“I think, therefore it is true.”
Honestly I think a lot of the worst evo psych takes don’t even get as far as hypothesizing or evidence. They fail at the first hurdle of “identify something about the world”. It’s the classic Freudian error of never once asking “hey wait is everyone like this or is it just me?”
This is my favorite pseudoscience to shit on. Fundamentally the big problem with it is that there are too many layers of conplexity between psychology and evolution. You can’t ignore genetics and neuroscience if you want to look at how psychology is affected, IF it’s even possible.
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
“We studied 10 Americans and generalized the findings to all humans”
I have a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, and while I was a grad student the department-wide punching bag of choice was ev psych. Every year we all lobbied for more guest speakers from that subdiscipline so that we could wine and dine them before their lectures and then devour them in Q&A. Such easy prey, but so little meat on the bones. 🤷♀️
Is shitting on evolutionary psychology the meta in this community?
Like many things, people hate it because of its associations with other things. They will happily throw it out even if it has good uses. Here have some spicy examples:
Some people experience gender dysphoria and may benefit from medical intervention? Nah it got abused by ideological idiots so it must always be bad. Karl Marx says workers must arm themselves? Nah guns are bad, I know this because rightoids like them.
They will happily throw it out even if it has good uses.
Your comment is passive aggressive criticism without any substance. I’m going to challenge you to back up that claim. Name the good uses.
Bad by association and the hivemind are my faves, I particular enjoy:
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“Evolutionary psychology is inherently bad, useless, and only stupid people could have such thoughts. Science as I understand it is the only valid way of thinking.”
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“Dosing a population with fluoride via tap water is inherently a 100% good thing and to question it implies ones utter stupidity, drugging a population this way with any other substance would be unthinkable though.”
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“Guns for civilians have no use other than school shootings, no good person should want a gun they must be banned.”
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“Boomers caused all of our problems, despite the fact that I also willingly participate in all the harmful systems that caused these problems.”
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So that’s what’s going on. I had a feeling everyone dunking on it didn’t actually know anything about psychology. Glad to know it’s just pettiness.
