rationalskepticism.org

Reeve wrote:Do you know if there are any clear cut cases found in mammals where there are any hard-wired behaviours?

Yes, I'm sure there are many cases. I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but I think many mating dances are gender-specific. It's important to be careful with some assumed examples though, like individuals butting heads or fighting for mating rights as learning often plays a huge role in these examples (for example, mountain goats practicing butting heads as kids, and then using it when they're older to fight for resources - no hard-wiring needed).

VazScep wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:With humans, you can't exactly get certain men and women to breed with each other, then take their babies away, raise them for years in isolation, and see what behaviors pop up.

It's political correctness gone mad.

It is! Those people must just hate science or something.

Oldskeptic wrote:Lastly this hostility towards evolutionary psychology amazes me. It is a new field, and there have been some claims that do not hold up under scrutiny, but to deny that evolution has nothing to do with psychology and can't help explain is again absurd.

A lot of the hostility towards evo psych is justified. It has nothing to do with denying that evolution affects psychology, it has to do with the current major approach to evolutionary psychology - that is, the approach taken by people like Buss, Cosmides, Tooby, Pinker, etc, is little better than pure pseudoscience. It's founded on baseless assumptions like adaptationism, environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and massive modularity, and generally has a lack of rigorous testing of hypotheses (for example, finding a culturally universal behavior and stopping the research there, instead of testing whether the universal behavior was learnt or evolved).

There's a good article on the topic here: [Evolutionary Psychology and the Challenge of Adaptive Explanation](http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GrayEP.pdf). Importantly, this doesn't mean that all of evolutionary psychology is nonsense, it just means that the kind of evolutionary psychology that people are aware of is nonsense. A good rule of thumb I find is that if it makes a claim about humans (especially if the claim is more grandiose than a mundane statistical discrepancy), then it's likely bullshit. Not because humans are special, but because the science is nowhere near being able to make claims like that (and potentially never will be).