Posted: Apr 19, 2018 10:00 am
This is the sort of thing that caused my intense dislike of Myers. You just requoted me describing him as "the Minnesota loudmouth". I started ranting about him at the Richard Dawkins forum about twelve years ago. When that forum was killed off I continued my rants at Rationalia. Here's one example from 2009: "...he could teach the tabloid media a trick or two regarding the arts of exaggeration, twisting facts until they bear no relation with reality and sheer hysteria mongering. Fuck off, Myers. Your blathering - at least in this instance - is counterproductive to the spread of atheism." Myers likes outrageous exaggeration, screeching hyperbole and totally inappropriate analogy too much for his own liking. So he does not mind riffing on Hitchens's book title, comparing evolutionary psychology to phrenology, and so forth. As long as it is loud and colourful he loves it. In that regard he is a fucking idiot. Once you read the texts themselves, at least on the topic of evolutionary psychology he writes mostly about its woeful methodology, its habit of coming to conclusions that bear no relation to the data they are supposedly based on, and such. You know, the sort of things Rumraket highlighted.
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.
zoon wrote:That is a blanket condemnation of all evolutionary psychology...
It is indeed. At this stage I must agree with Myers. From your link in post #10:
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.
zoon wrote: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.
Where did you get the idea from that I might have seen anything of value coming from ev psy? My opinion that funding should be increased? My dear fellow, in my opinion funding should be increased for every field of inquiry, be it evolutionary psychology, phrenology, the paranormal or whatever else you can think of. At a stretch even astrology. I have this, perhaps naïve confidence that unimpeded competition will sort the winners from the losers. People with a modicum of education, including a rudimentary grounding in scientific method will be able to tell which is which.
Meanwhile, I am still waiting for that link to Myers's attempt to shut down evolutionary thinking.