knb 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.
That is simply untrue. Ev. Biologists often make use of ev. psych reasoning. Dawkins does this all the time.
Could you give an example? Perhaps you and I understand different things by evolutionary psychology.
I'm guessing that most laypeople here identify Ev Psych with the sort of explanations offered in Pinker's How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. Are those the kinds of explanations that you consider to be pseudoscience?
I haven't read Blank Slate. What little I remember of the fraction I read of How the Mind Works made the case for a materialistic and reductionist account of the Mind, and pointed out that the Human Mind evolved by natural selection. I am in complete agreement on both points - those viewpoints did not originate with Evolutionary Psychology, and EP does not have the sole responsibility for defending them.
So, since I don't know the explanations you are talking about, I can't say for sure they are pseudo-science. But I do know of a demarcation criterion. Did Pinker suggest how his explanations could be tested by experiment? Did he report the results of experiments? If not, then he was either doing pseudo-science or philosophy. Sorry, I don't have a demarcation criterion to distinguish those two. But, if someone says they are doing philosophy, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt.