But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is the admission of skepticism at a popular scitech mag:
It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem.
Ryan F. Mandelbaum, “This Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology” at Gizmodo
Smith’s paper is paywalled but we have a copy and will have more to say about it later.
Meanwhile, get this:
We at Gizmodo have long rolled our eyes at the often-nonsensical conclusions that some people come to when employing evolutionary psychology theory, so we were excited to chat with Smith about her work. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Ryan F. Mandelbaum, “This Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology” at Gizmodo
Rolled their eyes? As you’ll see from the interview, the prof’s on target but … imagine … it’s now becoming okay to admit that evo psych is mostly just flaming nonsense?
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…
Wow.
See also: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote — and shop, and tip at restaurants”