everything. And that affects how much I am able to say with confidence about how organisms evolved and why my monkeys do the things that they do.
Even then there is a strong recognition that lots of things organisms do are not adaptive and in particular, because we're often working on small populations cut off from gene flow due to migration (because they're in isolated forest patches), that lots of traits emerge due to genetic drift. And lots of behaviors happen because primates are smart and flexible and behaviorally adept at doing what works best, not necessarily because they have evolved to do something.
In fact, one of the longest running rivalries/debates in the field is about whether violence can be viewed as adaptive or if its excesses are the product of living in degraded habitats at high density with anthropogenic effects on the habitats. Can what you observe in these conditions really be applied to the environment of origin? And then taking what we see in modern primates and applying them to humans and questions of human origins without qualification - you just can't make a one to one comparison. Can we say that (for example) the last common ancestor humans shared with chimpanzees must have committed frequent infanticide and been very violent? If you ask an anthropologist studying primates, you should be told, at the strongest, maybe. Even theorists who believe strongly that that is the case (read Demonic Males, for example) will only be able to prove their case by pointing to an array of evidence from an array of species, and it will have qualifications - it is never a one to one "This behavior in modern humans evolved FOR THIS PURPOSE."
What irritates me most about evolutionary psychology (other than the misogyny, and when people confuse what I do with it - seriously, biological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology =/= ev psych!) is that they take just a few pieces of human behavior in a very modern context - foraging in a mall, looking at faces on a computer screen, whatever - and then unquestioningly analogize that to the environment in which human ancestors evolved. There's no one to one comparison possible. And culture changes the way we think and behave and response. And living in an industrialized agricultural economy and subsistence pattern changes the way we behave and, for example, respond to food and foraging, compared to modern hunter gatherers in a marginal environment, which is still different than the way our australopithecine hunting and gathering ancestors would have behaved. You just can't say "Because we here in our study population of primarily white, western, educated, undergraduates (pdf, 1 page) taking introductory psychology who need to participate in an experiment to get full credit for the class behave in a particular way, humans must have evolved to behave in that way!"
posted by ChuraChura at 5:58 AM on April 14, 2015 [26 favorites]
People studying primate behavior must take very detailed account of a variety of forces in order to come to any sort of conclusion about the ultimate (evolutionary) forces driving any set of behaviors. For example, in my dissertation research I am ostensibly looking at aspects of dietary seasonality and diet quality in wild monkeys. In addition to my detailed feeding data, I have to keep track of what is fruiting when, what other species are eating at the same trees, when do we have predation occurring, what social behavior is happening, when are babies being born and surviving or dying, etc. etc. etc. Behavior and evolution of that behavior is so complex that even though I am doing twelve zillion things and collecting data on a bunch of different potential things impacting the choices my animals are making, every time I've submitted a grant people say "Well, have you considered including x, y, or z so you get a more complete picture of this situation?" and I know that no matter what, I'll never be able to input everything. And that affects how much I am able to say with confidence about how organisms evolved and why my monkeys do the things that they do.
Even then there is a strong recognition that lots of things organisms do are not adaptive and in particular, because we're often working on small populations cut off from gene flow due to migration (because they're in isolated forest patches), that lots of traits emerge due to genetic drift. And lots of behaviors happen because primates are smart and flexible and behaviorally adept at doing what works best, not necessarily because they have evolved to do something.
In fact, one of the longest running rivalries/debates in the field is about whether violence can be viewed as adaptive or if its excesses are the product of living in degraded habitats at high density with anthropogenic effects on the habitats. Can what you observe in these conditions really be applied to the environment of origin? And then taking what we see in modern primates and applying them to humans and questions of human origins without qualification - you just can't make a one to one comparison. Can we say that (for example) the last common ancestor humans shared with chimpanzees must have committed frequent infanticide and been very violent? If you ask an anthropologist studying primates, you should be told, at the strongest, maybe. Even theorists who believe strongly that that is the case (read Demonic Males, for example) will only be able to prove their case by pointing to an array of evidence from an array of species, and it will have qualifications - it is never a one to one "This behavior in modern humans evolved FOR THIS PURPOSE."
What irritates me most about evolutionary psychology (other than the misogyny, and when people confuse what I do with it - seriously, biological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology =/= ev psych!) is that they take just a few pieces of human behavior in a very modern context - foraging in a mall, looking at faces on a computer screen, whatever - and then unquestioningly analogize that to the environment in which human ancestors evolved. There's no one to one comparison possible. And culture changes the way we think and behave and response. And living in an industrialized agricultural economy and subsistence pattern changes the way we behave and, for example, respond to food and foraging, compared to modern hunter gatherers in a marginal environment, which is still different than the way our australopithecine hunting and gathering ancestors would have behaved. You just can't say "Because we here in our study population of primarily white, western, educated, undergraduates (pdf, 1 page) taking introductory psychology who need to participate in an experiment to get full credit for the class behave in a particular way, humans must have evolved to behave in that way!"
posted by ChuraChura at 5:58 AM on April 14, 2015 [26 favorites]
Without any woman I'm pretty sure you can't reproduce at all. As far as qualifying that, I think you just made your chances sketchy if this was like Thunderdome.
posted by localroger
I realize you were making a joke and/or just trying to score Metafilter points, but it actually serves to illustrate my point: men and women always require a member of the other category in order to reproduce, obviously, so that isn't one of the factors that differs between the sexes. The minimum opportunity cost to procreate, however, very much is. In practice it's far greater than 2500:1 because a woman has substantially increased resource requirements throughout pregnancy and reduced resource acquisition ability toward the end of it - but those enormous factors aren't readily quantifiable in the way that simple minimum time investment is, which is why I just went with that.
Within our culture evolutionary psychology is typically used as a tool for male hagiography and further perpetuation of patriarchal social moires. It's not at all surprising or even unjustified that Metafilter as a group of people with an admirable taste for social justice reacts extremely poorly to that. But there are many common false beliefs whose opposite isn't any closer to the truth, and this is such a case: there are biological differences between the genders that under any remotely honest assessment are going to produce massive behavioral differences. Another obvious one is the partial asexuality of the Y chromosome.
The behavioral implications of these differences are going to be filtered through the lens of cultural norms and attempting to generate rules from them is essentially drawing lines around a point cloud, but to make the blanket statement "all evolutionary psychology is bullshit" isn't helpful. Evolutionary psychology as a cultural phenomenon at this point in history might be a litany of pure bullshit, but the fundamental concept is not, taken at face value, inherently false.
posted by Ryvar at 7:47 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by localroger
I realize you were making a joke and/or just trying to score Metafilter points, but it actually serves to illustrate my point: men and women always require a member of the other category in order to reproduce, obviously, so that isn't one of the factors that differs between the sexes. The minimum opportunity cost to procreate, however, very much is. In practice it's far greater than 2500:1 because a woman has substantially increased resource requirements throughout pregnancy and reduced resource acquisition ability toward the end of it - but those enormous factors aren't readily quantifiable in the way that simple minimum time investment is, which is why I just went with that.
Within our culture evolutionary psychology is typically used as a tool for male hagiography and further perpetuation of patriarchal social moires. It's not at all surprising or even unjustified that Metafilter as a group of people with an admirable taste for social justice reacts extremely poorly to that. But there are many common false beliefs whose opposite isn't any closer to the truth, and this is such a case: there are biological differences between the genders that under any remotely honest assessment are going to produce massive behavioral differences. Another obvious one is the partial asexuality of the Y chromosome.
The behavioral implications of these differences are going to be filtered through the lens of cultural norms and attempting to generate rules from them is essentially drawing lines around a point cloud, but to make the blanket statement "all evolutionary psychology is bullshit" isn't helpful. Evolutionary psychology as a cultural phenomenon at this point in history might be a litany of pure bullshit, but the fundamental concept is not, taken at face value, inherently false.
posted by Ryvar at 7:47 AM on April 14, 2015
You can study differential parental investment and the consequences of sexual selection and so on without invoking evolutionary psychology.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:01 AM on April 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by ChuraChura at 8:01 AM on April 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
You can! And should!
But when people here say "Evolutionary psychology is bullshit" it's about ideological opposition to an as-practiced socially nefarious concept. Doing so leads to a high probability of rejecting the notion that it is possible for there to be healthy, perfectly natural differences between the fundamental psychologies of the sexes owing in part to differences of biology.
It is of dire importance that social justice and those who practice it never yield an inch on honesty in their pursuit of equal respect and opportunity.
posted by Ryvar at 8:11 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
But when people here say "Evolutionary psychology is bullshit" it's about ideological opposition to an as-practiced socially nefarious concept. Doing so leads to a high probability of rejecting the notion that it is possible for there to be healthy, perfectly natural differences between the fundamental psychologies of the sexes owing in part to differences of biology.
It is of dire importance that social justice and those who practice it never yield an inch on honesty in their pursuit of equal respect and opportunity.
posted by Ryvar at 8:11 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Ryvar, I've repeatedly said I dislike the field because I work in a similar discipline and find its methods to be sketchy and its actual relationship with evolutionary scholars to be tenuous at best. So has ChuraChura. Care to comment about that?
(I work on sexual selection myself, for crying out loud. I hardly think it's impossible for this topic to be approached well, even in humans! But I have yet to see someone who self-identifies as an evolutionary psychologist doing genuinely integrative work. How many times do I have to repeat that evolutionary psychology is not the same thing as the study of evolution of human behavior, and that criticizing evolutionary psychology as a discipline is not the same thing as saying the evolution of humans is off-limits?)
posted by sciatrix at 8:14 AM on April 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
(I work on sexual selection myself, for crying out loud. I hardly think it's impossible for this topic to be approached well, even in humans! But I have yet to see someone who self-identifies as an evolutionary psychologist doing genuinely integrative work. How many times do I have to repeat that evolutionary psychology is not the same thing as the study of evolution of human behavior, and that criticizing evolutionary psychology as a discipline is not the same thing as saying the evolution of humans is off-limits?)
posted by sciatrix at 8:14 AM on April 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
sciatrix: my only comment would be that I agree with you completely on that point. Going one further than your parenthetical - I'm not even sure I'd categorize evolutionary psychology as a discipline, period. This isn't something where I have any expertise nor desire to really say anything other than what I've listed above, which is not in direct conflict with either of your comments, so far as I can tell.
posted by Ryvar at 8:20 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by Ryvar at 8:20 AM on April 14, 2015
> Doing so leads to a high probability of rejecting the notion that it is possible for there to be healthy, perfectly natural differences between the fundamental psychologies of the sexes owing in part to differences of biology.
I don't think that's demonstrated even here in this thread, where I haven't seen anyone - especially the evolutionary biologists and anthropologists - say anything like that!
posted by rtha at 8:26 AM on April 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
I don't think that's demonstrated even here in this thread, where I haven't seen anyone - especially the evolutionary biologists and anthropologists - say anything like that!
posted by rtha at 8:26 AM on April 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
Without getting into a comment-by-comment refutation, I'll just say that is very much *not* my reading of this thread. That having been said, I could not possibly be less interested in a Ryvar-vs-thread dogpile, so I'm going to bow out, now.
posted by Ryvar at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by Ryvar at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2015
Evo psych strikes me as an academic strain of the PUA community, only with graphs, peer-reviewed journals, and inappropriate references to Jane Austen novels. Unfortunately, this article, which starts with an anecdote about the speaker shocking -- SHOCKING! -- a female listener with a powerful masculine truth bomb about the SCIENCE of female sexual behaviour, doesn't really improve my impression of the discipline.
+1. I don't think it's a coincidence that ev-psych is a favorite of the PUA community, and of MRA types in general. It is my observation that MRAs and other misogynists who aren't religious, or at least not monotheistic/Abrahamic religious, and who therefore can't invoke "Patriarchy is right and natural because God said so" instead invoke "Patriarchy is right and natural because Evolution said so." You can put lipstick on a pig but it will still stink.
One of the low points of ev-psych was Satoshi Kanazawa's infamous "Black Women Aren't Attractive Because Evolution" (link to discussion of paper). You can't tell me that sexism and racism aren't a huge motivator in many True Believers of ev-psych.
If ev-psych were a person it would be a be-fedora'd Nice Guy(tm) whining about how he can't get a hot supermodel because they all like bad boys, and Sansa Stark ought to give Tyrion Lannister a chaaaaaaaaaaance, and Daenerys Targaryen proves that women are "too emotional" to be leaders (actual quote from a GoT discussion!).
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:05 AM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
+1. I don't think it's a coincidence that ev-psych is a favorite of the PUA community, and of MRA types in general. It is my observation that MRAs and other misogynists who aren't religious, or at least not monotheistic/Abrahamic religious, and who therefore can't invoke "Patriarchy is right and natural because God said so" instead invoke "Patriarchy is right and natural because Evolution said so." You can put lipstick on a pig but it will still stink.
One of the low points of ev-psych was Satoshi Kanazawa's infamous "Black Women Aren't Attractive Because Evolution" (link to discussion of paper). You can't tell me that sexism and racism aren't a huge motivator in many True Believers of ev-psych.
If ev-psych were a person it would be a be-fedora'd Nice Guy(tm) whining about how he can't get a hot supermodel because they all like bad boys, and Sansa Stark ought to give Tyrion Lannister a chaaaaaaaaaaance, and Daenerys Targaryen proves that women are "too emotional" to be leaders (actual quote from a GoT discussion!).
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:05 AM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
A lot of the criticism directed at evopsych (the WEIRD argument, "looking at faces on a computer screen" or " science tells us human behavior XYZ is inevitable") is just as applicable, or even more so, to psychology in general but, for some reason, it never is.
posted by huguini at 10:04 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by huguini at 10:04 AM on April 14, 2015
But when people here say "Evolutionary psychology is bullshit" it's about ideological opposition to an as-practiced socially nefarious concept.
I don't see how it's sensible to impute unspoken motivations to others when they're already saying explicitly what their critique is about. People here have been critiquing it mostly on methodological and theoretical grounds. I am the only one who literally said it was bullshit, and I said that because of its plethora of disciplinary flaws, its flaws as a field of inquiry, not because of ideological opposition.
Doing so leads to a high probability of rejecting the notion that it is possible for there to be healthy, perfectly natural differences between the fundamental psychologies of the sexes owing in part to differences of biology.
I'm not sure why it should lead to that; but even if it does, so what? If we can't demonstrate the validity of that claim in a convincing way, then there's no obvious reason to hold fast to it as empirically valid.
It is of dire importance that social justice and those who practice it never yield an inch on honesty in their pursuit of equal respect and opportunity.
I'm not sure how this comment was meant, but it seems it could easily be read as sarcastic; in which case it would be kind of bitterly ironic, in this context, that a male non-scientist would disregard the highly-informed critical commentary of at least two female scientists with directly relevant knowledge of the topic in order to suggest dismissively that people critiquing evo-psych are being dishonest or disingenuous.
posted by clockzero at 10:11 AM on April 14, 2015 [9 favorites]
I don't see how it's sensible to impute unspoken motivations to others when they're already saying explicitly what their critique is about. People here have been critiquing it mostly on methodological and theoretical grounds. I am the only one who literally said it was bullshit, and I said that because of its plethora of disciplinary flaws, its flaws as a field of inquiry, not because of ideological opposition.
Doing so leads to a high probability of rejecting the notion that it is possible for there to be healthy, perfectly natural differences between the fundamental psychologies of the sexes owing in part to differences of biology.
I'm not sure why it should lead to that; but even if it does, so what? If we can't demonstrate the validity of that claim in a convincing way, then there's no obvious reason to hold fast to it as empirically valid.
It is of dire importance that social justice and those who practice it never yield an inch on honesty in their pursuit of equal respect and opportunity.
I'm not sure how this comment was meant, but it seems it could easily be read as sarcastic; in which case it would be kind of bitterly ironic, in this context, that a male non-scientist would disregard the highly-informed critical commentary of at least two female scientists with directly relevant knowledge of the topic in order to suggest dismissively that people critiquing evo-psych are being dishonest or disingenuous.
posted by clockzero at 10:11 AM on April 14, 2015 [9 favorites]
Uh, yeah, there is plenty of criticism directed at psychologists that still rely on these methods, and plenty of discussion about how to mitigate the biases that arise from them and method development work, both among experts and here on Metafilter (try to find a psychology thread that doesn't have someone kneejerking about how "correlation doesn't equal causation" in the first dozen comments, even if the study isn't relying on the correlation-causation fallacy.)
posted by kagredon at 10:12 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by kagredon at 10:12 AM on April 14, 2015
I'm not sure how this comment was meant, but it seems it could easily be read as sarcastic;
I'm going to step back in, briefly, to clarify that my statement was completely sincere. I'm only breaking silence here because I really don't want to see that honestly pretty uncharitable misreading turn into a derail. Thanks.
posted by Ryvar at 10:37 AM on April 14, 2015
I'm going to step back in, briefly, to clarify that my statement was completely sincere. I'm only breaking silence here because I really don't want to see that honestly pretty uncharitable misreading turn into a derail. Thanks.
posted by Ryvar at 10:37 AM on April 14, 2015
The same website that hosts the paper in the op has a good smack-down, "Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither," by Jonathan Marks.
posted by No Robots at 10:55 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by No Robots at 10:55 AM on April 14, 2015
Yeah, elephantday already posted that article, No Robots.
posted by klangklangston at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2015
posted by klangklangston at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2015
You just can't say "Because we here in our study population of primarily white, western, educated, undergraduates (pdf, 1 page) taking introductory psychology who need to participate in an experiment to get full credit for the class behave in a particular way, humans must have evolved to behave in that way!""
Where I'm skeptical of evo-psych tends to be their teleological view of evolution and "just-so" stories, not so much in the idea that e.g. population level psychological differences exist between men and women.
"I am the only one who literally said it was bullshit, and I said that because of its plethora of disciplinary flaws, its flaws as a field of inquiry, not because of ideological opposition. "
You begged the question then, and you're begging the question now. Other folks are at least criticizing specific things; you're asserting broad claims without addressing the counter-claims of the FPP.
posted by klangklangston at 11:23 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
2) Yes, but…those studies are mostly with college students. People in the real world (e.g., representative samples of adults) won’t display these stereotypical sex differences of youth.While the selection bias in psych is well-known, it seems that at least some folks looking to practice evo-psych are doing broader population-level studies. I don't know enough about those papers to address their methodology in depth, but many of the criticisms here are ones that the main article at least attempts to address.
Actually, yes they do[24] [25] [26]. For instance, Sprecher and her colleagues[27] examined sex differences in mate preferences across a nationally-representative sample of the United States and found women, more than men, valued a long-term mate who had a steady job (d = -0.73), earned more than they did (d = -0.49), was highly educated (d = -0.43), and was older by five years (d = -0.67). Young or old[28] [29] [30], gay or straight[31] [32], sex differences in long-term mate preferences for status-related attributes tend to reliably emerge.
Where I'm skeptical of evo-psych tends to be their teleological view of evolution and "just-so" stories, not so much in the idea that e.g. population level psychological differences exist between men and women.
"I am the only one who literally said it was bullshit, and I said that because of its plethora of disciplinary flaws, its flaws as a field of inquiry, not because of ideological opposition. "
You begged the question then, and you're begging the question now. Other folks are at least criticizing specific things; you're asserting broad claims without addressing the counter-claims of the FPP.
posted by klangklangston at 11:23 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
That opening paragraph reads like a pua seminar gone horribly wrong.
posted by No Robots at 12:00 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by No Robots at 12:00 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Yeah, elephantday already posted that article, No Robots.
Which is a very thin article that Schmitt actually cities in the featured link as an example of the critics he intends to rebut - specifically in response to Marks' claim that the studied effects disappear in gender-egalitarian societies though he also addresses the WEIRD sample bias. Even if Schmitt is right he's only (wisely, nobody wants to be on the hook for Satoshi Kanazawa) defending a pretty narrow swath of evospych conclusions, and I'm quite open to hearing someone with domain knowledge explain why his superficially extensive citations are unconvincing because I certainly haven't read them.
But you can't tell me there aren't a few people in this thread who didn't really read the linked piece.
posted by atoxyl at 12:18 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Which is a very thin article that Schmitt actually cities in the featured link as an example of the critics he intends to rebut - specifically in response to Marks' claim that the studied effects disappear in gender-egalitarian societies though he also addresses the WEIRD sample bias. Even if Schmitt is right he's only (wisely, nobody wants to be on the hook for Satoshi Kanazawa) defending a pretty narrow swath of evospych conclusions, and I'm quite open to hearing someone with domain knowledge explain why his superficially extensive citations are unconvincing because I certainly haven't read them.
But you can't tell me there aren't a few people in this thread who didn't really read the linked piece.
posted by atoxyl at 12:18 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
This is almost certainly my anthropology bias speaking, but for one thing, internet surveys, which seem to be how many of these cross-cultural studies are being done, are by their nature biased. Who accesses the internet to do internet surveys in Laos? In Zambia? In the United States? In Fiji? It's a very particular group of people, so saying that studies found "100% of cultures displayed expected sex differences, with women demonstrating especially heightened long-term mate preferences for good financial prospects, social status, ambition, and older age" is not actually saying that. Studies of behavior and choices and psychology must be grounded in an understanding of the particular sample you are drawing from, and what generalizations the characteristics of that sample allow. I don't find very compelling evidence (certainly not from this article) that evolutionary psychology is really taking a critical look at who and what they are sampling, and then to what larger population their generalizations are applicable.
This is not to say that what they are finding is necessarily false. But I still have a very hard time following the leap in logic from "Trivers theorized that males and females invest differently in offspring, which suggests that they have differential strategies when it comes to mate choice" to "Mail order brides are looking for wealthy men, which means that females have evolved to seek males who are good provides!" Well, maybe Filipina women who are willing to be mail order brides are seeking a particular outcome. Maybe there are a set of cultural expectations for what you get when you are a mail order bride. Those are almost certainly going to be different in the particulars from what you would look for in another circumstance.
These studies are asking questions which could be interesting, but then they're taking their really narrowly focused set of answers and splashing that answer across ALL OF HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY. And that just does not work. I am quite sure that there are biological differences between the sexes, and that this has an effect on mating strategies, on sexual selection, on mate choice, on parenting, and so forth. But in humans, those changes are filtered through culture, and I don't think that evolutionary psychology has really figured out how to deal effectively or convincingly with the effects of culture and how that changes or mitigates what you can say with certainty about human evolution.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:36 PM on April 14, 2015 [10 favorites]
This is not to say that what they are finding is necessarily false. But I still have a very hard time following the leap in logic from "Trivers theorized that males and females invest differently in offspring, which suggests that they have differential strategies when it comes to mate choice" to "Mail order brides are looking for wealthy men, which means that females have evolved to seek males who are good provides!" Well, maybe Filipina women who are willing to be mail order brides are seeking a particular outcome. Maybe there are a set of cultural expectations for what you get when you are a mail order bride. Those are almost certainly going to be different in the particulars from what you would look for in another circumstance.
These studies are asking questions which could be interesting, but then they're taking their really narrowly focused set of answers and splashing that answer across ALL OF HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY. And that just does not work. I am quite sure that there are biological differences between the sexes, and that this has an effect on mating strategies, on sexual selection, on mate choice, on parenting, and so forth. But in humans, those changes are filtered through culture, and I don't think that evolutionary psychology has really figured out how to deal effectively or convincingly with the effects of culture and how that changes or mitigates what you can say with certainty about human evolution.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:36 PM on April 14, 2015 [10 favorites]
"Human history is the story of the diminishing importance of the body and the increasing importance of the superorganic or cultural."--"Cultural and Organic Conceptions in Contemporary World History" / Morris Edward Opler. In American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1944), pp. 448-460.
posted by No Robots at 12:53 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by No Robots at 12:53 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
they're taking their really narrowly focused set of answers and splashing that answer across ALL OF HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY. And that just does not work. I am quite sure that there are biological differences between the sexes, and that this has an effect on mating strategies, on sexual selection, on mate choice, on parenting, and so forth.
This actually hones in pretty closely on how I feel about EvoPsych. It's almost tautological to say these behaviors are affected by biology - and therefore evolution. I think it's not unlikely that some specific cross-cultural behavioral observations are explained by biology. But the specific causes that EP likes to try to link specific effects are often very unconvincing.
posted by atoxyl at 1:09 PM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
This actually hones in pretty closely on how I feel about EvoPsych. It's almost tautological to say these behaviors are affected by biology - and therefore evolution. I think it's not unlikely that some specific cross-cultural behavioral observations are explained by biology. But the specific causes that EP likes to try to link specific effects are often very unconvincing.
posted by atoxyl at 1:09 PM on April 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
Actually, these findings are not unusual, as high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51].I was particularly curious about this claim, especially as it had only a single citation, so I clicked and
[51] Schmitt, D.P. (2015). The evolution of culturally-variable sex differences: Men and women are not always different, but when they are…it appears not to result from patriarchy or sex role socialization. In Weekes-Shackelford, V.A., & Shackelford, T.K. (Eds.), The evolution of sexuality (pp. 221-256). New York: Springer.you've gotta be fucking kidding me
But okay. Citing your own chapter where you gathered several claims from various sources (so I assumed) might not be best form, especially when you're trying to write a rebuttal like this one, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. What does the chapter look like?
It turns out that, in fact, all of those claims originate from Schmitt's own research. Here is his description of his methods:
In a study of 58 nations called the International Sexuality Description Project-2 (ISDP-2; Schmitt et al. 2014), data were collected from a more diverse set of cultures than previous studies, including samples from several Northern European nations with relatively high levels of gender egalitarianism (e.g., Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway) and several new samples from less egalitarian nations (e.g., Colombia, Ecuador, Nigeria, and Swaziland). Men’s and women’s nation-level personality traits were related to Sex Role Ideology (SRI as directly measured in the ISDP-2), an index of gender equality attitudes from a nationally-representative study (Inglehart and Norris 2003), the Standardized Index of Gender Equality (SIGE), the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and other indicators of sex role socialization and sociopolitical gender equity across this more diverse set of nations. Schmitt et al. (2014) reported across nearly all Big Five traits that egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity were associated with larger sex differences in personality.Already, there's a lot of questions. Was the Big 5 data collected by Schmitt with the SRI data or did he aggregate previous work? What questions were used in the SRI (it's not replicated anywhere within the chapter), and how were they constructed? Did Schmitt collect and analyze data about differences in age, socioeconomic status, etc. within nation groups, and did he find any effect there? What were the sample sizes, were there any sampling biases, and how were they minimized? Were the physical metrics (height, blood pressure, BMI) self-reported? There's a "manuscript in preparation" of the results that presumably includes more detail, but...come on. These are a lot of big claims, and it's unclear what evidence is backing them up.
posted by kagredon at 1:38 PM on April 14, 2015 [8 favorites]
klangklangston >
You begged the question then, and you're begging the question now. Other folks are at least criticizing specific things; you're asserting broad claims without addressing the counter-claims of the FPP.
I think you're underestimating the burden of refuting much of the field in specific terms. If I had a whole day with nothing to do, I'd be happy to provide detailed, specific critiques of evo psych.
I'm a graduate student. And you know what? Reading reams of articles, reading citations for claims, and evaluating the shape of a field is work; specifically, it's a literature review. It's one of the things which I get paid (not nearly enough) to do.
Here's an exemplar of EP's intellectual vacuity, from the article linked in the post here:
Looking across the animal kingdom, one cannot help but notice that members of most species tend to mate non-randomly. Whether it is peahens preferring peacocks with more elaborate trains[5] or female common chimpanzees preferring males who possess higher social dominance[6], males and females of most species display adaptive forms of preferential mate choice.
Now, let's look at the abstract for reference number 6, which is given as a citation for an argument that EP proponents often make, namely that human women's choice of partners can be understood by analyzing the mate selection of other members of the animal kingdom:
Mating and consequently reproductive success in male vertebrates are predominantly determined by intermale competition and female mate choice. Their relative importance however, is still poorly understood. We investigated the interrelationship between male dominance rank — a formal indicator of male competitive ability — female mate choice, and male mating success in a multimale-multifemale group of captive chimpanzees. In addition, we examined the relationship between male dominance rank and reproductive success determined by genetic paternity analysis over a 13-yr period in the same captive population.
Immediately, serious flaws are evident in the use of this study as proof of a broad claim about chimpanzee behavior: the most serious of these is that the finding is based on a very small population of captive apes. I'm not a primatologist, but if we assume that behavior is influenced by environment (which nobody argues with as a general principle), we have a potentially hugely confounding condition that affects every observation. So, we have no idea if these findings are generalizable to all chimpanzees, leaving entirely aside the question of how or whether this should be considered a form of evidence for reasoning about behavior in modern humans.
posted by clockzero at 2:28 PM on April 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
You begged the question then, and you're begging the question now. Other folks are at least criticizing specific things; you're asserting broad claims without addressing the counter-claims of the FPP.
I think you're underestimating the burden of refuting much of the field in specific terms. If I had a whole day with nothing to do, I'd be happy to provide detailed, specific critiques of evo psych.
I'm a graduate student. And you know what? Reading reams of articles, reading citations for claims, and evaluating the shape of a field is work; specifically, it's a literature review. It's one of the things which I get paid (not nearly enough) to do.
Here's an exemplar of EP's intellectual vacuity, from the article linked in the post here:
Looking across the animal kingdom, one cannot help but notice that members of most species tend to mate non-randomly. Whether it is peahens preferring peacocks with more elaborate trains[5] or female common chimpanzees preferring males who possess higher social dominance[6], males and females of most species display adaptive forms of preferential mate choice.
Now, let's look at the abstract for reference number 6, which is given as a citation for an argument that EP proponents often make, namely that human women's choice of partners can be understood by analyzing the mate selection of other members of the animal kingdom:
Mating and consequently reproductive success in male vertebrates are predominantly determined by intermale competition and female mate choice. Their relative importance however, is still poorly understood. We investigated the interrelationship between male dominance rank — a formal indicator of male competitive ability — female mate choice, and male mating success in a multimale-multifemale group of captive chimpanzees. In addition, we examined the relationship between male dominance rank and reproductive success determined by genetic paternity analysis over a 13-yr period in the same captive population.
Immediately, serious flaws are evident in the use of this study as proof of a broad claim about chimpanzee behavior: the most serious of these is that the finding is based on a very small population of captive apes. I'm not a primatologist, but if we assume that behavior is influenced by environment (which nobody argues with as a general principle), we have a potentially hugely confounding condition that affects every observation. So, we have no idea if these findings are generalizable to all chimpanzees, leaving entirely aside the question of how or whether this should be considered a form of evidence for reasoning about behavior in modern humans.
posted by clockzero at 2:28 PM on April 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
Also, why the GEM instead of the GII, which is more recent, and includes reproductive health metrics (maternal mortality and adolescent fertility rates), which you would think would be a highly relevant factor, as far as differences in relative risks/costs of sex? How much did the tendency for higher GEM to be correlated to higher HDI and GDP change things (i.e., how did wealthy, mid-HDI nations with poor gender equality like Saudi Arabia compare to poorer nations with similar gender-equality metrics?)
agh there are so many interesting things you could do with this, assuming the data is any good, why would you limit yourself to trying to stick a thumb in the eye of social role theory
posted by kagredon at 2:31 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
agh there are so many interesting things you could do with this, assuming the data is any good, why would you limit yourself to trying to stick a thumb in the eye of social role theory
posted by kagredon at 2:31 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
A lot of the criticism directed at evopsych (the WEIRD argument, "looking at faces on a computer screen" or " science tells us human behavior XYZ is inevitable") is just as applicable, or even more so, to psychology in general but, for some reason, it never is.
Psychology certainly has some problematic issues. But regarding this point, psychologists would say something along the lines of, the behaviour we observe in our sample of directly observed living people [may be/probably is/probably isn't] reflective of the behaviour of the appropriate population of living people. And, here are some reasons why we think this behaviour exists in this living setting of actual people whom we know quite a bit about. They might be wrong, and sometimes they may be naive (especially in cross-cultural contexts) but their scope is so vastly more limited than EP it isn't really comparable.
EPs look at the behaviour of the sample and quickly end up concluding that the behaviour exists because of evolution, which often is close to saying, it exists because it has always existed (and always will). Like they have their explanation in hand and are looking for instances of it. Overgeneralization is the hobgoblin of almost all social science.
Anyway I'm not opposed to the general concept that some behaviour is influenced by evolution via natural selection but the vast majority of the EP I've seen manages to be both shitty natural science AND shitty social science. I'm glad it exists and all, fill your boots, follow your bliss, etc., but maybe one day they will find their Newton or Darwin or Einstein and thereby become much more persuasive.
posted by Rumple at 4:46 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Psychology certainly has some problematic issues. But regarding this point, psychologists would say something along the lines of, the behaviour we observe in our sample of directly observed living people [may be/probably is/probably isn't] reflective of the behaviour of the appropriate population of living people. And, here are some reasons why we think this behaviour exists in this living setting of actual people whom we know quite a bit about. They might be wrong, and sometimes they may be naive (especially in cross-cultural contexts) but their scope is so vastly more limited than EP it isn't really comparable.
EPs look at the behaviour of the sample and quickly end up concluding that the behaviour exists because of evolution, which often is close to saying, it exists because it has always existed (and always will). Like they have their explanation in hand and are looking for instances of it. Overgeneralization is the hobgoblin of almost all social science.
Anyway I'm not opposed to the general concept that some behaviour is influenced by evolution via natural selection but the vast majority of the EP I've seen manages to be both shitty natural science AND shitty social science. I'm glad it exists and all, fill your boots, follow your bliss, etc., but maybe one day they will find their Newton or Darwin or Einstein and thereby become much more persuasive.
posted by Rumple at 4:46 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
...female common chimpanzees preferring males who possess higher social dominance
From from what I've read, female preferences don't play much of a role in chimpanzee sexual politics.
posted by fivebells at 8:29 PM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
From from what I've read, female preferences don't play much of a role in chimpanzee sexual politics.
posted by fivebells at 8:29 PM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
There's a discussion of problems with measuring female preference in chimpanzees on page 207 of that book.
posted by fivebells at 8:33 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by fivebells at 8:33 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Female choice can be an important component of chimpanzee mating behavior if you look at chimpanzees in a number of different forests across Africa. Chimps are so different from eachother - different subspecies, different ecological contexts, different cultures - that they can also be difficult to generalize about, and it's important to remember that they've evolved and changed from our last common ancestor just as we have when making comparisons between human and chimp behavior. Anyways, the data they're reporting from Kanyawara is really interesting, but doesn't mean that female choice is not important for other communities of chimpanzees. Even within a context of male aggression and sexual coercion, females can influence on male reproductive success. For example, looking at chimpanzees from another forest, different researchers found
that all females exhibited proceptivity and resistance to male solicitations, but that there was substantial variation in their magnitudes within and among females. Female proceptivity rates were lower and resistance rates were higher in the periovulatory period (POP) when conception is most likely. Females were more selective during POP, and more promiscuous outside of POP, suggesting that females may follow a mixed reproductive strategy, being selective when conception is likely and more promiscuous when conception is unlikely.posted by ChuraChura at 8:52 PM on April 14, 2015 [6 favorites]
ChuraChura, the authors of your second link, Stumpf & Boesch, are the authors of the paper being criticized on the above-mentioned page 207. From a really brief look, it seems like the same criticisms apply.
posted by fivebells at 2:21 PM on April 15, 2015
posted by fivebells at 2:21 PM on April 15, 2015
Muller and Wrangham are squarely in the "Chimpanzee violence is inevitable and very important to fitness" camp, and their criticism is in a book all about the importance of sexual coercion, so, while I find their critiques interesting, I'm not convinced that it means that female choice is meaningless in chimpanzees.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:16 PM on April 15, 2015
posted by ChuraChura at 3:16 PM on April 15, 2015
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posted by localroger at 3:53 PM on April 13, 2015 [12 favorites]