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knb comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong
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My Evolutionary Psychology class never claimed that people are naturally monogamous or polygynous. The "story" is much more complex than that.
For example, we learned that women are more likely to cheat on boyfriends/husbands while ovulating. They also are more likely to find feminine male faces attractive while non-fertile as compared to when they're fertile. When ovulating, they find highly masculine faces more attractive. This fits well with evo. psych explanations for human sexuality (securing a feminine male's resources and parental care and a healthy, masculine male's genes) but it is neither monogamous nor polygynous. Nor is it polyandrous. Those are idealized concepts that don't get at the selfish-gene replicating nature of human sexuality.
Agreed regarding the standard content of science-grade evolutionary psychology. That's what people who actually make and test predictions say.
It seems to be the case though that most supposed evolutionary psychology is speculation based on fairly long logical chains with fairly high probabilities associated with each step and a lack of awareness of conjunction fallacies. This method can work, but it isn't science, and when combined with motivated reasoning it's not one of the methods of rationality either.
If it produces successful advance predictions - if you do new experiments to test the idea and they seem to come out pretty much the right way - then it's probably working well enough.
Agreed. But that's mostly not what goes by the name.
Also, massive modularity isn't necessarily due to genetic biases. T&C Evo Psych consists of a number of logically distinct hypotheses, some of which are true but obvious, some true and non-obvious, some false. Most Evo Psych is basically what I just described.