Evolution Species article online 27 Oct 2008 The NCSE has put up more of its content from it’s excellent, if badly laid out, magazine Reports of the NCSE. As a result, one of my better pieces, on species concepts, is now up, with a list of what I at the time thought were the concepts in the… Read More
Biology The false analogy between species and art 26 Jan 201118 Sep 2017 Biological topics are used widely in philosophy to illustrate arcane and recondite philosophical topics,and one of the most widely used, and most abused, are species as examples of natural kinds. Kangaroos, swans, tigers, lions, cats, and of course humans are all brought in to assist our intuitions. As Umberto Eco… Read More
General Science Indifferentialism 30 Jun 2009 The Sensuous Curmudgeon has a new (old) take on the accommodationism debate: indifference. To quote him/her/them: Our position is to totally disregard what we consider to be a sectarian disagreement among various denominations about whether scripture should be read in a manner to deny verifiable information about reality. One might… 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.