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JoshuaZ comments on How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology? - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: diegocaleiro 04 December 2012 10:22PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 December 2012 07:07:27PM 2 points [-]

In any case, the "resolution" between feminist concerns, and evolutionary psychology is to understand that evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done

Evolution doesn't have a job to do. It just is, Moreover, our ancestral environment doesn't look much like modern cultures, but seems at this point pretty clear that culture can influence evolution.

assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females)

If you think this definition of asshole captures your intuition about the meaning of that word then something has gone drastically wrong.

f even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural

They have much more of an is v. ought problem before one gets to whether or not it is unnatural. But it also isn't helpful in this regards in another way: whether something is or is not natural is distinct from whether it is evolutionary advantageous (either now or in our ancestral environment). Note also that there quite a few hypotheses giving potential explanations for why homosexuality would evolve.

one would screw with evo psych's result at one's peril

This is essentially an argument that we should reside in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence agriculture society and also shouldn't try to address cognitive biases and shouldn't do any math that wasn't easy in our ancestral environment, etc. etc. I don't think this argument does what you want it to do.