Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006
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Uncommonly Denyse continues her strange relationship with evolutionary psychology: Quote | Responding to something I wrote at the Post-Darwinist about the popularity of evlutionary psychology among atheists, Moran (a textbook co-author you may well have suffered though in school), responds:
"Just for the record, Denyse, I’m one of those evil atheists that you like to rant about but I’m totally opposed to evolutionary psychology.
But you already knew that many evolutionary biologist were against evolutionary psychology, didn’t you?"
No, I didn’t, Larry, and if that’s true, it’s high time more of them voiced their objections...
No doubt, there are many critiques out there that I haven’t seen, but I wonder what proportion comes from evolutionary biologists, as opposed to social scientists who know the difference between research and speculation... |
errrraAAAARHHHHHHGH
(Ouch. I've GOT to dispense with mentation-based irony detection.)
She continues: Quote | Are you an evolutionary biologist who does not believe in evolutionary psychology? Write in and tell us, will you? If, for whatever reason, you’ve been banned at Uncommon Descent, go to the Post-Darwinist and put a comment in any story. |
Howabout you engage in self-referential coitus.
Denyse, dearie. There ARE clear epistemological and methodological problems with the brand of evolutionary psychology presented, for example, in Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby's 1992 The Adapted Mind. I know this because there is a LARGE LITERATURE addressing the promises and perils of evolutionary psychology. See, for example, the Paul Sheldon Davies article "The Conflict of Evolutionary Psychology" in the excellent 1999 edited volume Where Psychology Meets Biology: Philosophical Essays (Edited by Valerie Gray Hardcastle, MIT Press). Buller is represented there as well. Way to tip us off that you are completely ignorant of the literature you so often critique.
Two things you need to catch up with. (OK, three, if you include the fucking literature.)
One: Denyse, sweetheart, you need to understand that the central problem with evolutionary psychology of the Barkow/Cosmides/Tooby/Buss variety (namely: the heuristic it proposes - analysis of adaptive problems faced by human beings during the Pleistocene as a way of understanding contemporary human psychology - is difficult to employ because we typcially independently know very little about those adaptive challenges) in no way undermines the reality that human beings originated, both physically and in many respects cognitively/affectively/behaviorally, across an extended, contingent evolutionary history. What it does mean is that psychology and cognitive science may be more helpful to developing our knowldge of that human evolutionary history than speculation regarding human evolution will be to contemporary cognitive science. That remains to be seen: significant research efforts are being made to confirm hypotheses generated from within the EP framework. (That may not sound familiar to an ID proponent...).
Two. Sweetie? I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but these obstacles to making evolutionary psychology work offer no cover for ID. Zero. Zip. NADA.
Evolutionary psychology is not contra ID, or to your wierd notions that something called intelligence just knows things, and does things, and pulls cortical strings to those ends. We'll call that "cortical string theory."
Evolutionary psychology is contra other research programs in cognitive psychology that derive heuristic insights from observations of current human and animal functioning without resort to speculative analysis of an historical dimension. All of which programs acknowledge human evolution, and all of which understand that human psychological functioning is grounded in people, their bodies and brains, and the cultural contexts within which they are nurtured. There is no research into detachable ghost psychology within contemporary science.
-------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington
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