Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
The matching critique doesn't make any sense to me, because it's a fundamental assumption behind evolutionary psychology, from which it derives hypotheses.
But this quote:
"Now, one of my major charges with evolutionary psychologists is that they go to the ordinary folks, college students, and they ask them questions about such intimate things like their sexual behavior. We know that people are wanting to not be honest about such matters, and, of course, evolutionary psychologists are aware of this. The second issue is that the answers given to these sorts of questions are then generalized to humanity in general."
also disqualifies clinical, educational and social psychology.
For a much more thorough critique of social sciences, see Tal Yarkoni's upcoming paper "The generalizability crisis" (in BBS, I believe).
This sounds circular. She has offered a warrant to this argument clearly in the article.
She's free to attack shoddy papers, of course: the harder, the better, I say. But that doesn't disprove anything.
> This is obviously bogus
Only if computers cannot have inner experiences. But psychology doesn't study experiences directly, it primarily studies behavior. And it does not assume they are independent of culture and language per se, even though it is the default assumption in many studies.
Yes.
We've been seeing the reproducibility crisis in these fields unfold for several years now.
To answer your first question, her perspective seems to be "I like evolutionary psychology, so I want it to be better and actually founded on science."
Came to say the same. From different angles...
from the article:
"""The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring—the cognitive structure of the brain itself—is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn’t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance—that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors’ brains."""
But, nobody is saying our brains are in the same state. Rather that our brain's state is impacted in the same way as our ancestors, because we have inherited the genes that produced the structures that influence the brain states which are possible/likely.
edits: readability
Is that summation adequate? She is not well known, I haven't read her dissertation, just the interview on gizmodo, not exactly the best science website.
The first link in the article goes to another gizmodo article titled "the rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag", so I'd add "not exactly the least biased website" to that as well.
And what qualifies the thoughts of "We at Gizmodo"? Writers at a pop-tech buzzfeed-a-like that became possessed by the ghost of Gawker?
This is her secondary critique, her primary critique is that Evo Psycho's pivotal hypothesis has absolutely no warrant.
I think this is where we enter the twilight zone.
We have a story featuring a quite attractive and strong-looking colored woman, apparently challenging the evolutionary narrative, which has all too often been used to justify racial oppression.
Good for her.
But who is actually pushing this story?
Gizmodo is all about clicks and 'engagement'
Are they, really, trying to champion, or ridicule, this research, do they even care?
IMHO the research seems flawed, but in any case, regardless of where we came from, we should just get on with the fact that we are all going forward, together.
I'm not really sure, but it smells fishy. What are lay people supposed to make of this article? We aren't qualified to evaluate the philosopher's critique and there is no counterpoint presented. Why should we trust her position over the other, presumably larger group of experts? Gizmodo was pretty transparent about its own biases in the first couple of paragraphs. Seems like this article could be reduced to the headline, "Publication finds expert to reinforce its own priors".
Her speech is very humanities academic and this being a casual interview she's not in a rush to lay it all out in one paragraph. She's claiming we haven't eliminated a number of possibilities about how brain structure works and how that transmits over generations. Concretely, (a) we don't know just how plastic the brain is and whether the brain someone has today has identical locations for behavioral responses to someone in the past across the board, (b) we don't know if cultural behavioral selection dictates brain structure transmission over generations; and (c) we don't know if behavioral control locations (what she's calling "modules") don't move over generations regardless of the questions about cultural selection:
>We know that ancient humans avoided predation, for instance. What exactly they did is something evolutionary psychologists have to show. Did our ancestors avoid predation because they were good at hiding in bushes or because they were running? Evolutionary psychologists would say that the better explanation is that they were running. But the fact that they ran to avoid predation and the fact that we have the disposition to run when we’re endangered still does not establish that there’s a singular module doing both of those jobs.
These are real questions because we know the brain is plastic and it's not a bone, so unlike paleontology they have no physical evidence to base their speculation on the past on.
There's no way to test any of their theories, and there's no historical evidence to support them. It's more like religion than science.
Was fun to build though, and surprisingly 'useful'.
Sure, there are tons of over simplifications or extrapolating data which support narratives in evolutionary psychology, especially on the pop psych end of things. The humanities are full of ideology in search of evidence. But this... modules of thought? That has to be some of the dumbest reductionist pigeonholing I've heard in a moment. Let's completely throw out what we know about neurology, endocrinology or biology as a whole, because... it makes me feel uncomfortable?
We are getting conned folks.