Why invalidate evolutionary psychology/behavior in sexual dynamics?

DreamCatcher24 · 2015-03-05T21:17:28+00:00

Evolutionary Psychology even among scientists is debated. One of the problems is that they over explain every single behavior within a context of millions of years ago. For instance there was a study about men and women liking a color, and the explanations used in the discussion was tracing it back to hunter gatherer even though the experiment itself did not warrant that explanation. I'll look up the study later on.

Here is a wiki of criticisms of Evo Psych

Sexual selection is certainly a real topic, I think you just need to have the right studies that justify the conclusions you are drawing. Which is a problem with Evo Psych.

saltinado · 2015-03-05T21:32:18+00:00

Ahhhhh! I'm so glad you asked! I work in a psych lab, and this is insanely interesting stuff. I can really nerd out on this.

Okay, yes, human brains DO have primitive parts of their brain that do the evolutionary me-Tarzan-you-Jane-now-give-me-the-banana-before-I-end-your-genetic-line thing. But our brain has evolved wayyyy past pretty much every other brain (although you could probably make an interesting case about dolphins, but that's a story for another day). Let's say you took a rat brain (because psychologists love rats), and you cut it open, you would see huge areas devoted to getting sensory info and processing fear in comparison to humans. That's because the evolutionary strategy of the rat is to just be hella good at quickly responding to stimuli.

Now if you looked at say a cat, then you would see slightly smaller sensory processing areas, and a larger cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex (specifically the associative cortex) is the interesting thing here. It's where all the information goes in your brain, gets all jumbled about (it's way more technical than this, sorry), and your brain does it's thing to make rational decisions. Now in humans, the cerebral cortex is MASSIVELY bigger than any other animal (in comparison to body size), and it has much less space devoted to sensory processing and much more space devoted to the associative cortex.

where the rat is good at executing simple responses to simple stimuli, the human brain is way more complex. It takes into account stimuli of just massively more complex nature. It doesn't act the same way every time, and it's capable of making self aware decisions (let's just take a moment here to really think about how awesome that is). So this leads to what psychologists call the "power of the situation". It means that humans act in wildly different ways in different situations. So maybe a person is racist when (s)he's around racist friends, but feels genuine affection for a black man when (s)he goes to visit elderly people in a nursing home. That happens, we just don't do the same thing every time.

So a "mating game" for humans is a more complex thing than in other animals, and its much more subject to individual differences, individual days, and individual social influences. So you might have a woman who's been raised by her parents to be respectful of everyone, but she can change her mind and cry rape on the first guy that pisses her off, just because she thought it was a good idea and she saw it on the internet. There is no "women and men inherently do x and y actions" in the real world, we're wonderfully, beautifully more complex than that. We're an infinitely complex combination of always shifting thoughts, personality, situation, and behaviors. Evo psych takes that and paints a much simpler picture that comes nowhere near capturing the nuance of the human brain.

Now that's not to say evo psych doesn't have its place. In things like face impression, where a fast impression is critical, the brain gives you a quick response, favoring baby faced people and people of your own racial group and whatnot. But something so complex as human interaction can't really be explained by evo psyche, it's like trying t o arrange chemical compounds on the molecular level with an industrial chainsaw.

Fancypantser92 · 2015-03-05T21:15:02+00:00

The argument is that RP endorsed evopsych tends to start with a hypothesis (eg "most/all women are hypergamous") and then come up with an explanation that seems plausible in the setting of very early human cultures. This explanation is often based on very little actual evidence beyond "that seems like a good reason why that might be advantageous behaviour". The reasoning is often very circular.

Secondly, RP evopsych ignores the concept that sociocultural evolution usually explains Western human behaviours better than biological evolution, and that humankind has made many behavioral adaptations over the centuries during which monogamous relationships have been enforced. Humans in the west haven't engaged in free mate selection for an very long time: it should be obvious that we can't take it for granted that the majority of human gender dynamics are even mostly instinctual. The oversimplifications often seem silly and contrived when you don't already support the hypothesis.

luxo42 · 2015-03-05T22:06:31+00:00

I absolutely agree with evolutionary psychology. What I don't agree with is TRP's extrapolations and interpretations of evolutionary pschology. For an example, I agree that women have dual strategies when choosing a mate, maximizing gene quality and finding a good provider for her children. This is consistent with evolutionary psychology. However, TRP goes beyond this to say that women are only sexually aroused by mates possessing qualities that are consistent with the first strategy, but not the second. According to TRP women are still dreaming of their AF after being married to their BB for 10 years, since it is only qualities that indicate high testotersone that sexually excite women. I understand that women's preferences shift towards heightened masculinity when seeking short term relationships, but no where have I read that women are sexually excited solely by hyper-masculine (or Alpha if you prefer) traits. From what I've read, women prefer a mix of alpha and beta traits. This would indicate that the two female mating strategies are overlapping, not binary as TRP suggests. Furthermore, It seems reasonable to suppose that evolution would select for women who were sexually attracted to mates who possess not only alpha characteristics, but beta qualities as well. This will produce the best chance for her offspring. So in short, I would agree with TRP if they just stuck to evolutionary biology, but their extrapolations seem a little too far-fetched and unsupported.

For a few more examples in case you didn't like my first one, TRP claims that women stop maturing mentally after 18. Also, women have no evolutionary reason to develop loyalty, but men do. Women are unable to empathize with men. These are all claims of TRP that I am skeptical about, strictly because, and not in spite of, the lack of support from evolutionary psychology or any other science.

zlex · 2015-03-05T21:11:54+00:00

Evolutionary psychology is mostly soft science gibberish. Abuse of science to foist a political argument.

The required disciplines of the hard science – significance, uncertainty analysis, calibration – are uniformly missing. Not so much dismissed or ill regarded as never recognized as a significant part of the scientific process to begin with. The entire endeavor is perceived, therefore, as an example of what Feynman referred to as ‘Cargo Cult Science’ in his 1974 Cal Tech commencement speech. It is perceived as the veneer of mathematics and science, without the discipline or essence or either.

It is perceived as a process similar to someone stumbling into a math or science lecture, seeing the form of presentation, the charts, the tables, the graphs—the white labcoats even, and then running off to an unrelated subject and borrowing just some of what was briefly glimpsed, mimicking the form but not the essence, and attempting to borrow the veneer of actual science to make what is in essence a political argument. Really no different than what occurs in a Women's Studies class. Or even an Economics class. This tactic works well in impressing the majority of folks who have never actually labored in the math and science lecture halls, but not nearly as well with the minority who have. And so, it persists as a political tactic, because as politics, it is an entirely effective tactic.

Even as we are bags of evolved meat, we are more that that. We are more than our reptilian brain stems, and even, more than our mammalian overlayers. There is strong evidence that we can choose what to value, and emergent behavior exists all around us, everyday.

We are not just autonomous robots responding to hardwired weightings; we can choose what we value, especially with sex and relationships.

Consider that we all communicate in the visible light spectrum. How? Because at sometime in the distant past, our ancestors evolved these funny looking orbs that reach out from our brains, collect light with rods and cones, and convert stimulation in the visible spectrum that stimulates our optical nerves; our visual processing subsystem pre-processes all that and delivers it to 'something' which figures out what the Hell to do with the stimulation.

Yet, no matter what our individual palettes, we yet do not all agree on the same aesthetics, either visually or aurally. We account for that as 'difference in tastes.'

We don't all like the same music or paintings or food or even women.

We all don't have the same evolutionary wetbits in detail, only very close approximately.

In humans, for example, the value of self-preservation is not absolute; it can and does regularly fail(suicide). Is suicide a failure of a higher level neural net, or a sign of humankinds ability to truly rewire our basic neural net/value seeking circuitry, inserting our high highest value seeking neural net that sometimes concludes "my highest value is achieved by shutting down."

At one level of abstraction, we are all the same, and at a deeper level we are fundamentally not the same, we are unique as individuals.

lesslucid · 2015-03-06T00:56:58+00:00

I think real evolutionary psychology is important and interesting and, with some caution, offers lessons we can learn and try to apply in the real world.
However, much of what passes for "arguments based on evopsych" are essentially just-so stories. A plausible-sounding but untested hypothesis is presented as if it were evidence, and then an edifice of wishful thinking is constructed on top. That's not how real science is done, people.

CleverNeologism · 2015-03-05T21:21:13+00:00

How is it reasoned that the animal Homo Sapien is exempt from having any innate, identifiable "mating game", given that Homo Sapiens are just another biological, sexually reproducing organism?

People way overestimate people's ability to rise above their "baser" instincts and operate in the abstract, mostly because they don't want to view themselves that way. We'd rather consider ourselves ethereal souls that just happen to be encased in our craniums than highly complex biological creatures with reason being a rather recent after-market accessory.

Our minds are rather powerful: but they are not more powerful than our brains. To think so is the equivalent of thinking that the house is stronger than the foundation.

bitchfit6 · 2015-03-06T07:38:30+00:00

As evopsych is entirely speculative, it often falls into the realm of pseudo science. The field often ignores contradictory evidence or explanations (Neuralplasticity, Environmental Psychology, etc.) in favor of their unprovable claims. As their claims often cannot be proved, they are extreamly difficult to disprove. It makes arguing against proponents of the field extreamly difficult. It is a bit like arguing with someone who is extremely religious. (see: The Dragon In My Garage)

EvoPsych has a time and a place. It is simply theoretical. It is nothing to base a movement off of. Also if you are not an expert in the field you probably shouldn't be creating your own knock-off theories. Rather, EvoPsych should be taken with a grain of salt. There are other theories in Psychology and Medicine that explain certain aspects of human behavior more efficiently than EvoPsych.

theloneliesthalfling · 2015-03-07T01:46:00+00:00

Evolution takes millions of years. A better explanation is cultural norms/ psychology. Cultural norms are caused by changes in structure.

Women were allowed to work in factories during world war II because of demand, rather than any civil rights thing. They went from: 'Women can't handle that kind of work!' to 'There's not enough workers, somehow you can do this now!'

This present isn't any different. There are demands that require you to consume.

Will_Im_Not · 2015-03-05T21:23:29+00:00

I think it's an interesting way of looking at things and worth considering. But as human beings we're able to go against a lot of things that nature initially intended. You might as well be saying we shouldn't build airplanes because "humans didn't evolve to fly". To me, it feels very similar to the "that's unnatural!" argument against supposedly immoral behavior.

It's not like you guys are above denying science when it doesn't fit with your worldview though, I've debated multiple people in this sub who said that psychology wasn't a real branch of science

GuildedCasket · 2015-03-05T22:29:31+00:00

Well, I don't like e-psych that much in general because of very simple and universally understood facts it (in the psychology community): it is impossible to test, entirely hypothetical, and correlational (if even that) by nature. No experiments, not even quasi-experiments, can be had.

It's interesting, yeah, but we just don't have the tools to be able to make any conclusions from it whatsoever.

cxj · 2015-03-06T05:18:31+00:00

IMO certain "evo psych" claims can be boiled down to common sense. Of course women would be pickier about their mates, they have an investment of 9 months pregnancy + some huge amount of years raising the kid. Of course women are more socially valuable than men, they can produce more humans while men cannot. Hence, male disposability. Of course men would want more than one woman at the same time, it maximizes their chances of reproducing, which would not be the case for women.

The above claims are fairly common sense and don't really need peer reviewed studies or whatever, and are a huge amount of the basis of TRP "evopsych."

WCaesar · 2015-03-06T08:19:11+00:00

Everything is caused by evolutions and they are optimization processes, but they are shitty optimization processes, inefficient like fuck (would you design a camera so that you route the cabling through the center of the field of vision?) so you cannot simply assume if X exists then X is a back-then optimal solution for a problem that existed back then. It can be a side-effect or anything really.

Furthermore, evolution, the genes, are a sort of very slow computer. The brain is a very fast computer. You need to keep the two categories different.

Here is a good discussion between brain vs. evolutionary history:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/yi/the_evolutionarycognitive_boundary/

Here is a decently rational use of evolution for sex and marriage:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hbp/using_evolution_for_marriage_or_sex/

HelenBeck · 2015-03-06T14:13:02+00:00

I find evolutionary psychology fascinating. The only problem occurs when you seize it like a religion. Not all evolutionary psychologists agree, even on the extent of modularity and adaptive mechanisms etc. What happens if the latest studies on bonobo mate selection turn out to be closer to humans than chimpanzees? Bonobos love those sweet betas.

[deleted] · 2015-03-05T23:05:51+00:00

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wazzup987 · 2015-03-06T01:25:12+00:00

Red pill does the exact opposite to feminist do in that they over value EVO pyshe. strict biological determinism is just as bat shit as social construct determinism.

[deleted] · 2015-03-05T21:17:18+00:00

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Title	Why invalidate evolutionary psychology/behavior in sexual dynamics?
Author	nomdplume
Upvotes	19
Comments	90
Date	March 5, 2015 8:23 PM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/2y255p/why_invalidate_evolutionary_psychologybehavior_in/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/why-invalidate-evolutionary-psychologybehavior-in.283210 https://theredarchive.com/post/283210

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