Verdandi wrote:
Finding evolutionary psychology's unfalsifiable just so story explanations for human behavior to be dodgy and unscientific does not have anything to do with the false notion that humans are fundamentally different from animals. Clearly, we're not. Just as clearly, much of evo psycho is predicated on assumptions about human behavior and it seems that it fails at parsimony as well as falsifiability. There's little to separate much evo psych from creationism as far as the scientific method goes.
Plus the fact that you had to make excuses for why data that disagrees with your beliefs must be false or the result of social engineering or some other factor that makes it somehow less true.
Exactly.
It's not that anybody is trying to be 'unscientific' or cowtowing to the idea of being PC, it's just that evo psychology simply isn't all that good of a science.
It reduces people to little more then categories and boxes, and bases thoughts and actions on little more then getting laid and having babies. It doesn't treat people like people. It acts on a paradigm that treats people like robots, who can't think outside the breeding box and are slaves to their genes.
If we are slaves who do nothing but breed, why are there childfree couples? They are perfectly fertile, are able to breed and fit many of the 'ideal' breeding criteria, but choose not to have kids? Why are so many surmising that the 7 billion are becoming too much and bucking the ever important trend of 'passing on one's genes?" It's because we aren't robots, and evo psychology doesn't take anything like this into account. It only looks at one narrow view, and doesn't look beyond that to see if it matches up.
While we might share genetics with chimps, we still are NOT chimps. We don't have a true estrus cycle, we don't gain prodigious strength, etc. We also share a lot of genes with an earthworm, does it mean that we must think like a worm too? Evo psych doesn't think about this. It treats humans as if they haven't evolved past that sunny patch of jungle, and not the thinking species that can go beyond it's own primitive instincts.
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Crispy Pickles!!
04 Aug 2013, 3:19 pm
