It's the equivalent of the "Is-Ought" fallacy for empirical sciences.
In fact, the kind of argument used by the authors is more in line what human paleontology looks like.
In my opinion, other sciences are not immune to this.
You find it unscientific to observe that humans are exceptional for being the only known species with the ability to dominate and shape any environment, create, process, and communicate abstract thought, practice science, generate art, communicate across the planet instantly, travel to the bottom of the ocean and to space, with technology that other humans conceived of, designed, and built?
If that isn't scientifically provable exceptionalism, I don't know what is. "Better" is a loaded term because you can weasel in talk of destroying the environment and what not - but I don't think there's any argument against obvious and overwhelming human exceptionalism, the origin of which unquestionably begs exploration and explanation.
My point is that it isn't scientific at all.
Any person can declare themselves exceptional - I have observed consistently that if a person has to declare they are exceptional themselves, it means they probably aren't.
I don't assume that general rule to be different on a species-level: if we (as the human race) feel a need to spend a lot of effort making claims to why we are exceptional, acting both as the judge and the jury, it leads me to suspect that we probably are not.
"Better" always has to carry the "at what?" part, explicitly or implicitly. There's no universal Better, thus humans aren't Better than chimpanzees - but humans are better than chimpanzees at quite a lot of things, including intelligence, learning, preserving knowledge across generations, use of tools...
> therefore that we must reverse engineer and fill in the gaps to justify this
There's nothing to justify here. We just are better - by far - than every other animal on this planet at the things that makes a species rule every other. This is an observable fact of reality. We had no contenders for this status as far as the recorded history goes. But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.
> any way of reverse engineering the random process of natural selection
Natural selection isn't completely random! If it were, there wouldn't be any complex life forms on Earth. Or, more strictly, for natural selection to be completely random, the universe would have to be a fully uniform blob of matter.
There's randomness involved in natural selection, but that randomness has a strong bias. That bias itself is the part that's interesting to understand / reverse engineer.
> But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.
As you admit, we could ask about exceptional adaptations in other species, e.g. "why do birds rule the sky, and not other species?". This might be sometimes studied, but there is not nearly a comparable level of interest in that form of exceptionalism. I'd say there's so little interest, that we often fail to even observe such cases.
It strikes me that we are really just interested in ourselves. (I have no problem with that.)
I don't think we will learn very much as long as we start with the assumption we are primarily exceptional above all other species. I think it immediately leads to circular logic, where any and all differences become evidence supporting the assumption.
I accept what you say about natural selection having a bias. I remain doubtful that we are truthfully observing that bias over the noise of essential randomness. (Edit: on further consideration, I'd strengthen this and believe it is statistically impossible to distinguish evolutionary pressure from randomness, if you are considering N=1 runs of evolution).
Humans have both much more complicated psychologies than most animals (whether we have true peers is debatable), and we certainly are much easier to collect data on. It makes sense that human evo-psych should dwarf animal evo-psych for the same reasons terrestrial-biology dwarfs astro-biology. I wouldn't interpret that to mean we don't consider the questions interesting.
We are just primates, doing what all primates do just with a lot more suave and panache
Not much more really.
This is the direct result of an obvious evolutionary psychological adaptation - being warm helps people survive, and fire is warm - therefore, if I were to do that, I would just be following an, ahem, evolutionary imperative.
Still, I'm trying to figure out exactly what my issue is with evo-psych claims that I don't have with e.g. physics claims.
There seem to be some commonalities between the two fields: developing models to explain empirical data. And when working with their models, they're willing to assume a certain degree of causality.
I wonder if my issue is that evo-psych is a lot more like history than like physics, in that it's really hard to do repeatable experiments to vet their theories? So when we hear an evo-psych theory stated with confidence, it discredits the speaker?
Can you give an example of an analogous claim in physics that you have an easier time accepting?
Not flaming. Just trying to understand a similar situation that might arise from physics.
One of the main issues I have with evo-psych is that you can't run rigorous control experiments, so my "analysis" of the claims amounts to "Well, that seems like a reasonable explanation. But so do a hundred other models...."
Regarding an example: I was thinking along the lines of physics models that, in daily use, physicists treat as genuinely true. This includes concepts that are somewhat problematic, like true causality. (E.g., Newtonian mechanics as taught in high-school.)
But after some more thought, I think my real issue is how the two communities vet their theories. My simplistic take on it is:
The physics community has a healthy focus on refutability. IIUC, the community has little tolerance for someone even posing an unrefutable theory, let alone espouse it as likely truth.
The evo-psych community (and I could be mistaken) is much more tolerant of people advancing theories that are (practically speaking) untestable as though they were genuinely true.