Are you Jewish. You did not bother to answer before?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Just questions?
I fully accept the process of natural selection.
Natural selection builds on what starts as random variations and mutations, and the needs of survival make negative traits that compromise survival less common in the population; and the reproduction of viable progeny more likley.
That is no basis for the draconian statements offered by EP. Becasuse EP leaves no room for neutral traits and the persistence of some negative traits in organisms that manage to survive despite them.
Natural Selection cannot and does not select positive traits. It simply cannot work that way. Sadly that is the unspoken assumption of the EP brigade. Natural selection works ONLY by the elimation of traits that make an organism unfit for the environmental circumstances in which is seeks to survive.
I’m not alone, as a Darwinist that thinks the Pinker brigade are a bunch of evolutionary religionists.
There has been a long-standing, subtle confusion, elegantly expressed by Fodor&Piattelli-Palmarini between;
"(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and
(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits.”
What Darwin Got Wrong
With claim 1 EP is idle speculation. But EPers run on claim two which is FALSE.
This is essentially the point of dpearture from people who accept what Darwin said, and those that want to make a career out of the obsessive production of falsifiable pronouncements. They offer books filled with idle speculations. That would be fine were there no negative ideological consequences to it. Sadly Steve Pinker’s coffee table tomes infeect society with the worst sort of genetic determinism and leave little room for the nurture argument.
EP fails because it tries to explain everything teleologically, when NS cannot support ANY teleology.
Popper accepted evolutiary theory, but said this of it; “There were no human witnesses to the origin of the Universe, the origin of life or the origin of a single living thing. These were unique, unrepeatable events of the past that cannot be observed in nature or repeated in the laboratory. Thus neither creation nor evolution qualifies as a scientific theory and each is equally religious. As the scientific philosopher Sir Karl Popper has stated, evolution is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.”
There is no doubt that Pinker and others have de-elevated Natural Selection to a religion; a fun party game, where you pick a trait, any trait, then you argue for it being a positive trait and then demand that the reason we have the trait is because it was selected by nature; goodness/evil; agression/co-operation; selfishness/selflessness, attention/inattention, . They all scoire hits in this silly game. It is the most absurd and childish conformational bias. Totally shameful waste of good brains.
What does that have to do with whether or not evolutionary psychology is falsifiable?
Why do you want to know if I’m Jewish? It’s irrelevant.
Because.
I fully accept the process of natural selection.
Natural selection builds on what starts as random variations and mutations, and the needs of survival make negative traits that compromise survival less common in the population; and the reproduction of viable progeny more likley.
That is no basis for the draconian statements offered by EP. Becasuse EP leaves no room for neutral traits and the persistence of some negative traits in organisms that manage to survive despite them.
Natural Selection cannot and does not select positive traits. It simply cannot work that way. Sadly that is the unspoken assumption of the EP brigade. Natural selection works ONLY by the elimation of traits that make an organism unfit for the environmental circumstances in which is seeks to survive.
I’m not alone, as a Darwinist that thinks the Pinker brigade are a bunch of evolutionary religionists.
There has been a long-standing, subtle confusion, elegantly expressed by Fodor&Piattelli-Palmarini between;
"(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and
(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits.”
What Darwin Got Wrong
With claim 1 EP is idle speculation. But EPers run on claim two which is FALSE.
This is essentially the point of dpearture from people who accept what Darwin said, and those that want to make a career out of the obsessive production of falsifiable pronouncements. They offer books filled with idle speculations. That would be fine were there no negative ideological consequences to it. Sadly Steve Pinker’s coffee table tomes infeect society with the worst sort of genetic determinism and leave little room for the nurture argument.
EP fails because it tries to explain everything teleologically, when NS cannot support ANY teleology.
Popper accepted evolutiary theory, but said this of it; “There were no human witnesses to the origin of the Universe, the origin of life or the origin of a single living thing. These were unique, unrepeatable events of the past that cannot be observed in nature or repeated in the laboratory. Thus neither creation nor evolution qualifies as a scientific theory and each is equally religious. As the scientific philosopher Sir Karl Popper has stated, evolution is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.”
There is no doubt that Pinker and others have de-elevated Natural Selection to a religion; a fun party game, where you pick a trait, any trait, then you argue for it being a positive trait and then demand that the reason we have the trait is because it was selected by nature; goodness/evil; agression/co-operation; selfishness/selflessness, attention/inattention, . They all score hits in this silly game. It is the most absurd and childish conformational bias. Totally shameful waste of good brains.
No doubt evolutionary psychology has its limits. Not all biological traits are adaptations. Some are just side effects or byproducts of traits that are adaptations. For example the complex structure of Bones is an adaptation that solves the problem of providing a strong but light framework on which soft tissue can be arranged. But the white color of Bones serves no function at all. It’s simply a side effect of the fact that bones are made of calcium.
The same thing applies to the mind. Mental modules are adaptations but there are other mental phenomena that are just byproducts of these adaptations. For example reading. The capacity to read was not directly designed by natural selection. Writing was only invented around 5,000 years ago which is not nearly enough time for natural selection to design a complex adaptation. There’s no reading module in the human mind. The capacity to read must therefore be a side effect of various other modules that were designed by natural selection such as the modules for vision and language. So evolutionary psychologist must be careful when attempting to map the mind. They shouldn’t assume that there is a module for every complex capacity because some capacities are just side effects of modules designed for other things. If they think that some behavior is caused by a module designed to produce that behavior they must be able to devise a way of testing their idea. In other words the idea must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it’s just a hypothesis. Looking at the claims of evolutionary psychology in terms of their falsifiability on this thread seems like a worthwhile project to me.
Driving carefully, is a commonly proffered example of behavior that may have been adaptive to hunter-gatherers who were both predator and prey in the field, but it’s inappropriate and perhaps dangerous to a driver in traffic, too slowly for your own safety
I’ve seen it already. I’ll watch it again when I have a chance. He doesn’t destroy it as just entirely as all that since he accepts the work of Robert Trivers whose work was foundational to EP. There is another video of he and Trivers discussing Trivers’ work. You don’t just accept Chomsky’s opinions carte blanche do you? Some people seem to.
You can make a good argument for psychopathological agression on EP terms are you can for co-operative and altruistic behaviours.
At the end of the day, evolution is an effect, and not a cause. When you know that you more clearly see the “infinite variety” that Darwin talked about existing for non-teleological reasons, since traits are not selected FOR, but from those that survive.
It’s not exaclty rocket science. I Had no idea until today that he’s made any comments about it
You are blinkered.
Nothing can be said to be mandated by evolution since it is not a cause of change. It is an effect of change.
99% of all traits have no consequences for adaptation, since most are shared by all competitors, and many are selectively neutral.Moreover it is painfully obvious that organisms can carry a whole range of negative traits, just so long as they continue to produce the next generation those traits remain.
SInce there is no direct evidence for any selection except in the last handful of generations everything offered by EP is utterly speculative and fanciful.
Nature does not work at the level of the trait in any event. It kills poorly adapted individuals, all of which have a range of traits that EP can find positive, neutral or negative.
EP is simply backwards confirmational bias and completely unempirical.
The most absurd priestess of this religion is Susan Blackmore.
Yeah Stephen J Gould accused evolutionary psychology of accepting adaptive hypotheses just because they’re good stories without properly testing them. He thought that many mental phenomena are just side effects. Spandrels he called them. “Adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should be used only where it is really necessary.” See “adaptation and natural selection” by George Williams 1966
Every effect is a cause.
No, given the manner in which I construe the meaning of the small “d” dasein, even though the evolution of human psychology – given the evolution of the human brain – is likely to be the same for all of us biologically, I have come to conclude that how each of us has come to answer that question is beyond the reach of evolutionary psychologists to explain. Instead, “I” here for me is rooted historically, culturally and experientially in the individual lives that we live. Thus given a particular context on, say, the Society, Government, and Economics board here, the at times fiercely heated debates about how one ought to live are reflective in my view of the existential parameters embedded in each of our cumulative experiences. The communication breaks down as a result of conflicting memes that the shared genes seem powerless to make go away.
Okay, so how do the evolutionary psychologists explain why, given the same brains and the same biological/psychological components among tribal communities that revolve around “we” and “us moderns” that live lives revolving so much more around “I”, the changes came about?
I merely add the arguments I make in my signature threads into the mix. The small “d” dasein and the gap between the moral objectivists and the moral nihilists.
As for this…
…I’ll need a context. I’ll need you to note how the abstract point you are making here is relevant to the life that you have lived over the years. In particular regarding contexts in which your own moral and political and spiritual value judgments came into conflict with others. The evolution of human psychology here.
Gould is on the money here.
Yes but there is a vector here.
Change is the constant, if you will, and evolution is a consequence. The change is that cause of the effect, not the other way round.
I might be worth you taking a look at the badly titled, but great book “What Darwin got Wrong”, that I quoted above.
I think evolution is a trend - a direction - neither cause nor effect. Downward is not an effect of gravity - motion is the effect - downward direction of motion is only an attribute of the motion.
Just an insignificant small point. 
I’m not blaming you alone but the languge here is a mistake which hints at the way people, even people who ought to know better, like Dawkins, abuse their descriptions of the process of evolution.
Traits are not adaptations in any sense. They can be adaptive, or not adaptive, even counter adaptive. But calling them adaptations leans towards the idea that that is WHY we have them, which cannot be correct.
Becasuse the fact is that ALL traits emerge BEFORE they are adaptive or otherwise. They do not emerge because they are adaptations. The process begins with variation and mutation, next is selection of successful individuals. There is no selection of traits as such. Fit individuals persist with the collections of traits they have.
It is the difference between:
(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected TRUE
(2) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. FALSE
Do you see what I am getting at here?
Calling it a trend is calling it a cause.
The analogy with gravity does not hold true.
Gravity is attraction. That is the cause, you are attracted to the earth and the earth is attracted to you. The effect is collision.
In the same way environmental change, life, death, variation, reproduction, and mutations are the causes; the effect of these over time is such things as evolution and extinction.
My point was that there is a tendancy with the “evolutionary religious” to consdier evolution as a cause.