Posted: Apr 19, 2018 11:49 am
Hermit wrote:
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.
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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.
OK, I should have said evolutionary thinking in the field of psychology. Given that Myers is in the habit of saying things like: "history will judge evolutionary psychology as the phrenology of our era" and "the fundamental premises of evo psych are false", it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose he thinks it should be treated in the same way as phrenology: worthless at all levels. I don't think he backtracks enough in the small print to be let off the hook, but that's probably a matter of opinion. Also, there's a question of what exactly the phrase "evolutionary psychology" refers to: Tooby and Cosmides did indeed make claims in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind which are overblown (massive modularity etc) and which have since been associated with "Evolutionary Psychology". If "Evolutionary Psychology" is taken to refer only to the approach set out in that book and similar writings, then I think the criticisms are largely reasonable. If "evolutionary psychology" is taken to refer more generally to any attempt to link psychological findings to evolutionary theory, then I'm with Jerry Coyne, I think Myers' criticisms are too general and are not limited to the headlines.
I think it's fair to say there's a difficulty for atheists who are left-leaning in current political arguments, in that we insist on the evidence from evolution when it comes to questions of any god's existence, and then have to insist equally strongly that apparent evidence from evolution is irrelevant when it comes to practical morality. For example, evolutionary theory is, as far as I can tell, adamant that kin altruism is at the core of evolved cooperation between large animals (group selection being a variant of kin selection which is usually less tractable mathematically), and this is not helpful when trying to combat racial prejudice. If racists wave that fact in our faces, it does look helplessly feeble merely to respond that we don't know enough about how brains work to draw any practical conclusions from evolutionary theory and leave it at that, even though that is correct. I would be happier to say that the evidence shows humans have evolved to cooperate with non-kin far more effectively than any other animal, largely using our ability to quantify reciprocity, and that this underlies our unique success in taking over the planet. Granted, what I've just said would be another evolutionary just-so story (though there is a good deal of evidence in its favour), and I would need to add that we don't know enough either about our evolution or how our brains work as mechanisms to be able to draw any firm conclusions from science about the best way to manage multiracial societies.
I still think that the apparent lessons from evolutionary theory in favour of racism etc are blatant enough to need some sort of counter, also from evolutionary theory, as well as the point that we don't know enough yet to use evolution as any kind of basis for politics. In the same sort of way, abiogenesis does indeed look exceedingly improbable at first sight, like a Boeing being assembled from a high wind in a junk yard, and it is useful when arguing against theists to have the admittedly speculative ideas about how it could have happened as well as the more general point that we don't know.