cricket

Same here... I would love to see all of the informed posters' views regarding these books &/or their authors. Pinker, Wright, David Buss, the Ridleys, etc. It would be interesting to hear the intelligent and, i'm sure, opiniated POVs of the members here.

cricket

Did you get a reply?

The Lone Ranger

Well, it's not my field of study, but I've read a fair amount of literature in the area.

With all respect to pz, I didn't think much of Not in Our Genes because, though the authors make some worthwhile points, they present a gross misrepresentation of the field of sociobiology. "Sociobiology" is largely irrelevant nowadays, anyway. Granted, it has been years since I read Not in Our Genes, so I'm not presenting this as a definitive claim.

For the average reader, I'd rank Ridley above Pinker (whose writing can be rather dense, and who does make a number of poorly-supported claims), and also above Wright. Ridley seems to have a far better grasp of evolutionary theory than Wright, and is much better at explaining things, in my opinion. He's also less prone to unsupported speculation.

For those with an interest in the field, the Churchlands' work, along with the writings of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are essential. They're much less reader-friendly than the writings of Ridley, but will quickly dispel the illusion that Evolutionary Psychologists are simply making up "just-so stories," and that they don't consider alternate hypotheses.

Cheers,

Michael

[No, Gould never returned my message. All I got was a generic "Thanks for writing" response.]

Duck!

Well, I've just finished "How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker and I really enjoyed it. But I'm a total scientific spaz so I don't understand the current understanding of evolutionary psychology. I simply don't understand one way or the other.

I'd really like to hear the thoughts and understanding of the likes of Rufus, PZ, Peez, Dr. GH, lpetrich, Darwin's Terrier, etc. and others with professional and non-professional understanding of this situation. Because my understanding is limited to the average layman's (non)-understanding.

I simply don't understand all the related variables but I'd love to really understand the situation at hand.


Duck!

Kantian

That makes the two of us. I also bought Julian Jaynes' Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind for laughs.

Despite my background in philosophy, i am as much as a layman in these matters as you are, Duck.

~Transcendentalist~

Secular Pinoy

Whoa people! Please make sure to refer to the proper M. Ridley here. I already have a hard time remembering who is who. Now people talk about Ridley this, Ridley that, without referring which Ridley s/he meant.

Errr... am I making sense?

The Lone Ranger

In my opinion, a great deal of the criticism of Evolutionary Psychology is misguided, particularly that which you'll find in the popular press.

Far too often, opponents of EP engage in ad hominem attacks against those who would dare suggest that there might be species-specific behavior in humans, rather than address the issue forthrightly. Sometimes, the misrepresentation of EP is so blatant as to be downright dishonest. For example, my problem with Gould's misrepresentation of Wright's The Moral Animal is that Gould claimed that Wright was insisting that human behavior is "genetically determined" and hence inflexible, and that there was therefore no point in attempting to oppose our "baser instincts." This is, in fact, a very common "refutation" of EP -- that its proponents are sexist, racist, etc. and believe in "genetic determinism." Truthfully, though, I've never encountered any EP so utterly stupid as to believe in genetic determinism.

The "Nature vs. Nurture" debate is a red herring. All behavior is both genetically and environmentally influenced. How could it be otherwise? Of course, some behaviors are less malleable than others.

In any event, no one could possibly have read Wright's book and believed that he was arguing for genetic determinism, since the entire point of the book is that we are not slaves to our genes.

***

For any species other than Homo sapiens, it's utterly uncontroversial to point out that there are species-specific behaviors that are clearly inherited. Much of the science of ethology revolves around trying to determine whether the behaviors in question are adaptive or neutral -- and if it's adaptive, what might have shaped the evolution of that behavior.

As I pointed out earlier, we use species-specific behaviors in salamanders to help us reconstruct their phylogenies. The phylogenetic trees we get when we use behavioral data correspond very nicely with those we get when we use morphological and/or genetic data. What's more, the program often predicts (very well, I might add) behavior for species, if we include both behavioral and morphological data in the analysis.

If someone dares to suggest that there might be species-specific behavior in humans, however, some people become quite irate, and start throwing around words like "racist" and "sexist."

It would be awfully surprising if humans -- alone among animal species, so far as we can tell -- didn't have species-specific behaviors, though.

That natural selection can and does shape species' behavior is more or less unanimously accepted within the scientific community, particularly since the genes that influence certain behaviors have been identified, in some cases. [Please note that I use the term "influenced," not "determined.]

***

Evolutionary Psychology is in it's infancy, and as best I can tell, has no real organising principle other than that behavior can be genetically-influenced, and so might be subject to inheritance. (It's also worth pointing out that behaviors can be inherited through non-genetic means, and indeed, cultural evolution is far faster than biological evolution.) Some in the field are (perhaps in reaction to the near-hysterical opposition of some critics) prone to making grand and poorly-supported claims.

Is Evolutionary Psychology a mature science with a clearly-defined core of established facts? No, certainly not. (I would say the same for traditional Psychology, too, by the way.)

It's certainly a great deal more scientific in its approach and methodology than is ID, however.

Cheers,

Michael

Secular Pinoy

I don't know if anyone's cited this article, but it seems relevant to the discussion. Religion has always been a favorite topic of Evolutionary Psychology (just read Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained for a very EP-heavy account). I'm not fully convinced by several different explanations of religion in an EP mindframe, though I am optimistic that there could be a credible one someday.

pz

That article contains a perfect example of what I find grossly objectionable in evolutionary psychology.There is precisely zero evidence to support that contention. Zero .

That stuff isn't science. It's fantasy. That's why it's comparable to ID: it's people inventing stories with varying degrees of plausibility in support of something they merely wish to be true, and then pretending that their confabulations constitute evidence.

The Lone Ranger

There's far too much "just so" theorizing in EP, but I wouldn't put it into the same category as ID, since some evolutionary psychologists are at least trying to do real science.

For all the faults of the discipline itself (though I hesitate to use the term "discipline" in respect to EP), there are some people in it trying to do legitimate science.

I've yet to see any convincing evidence that the same is true of ID, for all the IDists' claims to the contrary. ID really is nothing more than people making up stories that they wish were true, and calling it "science."

***

I think of EP in much the same way that I think of "Regular" Psychology. It provides some interesting viewpoints and possible hypotheses, but doesn't qualify as a true science in the same way that genetics does, for example, since it lacks hard data and a well-established core.

Cheers,

Michael