Reviewer Charlie Jane Anders tells us “Zookeeper is a horror movie about evolutionary biology” (IO9, July 8, 2011), but she means “evolutionary psychology.” Briefly, the zookeeper wants this girl, and the animals (who can talk, of course) advise him to use their mating strategies:

Griffin is encouraged to become an Alpha Male, to pee in public to mark his territory. (There is a lot of urination.) The Adam Sandler-voiced monkey tells him to fling poop. At various times, his mating seminar starts to seem like an episode of the Pick-Up Artist, as a lion tells him to throw some negs. He’s encouraged to pick fights with competing males, to separate his desired mate from the pack, and to make his nerdy-but-gorgeous best friend pretend to be his girlfriend to make Stephanie jealous. There is much slapstick involving Griffin attempting to do a frog confrontation stance and making his pants split open.Eventually, though, it starts to work — Griffin, implausibly, becomes an Alpha Male and everybody admires him. He becomes a kind of super-yuppie and God among ordinary shlubs.

The usual keenness of evolutionary psychology’s insight into human nature is on display here; the screenwriter captures the quintessential truth that humans have evolved to consider this kind of behaviour sexy – just as animals evolved to have equivalent-to-human minds. From Anders:

Read More ›

In “Family ties doubted in Stone Age farmers” (New Scientist, 01 July 2011), Michael Marshall reports that

Blood may not always be thicker than water, if a controversial finding from one of the world’s best-preserved Stone Age settlements is to be believed. At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.

How do we know? TheÇatalhöyük people (7500-5500 BCE) “buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses, suggesting that people were buried where they lived.”

The researchers measured the teeth from 266 individuals, assuming that teeth are are more similar among relatives and that people buried together would be more closely related.

But she found no pattern at all. “It does not appear that individuals that were buried together were closely related to each other,” she says. “Çatalhöyük was likely not centred around nuclear families.”

In the best tradition of the assured results of modern science, further speculations follow. In the rush to confirm a trendy idea (families are optional), no one seems to consider that Read More ›

Heck, it’s “science”, which is way better than being true, reasonable, or useful.

He tells us,

Recently, evolutionary psychologists have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn’t take them long to notice that when people fall in love, there’s a period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak.

(Many parents of young adults, attempting to dissuade children from a predictably bad match, have noticed this.)

[ … ]

From this perspective, we are preprogrammed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about four years. Read More ›

In “The Social Psychological Narrative — or — What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?
A Conversation With Timothy D. Wilson” (Edge (June 16, 2011), Wilson, a researcher into consciousness, comments on evolutionary psychology, taking on one of its most widely quoted exponents, Steve Pinker:

To be clear, evolutionary theory is obviously true and has added to our knowledge about social behavior, by suggesting novel hypotheses that could then be tested with the experimental method. But I believe the examples of this are far fewer than Steve suggests. He mentions a 2003 paper by David Buss that “listed fifty novel predictions about social behavior derived from evolutionary theory.” I went back and checked that list to see how novel those predictions were. Read More ›

In “Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans’ Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes”
(ScienceDaily, June 3, 2011), we are told

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department. Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

Parents of autistic children will wonder about that. One such knowledgeable source commented, “But a feature of autistic/Asperger’s people is that their focused attention is generally toward things that do not provide important survival skills and that they are not as aware of their surroundings ”

Language warning: Present tense of observable fact is used in the main text sentence above and in those below. Read More ›

Reviewing Elena Mannes’ “The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song” (The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2011), Tallis writes,

Ms. Mannes, an Emmy-winning granddaughter of the founders of New York’s Mannes School of Music, is inspired by the possibility that neuroscience may help us harness the potential of music to treat the sick and even to build more harmonious communities. Yet her investigation, based on a PBS documentary that Ms. Mannes produced, gives us little reason to expect that neuroscience will deliver on this promissory note. Read More ›

At Slate , reporter David Dobbs muses (May 2, 2011) on the Marc “but the monkeys talk to ME!” Hauser research scandal, which he covered:

First, let’s recall that “scientific misconduct” in this case does not mean sloppy work; it means, by the NIH definitions Harvard uses in such investigations, either plagiarism (not on the table here) or the manipulation or fabrication of data. Extremely serious charges. I covered this heavily last year here at Neuron Culture and in a wrap-up at Slate.

Given the seriousness of those findings from Harvard, many wondered if Hauser would be fired. Harvard has kept its cards close, however, probably for a mix of legal and strategic reasons, and probably too because a federal investigation is apparently underway, Read More ›

Here’s Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) on Francis Collins’s curious affection for C.S. Lewis and other thinkers who assumed the reality of the mind, while believing just about anything else that Darwinism throws through the mailbox: Theistic evolutionists … Simply take what Collins calls “the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God” as a feature of human nature that is entrenched enough to be self-validating. But is their dismissal anything more than an arbitrary theological intervention? If humans are indeed, as the Darwinists say, just on among many species, susceptible to the same general tendencies that can be studied in the some general terms, then findings derived from methods deemed appropriate Read More ›

In “Survival of the Frummest: Darwinism and Judaism on Dating, Mating and Procreating,” Talia Kaufman of Yeshiva U enlightens us (April 14, 2011):

Human Mating Is Inherently StrategicOur subconscious has a whole lot more influence on our animalistic desires than we realize. Every aspect of attraction is subliminally dictated by our drive to find the mate that will best carry on our genes.

It is hard to think of a proposition more consistently refuted by human experience than the idea that people have a “drive to find the mate that will best carry our genes.” Read More ›

… allegiance to Darwinism has become a litmus for deciding who does and who does not hold a ”properly scientific’ world view. ‘You must choose between faith in God and faith in Darwin; and if you want to be a secular humanist, you’d better choose the latter.’ So we’re told. We doubt that those options are exhaustive. But we do want, ever so much, to be secular humanists. In fact, we both claim to be outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists. [ … ] Still, this book is mostly a work of criticism; it is mostly about what we think is wrong with Darwinism. The cry of their heart is to follow anyone or anything but Darwinism, for the sake Read More ›