Why Hate Science?

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Psychiatrists use the DSM for diagnosis as well. you just have to be careful with who you choose.

i have been with some Psychiatrists that just immediately wanted to medicate me without knowing anything about me, or my psychological history... i feel pretty lucky to have recently been able to find one that actually cares.

that would go for any profession though... psychiatrist to bus-driver.

this is true... if you go to a psychologist that has crystals everywhere, then you're probably not dealing with someone who is scientifically based. i still disagree with Fnord in his opinion that psychology isn't completely a real science, but this recent DSM debacle is pretty damning in terms of making the APA look really bad. i know that longitudinal studies in a bulk of psychology are done in a pretty rigorous scientific way, adherent to the scientific method. for me, i feel like if you just look for the pseudo-scientific cohort in a field, and judge the entire area of study by their methods, however wrong they are, then by that method of assessment, one can throw something like the theoretical particle physics out because of the loud minority that abuse it.

also, i wanted to note that there is some controversy about evolutionary psychology, and i wanted your opinion on it. i have heard people call it an excuse for racism and sexual assault. i'm really intrigued about this kind of work though, as evolutionary biology is one of my pet interests, and it's neat to think about how Evolutionary Psychology fits in with how organisms, especially humans, evolved. however, organisms even of very low degrees are not robots, and will change to suit their environment whether something is psychologically inherent or not, so this i think is why this field has so many questions in it.

"God made the starfish in his image, and gave him a soul."

Darwin said "God must be inordinately found of beetles, or he wouldnt have made so many kinds of them."

No, I put up with their crap so that I could have sex with the one that had the nice rack and who was very vocal in her appreciation.

But eventually, I got fed up with her mind games, too.

So that wasn't for me, but IMO evolutionary psychology could be an interesting field if they didn't have the misconception that cultures never changed. They are looking at what is desirable/common (and deeply problematic) in modern day american society and then coming to the conclusion that it has to be some intrinsic part of the human psyche, totally dismissing earlier norms ever existed that contradicted those in place today, and that felt just as natural to those living in them.
The thing about culture/norms/fashion/trends is that those inside it do not realize it's not something that's been around forever, and that won't be around forever. If the nazis invented evolutionary psychology (and maybe they did, I don't know) they would use it to explain why what felt natural to them in that time and place had to be natural to our species as a whole. I think evolutionary psychology should take both the evolution of society and evolutionary biology into consideration.
They are also not (as far as I know) talking about the brain as the safekeeper of the genes - it has to be able to adapt as genes can't change our behavior as needed, and humans are the animal that is the absolute best at adaptation (as otherwise we would be unable to settle in places we did not evolve in) so it's a very complex issue to sort out what's actually instincts (as every other animal has too) and what's adaptations/society.

As for what the thread was originally about:
[img][800:649]http://icons-ak.wxug.com/graphics/earthweek/climate-change-consensus-gap-in-united-states.png[/img]
http://www.wunderground.com/earth-day/2 ... sensus-gap

I don't see how this goes against what evolutionary psychology assumes. If anything, it stresses on the concept of adaptation. If you observe the behaviors of non-human animals around us, there are many things that haven't changed in humans in terms of behavior. If humans are so flexible that they change overall in a jiffy, why do certain behaviors from evolutionary past persist in humans? Why do all humans, cross-culturally, seem to share the same basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and such)?

Also, who cares what some people think about it anyway. Science is supposed to be amoral; it doesn't there to make moral decisions for anybody. It leads to conclusions that may or may not be considered favorable by many, but it doesn't excuse anything deemed immoral by anybody.

This is not to say that evolutionary perspective is perfect. All perspectives, at the end of the day, have their faults. And the best approach to take as a psychologist would to to take from all perspectives and accept only the stuff that's been scientifically validated. Even points made by psychodynamic proponents have ended up being considered science (like the subconscious and such).

Anyone can agree that basic emotions like "happiness, sadness, anger, and such" aren't created from culture alone. But they are trying to fit shifting cultures into some grand evolutionary view and it's not working as cultures work in a different way from biology. They shift and they change and what's considered acceptable one century will be despicable the next. So far they have not come up with anything that isn't considered acceptable right now (either directly or indirectly). It's not like they are saying "see, our instinct is to eat our babies!" and then try to explain why we don't do that right now. They are saying stupid things like that the fashion from early 00s when women were supposed to bleach their hair and have implants have some deep evolutionary meaning. Just ask the american 1920's flappers from when it was trendy to have short dark hair and small breasts if they think the men they slept with were evolved to find them attractive or not, as they were the height of attractive for that time and place.
Science is performed by humans. Humans are biased. Evolutionary psychology is so inexact and new it's barely science. Why evolutionary psychology has such a bad reputation is because their research ends up in bad hands when people who want to defend being racist, sexist, etc use it as a way to promote why they should continue being racists and sexists. Which is a very illogical result.

It has its flaws (just like all the other perspectives), but it has contributed to science in various ways. And some of the experiements using evolutionary assumptions are quite interesting. My textbook is full of examples such as one experiment that showed that maternal grandmothers were most willing to invest time in their grandchildren than their spouses and the parental grandparents, while the paternal grandfather tended to be the least. This was actually predicted using evolutionary assumptions and so is best explained using the evolutionary psychology approach. Reason why is since maternal grandmothers were very certain that their daughter is their own and, therefore, is very certain that the daughter's child is her own grandchild, she is willing to invest more time in the grandchild.

If this doesn't lend credence to evolutionary psychology in your view, then what will?

i heard about this study last year, and it seemed pretty convincing at the time. but this is one study among many.

the whole "science is amoral" may be the ideal, but in sciencem you are dealing, like Anomeil said, with the perspective of humans. there is most likely some sort of moral component to a point of inquiry. whether you believe that morality can be explained scientifically or not, this is nearly a constant.

If I'm not mistaken, replicated and confirmed in several countries.

Quick overview read:

http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb4/psychologi ... arents.pdf

i suppose i should have said: "...among many other studies that are unrelated". i wasn't doubting the validity of this study.

scientists are pretty creepy

also, this concepts of science being something that is "amoral"... this concerns me. does this mean that no ethical considerations should be broached because they will inhibit the forwarding of science? i think that science unchecked by ethics and morals would be a very dangerous thing. look at what Lamar Smith is trying to do with regard to replication and peer review in nationally-funded science. that's taking a lot of ethics out of science, and replacing them with dollar signs and "progress".

one such ethical issue that has piqued my interest is in the field of genetics, with the recent publication of the HeLa genome sequence. who owns the sequence and the rights to publish it? the scientists or the family of the woman the genome was taken from in the 1950s? yes, Henrietta Lacks has been long dead, and initially the strain was taken from her without consent, but does that allow those who have her genome to do whatever they want with it? there are ethical standards to be used in this kind of situation, and so far, ethics haven't been used in the matter of privacy for the family. there has been an outcry from concerned parties, and the published sequence was taken down from the website it was posted on. the scientists are now in discussions with the Lacks family to see how to proceed.

science, as an inert abstraction, is essentially amoral; it cannot think or feel. that much is true. however, when humans, using science as a methodology to explore and create, come into the picture, this is where ethical and moral standards come into play.

i want to be clear; i am not speaking in favor of universal moralism. i do not know, or believe, that there is a scientifically reducible morality or if it's something that is relative to an individual's culture. this is a very turbid issue that that may or may not be solvable, and one that i feel the necessity to crystallize my stance on in conversations related to the topic.

There are, obviously, ethics to keep in mind when doing experiments. And guidelines to maintain these ethics exist for when conducting experiments and studies and such.

My point about science being amoral is that when/if it does make a statement about rape or any other subject that may be a sensitive topic to many, it is still just a scientific statement (detached from all personal agendas and moral standards) regardless of how strongly you or someone else may feel about it.

If you're concerned about personal agendas playing a role, well, that's why we have this concept of replication in science.

Science gets you nowhere with chicky babes. In fact, chicky babes may bully you, for being into science