Is Evolutionary Psychology Pure Bunk?

[iNow]

The reason people object is because EP leaves no gaps for god to hide in and makes Man 'just another animal'

I certainly agree that plays a role, but (just to be fair) there's more to the criticisms than just that.  Scientific American had two really well done articles/discussions on this recently.  I've shared those below.


http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -fallacies

Some evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence.

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Key Concepts

   

• Among Charles Darwin’s lasting legacies is our knowledge that the human mind evolved by some adaptive process.
• A major, widely discussed branch of evolutionary psychologyâ€"Pop EPâ€"holds that the human brain has many specialized mechanisms that evolved to solve the adaptive problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
• The author and several other scholars suggest that some assumptions of Pop EP are flawed: that we can know the psychology of our Stone Age ancestors, that we can thereby figure out how distinctively human traits evolved, that our minds have not evolved much since the Stone Age, and that standard psychological questionnaires yield clear evidence of the adaptations.

Here is a podcast they did a few months later (just last month, actually):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca ... e-09-07-17

Well it’s pretty cool when we can see scientific viewpoints turning, slowly of course. Also known as a paradigm shift. Right now, it appears evolutionary psychology is under mainstream fire.

Put simply, evo psych posits that favorable traits during our hunter-gatherer days persisted in our modern contexts. Natural selection carved our behavior and locked it in place. For example: so-called rape genes are passed on to modern males because the cave dwellers who carried rape genes sired more offspring and thus passed on that trait or adaptation to more descendents than those without the trait. And so that’s why we have rape today. This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

The public is drawn to evo psych because it provides a most desired thing: a neat reason, or excuse, for who we are; how we behave. That is not easily questioned, because it’s essentially unverifiable. We can’t go back in time to prove it.

With the appearance of a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks and a feature piece by Sharon Begley in Newsweek, the evo psych paradigm is being questioned in front of the general public.

These authors break the fanfare with two hits: evo psych depends on a relatively static environment over millennia, which evidence shows not to be the case. Our environment changes, and so the potential to engage genetic potential changes, dependent on the environment. Secondly, neuroplasticity appears to be firmly established, and the brain has extraordinary malleability and is able to adapt to different contexts over time. In short, the authors and their quoted researchers say the core of human nature lies in its “variability [across cultures and contexts] and its flexibility.”

[LoneMateria]

Our morals exist because we are social animals.  Plain and simple.  Social animals tend to have a low tolerance for murder as well as demonstrating empathy to group members.  There was a study done where they taught chimps to pull a chain and when they do they get food.  Then they put 2 of them in cages where they can see each other and when one would pull the chain it would get food then the other one would get an electrical shock.  Once they realized this was happening they would not pull the chain.  One went 9 days before pulling the chain the other went 14 days.

There was another study done with a certain fox (I don't remember the species anymore).  The fox was a solitary hunter.  It lived by itself and would kill other members of its own species if they it got close to it.  Scientists breed the foxes to be more social and when they did there was less infighting, they wouldn't kill each other, and they wouldn't even bite the humans who were doing the experiments.  This shows you can breed morals into animals.  What we perceive as morals is just part of being a social animal.

[jbeukema]

I just read and I highly recommend The Origin of Minds by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham