Sideways2 comments on An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 February 2009 02:58PM

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Comment author: Sideways2 13 February 2009 04:49:23PM 2 points [-]

People who say that evolutionary psychology hasn't made any advance predictions are (ironically) mere victims of "no one knows what science doesn't know" syndrome.

I hope this isn't pointed at me. When I wrote,

I've never seen a researcher make a prediction based on EP and then verify it via testing. Of course, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened...

I was pretty careful to make that a statement of my own probable ignorance instead of an assertion of fact.

Reading the summary and the linked abstract left me with a few questions remaining. I'd like to know what the !Kung grief-curve looks like, for example. And the reproductive-potential curves of a few other hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn't hurt, either. I find it a bit fishy that Crawford et al. found a .92 correlation with the very first curve they compared their results to, and then didn't make comparisons to any others. Maybe I'll drop by my university library on Monday and see if I can dig up the full study.