Questions about evolutionary psychology?

LittleAmpton · 2023-10-30T23:02:46+00:00

(I have a degree in evolutionary genetics as a preface so I am approaching this as a scientist not a psychologist) Evolutionary psychology or evo-psych is a field of psychology discussion which attempts to use our evolutionary history to explain human behaviour.

A common example I see redpillers use is saying that women prefer aggressive men because aggressive men are better protectors and can provide more resources, and they compare this to other animals, like lions competing for place in a pride, or the fact that chimpanzees go to war.

This is a tempting narrative as it provides a comparison in nature for their behaviour which sounds cool (redpillers love lions) but there's no easy way to prove or disprove this. Humans have much more complex social structures than lions, and while we're closely related to chimpanzees, we're just as closely related to bonobos, which solve most of their problems through mutual sexual behaviour.

We've had at least five million years of independent evolution since we and chimps were the same animals and what archaeology and paleontology tell us is that humans have always had complex social networks which involve caring for disabled people and the elderly and providing food to the entire group regardless of social status. If you wanted to prove that aggressiveness in humans was a benefit during the hunter-gatherer era, how would you go about it? There are no four million year old humans left, and all humans alive today are equally "modern" from an evolutionary point of view.

For what it's worth, there are studies examining modern humans which look into aggressiveness as a sexual/social strategy, and they generally indicate that the shunning behaviour that occurs when someone is too violent for the norms of a group reduces sexual success. You'll likely not hear redpillers talk about this, though - since they're more interested in promoting their own feelings on a topic than the scientific facts, it's much more common for them to make a baseless statement like "Men should be more like lions" and then accuse dissenters of being failed lions, or betas.

Sorry if this was a bit wordy, it's a topic I'm passionate on! I can provide some more information or sources if you'd like, and while it's not a complete source, the wikipedia article on this topic is quite illuminating.

xvszero · 2023-10-30T22:46:26+00:00

Evolutionary psychology tries to understand human behavior as a result of evolution. It can't be "tested" because evolution takes millions of years, not to mention human records only go back thousands of years, so it's mostly theory.

Basically every theory about human behavior also runs into the age old nature versus nurture question. That one is tough to solve since it's kind of impossible to remove either from the equation to test just the one.

So a lot of it remains theory, not fact. Which isn't to say all theories are equal. Some have more evidence than others.

bluemagex2517 · 2023-10-31T15:04:15+00:00

Re-posting this from the last time this was discussed:

The field of Evolutionary Psychology is very controversial and much of it is denounced as pseudoscience by psychologists broadly. It's not that evo psych has no explanatory value, but it has much less explanatory power than many try to give it credit for.
The kind of evo psych explanations that the redpill makes are precisely the sort that it doesn't have the power to make. One can't simply make up a story that kinda sounds right about neolithic humans and use it to explain modern day behavior. Any hypothesis like this is unverifiable because an equally plausible but contradictory hypotheses can be generated the same way. There is no way to test either hypothesis against one another.
Let me illustrate:
A redpiller will give a story like, "In early humans there was evolutionary pressure for women to select the best genes for survival for her offspring. Because these women could only have so many children, it was better for them to be hypergamous in respect to genetic traits. If they found a man with better traits, it was to their advantage to switch or cheat to have offspring with better genes. Over time humans developed a genetic psychology that was likely to produce hypergamous behaviors in women.
Someone else can counter with a story like, "In early humans there was evolutionary pressure for women to find a stable partner who could raise their offspring into adulthood. Because human offspring are so fragile, maximizing the number of copies of your genes that survives to reproduce requires at least two parents who take care and nurture and provide for those offspring until adulthood. Hypergamy would have impeded that. Women cheating or jumping ship to another mate often would be at increased risk for being left single to raise their offspring. Overtime the children of hypergamous women would have been outnumbered and weeded out by those who chose stability. Human's thus developed a genetic psychology that was unlikely to produce hypergamous behaviors in women.
The problem here is there no way to test which theory is correct. We can't go back in time to make observations of prehistoric man, and we don't understand genetics well enough to know which genes are effecting psychology in which ways. At best we can look at both hypotheses and argue about which is more or less plausible. The problem with that is that a near infinite number of these stories can be created, so inevitably we end up with multiple equally plausible stories that we have no way to prove which is more likely correct.
Instead, what evolutionary psychology is useful for is studying the development of universal psychological behaviors, like early childhood developmental stages and other things of that nature.
On the other hand, Behavioral Psychology and Cultural Anthropology* already have robust explanations for the kinds of behaviors redpillers want evo psych to explain. Those answers just contradict what the redpillers want to be the case, so they ignore them.
*Sociology also has some good answers here, certain sub-disciplines of sociology, but generally Cultural Anthropology has the more scientific answers. Much of Sociology is 19th century continental philosophy, not actual science.

shyreject17 · 2023-11-02T07:18:48+00:00

It's already been tested. I'd refer to research from David Buss and Jeffrey Miller. Both of them have well conducted research on Sexual attraction.

Of course, there are many more researchers out there that exist, including women, who corroborated with their findings.

There have also been multiple independent field tests on women before and after ovulation, and found that they prefer masculine muscular men when they ovulate.

Title	Questions about evolutionary psychology?
Author	Darkorigins7323
Upvotes	8
Comments	24
Date	October 30, 2023 8:59 PM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/ExRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/17k3jk0/questions_about_evolutionary_psychology/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/ExRedPill/questions-about-evolutionary-psychology.1236873 https://theredarchive.com/post/1236873

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