I hope (wish it were?) so.
Thanks for the reply. I’d welcome your thoughts as well on the perils back here of mentioning Jordaddy in BB posts…
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I’m on vacation with family so I won’t comment in depth, but I’m committed to critiquing Jordan Peterson because his misogynist cult is regrettably salient and deserves being addressed where relevant. The fact that his cult followers try to suppress such criticism is not sufficient reason to capitulate to them.
ETA Also, I don’t think 8 mentions in 19 months is excessive:
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Also, point of order: this post has been up for 9 hours, has over 20 replies, and the newest account in the conversation is @Pensketch (!).
… I just jinxed us all, didn’t I.
Edit: @DonatellaNobody is newer (just joined in the last year), but they’re definitely on the good list too.
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I’d guess that “they” just haven’t found/been alerted to the BB post yet.
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I really like the idea of evolutionary psychology. Look into our biology and evolutionary past for clues about the roots of human behavior! It’s a thrilling concept!
But the actual practice of evo-psych is mostly people coming up with far-fetched biological excuses for all the old prejudices about race and sex and gender. Urgh, such a waste of a cool idea.
Sorta. Hyena genital stuff below!
Female spotted hyenas have, due to a number of evolutionary and hormonal reasons, very male-like genitals (to the point where ancients thought all hyenas were male), with a pseudopenis based on the clitoris. They both pee and give birth through it; this means that a lot of firstborn hyena cubs end up dead, with the ones afterwards having an easier and quicker time out. It also means the male can’t really mate with the female without her cooperation, reinforcing the spotted hyena matriarchy.
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At some point, the idea meets the praxis, and praxis wins out. Much like many saw some promise in the idea of Eugenics who weren’t trying to justify white supremacy, but rather to bring positive improvements to the human race. It still was endlessly used in the service of white supremacy and ended up in the holocaust. So… 
at what point to we admit that this concept adds nothing to our understanding of humanity as it actually existed, rather than as an ideological excuse for bigotry and eventually mass slaughter and let it go for something else? [ETA - grammar fix]
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Worth mentioning, the study JP cites is about Crayfish – which are not lobsters. Exhibit A on his level of intellectual rigor.
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while all the men who preceded her had observed firsthand that male giraffes are super queer… only Dagg was willing to write it down and publish it.
The implication here being that whatever Dagg does differently from her colleagues is because she’s a woman (as opposed to a courageous individual who just happened to do things differently as individuals often do) using Dagg as the sole data point, all while talking about her work debunking poorly supported theories about gender differences.
That hurts my brain.
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That’s not going to happen, since there isn’t any replacement for evolutionary explanations (well, apart from “God did it”). You can criticize the misuse of evo-psych (kill the naturalistic fallacies; emphasize that the human situation is a combination of nature and nurture, with nurture/culture probably having a dominant role; get rid of the worst just-so stories), but it’s an inescapable fact that the universal acid of evolutionary explanations are here to stay. Some of the criticism of evo-psych runs perilously close to evolution-denial, unfortunately.
Or, you know… human agency and conscious decisions?
There are many, MANY things that used to be assumed to be “inescapable facts” that have since proven to be not so inescapable.
Is there a role in evolution for psychology… likely so, though many other more immediate factors are far more important in understand human motivations and behavior. Is it the only determining factor that charlatans like he-who-must-not-be-named regularly invoke to justify their bigotry and hatred of people who do not look or think like them? Hell no.
Yeah… no. It’s not. We’re far more than the sum of our biology and to think that evolution magically stopped at prehistory is pretty myopic. On top of that, there is so very much we don’t understand about pre-historical humanity that we attempt to fill in with studies of modern hunter-gatherers or our own assumptions about such societies based on our own modern preconceptions.
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The female-dominant hyena is a fascinating case, but it doesn’t refute evo-psych/sexual selection theory; if anything, it confirms it. Female hyenas have evolved classically “male” traits, for a variety of reasons (as the article explains). The behaviours they exhibit are exactly what sexual selection theory predicts. And those behaviors are most definitely inate, and not cultural.
Sure, that’s the nurture/culture part that’s dominant in humans, like I said.
Well, it didn’t stop, but given that evolution tends to operate in timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, it’s a small factor. Cultural development is a far more important factor in humans change since prehistory.
Darwin employed rigorous documentation and tested (& rejected) multiple hypotheses before publishing On the Origin of the Species, and remained open to refinement of evolutionary biology for the rest of his life. Evolutionary psychology has started from the findings its proponents want and works backwards, cherry-picking evidence to back up those preconceived notions (ETA: Thanks for demonstrating it, above!). Which is silly, because there are amazing tools available for legitimate science in that area of inquiry, from fMRI to rapid, cheap genetic sequencing. But serious science seems to be the last thing they want.
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It’s all about maintaining control, not obtaining enlightenment.
Same as it ever was.
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I would say that applies to most psych, not just evo-psych, but the actual psychologists understand, at some level, that this is a problem, so they misuse statistical methods that they don’t understand to back up their claims, while the eco-psych crowd seems to not understand at all (perhaps deliberately), that claims of scientific truth require more to back them up than the late-night stoned ruminations of some college sophomores who think they know everything.
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This. Books like The Art of not being Governed: An Anarcist History of Highland Southeast Asia and La Société contre l’Étatmake it clear that many of our assumptions about the parallels between modern hunter gatherers and prehistoric societies are unfounded, since most of the modern “uncontacted” tribes were formerly the subjects of agricultural states, and ran off to the jungle to get away from that.
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That’s an unhelpful construction.
Their behaviors are female behaviors by definition in this usage. Just as in animal matriarchal groupings of killer whales, bonobos and bees females being dominant is female behavior.
It breaks down when applied to humans in either case as our defining characteristic is culture. We don’t have the pronounced sexual dimorphism seen in many animals. Size is pretty close between the two sexes being discussed- not that there are only two distinct sexes. You don’t see the size differences like some turtles were the female is 2x to 10x the size, insects where the female is much larger or some octopuses where the female is 40,000 times larger.
Human intelligence and capabilities don’t vary much between sexes. Animal models like say crawfish isn’t a good description and is more of a metaphor than science.
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