Evolutionary psychology (“Darwinian” explanations on tap for the vast and contradictory variety of human culture) was all the rage in recent years. As I told a friend, I remember getting a double, maybe even triple word score, now and then, off Denis Dutton’s Arts and Letters Daily site.
Dutton (1944–2010) was a big, apparently uncritical fan himself, so no surprise practically any nonsense got aired there. Branding popular arts and culture for Darwin was the cutting edge of evo-schlock generally…
But lately, it seems quieter in that marketplace. There were a few stories in 2014, as per below.
Some around here have suggested that the death of Dutton and the failure of many senior Darwinians to join the pop psych circus played a role. David Brooks’s dreadful evo psych novel or that the Sokal-style “Gentlemen prefer blondes” hoax possibly contributed.
I prefer to attribute the loss of interest to the obviously ad hoc reasoning of almost all evo psych theses. The reasonable ones do not rise above mere common sense—and the ones that depart from common sense are generally unbelievable.
For example, we don’t need evo psych to explain why big banks sometimes get away with fraud. And when people try to tell us that single parenthood is adaptive, based on the behaviour of small, remote, impoverished cultures—as opposed to the vast majority of cultures historically worldwide, whose success has set off population bomb alarms—I can’t help smelling something funny.
Anyway, here are some 2014 evo psych stories we spotted:
Evo psych: And now, the germ theory of culture
Evo psych: “Evolution” explains procrastination?
An NPR pundit explains the evolution of religion
Oxford evolutionary psychologist on unselfishness, Earth Day
Dreams are really about Darwinian reproductive fitness?
Is “evolutionary psychology” taking a hike south?
Oh, and did you know, crime is adaptive. Adaptive to what? The prison system? The thesis is that guys in jail have more children than others in an advanced industrial society. As we asked at the time:
Will the children of such persons be more likely to grow up and do well themselves? The odds are against that in real life, which kind of puts a dent in the Darwinian adaptation thing.
Like we said to that prof who thinks there is something in evo psych: If you want to be taken seriously, lose the clowns.
Longtime commenter Mahuna offers a useful observation:
In any hunter-gatherer man-pack, a thief or cheat will be exiled, which is equivalent to a death sentence. Similarly, if any man-pack is identified by other man-packs as thieves or cheats, ALL of the other packs will refuse to associate with them.
Well, yes of course. Birds of a feather, and all that. And what kind of a “science” would ignore such self-evident facts but still expect to be taken seriously?
The prof who still wants to take evo psych seriously is U Manitoba philosopher Neil McArthur.
We ourselves thought it could just be consigned to oblivion. If not, it would need to be entirely reconstituted, first by taking seriously the critique offered by Australian philosopher David Stove (1927–1994) in Darwinian Fairytales.
What explanations are truly informative about human beings—as opposed to merely supportive of “selfish gene” claims?
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