This video is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it (what I’ve seen of it — it’s 3½ hours long! I don’t have time for the whole thing). Part of it because I agree wholeheartedly with its conclusion that evolutionary psychologists are a mob of pretentious wankers, but also the reason for the length is that münecat actually reads and summarizes more evo psych papers than I’ve ever read myself. Also, she frequently breaks to sing and dance.
If that’s to your taste, or if you just enjoy seeing Geoffrey Miller, David Buss, Jordan Peterson, etc., getting skewered, I recommend this video. Or if you already know that evo psych proponents are nothing but bullshit artists, you can skip it.
One great thing she does, something like 2 or so hours in, is tie in all of EPs failures with broader issues of researcher degrees of freedom, replications, and the myth that science (and therefore good scientists) are value-free. What I liked about it is the implication that if the rest of the scientific community got their shit together, it’d be easier and easier to illustrate how EP research methods are insufficient to accomplish what the researchers set out to do and how harder and harder it is to square reported EP findings in with the broader empirical literature. We all share responsibility for what the scientific community allows to be considered science, and boy howdy are we all falling short the more we tolerate EP to be considered science.
I particularly enjoyed the evo psych flights of fancy regarding Pleistocene humans. Well, I say ‘enjoyed’ — I was all but yelling “How the fuck can you possibly know that?!” at the screen. I hope I didn’t wake my neighbours up.
Yeah, how does Geoffrey Miller still get any attention? I laugh at everything he sees, but still the pundits keep treating him as a serious scientist. EP appeals to the worst people, Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, that are popular because they confirm common prejudices.
I think the problem with evolutionary psychology is that it tries to prove too much. There are certain behaviors that are evolutionarily advantageous — offspring with attentive parents are more likely to do well than offspring whose parents ignore them — and it’s not unreasonable to say that those behaviors may have become hard wired. And, if that’s all EP claimed, it would be non-controversial.
But where EP goes off the rails is when it attempts to explain EVERYTHING via evolutionary psychology. Some personal preferences really are nothing more than personal preferences, and some preferences have little to no evolutionary significance, even if they are the preferences of a majority of the population. So let it explain those things for which it offers a good explanation — the children of attentive parents do better than the children of absent parents — while not trying to use it to explain why men prefer a certain type of cheekbone or why women have traditionally provided most of the child care.
One thing that really irritates me is this alarming tendency for people to jump to the conclusion that everything is genetic, as if sociology and psychology don’t exist as fields of study. Remember one anime that took it far enough that the main characters speculated that they were genetically predestined to meet this psychic who knew they were coming, and that his powers worked by reading DNA or something like that.
I imagine a lot of this is that what I call “seduction of the hammer.” If you’ve got a really nice hammer that’s been very useful in your everyday tasks, you’re going to treat every problem like a nail, regardless of better tools being available. Genetics have been a nice hammer for a lot of things, but these people need to learn to put it down on occasion.
That is one problem with evo psych.
Another problem is that evo psych assumes all humans behave like white, middle class, male, college students in the USA.
A huge amount of work in evo psych starts with white male college students as informants.
This ignores all the other cultures that existed and still exist in the world today.
Most of the time, the behaviors they claim are genetic aren’t even consistent from one culture to another or even consistent through time.
Evo psych misses how plastic and variable human societies can be.
Most of the behaviors that evo psych pretends to explain are culturally determined, not genetic.
At least evo psych is good for a laugh. I’m currently at the part where Nigelsaurus Rex is masterminding the breakup of Pangea ala Prexit so that he doesn’t have to live with all those inferior beta dinosaurs..
But evo psych gives such nice an easy answers!
Why bother with the psychological and social roots of male violence, when it’s all because “We hunted the mammoth!!”.
Why deal with gender inequality when it’s all just because “We hunted the mammoth!!”.
Also lobsters.
There is one good use for evopsych: it’s an excellent red flag.
The dude talking at about 2:22 seems to be paraphrasing John Sanford—“accumulating deleterious mutations” leading to “genetic meltdown”, though he’s arguing not that the universe is 6,000 years old, but that social safety nets must be abolished. Kinda weird to hear YEC talking points from an “evolutionist”.
Oh, he’s flogging Great Replacement “theory” and eugenics. Fucking YIKES.
OT, but for me on FF and Edge the pharyngula banner and ftb logo are messed up html… Tried private mode and hard reloading the page no luck.
=8)-DX
I think the problem is not with evolutionary psychology as a concept, but with actually existing evolutionary psychology. Obviously the human brain is a product of evolution and that is essentially the explanation for it. (I expect PZ will admit that evolutionary psychology might have something to do with why he is besotted with his grandchildren.) What we have here is a demarcation problem. Why is it that so much pseudoscience has infected this particular field, and how can we separate the wheat from the chaff? I would find that a much more interesting and important discussion than this blithe dismissal.
mordred @8
I think someone like Pinker would point out that an explanation is not an exoneration. Of course at some point Pinker went from linguist to overly skilled polemicist in defense of ev psych. I vaguely recall the dustup with Gould vs. Pinker, Dennett, Robert Wright etc in the late 90s.
IMO Gould’s nonaptive spandrel short circuit deals effectively with much of what ev psych puts forward. Yet I had also thought contingency important per historical aspects of evolution but there is a whole literature out there now taking a very serious look at repeatability versus contingency based on stuff like the Lenski experiments, anole lizards converging on Caribbean islands etc. Has nothing to do with ev psych. So…
I’ll try to make it through at least some of that behemoth of a debunking video PZ linked in the OP. I had recently tried making it through a overly long and tedious video of James Lindsay attempting to pin a dot and some red yarn on George Soros and stalled. Hopefully this video goes much better than that…
BTW as far as “alpha males” go I figure this video I link below is about a good an exemplar of how that notion has gone off the rails and seems apropos in a thread on ev psych gone wrong. For some reason the Youtube algorithm thought it was something I would want to watch because of God knows what videos I hatewatched recently (Lindsay on New Discourses?). No. I was horrified. Also after having watched a good bit of it I feel compelled like on The Ring movies to pass it along or something bad happens to me in seven days. This bozo reminds me of the guy who body checked me in a supermarket not long ago or another who cut me off in traffic:
This stuff actually happens as an event? The annual douchebro manosphere convention? WTH?
cervantes@13:
I was fine with your comment up until (1) ‘how can we separate the wheat from the chaff?’ and (2) calling the sebunking ‘this blithe dismissal’.
(1) It’s all chaff. Believe me, I tried finding the wheat. There is none there. In 20+ years of trying to find good evopsych papers, I never found a single one. I even tried asking evopsych enthusiasts to point me to papers they thought were good. Most wouldn’t give me an answer. The people who did answer almost always sent me the appalling Kanazawa paper (because it had been favourably reported in The Economist, naturally, not because they had bothered to read it). Sure, I presume that someone, somewhere has published a decent evopsych paper, but if so it is an obscure paper that even evopsych bros don’t know or care about.
(2) Why is pointing out the problems of evopsych at length, with multiple lines of evidence, and robust argumentation a ‘blithe dismissal’? The most bullshitty bits of evopsych are filtering into regressive conservative politics. It needs to be dismissed at every opportunity.
So from about 47:22 from the video in the OP the reason for men being enthusiastic about oral sex is to taste if they’ve had recent competitors? Is that typical ev psych now? Someone actually thought that up and “researched” it? No judgment but that kinda sounds beta cuckish to me. Makes me really rethink the sex life of man the hunter on the EEA savannah wondering about what his S.O. might be gathering. Berries and nuts?
I need to go to sleep soon and if I’m late for work I blame PZ, but at around 51:10 on the elusive female orgasm we get the irresistible gem by some intrepid researcher: “I have done studies with vibrators and so on indicating that you know that some of the other great apes do seem to have contractions”.
Wait, what? Sciencing!
Damn you PZ! I’m not getting to sleep tonight am I?
Ughh! I failed to look at my @18 the right way, but doing sexual studies on other apes with vibrators without consent seems to cross a boundary that shouldn’t be, right?
I can imagine bonobos grabbing the vibrators out of the hands of the researchers and exploring all possible applications with remarkable enthusiasm. It’s true that they probably wouldn’t care to pause and sign the consent papers.
I recommend you read Psych by Paul Bloom. Here’s a review from the APA. He rigorously but accessibly reviews what we know and don’t know so well about the human mind, but it is pretty clear how many of its functions evolved. Sociologists and anthropologists have <a href="https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-introductiontosociology/chapter/examining-culture/"convincingly identified many cultural universals, while also showing how their forms vary with culture. Our evolved psychology has a lot of plasticity, but it also has basic properties that are as universal as the rest of our bodily functions. (Just because some people are born with defective kidneys or lacking limbs doesn’t mean that evolution doesn’t explain our kidneys and our limbs.) I think the confusion is because the very respectable science that produces these insights doesn’t use the label “evolutionary psychology.” But it could.
Sorry, bad link in above. (Freethought blogs should allow comment editing.) Here it is: Examining culture.
These studies of culture and human behavior don’t use the term evo psych because they aren’t evo psych.
They usually call themselves sociologists or cultural anthropologists.
Saying these behaviors such as tribalism or language are products of an evolved brain is self evident and trivial.
It doesn’t add anything to the subjects being studied and doesn’t explain anything.
Evo psych pretends to explain psychology and examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective.
And, gets it all wrong all the time.
A century ago, pink was the boys color and women historically never just stayed home and raised the children. In hunter gather and early agrarian societies everyone had to work to provide the food supply including the female half of the population.
Evo psych has had 30 years to prove itself as a legitimate field and hasn’t done it yet.
In fact, it seems to be going backwards with more fake scientists and fake science.
I can’t think of any other field of science that has had that sort of history.
“These studies of culture and human behavior don’t use the term evo psych because they aren’t evo psych.
They usually call themselves sociologists or cultural anthropologists.
Saying these behaviors such as tribalism or language are products of an evolved brain is self evident and trivial.
It doesn’t add anything to the subjects being studied and doesn’t explain anything.”
If evolution is self-evident and trivial, why did it take 250,000 years for people to discover it? Actually, it explains most of what’s true about life on earth, including human brains. What do you mean by claiming it doesn’t explain anything? If evolution doesn’t explain anything, then why talk about it at all? Why and how did tribalism, language, music (which is a cultural universal) evolve? It may be difficult to answer those questions, but that’s not a reason not to ask them or try to find such answers as we can.
And finally, basic logic. What people do or do not call themselves does not tell us what they are doing.
Thanks for the warning. That’s much too long for an internet video.
That strawperson you murdered didn’t appreciate it.
I didn’t say the Theory of Evolution is trivial.
I said that commonly observed cultural universals such as language are the product of evolved brains, something both trivial and obvious.
If you can’t read for comprehension, I’m not going to waste any more time on you.
Oh really?
Actually who knows more about what they are doing then…the people who are actually doing it. You are wrong here and wrong above.
You don’t even know what evo psych is or what it pretends to do.
It pretends to explain psychology and human behaviors. And hasn’t gotten anything right yet.
Read Wikipedia and a few simple sources before making non factual claims.
Claiming that our brains are large due to evolution is correct.
But you don’t need evo psych to explain that and evo psych didn’t discover that.
We knew this a century and a half ago.
Evo psych pretends to explain human psychology.
It’s right there in the name, Evolutionary psychology.
Evo psych has yet to explain what about human psychology is an evolutionary adaption.
Evo psych hasn’t yet identified what problems in human ancestral environments, they evolved to solve.
In fact, we don’t even really know what “human ancestral environments” were really like.
There may never even have been a “human ancestral environment”.
We lived in a lot of places over millions of years. Probably there were numerous and changing human ancestral environments.
Cervantes is arguing from ignorance.
He doesn’t know what evo psych is or what it claims.
Also, she frequently breaks to sing and dance.
A tendency we should encourage, though perhaps not to the point of making it mandatory for all instructors.