Glen and Steve,
The reason that I am not answering is not that good points aren't being made, but that I am in the midst of a writing project and it's not going well, which means that I am carrying blocks of ill organized text around in my head like so many 747's just after the air traffic control system went down. If I stop to think about anything else, I am afraid they will all crash.
I am inclined to share Steve's view that behavior is where the rubber meets the road, and so to agree that talk of the evolution of behavior makes sense. Let me risk one thought. Let's imagine that (as I believe) that testosterone is an aggression hormone. It's effect on the nervous system is, other things being equal, to make a person a tad more assertive in all domains of action. Let it be the case that a little more assertiveness in all domains leads to reproductive success. The nature will be selecting not for the individual behaviors but for the "style" of behaving. Now, I call a style of behaving, a behavior, or a behavior pattern, or a meta-behavior, or a behavioral design. What have you. So talk of selecting for behavior doesn't bother me. I am not quite sure what "selecting for testosterone" would mean. When it comes to evolution, behavior functions, physiology mediates.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 2:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?
Glen -
> OK. But I believe I merely asked the question: Why talk about these vague behaviors like "dress for sex", when we can talk about reasonably well-defined things like hormones and neurotransmitters? What explanatory power does evopsych have that, say, evolutionary neuroscience would not have?
A question, yes, but "mere" I don't think so?
>
> One possible answer is that evopsych allows us to tap into folktales like Jungian archetypes, even if only so we can trick people into believing our rhetoric.
while "rhetoric" is defined to be "persuasive", the goal might be to persuade others to consider a hypothesis long enough to investigate it further. On one end of the spectrum, your speculation is probably accurate, sometimes some people simply want to be "right" or "believed"
(or may not care or know the difference?) but on the other, they may simply want to engage other's in a little broader speculation as part of expanding a search space?
> That trickery is power of a kind, explanatory or not. Science popularizers walk that thin line all the time. But is there something *more*?
Science Popularizers are a good (positive I think) example, but again, on the opposite end of the spectrum I think "guided speculation" has a value when combined/juxtaposed with more rigorous/formal methods for
*validating* insights found during the wider ranging speculations? Where does intuition come from? It would seem to find a good launching pad on the foundation of good formalized, quantifiable work, but it also would seem to be fed well by more qualitative and perhaps even verging on "whimsical" considerations?
>
> Re: thread pollution --
> I don't think it's a big deal. The forum is asynchronous. Anyone can read or not read, reply or not reply, to any post at any time. It was easier, I'll admit, when the archives worked.
I wasn't necessarily thinking of this as pollution (or any kind of problem)... but rather speciation... more on the exploration theme? It was a conjunction with my nod to Nick's original (early) appeal to those of us with higher bandwidths to somehow keep him in the loop as (even if?) we might explore (more) widely than he was seeking.
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