Whenever the redpill asserts naturalism

eefr · 2023-07-18T03:50:59+00:00

But it is not wrong

Pretty sure it's wrong.

bluemagex2517 · 2023-07-18T14:22:17+00:00

not wrong it's just toxic

and

tend to support the idea of naturalism and evolutionary psychology as our nature

Are incompatible.

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.

Title	Whenever the redpill asserts naturalism
Author	Nightchanger
Upvotes	1
Comments	3
Date	July 17, 2023 5:54 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/ExRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/1528xud/whenever_the_redpill_asserts_naturalism/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/ExRedPill/whenever-the-redpill-asserts-naturalism.1225592 https://theredarchive.com/post/1225592

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