evo psych

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This is one of the milder criticisms I've seen of evo psych, but it does give a few rubrics with which to judge evolution research in general.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/con ... ereotypes/

LKL, interesting article, and I posted at the end of it.

The problem with evolutionary psychology, which I find fascinating, isn't stereotypes (a valid stereotype is a statement that is frequently, though not always, true). The problem is what Popper called falsifiability. How can evolutionary psychology's contentions be proven or disproven?

Are you saying that the hunter vs. farmer hypothesis regarding ADHD (a textbook example of a evolutionary psychology hypothesis) is not falsifiable?

Here, let me try. Lets look at a genetic predictor of ADHD (DRD4-7 repeat):

H0: There is no correlation between the frequency of genetic traits associated with ADHD and the history of migration patterns in populations.

H1: The frequency of genetic traits associated with ADHD will be higher in populations with a history of high migration patterns than in populations with a history of low migration patterns.

H2: The frequency of genetic traits associated with ADHD will be lower in populations with a history of high migration patterns than in populations with a history of low migration patterns.

Now, look at the result:

Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Allele Frequencies Around the Globe

Theory. Hypothesis. Test.

I'm not saying that this is a conclusive account of evolutionary hypothesises (last time I checked, the link between DRD4 and ADHD isn't exactly awesome), but I just proved that evolutionary psychology is falsifiable...

What I am saying is that the animosity against evolutionary psychology is in may ways a political - and not a scientific - animosity. If a person has a problem with specific studies, one should focus on those specific studies and not a discipline as a whole. Even fringe disciplines like Marxism and the Austrian School of Economics - widely considered non-falsifiable and thus non-scientific - have produced spin-off studies within the framework of actual science...

And evolutionary psychology shouldn't be compared with these groups. Evolutionary psychology is just a subset of evolutionary biology focusing on a specific and narrow subset of biology (the brain of Homo Sapiens). The so-called "bad" reputation of evolutionary psychology likely suffers from the same problem as the "bad" reputation of intelligence studies...

People are too lazy to read research outside their particular field of interest...

Viper, did you notice that the original article didn't say that @all@ evo psych is bad science?

I did notice that. I also noticed this.


So, are you going Stephen Jay Gould on me? The only tools for evaluating evolution research are... the same tools for evaluating any other branch of scientific inquiry.

In the broadest sense, yes; however, the article gets a little more specific. I do agree with Gould that too much evolution research is overly adaptationist - I think that is represented in the article - and strays into the just-so storytelling that creationists accuse us of.

My beef with those who attack evolutionary psychology (as I recall, someone on this very board referred to it as "evo psych" BS) is that they are attacking the entire concept of unity of science.

We have a field (biology) which is inextricably tied to evolution. In fact, biology would pretty much be unintelligible without evolution, as it would be disconnected from both chemistry and physics.

Then we have another field (psychology) which has a reputation for BS beyond comprehension due to the works of charlatans like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. At some point (in the 1970s and 1980s) some psychologists got fed up with that and decided that they would base their work on a more fundamental science (biology), just as biology is formed on an even more fundamental science (chemistry) and so forth...

Given the predominance of evolution in biology, it would be obvious for psychologists subscribing to the unity of science to frame their inquiries in an evolutionary perspective. There might be methodological challenges that need to be addressed. But this is nothing new. Biology itself needed the distinction between genotype and phenotype to figure out how evolution actually works, and this concept wasn't coined until 1903. Furthermore, Popper himself was at first sceptical about the falsifiability of evolution.

Yet evolutionary psychology is continuously subject to attack on the most basic level: Because it makes the claim that humans are somehow comparable to the 5,000+ other species of mammals on this planet, it must be killed by fire.

[sarcasm]Instead, we are to entertain the notion that humans have reached some sort of evolutionary singularity, where our personalities, preferences and abilities are somehow completely disconnected from millions of years of evolution, and that the only difference between Leonardo Da Vinci and a village idiot is that the former had a good upbringing.[/sarcasm]

The problem with many critics of evolutionary research (not just psychology, but biology itself) - and their champions Gould and Lewontin - is that they clearly have a political agenda: If key components of the human personality are either fixed or very difficult to change due to having a genetic basis, this drastically reduces the effectiveness of certain policies. Thus, we must protect these policies by attacking studies that find a genetic basis. Gould's criticism of intelligence studies, for instance, is flat out anti-scientific, and he definitely knew that himself given the reaction to The Mismeasure of Man, but that didn't sit well with his political agenda.

I am one of the people who calls evo-psych BS. There are many biologists, including myself, who think that most evo-psych is simply bad science, done with bad methodology and almost always without any actual experimentation done under rigorous standards. The conclusions often do not fit the data, and sometimes are not even related to the data.

No biologist denies that there are certain aspects of human behavior that are genetic and evolutionary. However, separating these from culture is excruciatingly difficult. Most evolutionary psychology studies have samples consisting entirely of middle to upper-class Western college students and extrapolate from these out to all of humanity. It's the equivalent of saying, "well, when I see couples driving,it's usually the man who drives, so men must have evolved to be better at driving than women." And then they make up some story about how men hunting for big game on the Savannah made them naturally better drivers or something, without actually looking for any evidence about men being better drivers, or how many accidents people get into, or acknowledging that the "early man the Hunter/woman the gatherer" hypothesis is far from proven, or anything like that. Evolutionary psychology is the kind of science you see in Discover Magazine, not the kind you see published by the AAAS.

Before we had evo-psych, we had evolutionary behavior studies (including on humans) and that was perfectly adequate.

As for Stephen Jay Gould, your view on him is far from universal. He he remains one of the most respected evolutionary biologists in American history. EO Wilson also had political views, as does Pinker, and any other biologist you care to name. Having political views does not make one's research, nor even one's world views, invalid.

I know. I was referring to a statement made by you in another thread.


You are aware that it only takes a few seconds to go onto the website of Science/AAAS and do a search on "evolutionary psychology", right?

Unsurprisingly, I got a quite a few hits. Which brings me back to my previous statement: The only tools for evaluating evolution research are... the same tools for evaluating any other branch of scientific inquiry (in this case: scientific peer review). I most certainly do not consider myself to be in a position where I can pass damning judgement on an entire field of scientific inquiry when the top scientific journal on the planet finds no reason to do so. Do you?

And the concept of labelling an entire field of study as unscientific is extremely arrogant, in my opinion. The theoretical assumptions of evolutionary psychology are pretty straightforward: The brain, just as the foot, the liver and the eye, is a product of evolution. If there are studies that take these assumptions beyond what data can support, then deal with those studies. No need to maximize collateral damage by deliberately attacking innocent bystanders.


Correct, but E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker (or other biologists that Gould fought against - Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Trivers and Dawkins, if we are going to be in the name-dropping business) do not - unlike Gould - have a reputation for misrepresenting science. Personally, I think it was a disgrace to give him the presidency of AAAS.

John Maynard Smith on Gould:

"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... ds/?page=1

You're right that *all* evolutionary psychology is not BS, and that the AAAS does publish some of it; my statement was intemperate. However, I repeat that *most* if it is BS (particularly the crap that makes it into the popular press, and is further degraded there), and having been peer-reviewed and published does not preclude that judgemnet. Studies of ethology, by contrast - including the ethology of humans - are routinely rigorous and well-conducted. Ethology, unlike evo psych, rigorously works to separate the effects of training (and culture) and of the observer, on the observed behavior. Saying that evo-psych is usually bad science is not claiming that the human brain is not a result of evolution, nor is it claiming that evolution has had, and continues to have, an impact on our behavior.

Wrt. Scientists: I listed Wilson specifically because he is a controversial author, on the same level that Gould is. Maynard-Smith and Dawkins are not without controversey, either.
As far as what kind of respect he gets from biologists: I am a biologist, and evolutionary biology was one of my areas of interest in training. I read a lot of Gould when I was in junior high, a little be less in high school, and not much after that - nor Wilson, either. I am quite familiar with both Gould's writings (from my early extracurricular reading) and with the controversies surrounding him (from my university training), and frankly a lot of the criticism of him sounds more political than he was himself. Punctuated equilibrium remains a major hypothesis - even a dominant hypothesis - of modern evolutionary thought, and his criticism of adaptationism is entirely valid.