[lbo-talk] The Rise of the Evolutionary Psychology Douchebag

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 13:55:48 PDT 2013


"This is all part of his and many other evopsych researchers' project to prove that humans haven't changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych's biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time."

^^^^^ CB: The evpsych error is not so much that humans have evolved biologically from the time of species origin , but that the evpsych misrepresent in a Social Darwinist manner what humans were like at origin. And they understate the determining factor of culture in shaping human individuals.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> They believe that certain groups of people are inherently smarter than others. They write books about how rape is a natural part of human evolution. And now, with another scandal rocking the world of evolutionary
> psychology, we can officially welcome a new breed of mad scientist into
> the spotlight: evopsych douchebags.
> Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy — witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence
> for years. Then there was the case of Diederik Stapel, whose social
> psychology work shared a lot of territory with evopsych. He came forward in late 2011 to admit that most of his data was sheer invention.
>
> http://io9.com/the-rise-of-the-evolutionary-psychology-douchebag-757550990
>
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