This is my favorite pseudoscience to shit on. Fundamentally the big problem with it is that there are too many layers of conplexity between psychology and evolution. You can’t ignore genetics and neuroscience if you want to look at how psychology is affected, IF it’s even possible.
I have a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, and while I was a grad student the department-wide punching bag of choice was ev psych. Every year we all lobbied for more guest speakers from that subdiscipline so that we could wine and dine them before their lectures and then devour them in Q&A. Such easy prey, but so little meat on the bones. 🤷♀️
But also culture is influenced heavily by our evolution, but also also our evolution has been shaped by our cultures, and oh god it’s all spiraling in on itself
the problem IMO is just that people try to force more detail out of studying this than can sensibly be had, basically all i’m confident in concluding from evolutionary psychology is that humans are inherently social to an absurd degree, and contrary to what a lot of people want to believe people do not suck, they just end up doing bad things due to circumstances.
Pepole are inherently good and we need to take care to dismantle the societal structures that make us be not good.
This is my favorite pseudoscience to shit on. Fundamentally the big problem with it is that there are too many layers of conplexity between psychology and evolution. You can’t ignore genetics and neuroscience if you want to look at how psychology is affected, IF it’s even possible.
I have a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, and while I was a grad student the department-wide punching bag of choice was ev psych. Every year we all lobbied for more guest speakers from that subdiscipline so that we could wine and dine them before their lectures and then devour them in Q&A. Such easy prey, but so little meat on the bones. 🤷♀️
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
But also culture is influenced heavily by our evolution, but also also our evolution has been shaped by our cultures, and oh god it’s all spiraling in on itself
the problem IMO is just that people try to force more detail out of studying this than can sensibly be had, basically all i’m confident in concluding from evolutionary psychology is that humans are inherently social to an absurd degree, and contrary to what a lot of people want to believe people do not suck, they just end up doing bad things due to circumstances.
Pepole are inherently good and we need to take care to dismantle the societal structures that make us be not good.
“We studied 10 Americans and generalized the findings to all humans”
at least use the same species, jeez