I love seeing counter-evidence for everything. I estimate that while most of my beliefs are true (otherwise I wouldn't believe them in the first place), a small percentage is almost certainly completely false - and I don't really have any reliable way of telling the two apart.
Indiscriminatingly looking for counter-evidence for all of them can be very rewarding - the ones that are true are much more likely to sustain the assault of it than the ones that aren't. Yes, I might ignore counter-evidence of something that's false, or accept it for something that's true, ending up worse off, but it seems plausible that on average it should improve quality of my beliefs.
For example some of the standard beliefs about human sociobiology that seemed to be extremely widely held here are:
- Men have lower chances of having any kids than women
- Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids
Charting Parenthood: Statistical Portrait of Fathers and Mothers in America disagrees with them.
- It's true that young men are less likely to have children than young women, but it reverses at old age, and total chance of having children during lifetime is - for people over 45 - 84% for men, and 86% for women. As some of childless men might still have children between 45 and their death (quite a few according to data), but almost no woman will, the difference must get smaller by the time of death, or it might even reverse. This is pretty convincing evidence against a major gender difference in chance of having children, at least as far as modern America is concerned.
- The chance of having children is highest for people between 100% and 200% of poverty line (poverty line, not median income, these are all poorer than average people). For women going either lower or higher reduces chances of having children considerably. For men getting poorer reduces chance of having children considerably, while getting richer reduces it but only slightly. However - younger people are much more likely to fall below poverty line, and men tend to reproduce later, so even that can easily be an artifact of age-income relationship. The data is fully compatible with both poverty and wealth being negatively correlated with chance of having children in both genders.
These are not direct tests of sociobiological claims, so what we have is not exactly what we would like to, but I find them to be quite convincing counter-evidence. My belief in these sociobiological claims is definitely lower than before, at least as far as they concern modern world, even though I can imagine more focused studies changing my mind back.
More counter-evidence for things we commonly believe here, sociobiological or otherwise, welcomed in comments.
I do appreciate your post; see Yvain's comment below for my response. It prompted me to re-read the famous letter Against Sociobiology from 1975. Points to note:
Several of the lynchpins of this letter are based on dogmas that we now look back on as having been upheld for purely ideological reasons. The opening paragraphs criticizing ideas that behaviors could be genetically-biased as "absurd" are one example. The claim that animal behavior can't teach us about human behavior is another. The revisionist pre-history story they allude to which rejects the idea that hunter-gatherers had sexually-defined roles is another.
The motivation for the letter, and its main arguing point, is not about truth, but about EO Wilson's alleged reactionary motives.
They associated Wilson with the Nazis in the second paragraph.
Recall that this letter is the very best argument ever made against sociobiology, by the most prestigious biologists (including Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin), which most later arguments cite as authoritative.
This letter was written by a group that met regularly for over a month to compose it, in a room very near E.O. Wilson's office. No one ever told him about it until after it was published. If the authors of the letter had any interest in truth, they would have walked down the hall, shown him the letter, and said, "What do you say to this?"
I have the impression that 1970 marked the onset of a new dark age in science, after which ideology played a much larger role in the selection of ideas.
The letter is a pretty good example of problems of communicating over a paradigm difference, how convincing you find it seems highly based on which paradigm you accept.
And it seems to be mostly criticizing a version of sociobiology that attaches changes in post-Paleolithic to changes in genetic basis of humanity, and existing variety of behaviour to existing variety of genes in modern individuals.
As far as I can tell, they're perfectly right about this, they won, and nobody holds such beliefs any more. What's left today is far milder claim that all humans ... (read more)