Evolution Going backwards, or, devolution? 29 Sep 2009 Carl Zimmer has another one of his excellent summary articles, this time about the problems encountered by a research group that tried to make a protein that had evolved into one form, evolve back to the starting point. This is being touted as a molecular version of “Dollo’s Law” (which is… Read More
Humor Graphical Philosophy 4 Jul 20114 Jul 2011 Wittgenstein wrote: Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [On Certainty §611] Or, in a GIF: From Patton’s Argument Clinic. I think there’s a need for the entire corpus of modern philosophy to be done… Read More
Humor Funny philosophers 18 Jan 2008 It is widely understood that philosophers aren’t as a rule, intentionally funny. Partly this is because we are often old fogies whose sense of humour was formed in the early Jurassic. Mostly it’s because when you deal with the absurd professionally, you tend not to find the funny side of… 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.