Unnamed comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong

11 Post author: WrongBot 28 July 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: Unnamed 28 July 2010 06:41:30AM *  4 points [-]

The standard narrative is supposed to explain every universal aspect of human sexual behavior, and a great deal more besides.

Says who?

They try to explain what they can, especially broad commonalities across cultures, but of course they can see that there are variations.

Comment author: WrongBot 30 July 2010 02:40:34AM 4 points [-]

In general, when evolutionary psychologists see things they think are cultural universals, they look for an evolutionary explanation. Some evolutionary psychologists also go looking for evolutionary explanations for broad commonalities, and these explanations usually have commensurately lower strength. But broad commonalities are sometimes thought to be cultural universals (as in this comment), which leads to inappropriately strong explanations.

Less often, narrow commonalities are thought to be broad commonalities or cultural universals, which again leads to errors. Mistakes of this class are made more often than they probably should be because psychologists perform most of their studies on college undergrads; I often see studies labelled as "multi-cultural" because they sample college undergrads from several predominantly white, industrialized, modern Western cultures.