As a psychologist, I find EP to be one of the most fallacious and purely speculative branches of psychology. They have an explanation for everything, and an underlying political motivation.

http://thecountryshrink.com

Note to Gil: One of the difficulties with evolutionary psychology is that the traits identified need NOT have survival value, but only be associated with traits that do.

You are correct. Evo Psycho is more plastic and disconnected from reality than I suggested, which makes it even more ridiculous and irrelevant.

In addition, nations like India and Vietnam are being heavily impacted by this “Abrahamic meme”. In particular, the lower castes in India are feeling liberated by the message of equality in the Christian faith and are making their voices heard. The oppressiveness of Hinduism is being challenged. And in Vietnam, the slow fall of communism is being accompanied by a huge groundswell of Christianity. In fact, church leaders in Vietnam are traveling TO China to try to stem the persecution of the underground church there.

You might not hear about this stuff in the secular press or the ivory towers on university campuses, but this is what’s happening. Mr. Miller will soon be in for a rude awakening.

That’s part of the general incoherence. To see what this means, consider the following:

If producing fertile offspring confers survival value (a logical idea), then homosexuality should be counterproductive. However, in the era of gay rights, the evolutionary psychologist cannot quite make that argument, so he pulls the ever-obliging rabbit out of the hat: The homosexual confers survival value by helping siblings raise children. So, it turns out that both having children and not having them confer survival value.

Notice that we have gone from something obvious (if you are not a successful parent, your line will come to an end) to something speculative (how homosexuals – assumed for the purposes of our discussion to be non-parents* – might help parents).

The only thing we can really be sure of is that we have a current population of over six billion humans who come from a very small number of common ancestors.

Were those common ancestors doing something unusually correct? Given the small numbers, it is hard to know what, in particular, without speicific historical information.**

That’s why I think Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, admittedly fiction, makes way more sense than evolutionary psychology, which is actually fiction but not admittedly so.

*The whole evo psycho enterprise is riddled with mere “assumptions du jour”. In traditional cultures, people attracted to persons of their own sex married and had children simply because the culture required them to. Whatever else they did was a different matter, judged according to the culture. Thus people who were homosexually inclined did pass on their genes in large numbers – and probably needed about the same amount of help from their sibs as they gave, overall.

**If there were a large number of ancestors, you might be able to make some reasonable guesses as to the relationship between behavior choices and survival of offspring. But not necessarily so for a small number of ancestors. For example, if you knew that 400 men out of 500 had survived a battle, you might assume that their group contained a larger number of capable warriors than the fallen, treated as a group. But if only one single man survived the engagement, that may be because he is a great hero, or because he hid or ran away, made a deal with the enemy, or was too drunk to get up on the morning of the battle, or was in the stockade for stealing from his fellows. In other words, even assuming that his behaviour is passed on in his genes, what behavior is passed on? And what inferences can we make about its relation to his survival generally?

By the way, apologies for some messiness in the post, which I fixed. I posted rather late last night.

Like Buller, I make the difference between evolutionary psychology ( the research of the origin of the human comportement, whatever may be the causes) and Evolutionary psychology ( the dogma that natural selection has put into place a massive modularity in our brain during the evolutionary times).

I think that the alleged evidences supporting the usual claims of EP ( like the gene of infidelity, the cheat detector, the matin’s preference etc…) are either weak or tautologic, and could be explaind by other way that massive modularity.

But I must confess that I don’t appreciate the methodology of intelligent design and the political ground on which it lies.

Denise, I think tat you should avoid personal attack against people like Miller even if you strongly disagree with him.
If you claim to be christian, you should respect everybody, like Jesus said: “Love your foes, pray for your foes”.
I know it can be very difficult and I have a lot of difficulties with that, but that is God’s will.

And I must stress on a point where I BOTH DISAGREE WITH DARWINIST AND ID SUPPORTERS:

I think that the existence of a possible evolutionary path which could explain certain features of the living world doesn’t rule out the action of God.

For example, if we could explain conclusively the evolution of our brain through natural selection, it would still be possible that God made them evolve without using this awful process.

The features that are identified by darwinists as evidences of design by natural selection could also be viewed as evidences of design by God.

But the overwhelming examples of bad design in nature are much more difficult to deal with for theist like myself.

All the best for you,

Marc from France.

As even the atheist Jared Diamond notes, science was still born the world over except for Christian Europe. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the influence of christian conceptions of the world was a big one.

Worse yet for this clown, as noted, Christianity is on the rise big time in China and Asia in general, and this is inspite of it being persecuted by the state in many of these places.

Modern (beginning with Copernicus)did not arise in China. It arose in a Christian based culture which valued nature as being worthy and capable of study because a rational God created it. This did not happen in China for a reason.