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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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The entire field of evolutionary psychology debunked? Do you mean the idea that our brains are subject to evolutionary forces like every other part of our anatomy? No, not debunked.
This is conflating specific methodological problems with theoretical claims. Yes, many have criticized the game theoretical methodology typical of evolutionary psychology. There are a lot of highly speculative junk claims out there. It’s also true that some (not all or even most!) cognitive scientists think that we cannot take the perspective that psychology evolved at all. But it is certainly untrue that there is some consensus that evolutionary psychology has been “debunked”.
This criticism is also a bit ironic given the highly speculative nature of the claims you put forward. Your guess sounds plausible I suppose, but I see no reason to think it’s any more methodologically rigorous.
Show me a prediction it makes
That’s not how science works. I understand that you’re trying to criticize the field, but lack of predictions, even reliable ones, is not itself a problem it has. For one thing, even false theories can make reliable predictions, like Levoisier’s defunct theory of caloric in the 18th century which has now been replaced by modern thermodynamics. The caloric theory can be used to make mathematically accurate predictions, but the underlying theory is still wrong.
Similarly, evo psych can make a lot of reliable predictions without saying anything true. On the contrary, one criticism of the field is that it’s unfalsifiable because an evolutionary theory can always (allegedly) be proposed to fit the data. Which is to say, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
One example: it is proposed that the fusiform face area of the brain is a domain specific module evolved for face detection. It’s present in other animals that recognize conspecifics by their face. In humans, damage to the area leads to face specific agnosia. The theory makes accurate predictions, but is it true? It’s still being debated.
Without predictions and without tangible models you don't have falsifiability. You unintentionally acknowledged my point without understanding it. The field isn't a science, just philosophy trying to explain the results from actual sciences, but didn't itself have any kind of proof of validity.
Your example is much more closely related to neurology and neuropsychology.
If you actually take a graduate level course on scientific methodology or on the philosophy of science, you will learn that “falsifiability” is no longer a viable standard for scientific validity. This is because, logically, no claim is falsifiable: one can always adjust background beliefs to evade a logical contradiction. See the Duheim-Quine thesis.
Moreover, if your argument were correct, we would have to reject evolutionary inferences altogether! What you say about the cognitive system is true for, e.g. the immune system or the endocrine system. But that’s ridiculous. Evolutionary claims are part of the bedrock of the so-called Modern Synthesis in the biological sciences of the last hundred years. Yours is similar to bad arguments made by creationists.
Your “No True Scotsman” response is just deeply confused about what evolutionary psychology even is. What a mess.
Well duh, curve fitting isn't new, that's why we try to make predictions before we know the result and try to keep the hypothesis simple. Of course falsifiability isn't enough alone, but it certainly hasn't lost its place.
Your comparisons are ridiculous because you're comparing things which are testable (genetic variances, etc) with hypothetical differences between ancient brains we don't know the structure of. We still don't even know enough to make deep comparisons between brains of related animals. Until you can both synthesize and simulate the brain of ancient genomes you have absolutely no idea if you're on the right track, you can't know at all. There's so many different ways a brain can implement the same behavior with so many different unpredictable side effects that you can't say more than "they behaved in a way that kept them alive long enough" with any reasonable certainty. Do you know at what rate brains have changed biologically? No?
Ugh, your comments are everything I hate about the internet. Both of us know that only one us does research on cognitive science, and it's not you. Yet, because it's the internet, you think you can get by with bluster and false confidence.
Of the many mistakes you make: No cognitive neuroscientist would say, without huge caveats, that we can't make deep comparisons between animal and human brains — not after all the groundbreaking work finding deep functional similarities between bird brains and human brains in the last 10 years. These are groundbreaking findings in comparative neurology, and it's pretty obvious you know nothing about them. You go on to propose a standard of evidence which require that we can predict protein synthesis based on genetic variances, which is laughable. You also seem to be completely unaware of phylogenetic analysis, which is actually the standard way we make many of our evolutionary inferences.
Look, I'm not even an evolutionary psychologist. I have no skin in that game. But I do hate bullshit artists on the internet.
Why are you spending your time defending the least useful parts of your field? You're just making it sound more and more like people taking findings from neuropsychology (a science) and making historical guesswork around it (trying to guess what caused changes with zero evidence of how animals behaved in past environments). I'm aware of phylogenetics, but it seems to lose it's usefulness when most genes have such a weak correlation to behavior and when you can't actually observe historical behavior. Brains have too high plasticity to predict why a certain region would exist if you don't know the environment the animal lives in.
You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.
Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.
If you raise a group of human children without ever exposing them to language, they'll invent their own.
That's a prediction
Derived from what? From observation of the exact same thing already happening, or from a model of behavior?
From the fact that language of our complexity would be very hard to learn if humans didn't have specialised circuits for learning it, and the fact that evolving better language on a biological level would improve fitness.
That's untested, even if it appears likely, it's a hypothesis which doesn't predict how it would be formed or learned or how it would be used, etc
Okay, here's another. Large pupils are a sign of health and of arousal, and make humans feel more attraction, because it's a better mate for breeding. Ads that leverage a model's attractiveness will perform better if they use models with bigger pupils or digitally enlarge them.
Hypothesis for an existing observation without any robust underlying model. Even the advertisement bit is just a weak correlation which was observed after the fact and not predicted in advance based on any model
Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn't possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Astronomy at least collects a lot of data from those one-time observations and try to model the physics, hoping to be able to see something similar again to calibrate the models. For medicine it varies, for rare disease and injuries that are unethical to replicate its a valid issue but they still have scientific models of the affected organs, etc, and similarly to above they try to model it and predict what treatments would work. And all your examples have historical data to some extent.
Evopsych have essentially zero usable historical data and adds no new understanding over regular psychology, and I've never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Astronomy is mostly history sprinkled with physics.
You explained the limitations astronomers and medical researchers face. Psychologists face similar problems, which is why all their results should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. But that does not mean their work is worthless; just that it is hard. A lot of traditional psychology was based on what one person thought, rather than logical arguments or experimental evidence. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to place the study of the brain's workings in the context of evolution.
Individual human behaviours depend on a lot of other factors. All you can do from an evolutionary perspective is to explain some common trends. For example, in almost all cultures, some people are gay / ace. Traditional psychologists long thought of this as some sort of mental condition. But if you think of society in the context of inclusive fitness and r/K strategy, it makes a lot of sense to have a certain percentage of the population not reproduce. Is this why some people are gay / ace? I don't know, and I don't think we'll ever know. But at least we can try to explain some things.
It is impossible to make prediction or cobduct manipulation experiment in medicine and in climate studies? Do you read what you post?
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
You don't need to give anyone a disease to study medicine. Moreover, medicine is not limited to diseases. And it has both predictions and experimets.
You still can observe, describe, analyze and model(predict). The goal of every science is to create prediction function.