re your point about our ideas being formed by chance...I think there's a good bit of evidence that one major predictor of one's political opinions are your parents' political opinions.
the only Pinker book I read was Better Angels...which I thought was really sloppy and also just intellectually uncurious in disturbing ways.
There is that, and also peer group (as @DIGRESSIONSIMPRESSIONS pointed out on Twitter/X the peer group here was Ghent philosophy... I was not a grad student there but in Brussels, and I lived in the area, my partner was a grad student there, it was a kind of neo-positivist environment of people wielding evidence, critical thinking etc as these kind of self-validating tools.
Your tweet about philosophers and evolutionary psychology and this post encouraged me write a blog post about my understanding of evolution and philosophy which I have been thinking about sometime. Thank you.
I was never deep enough in ep to read up on the modularity debate but the idea that the most relevant or interesting eea is so long ago did a good job at keeping me out of ep. However, there are other evolutionary researchers like daniel nettle who examine adaptation to contemporary environments and on other timescales, and of this i am a big fan (see eg. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-33358-3_2)
Yeah, I think Evolutionary Psychology has a hidden layer of being ignorant of women's individualism by male thinkers, coming from a myself who's a male. I don't like identity politics, but I think this is one of those rare times where it actually works.
What snapped me out of EP was finding Holly Dunsworth's paper on sex difference in height in humans (https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/soc_facpubs/37/). In short, she explains how high levels of estrogen block bone growth, so that the male-female difference in height is not a sign of sexual selection, but a byproduct of our endocrine system (which we share with all other mammals). Combined with the fact that humans have the least sexual dimorphism of all great apes, it sure suggests that if any selection occured during the pleiostocene it was in the direction of less sexual dimorphism, not more. And if that goes for body size, all those stories EP has about biological sex difference in behavior seem poorly attested to me.
As someone more familiar with critical and philosophical corners of psychology, I've always struggled to get my head around the whole EP thing. So I really appreciated this post. Clearly, there is important work being done somewhere in that general vicinity. But so much of it seems sterile and unpalatable, with little room for subjectivity. And of course, speculative. I assume you saw Subrena Smith's takedown of EP a couple years ago? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4
But mention this to a hardcore evolutionary psychologist and they will become livid, saying that she "misses the point." What is the point, though? I feel like there's something I'm just not getting.
Some of the newer cultural evolution stuff looks promising. I liked Mercier and Sperber's theory of argumentative reasoning but wanted to leave some of the EP baggage at the door. I appreciate philosophers like Dan Williams who fold evolutionary ideas into social epistemology while situating this in the here and now, or draw upon evolutionary theory as part of a broad palette. (And you, of course). I'm curious what you think of Herb Gintis's evolutionary game theory stuff. I found it too rigorous and mathematical to stick with for long (which led me to reflect on the separate question of when things must be highly technical and when they needn't, in order to grasp enough to be of value). But it struck me as potentially powerful work.
Evolutionary insights as one of the many windows into human life, I can understand. But as an outright *evolutionary psychology* it becomes so.....literal.
I rarely comment on posts, because (1) post comments are not frequently known for their thoughtfulness, (2) there are just better things to do with your life, and (3) I rarely can say I have a great deal of experience in a topic compared to others. However, I'm making an exception here as I lived with a Ph.D student for five years getting a degree in EP and got to run in his circle a bit with his friends so we all talked frequently. I probably have 20+ hours of discussion and debate with people studying this under my belt over thee years... While he and his fellow students were very invested in it, I was very skeptical. However, what I found, over time, was most of my concerns are about the overstatement of what it can show.
Evolution is a geological timescale, human actions are a mosquito. timescale By saying, "I'm just hard wired that way, you are absolving yourself of responsibility and choice, which is just silly and cowardly." I may me hardwired to like fatty foods, but I can choose not to eat them now that they are readily available and making me fat. And I for sure choose to not eat peanut butter because I ate awhole jar of it as a kid and made myself sick....
I came to think of it as having a motor boat on a lazy river. The lazy river current being EP, and the motorboat moving me around being my choices.
For me, the argument that finally changed my mind was one of the EP people saying something along the lines of "maybe people tend towards tribal cooperation not because we are a people who cooperate, but because those who didn't cooperate with their tribe got murdered by those that did.... Maybe there are times when there are evolutionary advantages to seeing the world a certain way?" That, least to me, made a bit of sense.
They also talked a lot about masculine jaw lines as testosterone indicators and the group, as a collective, did more studies than I can count that involved female choice life preferences when a woman was most fertile, but that's for another post.
re your point about our ideas being formed by chance...I think there's a good bit of evidence that one major predictor of one's political opinions are your parents' political opinions.
the only Pinker book I read was Better Angels...which I thought was really sloppy and also just intellectually uncurious in disturbing ways.
There is that, and also peer group (as @DIGRESSIONSIMPRESSIONS pointed out on Twitter/X the peer group here was Ghent philosophy... I was not a grad student there but in Brussels, and I lived in the area, my partner was a grad student there, it was a kind of neo-positivist environment of people wielding evidence, critical thinking etc as these kind of self-validating tools.
Your tweet about philosophers and evolutionary psychology and this post encouraged me write a blog post about my understanding of evolution and philosophy which I have been thinking about sometime. Thank you.
I was never deep enough in ep to read up on the modularity debate but the idea that the most relevant or interesting eea is so long ago did a good job at keeping me out of ep. However, there are other evolutionary researchers like daniel nettle who examine adaptation to contemporary environments and on other timescales, and of this i am a big fan (see eg. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-33358-3_2)
Yeah, I think Evolutionary Psychology has a hidden layer of being ignorant of women's individualism by male thinkers, coming from a myself who's a male. I don't like identity politics, but I think this is one of those rare times where it actually works.
What snapped me out of EP was finding Holly Dunsworth's paper on sex difference in height in humans (https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/soc_facpubs/37/). In short, she explains how high levels of estrogen block bone growth, so that the male-female difference in height is not a sign of sexual selection, but a byproduct of our endocrine system (which we share with all other mammals). Combined with the fact that humans have the least sexual dimorphism of all great apes, it sure suggests that if any selection occured during the pleiostocene it was in the direction of less sexual dimorphism, not more. And if that goes for body size, all those stories EP has about biological sex difference in behavior seem poorly attested to me.
As someone more familiar with critical and philosophical corners of psychology, I've always struggled to get my head around the whole EP thing. So I really appreciated this post. Clearly, there is important work being done somewhere in that general vicinity. But so much of it seems sterile and unpalatable, with little room for subjectivity. And of course, speculative. I assume you saw Subrena Smith's takedown of EP a couple years ago? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4
But mention this to a hardcore evolutionary psychologist and they will become livid, saying that she "misses the point." What is the point, though? I feel like there's something I'm just not getting.
Some of the newer cultural evolution stuff looks promising. I liked Mercier and Sperber's theory of argumentative reasoning but wanted to leave some of the EP baggage at the door. I appreciate philosophers like Dan Williams who fold evolutionary ideas into social epistemology while situating this in the here and now, or draw upon evolutionary theory as part of a broad palette. (And you, of course). I'm curious what you think of Herb Gintis's evolutionary game theory stuff. I found it too rigorous and mathematical to stick with for long (which led me to reflect on the separate question of when things must be highly technical and when they needn't, in order to grasp enough to be of value). But it struck me as potentially powerful work.
Evolutionary insights as one of the many windows into human life, I can understand. But as an outright *evolutionary psychology* it becomes so.....literal.
I rarely comment on posts, because (1) post comments are not frequently known for their thoughtfulness, (2) there are just better things to do with your life, and (3) I rarely can say I have a great deal of experience in a topic compared to others. However, I'm making an exception here as I lived with a Ph.D student for five years getting a degree in EP and got to run in his circle a bit with his friends so we all talked frequently. I probably have 20+ hours of discussion and debate with people studying this under my belt over thee years... While he and his fellow students were very invested in it, I was very skeptical. However, what I found, over time, was most of my concerns are about the overstatement of what it can show.
Evolution is a geological timescale, human actions are a mosquito. timescale By saying, "I'm just hard wired that way, you are absolving yourself of responsibility and choice, which is just silly and cowardly." I may me hardwired to like fatty foods, but I can choose not to eat them now that they are readily available and making me fat. And I for sure choose to not eat peanut butter because I ate awhole jar of it as a kid and made myself sick....
I came to think of it as having a motor boat on a lazy river. The lazy river current being EP, and the motorboat moving me around being my choices.
For me, the argument that finally changed my mind was one of the EP people saying something along the lines of "maybe people tend towards tribal cooperation not because we are a people who cooperate, but because those who didn't cooperate with their tribe got murdered by those that did.... Maybe there are times when there are evolutionary advantages to seeing the world a certain way?" That, least to me, made a bit of sense.
They also talked a lot about masculine jaw lines as testosterone indicators and the group, as a collective, did more studies than I can count that involved female choice life preferences when a woman was most fertile, but that's for another post.