You are right; Pinker does consider himself an evolutionary psychologist. It doesn’t change my opinion of the field though
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/10/09/evolutionary-psychology-an-exchange/
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This. It’s obvious that our psychology, like the rest of us, is a result of evolution. I’ve never seen any "evolutionary psychology " that wasn’t a steaming pile of bullshit, though. Lots of just so stories by people who don’t understand how real science works. My particular favorite is the one where they take a behavioral trait that is broadly shared by most mammals, and make up a story about how humans evolved it in the savanna, that just happens to grant some aspect of the culture they were born into the status of natural law.
Psychology in general, not just the evolutionary variety, has a strong tendency towards ignoring the vast variation in human culture, and assuming that whatever conclusions they’ve managed to p-hack out of data collected from their own culture is a human universal.
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It doesn’t change my opinion of Pinker, either. Generative linguistics has many of the exact same flaws as evo-psych, so it’s not at all surprising that someone who started in one would gravitate to the other. (E.g. Assuming, without evidence, that things that are actually culturally determined and extremely varied, are genetically hardwired and universal. )
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Really? Why do you think Hamilton’s rule as an explanation for altruism is “a steaming pile of bullshit”, for example?
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Yep, the bit about spandrels was definitely a surprising fail on the part of Pinker. I remember reading it and thinking “uh? No.” But one flub by Pinker does not undo the entire adaptionist project. Gould has plenty of fails of his own.
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Evopsych is absolutely NOT evolutionary biology. People who actually work in evolutionary biology from the late lamented Stephen J. Gould on down recognize that it isn’t within a mile of science. The most polite terms are “Self-Serving pseudoscience”, “Just So Stories” and “Bullshit”. It gets less polite from there.
Unfalsiable. Untestable. Inchoate. Tendentious. Dishonest. Reifying. And those are its good points.
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I’d say E. O. Wilson who embodied the worst of the field as well as the Peter Principle
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“ affect “
Indeed! I indeed thinking about Evopsych, but typed evolutionary biology because that’s what gets talked about in my neck of the woods. Next up, thinking astrology and typing astronomy. Thanks for the correction.
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It’s an understandable error, one which evopsych charlatans likely encourage at every opportunity.
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As I say in my screed above, I don’t think evolution of genes is a good way to understand human psychology at all. When you look at evolution from the perspective that you have to wait for a useful random mutation to occur to start off change, there is no reason to think that humans are much different than they were, say, at the dawn of writing or of organized religion.
But how much different are dogs than they were back then? Breeding can select for traits within the range that the genome makes possible in just a couple of generations. Ideas look like the master of genes a lot more than genes are the master of ideas.
We know what happens when ideas get involved in making decisions. Hot peppers probably evolved the trait of being hot to avoid being eaten. Now they are a “successful” species because we like to eat them. Angelina Jolie had a gene that we say causes breast cancer but she had a pre-emptive double mastectomy when she found out about it so actually it was a gene that prevented breast cancer.
Genes only get so much say. My just-so story is that a particular type of ape was bred by its own ideas to select for the biggest possible brain, the most possible part of that brain devoted to abstract thought, and the smallest possible influence of instinct.
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For sure there is probably some general adaptation in the opposite direction, the question is how much, which properties, and whether they are adaptive or merely random variation. Contra the racists, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, variation of innate human mental properties between cultures and “races”, which argues against there being a lot of selection in that reverse direction (culture influencing genes), which you would otherwise expect if that thesis were true; and evo-psych generally looks at cross-cultural and cross-species psychology, which would be curious if culture/ideas had a great influence of genes. And recent findings from behavioral genetics point to a considerable influence of gene complexes on personality (on the order of 50%). But an interesting research area to be sure.
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