What’s going on with evolutionary psychology?
I haven’t written for sometime due to time constraints, but I decided to come back today to comment on an article I just read, before I lose my track of thoughts.
The article was published in Scientific American and is this: Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology
This article is written by Philosopher of science David Buller who is known for his critical view on evolutionary psychology. He was appeared before in Scientific American: Psyching Out Evolutionary Psychology: Interview with David J. Buller.
For those of you who don’t know what evolutionary psychology is, it is a field of psychology that tries to explain human behavior based on explanations concerning human adaptation in older times. As we all know, Darwin’s theory of evolution says that all species develop various mechanisms to adapt to their environment through the generations. Evolutionary psychologists have taken this concept further, by saying that these adaptations are not only biological, like for example immunity to a disease, but also, behavioral.
Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss
A very simple example is jealousy. Jealousy is considered an evolutionary adaptive trait. The reasoning behind this is the following: If a male, for example, knowingly lets his female partner mate with another male, then it becomes less likely that he will have children with her and, thus, it is less likely that he will transfer his genes to the next generation. Therefore, males who were jealous, had higher chances of transfering their genes and, so, jealousy has been transfered as an evolutionary behavioral trait in modern times.
Evolutionary psychology has been disputed many times. The main problem with evolutionary psychology is that, unlike other branches of psychology, like cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology theories are difficult to falsify.
Buller’s criticism focuses on 4 points. The first one concerns that we can’t really falsify or verify the theories, because we don’t have data on our ancestors. This is a subject I’d like to address. While we don’t have a completely clear picture of the way our ancestors lived, we still have some kind of an idea. Furthermore, this claim made me remember my last article: Can computation be the answer? The violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The world of computation is one based on repetition, chaotic patterns, and constraints or borders. What all this means, to make it simpler, is that while we can’t travel in the past to see how our ancestors lived, we can, however, create a picture of what life back then would be. Of course, a perfect situation would be to compute the past from the present (which can be is impossible at this point). However, we can still gather data from various sciences concerning these times, like geological and anthropological, and try to find the challenges the early homo sapiens faced.
Evolutionary psychologist pioneer Leda Cosmides
Furthermore, don’t forget that evolutionary dynamics, are not much different than economics. It is a system governed by agents with limited resources, and with the purpose to reproduce one’s genes. Pretty much like in economics we have used games, like the prisoner’s dilemma, to try and find the best strategy, maybe we can compute certain games based on the constraints of the environment we created based on data from other sciences concerning these ancient times, in order to find most successful evolutionary strategies. We could then, statistically, infer the probability of each strategy surviving after some thousands of years, until now. Should these strategies agree with the finding of evolutionary psychology, then we could say, with some certainty, that evolutionary theories are valid.
Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby
This argument I just presented, can also be the answer to the second fallacy that David Buller finds in evolutionary psychology, that we can’t know how a trait was evolved, because, we need to have a similar species, but in a different environment, to compare the two, between them.
The third point Buller makes, have some truth in it. David Buller says that the popular evolutionary psychology phrase "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind" isn’t so right. He cites that have seen human evolutionary adaptations in 450 years, so we could expect that some behavioral adaptations could also have happened since the early days of homo sapiens. The degree, however, up to which these adaptations have taken place remains to be seen.
The final argument D. Buller makes is that the psychological data gathered don’t provide a verification of the theories of evolutionary psychology. If you read the article and you have some experience as a psychologist, you’ll probably see that this is not a really good argument. Psychological experiments face problems many times, but scientists always try to make their best to avoid any problems that could hurt the research’s credibility. Buller provides an alternative explanation to the evolutionary explanation of jealousy differences between males and females.
Evolutionary psychology supports that males are mostly bothered by the sexual infidelity of their partner and females by the emotional infidelity of their partners. David Buller says that homosexual men, in the concept of jealousy, are more like women, than men, thus this proves the theory wrong. D. Buller obviously has never read the recent research that presents findings that homosexual men’s brains are closer to women’s brains, than men’s. He then offers the classic explanation that culture shapes the human mind, and jealousy is perceived differently among cultures. He is right about this one. However, while culture is a factor, evolution is another one. This means that the weight of the different factors can, and should be, compared statistically, not on vague writings and catchphrases that have been coming and going in the last century like mantras, based on a silly debates like nurture vs nature.
Nurture versus nature…
Of course, not everything in evolutionary psychology is right, like you may have suspected I believe by this article. Check this blog out for example in Psychology Today Blogs: The Scientific Fundamentalist. This guy is Satoshi Kanazawa, who has written why Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
While many of his theories are valid, others are extreme unscientific claims about all kinds of controversial issues, with the only purpose to piss off people.
Satoshi Kanazawa
There is another one evolutionary psychology blog, ran by a gay, which makes it even more interesting, since evolutionary psychology hasn’t yet found a convincing theory of human homosexuality: Quirky Little Things. He even has presented evolutionary theories on homosexuality: The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)
Well, anyway, I think that we have talked about many things today. We have certainly covered some important issues in evolutionary psychology. It is a highly controversial topic and I urge you to read some more to form your own opinion on the subject. 
