The Debate on Evolutionary Psychology

[differenceblog]

Nigel Nicholson (2005) addresses a list of concerns that various authors have raised about Evolutionary Psychology (EP). Nicholson's article was written in response to a "vituperous debate" in Human Relations (see Sewell, 2004; Markoczy & Goldberg, 2004) . EP tends to raise hackles (my own included) with opponents referring to the framework as "

Comments

[dilletante]

everything after #1 makes me twitch-- most of the evolutionary psychology stuff i run across appears to be, as you say, justifications for racist or sexist behavior, and moreover usually appears to me to be justifications for those behaviors in one specific culture. it's easy to make up a just-so story for any behavior and justification you can think of, but that doesn't make it true, and if you're claiming it's due to something inherently true about all humans it would be nice to at least show it's true across all human cultures.

that said, james flynn has had a lot to say about how tiny hereditary relative differences in abilities of one sort or another could lead to large differences in behavior.

[rhye]

I actually have no problem with it, except maybe #5, which I would like to see some studies of because I think that would be really hard to study. But I never saw EP as the drive for racism that many other people interpret it as. In fact, I think it's so logical and even anti-racist and anti-sexist. To say it is racist or genderist is to assume that EP is complete, that it is no longer progressing, which I think is a major leap and almost definitely not true

[rarkrarkrark]

Like Skeptics, I find that a lot of my problem with EPers is not with the basic theory but with their baseline assumptions and extrapolations. For instance, most EPers work from the assumption that men brought home most food and women only scavenged for small amounts, when evidence from tribal societies *and* the experiences of westerners who go back to the land strongly suggests otherwise. (Men may be bringing home smaller amounts of a more highly valued food, but that's still a different dynamic

[rarkrarkrark]

Also, nature vs nurture is a red-flipping-herring. It's both in complex relationship, over and over and over again.