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.
Evolutionary psychology
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…
Nature’s war on sex
From Nature’s editors: “A move to classify people on the basis of anatomy or genetics” should be abandoned. According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on Read More…
Who knew that Bret Weinstein would be a bigger Darwinist than Richard Dawkins?
Not Paul Nelson, if you go by his account of the discussion between Weinstein, the biology prof driven by “woke” students from Evergreen State University and iconic Darwinist Richard Dawkins: I witnessed something last week that I never thought I’d see. Richard Dawkins, pressed to affirm the explanatory power of Darwinian reasoning for human life, Read More…
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do Read More…
WSJ publishes Laszlo Bencze’s thoughts on evo psych and who pays on the first date
Readers may remember photographer Laszlo Bencze’s reflections here at UD on why men pay on the first date (or don’t) when we first posted his letter to us here (September 5, 2018). He also sent the letter to the Wall Street Journal, which — we are told — posted it on September 16. You must buy a Read More…
If a conventional evolutionary psychology claim is true, masculinity is “in crisis”?
We just tried to pull a Darwinian out of the way of the southbound freight called Progress when here it is rumbling back into town again: This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly Read More…
Darwinian risks all, takes aim at gender theory
Look, as Barry Arrington noted recently, you can’t even publish research today that suggests that some teen girls believe they are boys mainly because of teen groupthink even though such a conclusion must be obvious to anyone who has spent time with teens. Now, a Darwinian has blundered in front of the overloaded freight train of Read More…