Posted: Apr 19, 2018 7:37 am
Hermit wrote:zoon wrote:PZ Myers is claiming that he's not questioning the evolved nature of our brains, but he does then criticise, as SpeedOfSound says, every attempt to study psychology in the light of evolution. I agree with Jerry Coyne and the people here who say that this looks very much like an ideological attempt to shut down evolutionary thinking.
Having taken to a dislike of the Minnesota loudmouth a long time ago, years before he joined the Atheism+ crowd, I naturally jumped on the link you provided to see his ideological attempt to shut down evolutionary thinking. There is not even a hint of that, so I guess there is evidence of your and Coyne's assertion that you have not linked to for our perusal.
As for evolutionary psychology itself, it's chapter X of the debate concerning nurture versus nature. I don't think we have anywhere sufficient data to discuss that issue with any prospect of some kind of resolution. To forestall accusations that I too want to see evolutionary thinking shut down for ideological reasons I'd like to mention that, on the contrary, I'd like to see more actual research done, which means more funding for evolutionary psychology.
You are being careful to forestall accusations that you want to see evolutionary thinking shut down for ideological reasons. PZ Myers does not make any such attempt, or perhaps I should say that the nearest I've seen is in the quote I gave in post #10 above, where he's answering Jerry Coyne and says that he agrees brains evolved. Unlike you, PZ Myers doesn't say anywhere that he would like to see more funding for evolutionary psychology, or that he makes a distinction between the useful and the harmful variety. Other posts on Pharyngula include "History will judge evolutionary psychology as the phrenology of our era" (here) and "Evolutionary Psychology poisons everything" (here).
In post #11 above, Rumraket quotes PZ Myers from my original link (here), and says that he agrees:
Rumraket wrote:.....
But as evo-psych is actually practiced, PZ Myers has a point.PZ Myers: I detest evolutionary psychology, not because I dislike the answers it gives, but on purely methodological and empirical grounds: it is a grandiose exercise in leaping to conclusions on inadequate evidence, it is built on premises that simply don’t work, and it’s a field that seems to do a very poor job of training and policing its practitioners, so that it primarily serves as a dump for bad research that then supplies tabloids with a feast of garbage science that discredits the rest of us.
The parts in blue I can agree with, but I disagree with the rest.
That is a blanket condemnation of all evolutionary psychology, and while some evolutionary psychology deserves that criticism, I would agree with you and with Jerry Coyne (and I suspect also with Rumraket) that not all of it does, and that much of it is a valuable field of scientific investigation.
Again, I think the trouble is that in the end, those of us who don't think there is a god do in fact think that we are shaped by evolution, and it's all too easy to jump from there to claiming, when it suits us in one of the ongoing arguments about moral details which are a feature of human social life, that we should be behaving more like the animals we evolved from, in order to live in accordance with our "true" nature. In many fields we do this uncontroversially, for example, evolutionary thinking gives a clear and probably reasonably correct handle on our tendency to like sitting down and eating sugar (it's adaptive to conserve energy and to like calorific foods) and also why those traits can be bad for health (we evolved in environments which didn't often give us the chance to overdo the sloth and overeating). Morality is apt to be a social minefield in any culture, and arguments around the foundations of morality have extra potential for going nuclear. Unlike theists, we don't have the option of saying that our minds are essentially unlike those of other animals; the most we can say when arguing against those who may wish to promote tribalism or misogyny on supposedly scientific grounds is that humans have evolved socially in ways which are strikingly different from any other large animal, and that we are not yet close to understanding our brains as the mechanisms they almost certainly are.