timtyler comments on Problems in evolutionary psychology - Less Wrong
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Amen. Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists. It amazes me how readily laymen are fooled by this nonsense. Of course we evolved, and of course our adaptations are a result of natural selection. But that doesn't help us to know about ourselves unless we know in detail what the selective environment was, and what kinds of heritable variation was present in our gene pool. And we don't know those things. So why are we so seduced by invented stories about these things?
I sometimes think that we are tempted to draw too much significance from the Darwinian account of our origins, because it replaced the Biblical account of our origin and that account, if it were true, would have all kinds of significance. Just as the natural sciences tend to suffer from "physics envy", I suspect that the humanities all have a bad case of "Scripture envy". We expect our origin stories to be significant, and we can not accept the significance of anything unless it comes attached to an origin story.
Re: "Evolutionary psychology is generally considered to be pseudo-science by most evolutionary biologists."
It's a real science - just one where we would like more data - and most science is like that. Neanderthal resurrection should provide another data point someday.
<snark> Ah, yes. And that is why, every summer, when teaching duties are completed, the practitioners of evolutionary psych and their graduate students head out into the field to collect more data! </snark>
And Neanderthal resurrection will tell us next to nothing, since we still will have no idea what selective pressures our ancestors faced or what pressures Neanderthal ancestors faced. To say nothing of the difficulty in assessing the differences between Neanderthal psychology and H. sapiens psychology. And even if this weren't a problem, we would still have only two data points to work with.
There's chimps and bonobos - and other primates. That is quite a few "data points" - considering the mountain of information that can be obtained from each of them.