Reddit reviews Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour
We found 1 Reddit comments about Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
>Can you cite anything here? I have never heard of any of this, and evolutionary psychology was the focus of my major (anthropology, with a minor in psych (not that our psych department got anywhere near evolutionary psychology, mind you)).
There is a pretty big split in evolutionary psychology at the moment, and it's been this way for at least 10 years now. I'm not sure when you were studying, but if it was recently then it might not have focused on the divide.
Some good resources:
Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour - Laland and Brown.
From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology - in particular, this section: Evolutionary Psychology and the challenge of adaptive explanation where the authors discuss the difference between Evolutionary Psychology and evolutionary psychology.
>I.. don't agree?
The idea that the popular evo psychologists (Tooby, Cosmides, Pinker, etc) were promoting cartoon Darwinism, and fatally misunderstanding evolutionary biology, is a well-known problem in EP. This is the only explanation for why they cling to naive adaptationism, and fail to demonstrate the evolutionary pathway of any behavior.
Even assuming that all evolved behaviors/traits are adaptations, they still don't meet the criteria laid out by Williams (1966). They come up with the believable story for it providing an advantage, and then (if they're lucky) they find that it's a cultural universal. But then they stop there. They don't check to see whether the cultural universal is a result of some genetic or evolutionary mechanism, or whether it's a product of learning (remembering that cultural universals can come about through species-specific constraints).