the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

[gepr]

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity
"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Pieter Steenekamp]

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity
"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[gepr]

On 02/14/2018 08:20 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology.

But is it really a matter of quantification?  It seems, to me, more a matter of experimentation.  Does evolutionary psychology provide any predictions that are (might one day be) testable?

> I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:
> "Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

Yes, that's a specific example of the larger point, that anything can be abused.  A great example is quantum woo, where the stranger inferences of quantum physics are abused to, e.g., justify belief in free-will or "mind over matter".  Or, an even better example would be the complaints lodged against Penrose for abusing Gödel's Incompleteness theorems to justify that humans engage in non-computable processes when doing math.

I.e. saying evolution and evolutionary psychology can be abused isn't really saying much unless we say *why* it's easier to abuse those two "theories" and, perhaps, more difficult to abuse Gödel's theorems ... or, e.g. theories about the electrical properties of materials or somesuch.  My proposal is that bodies of knowledge overwhelmingly populated with ambiguous gobbledy-gook are *easier* to abuse than those bodies of knowledge that are "hard", with well-defined terms, domains of applicability, and use cases.

Testability is a kind of pragmatic trickery we use to get at the truth in spite of swaths of gobbledy-gook.  I suppose I'd argue that string theory is more like Gödel's theorems than it is like evolutionary psychology.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Nick Thompson]

Dear Glen and Peter,

 

I started out my career calling myself an Ethologist and studying communication in monkeys and then crows. I ended my career as an Evolutionary Psychologist studying human infant’s cries.  So I feel some obligation to stand up to your critique, while acknowledging that much of it is fair.

 

Lots going on right now so I will have to go at this slowly.  But for starters could we just agree to avoid saying anything stupid.  The two most obvious stupidities to avoid are:

 

Human Evolutionary history has nothing to do with contemporary human behavior

 

Human Evolutionary history has everything to do with contemporary human behavior. 

 

Once the two extreme positions have been set aside, we are left in the messy middle. 

 

Under what circumstances and in which domains does knowledge of human evolutionary history have anything to contribute to our understanding of contemporary human behavior? 

 

I would love to have a sustained, thoughtful discussion of this question on this list.  It is very close to my heart.   Because I don’t have time, right now,  to write a screed, or even a rant, I shall fall back on that practice favored by all academic scoundrels:  I shall cite one of my own papers.  (If this link doesn’t work, could somebody let me know, please?)

 

I hope we can carry this on for some time, but SLOWLY, please, so I can keep up.

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 9:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

 

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

 

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity
"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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[gepr]

Having skimmed your paper, I think the wikipedia quote is adequate and more appropriate simply because it's shorter:

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology#Testability
> Leda Cosmides argued in an interview:
>
>     "Those who have a professional knowledge of evolutionary biology know that it is not possible to cook up after the fact explanations of just any trait. There are important constraints on evolutionary explanation. More to the point, every decent evolutionary explanation has testable predictions about the design of the trait. For example, the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is a byproduct of prenatal hormones predicts different patterns of food aversions than the hypothesis that it is an adaptation that evolved to protect the fetus from pathogens and plant toxins in food at the point in embryogenesis when the fetus is most vulnerable – during the first trimester. Evolutionary hypotheses – whether generated to discover a new trait or to explain one that is already known – carry predictions about the nature of that trait. The alternative – having no hypothesis about adaptive function – carries no predictions whatsoever. So which is the more constrained and sober scientific approach?"

Given that, we can move back to Jordan Peterson and ask: Are there any testable hypotheses for this "alpha male" concept Peterson peddles to his "masculinity" fanboys?




On 02/14/2018 10:48 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Once the two extreme positions have been set aside, we are left in the messy middle. 
>
>  
>
> */Under what circumstances and in which domains does knowledge of human evolutionary history have anything to contribute to our understanding of contemporary human behavior?  /*
>
>  
>
> I would love to have a sustained, thoughtful discussion of this question on this list.  It is very close to my heart.   Because I don’t have time, right now,  to write a screed, or even a rant, I shall fall back on that practice favored by all academic scoundrels:  I shall cite one of my own papers. <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302220782_My_Descent_from_the_Monkey>  (If this link doesn’t work, could somebody let me know, please?)


--
☣ uǝlƃ
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[Prof David West]

Until this week I was blissfully unaware of Jordan Petersen. Two hours of YouTube research later my beta male mellow has been well and truly harshed. Be that as it may, the area of "evolutionary psychology" is interesting and I would like to respond to Nick's request to discuss it further.

I apologize in advance for the length of the post.

At the outset I would assert that Peterson's assertions have nothing to do with evolutionary psychology as I understand it because the 'evolution" in question is biological evolution. The grounds for this assertion will follow a bit of story telling.

Once upon a time there was a context (we will call it Nature, or Gaia if you want some personification) and a homogeneous population  of organisms. Nature provided a plethora of distinct and distinctive niches; into which the organisms flowed and began to exploit. Most often each niche required some kind of particularistic change in the organism occupying that niche and voila - adaptation. 

if the niche were static, if Nature was static and unchanging, we would have diversity but no evolution. The diversity could mask itself as 'evolutionary' just because adjacent niches could marginally idiosyncratic requiring marginally idiosyncratic adaptations and we have finches with different beaks.

Evolution requires either: change in the niche or differential efficiency among the organisms (otherwise homogeneous) occupying that niche. If the rate of change in Nature is slow enough or the efficiency gradient is not too steep, the conditions are created for adaptation over time. True the finches adaptations occur over time, over generations of finches, but one more element is essential for evolution as I understand it — an increase in complexity.

It is this 'adaption over time' along with 'increasing complexity' that naive people like me take to be "evolution."

Our most primitive ancestors were a product of this kind of evolution - biological evolution.

Our most primitive ancestors almost certainly had a "psychology" given that the only requirement to develop one is sufficient "self awareness" (sorry Nick) to differentiate between 'this' and that' with 'this' very rapidly becoming "I" and 'that' becomes anything and everything else.

Now "I" and 'other' is kind of lonely. and probably not a good adaption or evolutionary move, so gradations of 'Other' ensue and we have the foundation for "Us" and "Them" and "Other." This allows basic social organization and interaction of the sort we still see in primates and would have seen in among our most ancient ancestors.

The closest approximation to what was, would be the few hunter-gatherer societies known to cultural anthropologists and the recreations that arose when archeological findings were compared to extant hunter-gatherers. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the 'psychology' of these ancestors was the product of biological evolution as much as the physiological evolution.

So - first test for Petersen: were "alpha males" present in those societies? If yes, then he has some, minimal, grounds for asserting evolutionary psychological roots for his current claims.

Unfortunately for him, the answer is no. The closest approximation would be 'leadership' roles. But those roles were - as near as we can determine - both situational and ephemeral. Herd of bison walking by? The most experienced bison hunter assumed leadership and organized the band to run them over a cliff. Hunt over? So is the leadership.

The only person in the group that had lifetime status as a result of specialized ability was the shaman and SHE was definitely not an alpha male.

Shortly after the emergence of the "I" came language and, very importantly, story. The ground is set for an alternative, mostly complementary, form of evolution — cultural evolution. Instead of waiting to evolve fur, like the polar bear, so we could inhabit the arctic, cultural evolution led us to wearing the polar bear's fur instead.

Here Petersen might, but I doubt it, find some antecedents for his absurdities. E.g.,

  -- unless it has happened in the last decade no one has ever been able to explain why 'men hunt and women gather', a pretty universal division of labor in hunter-gatherer and antecedent cultures.

 -- why have all cultures (excepting one small group on the south of the Black Sea a few thousand years ago) been patriarchal? (There are lots of matrilineal cultures, but that is different.)

-- why, according to anthropologist Maria Lepowski, is there only one culture, in historical times, based on sex/gender equality. (The pre-WWII Vanuatu.)

  -- why, statistically speaking, are men attracted to women having the appearance of fecundity (physical symmetry, developed breasts, width of pelvic girdle, hence hips) and women are attracted to men with the appearance of power (fame, money, social position, all being secondary indicators).

Don't shoot the messenger for the last one. Merely reporting what was learned in a year long university course in sex and gender across cultures - historic and prehistoric.

davew

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018, at 9:20 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity

"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Frank Wimberly-2]

This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know whether either speculation is the case.

Frank

On Feb 14, 2018 3:42 PM, "Prof David West" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Until this week I was blissfully unaware of Jordan Petersen. Two hours of YouTube research later my beta male mellow has been well and truly harshed. Be that as it may, the area of "evolutionary psychology" is interesting and I would like to respond to Nick's request to discuss it further.

I apologize in advance for the length of the post.

At the outset I would assert that Peterson's assertions have nothing to do with evolutionary psychology as I understand it because the 'evolution" in question is biological evolution. The grounds for this assertion will follow a bit of story telling.

Once upon a time there was a context (we will call it Nature, or Gaia if you want some personification) and a homogeneous population  of organisms. Nature provided a plethora of distinct and distinctive niches; into which the organisms flowed and began to exploit. Most often each niche required some kind of particularistic change in the organism occupying that niche and voila - adaptation. 

if the niche were static, if Nature was static and unchanging, we would have diversity but no evolution. The diversity could mask itself as 'evolutionary' just because adjacent niches could marginally idiosyncratic requiring marginally idiosyncratic adaptations and we have finches with different beaks.

Evolution requires either: change in the niche or differential efficiency among the organisms (otherwise homogeneous) occupying that niche. If the rate of change in Nature is slow enough or the efficiency gradient is not too steep, the conditions are created for adaptation over time. True the finches adaptations occur over time, over generations of finches, but one more element is essential for evolution as I understand it — an increase in complexity.

It is this 'adaption over time' along with 'increasing complexity' that naive people like me take to be "evolution."

Our most primitive ancestors were a product of this kind of evolution - biological evolution.

Our most primitive ancestors almost certainly had a "psychology" given that the only requirement to develop one is sufficient "self awareness" (sorry Nick) to differentiate between 'this' and that' with 'this' very rapidly becoming "I" and 'that' becomes anything and everything else.

Now "I" and 'other' is kind of lonely. and probably not a good adaption or evolutionary move, so gradations of 'Other' ensue and we have the foundation for "Us" and "Them" and "Other." This allows basic social organization and interaction of the sort we still see in primates and would have seen in among our most ancient ancestors.

The closest approximation to what was, would be the few hunter-gatherer societies known to cultural anthropologists and the recreations that arose when archeological findings were compared to extant hunter-gatherers. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the 'psychology' of these ancestors was the product of biological evolution as much as the physiological evolution.

So - first test for Petersen: were "alpha males" present in those societies? If yes, then he has some, minimal, grounds for asserting evolutionary psychological roots for his current claims.

Unfortunately for him, the answer is no. The closest approximation would be 'leadership' roles. But those roles were - as near as we can determine - both situational and ephemeral. Herd of bison walking by? The most experienced bison hunter assumed leadership and organized the band to run them over a cliff. Hunt over? So is the leadership.

The only person in the group that had lifetime status as a result of specialized ability was the shaman and SHE was definitely not an alpha male.

Shortly after the emergence of the "I" came language and, very importantly, story. The ground is set for an alternative, mostly complementary, form of evolution — cultural evolution. Instead of waiting to evolve fur, like the polar bear, so we could inhabit the arctic, cultural evolution led us to wearing the polar bear's fur instead.

Here Petersen might, but I doubt it, find some antecedents for his absurdities. E.g.,

  -- unless it has happened in the last decade no one has ever been able to explain why 'men hunt and women gather', a pretty universal division of labor in hunter-gatherer and antecedent cultures.

 -- why have all cultures (excepting one small group on the south of the Black Sea a few thousand years ago) been patriarchal? (There are lots of matrilineal cultures, but that is different.)

-- why, according to anthropologist Maria Lepowski, is there only one culture, in historical times, based on sex/gender equality. (The pre-WWII Vanuatu.)

  -- why, statistically speaking, are men attracted to women having the appearance of fecundity (physical symmetry, developed breasts, width of pelvic girdle, hence hips) and women are attracted to men with the appearance of power (fame, money, social position, all being secondary indicators).

Don't shoot the messenger for the last one. Merely reporting what was learned in a year long university course in sex and gender across cultures - historic and prehistoric.

davew

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018, at 9:20 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity

"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[gepr]

Your questions seem to assume that the only reason to expose one's body is to be desired.  I know that *I* don't wear shorts in the summer so that I'll be desired by the women (or men) in my neighborhood. 8^)  One reason I try to expose my arms even when I'm cold is in order to increase my cold tolerance.  It has nothing to do with being desired.


On 02/14/2018 03:27 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know whether either speculation is the case.


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I think you're saying that your motivation for exposing skin is different  from that of the women on the Golden Globes program, which seems correct to me.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:46 PM
To: FriAM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Your questions seem to assume that the only reason to expose one's body is to be desired.  I know that *I* don't wear shorts in the summer so that I'll be desired by the women (or men) in my neighborhood. 8^)  One reason I try to expose my arms even when I'm cold is in order to increase my cold tolerance.  It has nothing to do with being desired.


On 02/14/2018 03:27 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know whether either speculation is the case.


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Frank writes:

 

< I was puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and the very provocative display of women's bodies. >

 

“I’ll stop using my sex appeal as a weapon when you stop using your hands as a weapon..”

(Why should I compromise for the greater good when you won’t?  That is the worst victimization..)

 

Marcus

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

 

This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know whether either speculation is the case.

 

Frank

----
Frank Wimberly

www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

 

On Feb 14, 2018 3:42 PM, "Prof David West" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Until this week I was blissfully unaware of Jordan Petersen. Two hours of YouTube research later my beta male mellow has been well and truly harshed. Be that as it may, the area of "evolutionary psychology" is interesting and I would like to respond to Nick's request to discuss it further.

 

I apologize in advance for the length of the post.

 

At the outset I would assert that Peterson's assertions have nothing to do with evolutionary psychology as I understand it because the 'evolution" in question is biological evolution. The grounds for this assertion will follow a bit of story telling.

 

Once upon a time there was a context (we will call it Nature, or Gaia if you want some personification) and a homogeneous population  of organisms. Nature provided a plethora of distinct and distinctive niches; into which the organisms flowed and began to exploit. Most often each niche required some kind of particularistic change in the organism occupying that niche and voila - adaptation. 

 

if the niche were static, if Nature was static and unchanging, we would have diversity but no evolution. The diversity could mask itself as 'evolutionary' just because adjacent niches could marginally idiosyncratic requiring marginally idiosyncratic adaptations and we have finches with different beaks.

 

Evolution requires either: change in the niche or differential efficiency among the organisms (otherwise homogeneous) occupying that niche. If the rate of change in Nature is slow enough or the efficiency gradient is not too steep, the conditions are created for adaptation over time. True the finches adaptations occur over time, over generations of finches, but one more element is essential for evolution as I understand it — an increase in complexity.

 

It is this 'adaption over time' along with 'increasing complexity' that naive people like me take to be "evolution."

 

Our most primitive ancestors were a product of this kind of evolution - biological evolution.

 

Our most primitive ancestors almost certainly had a "psychology" given that the only requirement to develop one is sufficient "self awareness" (sorry Nick) to differentiate between 'this' and that' with 'this' very rapidly becoming "I" and 'that' becomes anything and everything else.

 

Now "I" and 'other' is kind of lonely. and probably not a good adaption or evolutionary move, so gradations of 'Other' ensue and we have the foundation for "Us" and "Them" and "Other." This allows basic social organization and interaction of the sort we still see in primates and would have seen in among our most ancient ancestors.

 

The closest approximation to what was, would be the few hunter-gatherer societies known to cultural anthropologists and the recreations that arose when archeological findings were compared to extant hunter-gatherers. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the 'psychology' of these ancestors was the product of biological evolution as much as the physiological evolution.

 

So - first test for Petersen: were "alpha males" present in those societies? If yes, then he has some, minimal, grounds for asserting evolutionary psychological roots for his current claims.

 

Unfortunately for him, the answer is no. The closest approximation would be 'leadership' roles. But those roles were - as near as we can determine - both situational and ephemeral. Herd of bison walking by? The most experienced bison hunter assumed leadership and organized the band to run them over a cliff. Hunt over? So is the leadership.

 

The only person in the group that had lifetime status as a result of specialized ability was the shaman and SHE was definitely not an alpha male.

 

Shortly after the emergence of the "I" came language and, very importantly, story. The ground is set for an alternative, mostly complementary, form of evolution — cultural evolution. Instead of waiting to evolve fur, like the polar bear, so we could inhabit the arctic, cultural evolution led us to wearing the polar bear's fur instead.

 

Here Petersen might, but I doubt it, find some antecedents for his absurdities. E.g.,

  -- unless it has happened in the last decade no one has ever been able to explain why 'men hunt and women gather', a pretty universal division of labor in hunter-gatherer and antecedent cultures.

 -- why have all cultures (excepting one small group on the south of the Black Sea a few thousand years ago) been patriarchal? (There are lots of matrilineal cultures, but that is different.)

-- why, according to anthropologist Maria Lepowski, is there only one culture, in historical times, based on sex/gender equality. (The pre-WWII Vanuatu.)

  -- why, statistically speaking, are men attracted to women having the appearance of fecundity (physical symmetry, developed breasts, width of pelvic girdle, hence hips) and women are attracted to men with the appearance of power (fame, money, social position, all being secondary indicators).

 

Don't shoot the messenger for the last one. Merely reporting what was learned in a year long university course in sex and gender across cultures - historic and prehistoric.

 

davew

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018, at 9:20 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

 

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

 

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

 

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

 

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity

"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

 

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Pieter Steenekamp]

Nick,

I'd love to hear from you about evolutionary psychology and are prepared to wait patiently until you have time to respond properly. 

Pieter

On 14 February 2018 at 20:48, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Glen and Peter,

 

I started out my career calling myself an Ethologist and studying communication in monkeys and then crows. I ended my career as an Evolutionary Psychologist studying human infant’s cries.  So I feel some obligation to stand up to your critique, while acknowledging that much of it is fair.

 

Lots going on right now so I will have to go at this slowly.  But for starters could we just agree to avoid saying anything stupid.  The two most obvious stupidities to avoid are:

 

Human Evolutionary history has nothing to do with contemporary human behavior

 

Human Evolutionary history has everything to do with contemporary human behavior. 

 

Once the two extreme positions have been set aside, we are left in the messy middle. 

 

Under what circumstances and in which domains does knowledge of human evolutionary history have anything to contribute to our understanding of contemporary human behavior? 

 

I would love to have a sustained, thoughtful discussion of this question on this list.  It is very close to my heart.   Because I don’t have time, right now,  to write a screed, or even a rant, I shall fall back on that practice favored by all academic scoundrels:  I shall cite one of my own papers.  (If this link doesn’t work, could somebody let me know, please?)

 

I hope we can carry this on for some time, but SLOWLY, please, so I can keep up.

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 9:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

 

It may be difficult to quantify evolutionary psychology, but that does not mean it is pseudoscience. Like string theory that's also difficult to quantify, the scientific method is also applicable to evolutionary psychology. 

 

I support the view as expressed in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology:

"Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection was almost immediately perverted to justify cruel bigotry (Social Darwinism, eugenics), so evolutionary psychology is readily twisted to buttress prejudice. This does not make evolutionary psychology wrong, any more than the brutality of Social Darwinism made evolutionary theory wrong, but it does suggest that claims rooted in it should be assessed very carefully, both by those reading them and those writing them."

 

On 13 February 2018 at 23:07, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I remain fascinated by the neoreactionaries (most of whom have ceded their soap boxes to their alt-right offspring).  And Google's tendency to promote fringe garbage (https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggestions/) landed Jordan Peterson in my Youtube recommendations awhile back.  Based on the videos Youtube recommended, he sounded like a typical right-wing pseudo-intellectual.  But when I noticed Sam Harris taking him seriously, I thought I'd look a little closer.  Sure enough, the majority of his online lectures spout fairly reasonable (albeit justificationist) rhetoric ... a lot like Harris and fellow right-wing flirt Jonathan Haidt, both of whom appeal to our xenophobic friends for differing reasons.

I'm reminded of the argument I made on this list some time ago that, although I believe open source is necessary for pretty much all things, it *facilitates* nefarious action by obscurity.  Because your library (e.g. RSA backdoors or JavaScript cryptocurrency miners) has so much code in it, and is just one library in a gamut of libraries you invoke, there's absolutely no way you can *trust* that stack ... even if it's FOSS and gets lots of eyeballs.

Peterson, Harris, and Haidt, rely on the overt reasonability of 90% of what they say in order to Trojan Horse the racist or otherwise questionable content of the other 10%.  Sure, they make a *technical* effort to weight their assertions.  And that's laudable.  (Slate Star Codex and Alexander's ilk do this well with their "epistemic status" rating, displayed fairly prominently most of the time.)  But this raises the reason I'm posting this to FriAM.  The quote from the Alternet article is (should be) provocative:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity
"Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart."

In particular re: Peterson, I've actually *used* (although mostly jokingly) the alpha- beta-male (false) dichotomy at cocktail parties ... to justify why I, as a proud beta male, am a wallflower.  But now, I'm worried that (like the many memes I learned from my libertarian friends) it's not merely a useful fiction, but complete garbage: https://youtu.be/YTyQgwVvYyc

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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[gepr]

No. I'm saying that you are artificially discretizing the motivation of the women (and men) at the GG.

On February 14, 2018 5:43:08 PM PST, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

>I think you're saying that your motivation for exposing skin is
>different  from that of the women on the Golden Globes program, which
>seems correct to me.
>
>Frank
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
>Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:46 PM
>To: FriAM
>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?
>
>Your questions seem to assume that the only reason to expose one's body
>is to be desired.  I know that *I* don't wear shorts in the summer so
>that I'll be desired by the women (or men) in my neighborhood. 8^)  One
>reason I try to expose my arms even when I'm cold is in order to
>increase my cold tolerance.  It has nothing to do with being desired.
>
>
>On 02/14/2018 03:27 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated
>by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was
>puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the
>apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and
>the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques
>Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is
>relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be
>possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to
>who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with
>that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a
>question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know
>whether either speculation is the case.
>
>
>--
>☣ uǝlƃ
>
>============================================================
>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
>http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
>============================================================
>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

--
glen

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

It's probably true that there are as many idiosyncratic motives as there are people.  But I believe that there are dominant themes in that set of motives.  Which begs the question how you know what someone's motives are, including yourself.

On Feb 15, 2018 7:45 AM, "glen" <[hidden email]> wrote:

No. I'm saying that you are artificially discretizing the motivation of the women (and men) at the GG.

On February 14, 2018 5:43:08 PM PST, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:
>I think you're saying that your motivation for exposing skin is
>different  from that of the women on the Golden Globes program, which
>seems correct to me.
>
>Frank
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
>Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:46 PM
>To: FriAM
>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?
>
>Your questions seem to assume that the only reason to expose one's body
>is to be desired.  I know that *I* don't wear shorts in the summer so
>that I'll be desired by the women (or men) in my neighborhood. 8^)  One
>reason I try to expose my arms even when I'm cold is in order to
>increase my cold tolerance.  It has nothing to do with being desired.
>
>
>On 02/14/2018 03:27 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> This is not particularly relevant to Dave's essay but was stimulated
>by his questions about physical attraction between genders.  I was
>puzzled while watching the Golden Globes (for a few minutes) by the
>apparent conflict between the themes of "Me Too" and "Time's Up"(?) and
>the very provocative display of women's bodies.  I wonder if Jacques
>Lacan's insight that "Man's desire is the desire of the other" is
>relevant.  In this case: women want to be desired but not to be
>possessed or seduced.  Note that their bodies are on display to
>who-knows-how-many strangers. A warm, affectionate relationship with
>that number of men is not possible.  On the other hand, maybe it's a
>question of asserting alphaness among women.  I don't presume to know
>whether either speculation is the case.
>
>
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[gepr]

Exactly!  So, it seems most reasonable to assume that the style of the clothing one wears to an awards ceremony, including how much skin is exposed, has more to do with cultural and clique norms than a "desire to be desired", whatever that may mean.

On 02/15/2018 08:16 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> It's probably true that there are as many idiosyncratic motives as there are people.  But I believe that there are dominant themes in that set of motives.  Which begs the question how you know what someone's motives are, including yourself.

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Glen

 

I said I would be slow in responding.  True to my word. 

 

I agree with you that Cosmides and Tooby are among the most interesting manifestations of the Evolutionary Psychology ... movement, fad, whatever.  Their strongest "suit" was their attack on "Darwinian Psychology" which consists of picking out some trait valued by the author and his graduate students and making an argument that that trait exists because it is favored by natural selection.  C. and T. reminded us that no trait that came into being by selection should be expected to be favorably selected in the current environment.  However, they are. are, unfortunately, the worst sort of mentalists, people who think that brain research is going to save us from the absurdities of causal mentalism.

 

I agree also that some of the most interesting manifestations of evolutionary thought with respect to humans have come from Evolutionary Medicine.  Pregnancy sickness is a good example; I suspect food finickiness in little kids is another.  "Croupy" crying in babies might be a third.    I have always been interested in the argument that so-called "insecure" attachment in children is not a pathology but an alternative pathway adapted for (selected in?) the excruciatingly narrow "bottleneck" that human populations came through 1 to 200 thousand years ago.  I have argued myself that road rage is a form of altruism, in which the rager risks his own life to enforce a social norm. 

 

I apologize for the length of MY DESCENT and for the poor quality of the Xerox.  It doesn't surprise me that the main point didn't come through.   I think Evolutionary Psychology does provide testable hypotheses, but I also think testability is not sufficient to make a hypothesis heuristic.  The hypothesis also has to be interesting.  To be interesting, a hypothesis has to challenge some way of thinking that has become second nature, and good EP thought sometimes produces such surprising challenges.  Such interesting challenges do not arise from studies designed to bolster social stereotypes with biological bafflegab.  Here is another paper much shorter (only 600 wds)  and better Xeroxed, which exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary psychology.

 

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 u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 12:24 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

 

 

Having skimmed your paper, I think the wikipedia quote is adequate and more appropriate simply because it's shorter:

 

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology#Testability

> Leda Cosmides argued in an interview:

>

>     "Those who have a professional knowledge of evolutionary biology know that it is not possible to cook up after the fact explanations of just any trait. There are important constraints on evolutionary explanation. More to the point, every decent evolutionary explanation has testable predictions about the design of the trait. For example, the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is a byproduct of prenatal hormones predicts different patterns of food aversions than the hypothesis that it is an adaptation that evolved to protect the fetus from pathogens and plant toxins in food at the point in embryogenesis when the fetus is most vulnerable – during the first trimester. Evolutionary hypotheses – whether generated to discover a new trait or to explain one that is already known – carry predictions about the nature of that trait. The alternative – having no hypothesis about adaptive function – carries no predictions whatsoever. So which is the more constrained and sober scientific approach?"

 

Given that, we can move back to Jordan Peterson and ask: Are there any testable hypotheses for this "alpha male" concept Peterson peddles to his "masculinity" fanboys?

 

 

 

 

On 02/14/2018 10:48 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Once the two extreme positions have been set aside, we are left in the

> messy middle.

>

>  

>

> */Under what circumstances and in which domains does knowledge of

> human evolutionary history have anything to contribute to our

> understanding of contemporary human behavior?  /*

>

>  

>

> I would love to have a sustained, thoughtful discussion of this

> question on this list.  It is very close to my heart.   Because I

> don’t have time, right now,  to write a screed, or even a rant, I

> shall fall back on that practice favored by all academic scoundrels: 

> I shall cite one of my own papers.

> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302220782_My_Descent_from_th

> e_Monkey>  (If this link doesn’t work, could somebody let me know,

> please?)

 

 

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[gepr]

But your point *did* come through.  Peterson's (and many people's) conception of the "alpha male" (or "alpha female" for Frank), has become second nature.  It's everywhere in our culture.  And it is ripe for a debunking that is complete enough to GRIP the populace.  Dave's debunking is right, I think.  The Adam Ruins Everything video is good, but too fluffy.

Since Peterson depends on (some bastardization of) evol. psych., then it would be healthy to have an evol. psych. debunking.  *That's* what I'm actually looking for.  Perhaps your "Oh no" paper contains that debunking.  I'll look.


On 02/15/2018 11:58 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> I apologize for the length of MY DESCENT and for the poor quality of the Xerox.  It doesn't surprise me that the main point didn't come through.   I think Evolutionary Psychology does provide testable hypotheses, but I also think testability is not /sufficient /to make a hypothesis heuristic.  The hypothesis also has to be interesting.  To be interesting, a hypothesis has to challenge some way of thinking that has become second nature, and good EP thought sometimes produces such surprising challenges.  Such interesting challenges do not arise from studies designed to bolster social stereotypes with biological bafflegab.  Here is another paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again> much shorter (only 600 wds)  and better Xeroxed, which exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary psychology.

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[Pieter Steenekamp]

IMO it's going to be difficult to debunk evolutionary psychology.  It is a valid part of the medley of components of psychology and sociology. But is it the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? No, certainly not. There is much more to human behavior than evolutionary psychology. 

What's coming out from the #MeToo movement is just horrible. Sure, it may be consistent with evolutionary psychology, but we as humans should not accept it and root out the abhorrent behavior of some of the male of the species. And our society has been protecting the perpetrators and thank god that's changing. 

But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Give credit to evolutionary psychology as part of the effort to understand human behavior. 

On 15 February 2018 at 22:08, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

But your point *did* come through.  Peterson's (and many people's) conception of the "alpha male" (or "alpha female" for Frank), has become second nature.  It's everywhere in our culture.  And it is ripe for a debunking that is complete enough to GRIP the populace.  Dave's debunking is right, I think.  The Adam Ruins Everything video is good, but too fluffy.

Since Peterson depends on (some bastardization of) evol. psych., then it would be healthy to have an evol. psych. debunking.  *That's* what I'm actually looking for.  Perhaps your "Oh no" paper contains that debunking.  I'll look.


On 02/15/2018 11:58 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> I apologize for the length of MY DESCENT and for the poor quality of the Xerox.  It doesn't surprise me that the main point didn't come through.   I think Evolutionary Psychology does provide testable hypotheses, but I also think testability is not /sufficient /to make a hypothesis heuristic.  The hypothesis also has to be interesting.  To be interesting, a hypothesis has to challenge some way of thinking that has become second nature, and good EP thought sometimes produces such surprising challenges.  Such interesting challenges do not arise from studies designed to bolster social stereotypes with biological bafflegab.  Here is another paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again> much shorter (only 600 wds)  and better Xeroxed, which exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary psychology.

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[gepr]

Nobody's talking about debunking an entire domain. As Nick argues in the 1st paper and the quote from the Wikipedia page argues, it makes the most sense to treat particular hypotheses.

So I asked for testable hypotheses involving the alpha male concept and, in particular, Peterson's evolutionary psychology justification for that concept. And as I said, Dave West's debunking of the alpha male concept is good but it would be best to combat an evolutionary psychology justification for "alpha male" with an evolutionary psychology debunking of "alpha male".

On February 16, 2018 12:53:03 AM PST, Pieter Steenekamp <[hidden email]> wrote:

>IMO it's going to be difficult to debunk evolutionary psychology.  It
>is a
>valid part of the medley of components of psychology and sociology. But
>is
>it the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? No, certainly
>not.
>There is much more to human behavior than evolutionary psychology.
>What's coming out from the #MeToo movement is just horrible. Sure, it
>may
>be consistent with evolutionary psychology, but we as humans should not
>accept it and root out the abhorrent behavior of some of the male of
>the
>species. And our society has been protecting the perpetrators and thank
>god
>that's changing.
>But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Give credit to
>evolutionary psychology as part of the effort to understand human
>behavior.
>
>
>On 15 February 2018 at 22:08, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Since Peterson depends on (some bastardization of) evol. psych., then
>it
>> would be healthy to have an evol. psych. debunking.  *That's* what
>I'm
>> actually looking for.  Perhaps your "Oh no" paper contains that
>debunking.
>> I'll look.

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[Prof David West]

Some questions for Nick and one for Ed Angel

Peterson's "alpha male" silliness seemed to have prompted this thread but I wonder if a different example might advance the discussion more productively, especially since, I suspect, most everyone on the list would dismiss Peterson as inane.

The example I have in mind is sexism in computing. Back in the sixties, two psychologists (Cannon and Perry) created a "profile" or aptitude test to determine who would be a good programmer. Their work became the de facto standard used for hiring (and to a lesser extent for admission to grad school in CS) up to and including today.

Two psychological / behavioral traits dominate their profile: 1) affinity for and proficiency at 'logical / mathematical puzzle solving';and 2) antipathy towards people. Both of these traits are, supposedly, more prevalent in males than females, especially the second one. This instantly marginalized women as potential programmers. (I would argue that this work also had significant impact, indirectly and via cultural diffusion, on the reduction of women in all of the STEM educational paths and professions.)

Within the last year, James Damone, former Google engineer, essentially made the same argument and explicitly stated that the prevalence of the two behavioral traits was "biological" in origin.

Some questions for Nick:

  -- is any assertion of a biological origin for a psychological / behavioral trait a naive evolutionary psychology argument? I say naive because I doubt that any of those individuals had any knowledge of the evolutionary psychology discipline or research.

  -- If the assertion is made that 'anti-social nerdiness' is biological (evolutionary psychological) in origin, what criteria could / would be used to affirm or deny? Must you show that the trait yielded reproductive advantage? Would you need to show the trait was present in antecedent instances of the species — e.g. would you find individuals in hunter-gatherer tribes that exhibited the trait? Could the trait be biological in origin but not 'continuous' in some fashion — e.g. a case of punctuated equilibrium.

Nick has accused me of shameless reification when I use the term/concept of "cultural evolution" but ... I was taught that the time frame required for biological evolution is too long to be a reasonable basis for explaining or accounting for observed psychological / behavioral changes in human beings. E.g. psychological behaviors associated with things like social media and cell phones are clearly observable but occur in time frames that are generational at most, and most commonly intra-generational.

  -- Is it possible to argue for some kind of biological 'precursors' — traits from which the observable changes are derived, and dependent? (Kind of like the evolution of eyes being dependent on precursors like photo-sensitive cells.)

  -- Is it possible to disprove an evolutionary psychological argument (ala Peterson and Malone) simply by pointing out that it emerged and became prevalent in a time frame inconsistent with biological evolution?

The question for Ed Angel (only because he is a graphics maven):

  -- pure speculation, but what impact did the Lena image (de facto standard for testing image compression algorithms), in 1973, have on the decline of women in the profession? A mere six years earlier, Cosmopolitan magazine was touting programming as a smart career path for women and around the same time a peak of 37% of students in CS were women.

davew

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018, at 1:53 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

IMO it's going to be difficult to debunk evolutionary psychology.  It is a valid part of the medley of components of psychology and sociology. But is it the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? No, certainly not. There is much more to human behavior than evolutionary psychology. 

What's coming out from the #MeToo movement is just horrible. Sure, it may be consistent with evolutionary psychology, but we as humans should not accept it and root out the abhorrent behavior of some of the male of the species. And our society has been protecting the perpetrators and thank god that's changing. 

But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Give credit to evolutionary psychology as part of the effort to understand human behavior. 

On 15 February 2018 at 22:08, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

But your point *did* come through.  Peterson's (and many people's) conception of the "alpha male" (or "alpha female" for Frank), has become second nature.  It's everywhere in our culture.  And it is ripe for a debunking that is complete enough to GRIP the populace.  Dave's debunking is right, I think.  The Adam Ruins Everything video is good, but too fluffy.

Since Peterson depends on (some bastardization of) evol. psych., then it would be healthy to have an evol. psych. debunking.  *That's* what I'm actually looking for.  Perhaps your "Oh no" paper contains that debunking.  I'll look.

On 02/15/2018 11:58 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> I apologize for the length of MY DESCENT and for the poor quality of the Xerox.  It doesn't surprise me that the main point didn't come through.   I think Evolutionary Psychology does provide testable hypotheses, but I also think testability is not /sufficient /to make a hypothesis heuristic.  The hypothesis also has to be interesting.  To be interesting, a hypothesis has to challenge some way of thinking that has become second nature, and good EP thought sometimes produces such surprising challenges.  Such interesting challenges do not arise from studies designed to bolster social stereotypes with biological bafflegab.  Here is another paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again> much shorter (only 600 wds)  and better Xeroxed, which exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary psychology.

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[gepr]

Excellent contribution!  Thanks, Nick.

Of course, your arguments, in this letter, are primarily academic.  So, they won't grip the populace in the way Peterson's have (unless you launch a marketing campaign like he did, of course).  But I found the biased sample argument plausible as something which *would* grip the public, especially with this President and the #metoo stuff.

I believe (though I'm often wrong) Peterson's arguments seem closely parallel with the sexual gamers, pick-up artists, who try to game the mating game.  It's akin, I think, to the "power pose" concept or, perhaps even the "smile to be happier" thing.  In Peterson's case, it amounts to "act successful, and you'll have more sex."

Your two arguments: 1) that we'd expect a "curvilinear" relationship between success and more partners -- from which I infer some sort of saturation curve, and 2) justificationist studies will tend to self-select towards posers, combine to form an argument that might grip the public, in these times.

Women (and men) should be understood as complex enough creatures so as to be capable of spotting the gamers.  Even *if* Peterson et al are presenting some sort of essentialist truth (while squinting from the window of an airplane), too many details have been removed for their self-help woo to be true in any concrete circumstance.

My goal, however, would be to formulate a counter-hypothesis, perhaps based on the detection of defectors ... an evol. psych. counter-hypothesis.  Perhaps the detection of *lies* is rooted somewhere in biology?  Renee' mentioned the other day that some squirrels are defectors/gamers and they'll simply watch the industrious squirrels as they stash their nuts, then the defector will go dig up the stashed nut.  So, some industrious squirrels have developed a lying technique where they pretend to bury a nut, then run off to bury it somewhere else.  It seems we could formulate a testable, evol. psych. hypothesis that claims men and women who are authentic tend to be happier and have more babies?



On 02/15/2018 11:58 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Here is another paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again> much shorter (only 600 wds)  and better Xeroxed, which exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary psychology.


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