Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology

[ugly_boy]

Scientific American has an interesting article up, Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies [Evolutionary] of Psychology by David Buller. He discusses what he sees as some of the basic problems with the trendy field. The four fallacies, briefly, are:

1. Analysis of Pleistocene Adaptive Problems Yields Clues to the Mind’s Design
   
2. We Know, or Can Discover,

Comments

[tormod]

Psychology was founded as a pseudoscience, based mostly on philosophy (e.g. idle speculation). Animal behavior is a scientific discipline encompassing most of the science upon which modern psychology is based.

Contrariwise, evolutionary hypotheses are frequently wildly speculative, given huge gaps in the fossil record and the inability to tell convergent evolution from adaptive radiation, leading to mismatches between phylogenies predicted by genetics and those predicted by comparative anatomy.

Brains disintegrate the quickest of all organs after death, so there is little fossil evidence of neurologic evolution.

If we teach chimps and bonobos sign language and perform comparative fMRI, we might find they have more "uniquely human" neurologic structures for language than we assume. The idea that "play" and "care" date back only as far as early primates is somewhat ludicrous... both are defining behavioral traits of mammals, unless the author is using a very narrow definition which he does not make explicit.

If we take the theory of evolution seriously, the burden of proof is on anyone claiming humans are different in a given way from other animals, yet scientists largely assume we are unique in every way, only to prove themselves wrong time after time. It is annoying.

[ugly_boy]

yet scientists largely assume we are unique in every way, only to prove themselves wrong time after time

I disagree; I don't think that most modern biologists assume we are unique in every day. As someone who consumes a large amount of information on new research in science this is not my experience. The scientists I read and listen to seem to continually emphasize the similarities and where there are differences they attempt to rigorously, accurately and completely describe them. For example there are brain structures that are unique to humans. I think the scientific community recognizes the similarities between humans and animals much more than the general public. I would include psychologists, much of whose work is based on animal models.