Marius comments on Your Evolved Intuitions - Less Wrong

15 Post author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 04:21PM

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Comment author: knb 05 May 2011 07:22:52PM *  21 points [-]

For those people who claim that evolutionary psychology isn't predictive:

These data show that children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are roughly forty times more likely to be physically abused than children living with both parents.This greater risk rate occurs even when other factors such as poverty and socioeconomic status are controlled. Daly and Wilson concluded that "step-parenthood per se remains the single most powerful risk factor for child abuse that has yet been identified".... Some people, of course, might claim that such findings are "obvious" or that "anyone could have predicted them." Perhaps so. But the fact remains that hundreds of previous studies of child abuse failed to identify step-parents as a risk factor for child abuse until Daly and Wilson approached the problem with an evolutionary lens.

Buss (2008). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of Mind (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall. 7. 211-12

And of course, there are many similar examples throughout the book. I literally just opened it to a random page, and found that example.

At some point, the refrain of "Non-predictive! Just-so story! It's a pseudoscience!" starts to look like motivated cognition.

Comment author: Marius 05 May 2011 08:56:49PM 3 points [-]

Buller claims that the statistics come from police reports and that the police had previously been trained to look for stepparents as a source of child abuse. If so, 1 this was well known by nonpsychologists and 2 the magnitude of the effect may be overstated. Is there a problem with this critique?

Comment author: knb 05 May 2011 09:28:06PM *  5 points [-]

Is there a problem with this critique?

For 1, how is that a even critique? Is it possible for psychologists to have failed to understand something that cops understood? It doesn't even seem surprising that police, who have generations of practical experience dealing with abuse would notice the trend before ivory-tower academics.

As for 2, I don't think that suggests the effect is overstated, except maybe very weakly. The effect is so huge that it's hard to believe that police suspicion of step-parents can "explain it away".