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Syamsu  Suspended Member (Idle past 5619 days) Posts: 1914 From: amsterdam Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The third rampage of evolutionism: evolutionary pscyhology | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
I read his whole book. You read the first page, decided you know what it is, but dont seem to be arguing against anything but a strawman. I want to know what you think it is.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
You have failed to accuratly describe the theory. You created a strawman and argued against that.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
I agree there are areas of the brain that more plastic, empty disk, blank slate, ect. But only part of the brain is, and just how much of our conscious experience and (more importantly) our behavior is governed by interactions taking place solely with in this area is, in my opinion, highly overstated. Yes it happens all the time. But their are areas of the brain which are more hardwired that can govern large areas of our interactions.
To be honest, my interest in incest is very limited, and I have only dealt with a small portion of the literature, we can talk about it if you really want but its certainly not one of my stronger areas.
quote: Its your right to want to see more evidence to establish this, but there is a lot of evidence. Dates back several hundred years to the first systematic study of behavioral changes due to brain injuries. There are specific areas of the brain used for specific functions, everyone has roughly the same topographic map of brain area to brain function. Infants are born with a wide variety of skills that they couldn't have had time to learn such as facial recognition processing. And many of these things carry on into adult hood. Preference for symmetrical faces over unsymmetrical faces are found with in minutes of birth, and carry all the way through life. Not to mention many of the things we are finding have no counter point where they are "taught" in the culture. No one teaches people to look for hormonal cues in establishing attractiveness. No one teaches women to prefer different hormonal facial markers across the cycle. The more evidence we get the better. But I think we have plenty to more than justify that people do carry over domain specific functions from our evolutionary past.
quote: I disagree. I think if you can show functionally specific adaptations you know the selective force behind it. Whatever something is SPECIFICALLY designed to address is the selective force that shaped it.
quote: There are many things people assess when looking at mates. Not just WHR, I am not saying that it is only WHR. There are many really interesting studies looking at hormonal signaling, symmetry, yes even feet size, as mechanism for looking at mates. WHR is just one example. Just because there are other mating assessments doesn’t mean WHR is invalid. Homosexuality is an entirely different topic, and there has been considerable attention paid to it. But homosexual men still will say a women with a smaller WHR is more attractive than a women with a larger WHR. There is a BIG difference between an individual with a different preference and a culture. If you can find a whole culture that values relatively LARGER WHR (not just body fat percentage but the actual WHR) that’s a problem for the theory. An individual that doesn't isn't. These are what I call "I-know-a-guy-stories" just because you know a guy that doesn’t like small waists doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't. There is going to be variation, that’s how evolution worked, and if there wasn't variance in the preference for WHR it could not have evolved. But there are not going to be many that view things like this. And no fundamental culture where all people prefer a relatively larger WHR.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
Okay, so you think the selfish gene idea means people are selfish. That’s what I thought, that’s just not how it is viewed. But you are welcome to continue rallying against a straw man if you like. It certainly has not legitimate concern with evolutionary psychology.
Also there has been a lot that has come out since the Selfish Gene. Ideas advance
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
I dont think I am wrong, and I dont think the risks are high if I am. If Dawkins proposes everyone is completely selfish he is wrong. And no one believes it.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
quote: Oh I agree its defiantly not what he is saying. My point was that even if we, for the hell of it, grant Syamsu all of his points. That evo psych ignores "choice" that Dawkin’s believes everyone is selfish, and that us practitioners of evo psych have an evangelical zeal.................none of this adds up to a new wave of concentration camps..
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
Honestly, I feel like all we are really doing is waxing philosophical. The lack of evidence you are discussing serves as lack of evidence for your arguments as well. The fact that we do not know the exact relationship between hardwired and software and genes and traits does not prove your position any more than mine. Basically at this level of discussion my arguments are not going to change much.
Issue-We don’t know the relationship between hardware and software Evolutionary psychology says we don’t have to. Instead lets go out and LOOK for it and see what we find, evolutionary psychology uses a top-down theoretical method, not a bottom-up. The bottom-up development is lacking in technology to really get going, in the mean time lets instead ask what we should find and see if we can find. Issue-How do you know it is an adaptation and not some other thing (exaptation, spandrel, cultural factor) This is a problem for the entire field of evolution, not just evolutionary psychology. We just don’t know for sure how to do this yet. Is bi-pedialism an adaptation? We think so, but we can’t prove it. We are developing ideas that might help us sift out adaptations from other environments, such as universality, ease of development, path ways of development, optimality, special design and specified function, and parsimony. These are used to identify adaptations of all kinds, evolutionary psychology just applies them to behavioral models. Issue-You can not know the selective environment in which something developed Again, this is a problem for the entire field of evolution. We can not know this for any adaptation, but we can take educated guesses and then derive predictions, and see if they pan out. This gets us CLOSER to what the selective pressures were. Evolutionary psychology does this the same way. In the end, the proof is in the pudding, or the research that comes out of a field Does it provide fruitful areas of research, does it provide falsifiable predictions, are the predictions accurate, and does it expand the body of knowledge. I think the answer is yes to all of these. This is the area I want to explore, lets get down to the nitty gritty and see what going on in the research. I would like to see what issues you have with the WHR studies so far. There are hundreds of more where those came from, and I think they might address a lot of your issues (such as you mentioned all it shows is assement of 2-dimensional figures) but there are lots of studies showing this in the 3d world as well. So I am curious to see your analysis of the WHR problem.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
quote: The references were the works that defined the area of study. They provide the back drop. There are newer studies that BUILD upon the older studies. There have been other studies that tried to expand and address issue with them, but they are simple expansions of these studies. The foundation is in those studies. So I thought it would be of more value to see these studies then a more specific study that only addressed a peripheral issue of WHR. If you have points that have been raised before, I will wind up citing more research that has tried to address these points. It’s not to say these are bad, but they didn't address every issue that has come up since. If you come to me with your criticisms of the papers, I can then try and find, what I think are the best responses to it, or if there aren't why perhaps the criticisms are not valid. The other point is that you have to show many different angles to establish the preference as adaptive, and it takes separate studies to often do that. So it is more the proponderous of evidence that ultimately shapes how the field views WHR. My aim was background, and I guess we can go from there. That’s my reasoning behind those studies, not that they are the best, or most complete, but I think they are the necessary starting points.
quote:You have failed to show me why you have to know exactly the hardware vs. software issues to look for hardwired domain specific functions. The brain is obviously not a complete blank slate; there are obviously some hardwired functions. How important are these to how we think? Well we can begin to answer this question with out knowing at a neuronal level how exactly things work. That’s like saying we have to know the exact muscular contraction sequence in the esophagus before we can say that the evolved purpose of the esophagus is to swallow food. quote:You seem to be working on the assumption that a lack of known evidence should be treated as favoring more of a cognitive general theory. The same lack of evidence you decree for not being able to show at a neuronal level hardwired brain functions, means that you can not just make a claim that the brain can completely adapt to novel environments and over come all these innate functions through introspection. You have no evidence that this is the case. So you can not assume it as a response. EVERY single complex trait we have emerges from an interaction between the environment, genes and ontological development. Muscles, ligaments, veins, all these things adapt and respond to environmental cues. The ability to adapt to these environments is an adaptation in itself. But evolution defines the boundaries of adaptation. We have constraints, muscles can adapt to load bearing stresses over time, because of evolution, but also because of evolution they can only adapt to so much. I don’t see why this statement is so different from saying the brain is a complex organ shaped by natural selection, the ability to respond to novel environments is an adaptation of the brain, but selection pressures constrain just how adaptive the brain can be. People can like different body fat percentages, but will never prefer a WHR of 1.5 over .7. Adaptation and constraint. People can like different aged women, but will not prefer non-reproductively viable women to reproductively viable women (a 20 year old will be preferred over a 70 year old). Adaptation with constraint. People may prefer different facial hair, facial features, ect. But will prefer traits that signal higher secondary hormonal levels. Because people who preferred, sick, pregnant or 70 year old women did not leave their genes behind. The brain is not some grand organ that adapts completely to its environment. If that was true, we wouldn’t have nearly the number of mal adaptive traits that we do. One of the central focus areas for some researchers is explaining maladaptive traits in novel environments as being left over from a time in which the trait developed. The brain can not optimize itself in any environment. It is constrained. I don’t know what to tell you. You link evolutionary psychology to the ID movement, to numerology and a many other areas of pseudo science. I see no valid comparison here. It uses operationalized methods and definitions that you seem to accept in somatic phenotypes but then declare invalid when dealing with the mind. You declare them invalid because we do not have fossilized remains of behavior and because you assume the brain is nearly infinitely adaptable to its environment. I see no problem with the fossilization issue, and its unsolvable, I think the evidence points to the brain not being infinitely adaptable. Evolutionary psychology has demonstrated a lot of fascinating aspects of human psychology. That’s the key point, evolutionary psychology has a methodology that it has created for exploring these issues from a more top-down design. You say the top-down method is invalid, and approach it from a philosophical angle. If you want to get into that end of it we can have a lovely debate on the Computational Theory of Mind and work from Kant to Marr. But that’s not what this is about. I want to try addressing the science. That’s the whole point, the methodology, like all things is rooted in philosophy, but the question is, does it work. That’s why I think the empirical evidence that has been published is the place to look. If we are finding legitimate adaptations in people, the methodology seems to be working.
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Parsimonious_Razor Inactive Member |
I am in the middle of working on a dissertation project so large portions of time disappear very quickly for me. I haven't had time to sit down with this topic in a while. If you are still interested we can pick this up again.
I have been thinking off and on about the fundamental issues we have been addressing. There are still a lot of rifts in ev psych about the metatheory. The Santa Barbra school of Tooby and Cosmidies are big fans of the "computational theory of mind" mostly because of their cognitive background. In these model they attempt to describe the inner workings of the mind as a series of domain specific modules which have been shaped by evolutionary pressures. They do studies looking for these modules. Such as the cheater detection hypothesis that shows people are better at solving certain puzzle tasks if phrased in a social contract language rather than abstract knowledge. They tried to show that the mind doesn't use general rules like If P then not Q but rather processes things along specific circumstances. This is the school of research in ev psych that is most concerned with how the mind works, and is probably most subject to a lot of the discussions we have been having. The Santa Barbra school believes that adaptation and design have to be demonstrated in a cognitive model. But not everyone agrees. For example here at the University of New Mexico Steve Gangestad and Randy Thornhill practice more of a behaviorialist model. They believe we can demonstrate functional design by looking at the thoughts and behavior of the subject (thoughts here is more in line with the radical behaviorialist view that thoughts are as much a behavior as walking). In these models the cognitive model is not necessary and the exact biological nature of the brain/mind is certainly not needed. It is this model I have had most of my training in, and why I don't think the intricate biological description you are asking for is that important. Someone from the Santa Barbara school might disagree with me so I thought it was important to at least get that out. What I am trying to figure out is exactly where the heart of the issue here lies. Let me propose a couple questions/ideas and see where they fall. Do you have a problem with "functional design" as a definition of adaptation? Do you think the elucidated design can point us in the direction of the selective pressure that shaped the adaptation? So for example, do you think we can make the argument, with out ever looking at the fossil record or molecular genetics that bird wings have been functionally designed for flight? Or that the vertebrate eye has been functionally designed for sight? Can we then claim that the wing is an adaptation for flight and the eye is an adaptation for sight? From that can we derive that the wing was shaped by selective pressures that favored flight, and that the eye was shaped by selective pressures that favored sight. If your problem lies in this area of research then a different path of argument is necessary. But if you agree with functional design as a methodology for looking for adaptations do you then have a problem with its application to the mind because of some intrinsic property of the mind? I think this is maybe where the problem is based on past things you have said.
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