Category: Evolutionary psychology
The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…
| December 4, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Evolutionary psychology: The cat among the pigeons!
| November 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Psychology |
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 […]
Nature’s war on sex
| November 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Who knew that Bret Weinstein would be a bigger Darwinist than Richard Dawkins?
| November 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Religion |
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, […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
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 […]
WSJ publishes Laszlo Bencze’s thoughts on evo psych and who pays on the first date
| September 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
If a conventional evolutionary psychology claim is true, masculinity is “in crisis”?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Darwinian risks all, takes aim at gender theory
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Mortarboard mob “disappears” respected mathematician
| September 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Science |
He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill […]
Evolutionary psychology explains why men pay on the first date. And don’t.
| September 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
Explains everything and its opposite! Our philosopher and photographer friend Laszlo Bencze writes to apprise us of “the definitive explanation” of why men want to pay on a first date: “There is an evolutionary reason for this, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. […]
Darwinian conniptions over domestic violence
| August 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Media |
New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth […]
Richard Weikart on the anti-Semitic burst in evolutionary psychology
| July 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
From Richard Weikart at ENST: Even in cases of behaviors that seem to hinder reproduction, evolutionary psychologists can invent some good-old “just-so story.” E.O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and the founder of sociobiology, claimed that homosexuality might be selected for, because a homosexual would be able to help siblings have more offspring. Is there any […]
Evolutionary psychology: A promising new strategy for anti-Semites?
| July 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
At Undark, Michael Schulson asks, Why are ostensibly respectable, peer-reviewed journals now publishing discussions of what has long been dismissed as bigoted psychological research? IN THE 20 years since the publication of his best-known book, “The Culture of Critique,” Kevin MacDonald, an emeritus professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, has complained that […]
Does lack of a good father figure promote atheism?
| June 24, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Atheism, Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Psychology |
From Wintery Knight Here’s a lecture by New York University professor Paul Vitz to explain a connection between atheism and fatherlessness: Wintery Knight also suggests an article by Paul Copan which points out how father presence/absence and father quality affects belief and disbelief in God: Seventh, the attempt to psychologize believers applies more readily to […]
Richard Weikart: Why social science does not need evolutionary theory
| June 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
From Richard Weikart at ENST|: In an article for Nautilus, Cristine Legare explains “Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory.” An associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, she laments that the social sciences are missing out, because they ignore the findings of evolutionary theory. She states, “The lack of willingness to view […]
At Nautilus: Psychology needs evolutionary psychology
| June 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
As if psychology were not troubled enough. Psychologist Cristine Legare argues at Nautilus: My high school biology teacher, Mr. Whittington, put a framed picture of a primate ancestor in the front of his classroom—a place of reverence. In a deeply religious and conservative community in rural America, this was a radical act. Evolution, among the […]
Call for papers: How did atheism evolve? Evolutionary psychologists now want to study atheism
| June 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
Is it due to natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinian evolution)? Is it adaptive? A byproduct? A stop on the road to extinction? Papers wanted here: — Evolutionary perspectives on atheism/unbelief Despite increasing secularization and a decreasing role played by institutionalized religions in the western world, many scholars within the study of religion – […]
Larry Moran asks whether evolutionary psychology is a “deeply flawed” enterprise
| March 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Longtime University of Toronto biochemistry professor and frequent Uncommon Descent commenter Larry Moran: We were discussing the field of evolutionary psychology at our local cafe scientific meeting last week. The discussion was prompted by watching a video of Steven Pinker in conversation with Stephen Fry. I pointed out that the field of evolutionary psychology is […]
Evolutionary psychology puts people with disabilities in their place. Not a nice place.
| January 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
From Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, who struggls with a disability, reviewing a sci-fi film at Tor: I Belong Where the People Are: Disability and The Shape of Water On the surface, there are many things to like about The Shape of Water. The main characters, the ones in the right, they are all outsiders. They are people […]
From the Edge: Another reason not to like evolutionary psychology – support for Chinese eugenics
| December 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
A friend unearthed this: From evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of NYU at the Edge (a response to their 2013 question): 2013 : What *Should* We Be Worried About? China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry […]
