Evolution Chloroplast origins 6 May 2009 Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms has an absolutely stunning review of the origin of chloroplasts in eukaryotes. It’s so good I thought it was from Elio Schaechter’s blog Small Things Considered when it first popped up in my reader – higher praise there is not. Read More
Epistemology On innovation 11 Aug 201226 Aug 2012 [I’ll continue the congenital beliefs series soon. Also chocolatarianist political theory] [Late note: Stefano Ghirlanda has pointed me at two papers he has coauthored on just this topic. In one, published in PNAS, he and his colleagues investigate a model of cultural innovation. In another, as yet unpublished, they argue that “creativity… Read More
That stuff pisses me off as it ruins support for potentially promising and well-reasoned directions of research. Makes ALL applied evolutionary frameworks look very bad to those on the humanities side and beyond… And it seems that like anywhere else, it is too often the idiots who get the loudest voice in academia…
“See, that’s just the kind of bullshit optimism that discredits evo-psych. Your “evolutionary histories” always seem tuned to produce 1960’s flower children.” There, an alternative way of mis-interpreting life.
The problems with evopsych is that it (1) fails to employ phylogeny to constrain hypotheses, (2) assumes an adaptationist story for every trait in question, and (3) presumes massive modularity. When, and if, it doesn’t do these things it comes up with some interesting explanatory hypotheses. At best, only a very few traits will be universal solutions, adaptive, and modular. Evolution is crucial to psychology, yes, but not, necessarily, evolutionary psychology itself.