Re: the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Posted by gepr on Feb 23, 2018; 1:08am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/the-pseudoscience-of-evolutionary-psychology-tp7591207p7591282.html

OK.  It's good to have you respond directly to the physiology stuff.  Thanks.

Yes, I tried to respond to your causal model question.  My response is basically that any causal analysis should target the parts on the "critical path" ... the bottlenecks ... the "rate limiters" ... whatever your language.  In your example below, if happiness can be caused not only by the pill, but by thousands of other things, yet the physiological process is common to it all, then *that's* the important part, not whatever of the thousands of stimuli that might have stimulated it.

And, yes, I admit that causality is often thought of in terms of time.  But having struggled with parallelism and redundancy in my own thinking, time isn't what determines cause.  The determinant is the limited resource ... the bottleneck.  In biomedicine, it's the target of intervention.  Even if you think that's a perversion of the word "cause", you should still be able to grok my point.


On 02/22/2018 04:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Well, that was the point of my bee comment.  We start in the middle somewhere and work out from there.  There is no absolute boundary of the organism.  But as boundaries go, it's a pretty good one, and so we start there.  Once started, we don't switch without a good reason.  
>
> Did you ever answer my question about how you understand "causality"?   So, let's say I give you a pill and you get happy.  At the behavioral level, I would say that the pill caused the happiness.  At the physiological level, I would say that the chemical in the pill slowed the uptake of serotonin.  Then I might say that the slowing of the uptake of serotonin mediated your improvement of mood.  I am not sure I would say it caused it because CAUSES by my definition have to occur BEFORE the events they cause and the up-take slowing and the mood-improving are going on simultaneously.

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