Sunday, August 26, 2018

"The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag"



"This is all part of his and many other evopsych researchers' project to prove that humans haven't changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych's biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time.

But the classic evopsych douchebag, like Miller, absolutely wants to believe that humans are still in thrall to the same psychological forces that shaped our behavior much earlier in Homo sapiens evolution. At the same time, he wants to allow for the idea that some people have obviously evolved to be smarter, like guys who donate DNA to eugenics projects."



Blegh evopsych. I don't know, it seems like some of it has to be credible or else it wouldn't be a field that you could be a professor of...  

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