Biology Did Popper and Quine invent “Aristotelian essentialism”? 7 Feb 201221 Jun 2018 There are many narratives told about evolution. One of the most widely told is the Essentialism Story, replayed in textbook, popular storytelling and philosophy alike. It goes like this: Before Darwin, biologists were constrained by essentialist thinking, in which they were committed to species being natural kinds where there were… Read More
Administrative What I have been doing lately, and why 30 May 2009 It seems like only yesterday that we moved to these new digs, when in actual fact it’s a few days before yesterday. But I have been busy in real life, which is an uncommon occurence (having a real life, I mean), so I have not blogged as well or deeply… Read More
Evolution Evolution quotes: Diderot 14 Aug 201115 Aug 2011 It seems that nature has taken pleasure in varying the same mechanism in a thousand different ways. She never abandons any class of her creations before she has multiplied the individuals of it in as many different forms as possible. When one looks out upon the animal kingdom and notes… 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.