Most likely, “emotions research” is nonsense. But tying it to Darwinism means that its practitioners can hammer down hard on that lectern even if they are not making sense to the people whose emotions they are supposed to be describing. It’s all those people’s fault for being “creationists.”
Evolutionary psychology
Latest fun from evo psych: Does COVID-19 lead women to cheat?
As noted at the article, it’s an open question whether the mind evolved at all and therefore whether evolutionary psychology is any help in understanding it.
Why guys are fathers and gorillas aren’t: The real story
If one is not an evolutionary psychologist, the answer is obvious.
Finally someone takes evolutionary psychology seriously…
Seriously enough to realize that it is not really a discipline in science.
Rob Sheldon on the prof who challenges evo psych: Covering her tracks carefully…
Sheldon: Did you notice how Smith trashes Evolutionary Psychology because it uses “circular” reasoning? Then she realizes it sounds like an ID criticism, so she rushes to defend the remaining Evolutionary sciences with this paragraph…
Philosopher challenges evolutionary psychology
But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is the admission of skepticism at a popular scitech mag. Hey, we can provide lots of examples of flapdoodle. But we took for granted that all these science writers actually believed in it. And not wanting to just pick a stupid useless fight with true believers, we mostly talked (well, okay, hooted, really) among ourselves…
At Evolution Institute, of all places, evolutionary psychology is savaged
Philosopher of biology Subrena E. Smith: Furthermore, evolutionary psychological hypotheses turn on inferences about hypothetical structures for which there is a dearth of empirical support, and there is no evidence that the minds of our prehistoric ancestors possessed this sort of architecture.
Yes! Now there is a Darwinian explanation of suicide
It’s amazing what passes for insight among evolutionary psychologists. How would it help anyone decide how to help a depressed person? Read the whole thing for sure. It gets into beehives and such.
Here’s a pop Darwin look at the origin of religion
At the BBC, a writer offers an explanation of the Christian practice of Communion, Darwinism-style. Along the way, he discovers that apes are spiritual.
Surprise! War trauma makes people more religious
The researchers offer various evolutionary psychology musings, bypassing the obvious point: When tragedy or disaster strikes, merely facile, trendy accounts of life don’t work anymore. So people turn to timeless questions and timeless truths.
Evolution: If mental illness helped us adapt, Michael Behe is right
But, of course, Michael Behe’s point in Darwin Devolves is that natural selection primarily breaks or blunts complex things, resulting in survival at a cost. Sounds like Dr. Nesse is saying the same thing, not that he would admit it.
Darwinism at work: Being an addict might be an evolutionary advantage
Her basic thesis is that, because we don’t lead such exciting lives today, addicts ingest harmful substances instead. Maybe. One can almost hear a local addiction recovery group chuckling quietly in the background.
Social justice warriors (SJWs) turn their sights on another evo psych prof
It actually doesn’t matter what Kanazawa concludes. You can’t reason with a pack. Having been taught from childhood that humans are animals, the SJWs have become a pack. For technical reasons, that is easier than becoming a hive.
The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…
An evolutionary biologist chronicles the onslaught: At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of Read More…
Evolutionary psychology: The cat among the pigeons!
Confession: Some of us never took evolutionary psychology (a discipline whose subject died a very long time ago but allegedly lives on in all of us) seriously enough to wonder if it could actually create controversies in psychology. Apparently so: In terms of the political bias among social psychologists, Buss and von Hippel found that 95 Read More…