http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor#Philosophy.2C_religion_and_Cantor.27s_mathematics

Well, it’s nice to encounter such an agenda-free narrative on the topic.

ie. The ameba evolved into a squid so he could better survive.
No, the ameba did not evolve to better survive – they died in their billions through time and changed imperceptibly as a species through he impact of solar radiation on each concurrent generations dna.

NOW that means your DNA doesn’t make your RSP choices any better of worse than mine.

mh

and yeah, danlalan is the man too.

like ‘evolutionary progress’ is just a general trend, locally tho there’s going to be more failed experiments than successful ones, in this case, the person has a dupe of the vtnr subsequence in the moa gene, whether that was a transcoding error, or was inherited from a parent is unclear. anyways, this one had good lawyers.

Read some Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker to really understand what Evolutionary Psychology claims. Try The Adapted Mind or How the Mind Works. They are not claiming there is “a gene” for complex behaviours. This is with out a doubt a straw man argument against actual evolutionary biologists.

http://xkcd.com/263/

There are tons of published papers on male infanticide in primates.

If she’s lumping the loonies in with the actual science, oh god I have a splitting headache and am a bit ashamed to see Boing Boing giving her a positive platform, even indirectly.

Genes are a foundation to behavior, but they’re not the determinant of behavior; good evolutionary psychology understands this, and good evolutionary psychologists tend to be very emphatic when trying to explain this.

Everyone understands that your appearance is genetic, right? Except of course, it’s not – it’s largely genetic, but take two identical twins and they won’t be actually identical. Adult twins can diverge even more – disease, injury, nutrition, and lifestyle can make adult twins significantly different, even though they have the same genes. They’ll still look really similar and might be easily confused by strangers (like fraternal twins), but they’re not “identical” in the carbon copy sense.

So physical appearance is pretty darn complicated – obviously those genes don’t have total responsibility.

Behavior is the same thing, but the more complicated the brain, the less you can lay the blame for the behavior on the underlying genetics.

Underlying genetic influence on behavior in a complex organism is significant – but evolutionary psychology doesn’t say “You bought that apple because your genes made you.” The best it can do is show you the overall framework: “You have a genetic tendency to like sweet things but your hypoglycemia means that refined sugars make you feel a little ill sometimes, and you have a slight leaning towards impulsive decisions.”

I’m not really sure that I understand that sentence, but it seems as though you’re setting up a straw man about inevitable behavior. Whoever’s saying that any behavior is inevitable isn’t representative of evolutionary psychology.

And true evolutionary psychologists probably also aren’t saying that there’s a love of shopping gene. They might say that love of shopping is similar to something else that was selected for throughout our evolutionary history.

It’s true that a lot of EP is guesswork, but it’s educated guesswork, and to throw the good out with the silly is a mistake.

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as they apply to humans have been politically touchy subjects because of fears that the concepts could be hijacked by the earlier racist politicoscinonsense of eugenics, which has been thoroughly discredited and discarded. Many who are studying these interactions don’t want to associate themselves or their research with terms “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology” because they understandably feel it is a political liability. But that there is a relationship between the genes, evolution, the environment, neurochemical response and behavior is undeniable and is an extremely interesting subject from a biological perspective. Whatever label one wishes to use, our ability to see how these interactions operate at a physical level has been increasing as fast as the technology improves.

The attempt by some to use sociobiology to explain current human behaviors in terms of evolved responses to a paleolithic environment is problematic because the ideas can’t be tested. There have also been issues with hypotheses that were testable were never tested, just assumed. Without some testing methodology they are little more than speculation. It seems this is the stuff Dagg is going after.

http://ap.viewsonic.com/in/about/finch.php

I don’t suppose it’s genetic, but it’s definitely a conditioned response. Ah, psychology, another branch of science heavily abused and twisted by humans to achieve their nefarious ends.

The attacks by SJG and others on the idea (back when it was called sociobiology) comes from the very real fear that misuse of the concept can justify eugenic arguments, and the history of the last century certainly shows that such fears are based in reality. The problem is keeping the research away from the idealogues who don’t understand what the science is actually saying and hijack it for causes that its conclusions do not support, such as the idea that knowing an individuals genetic makeup can give a deterministic picture of their future behavior.

“The essence of mathematics is its freedom.” –Greorg Cantor

so much of EP seems like it can be cut away with occam’s razor. i like hanging out with friends because they make me laugh and we have fun together. the fact that they might help improve my survival does not cross my mind. i don’t understand why the EP explanation makes a better framework for testing neurochemical response, especially when it doesn’t match our everyday experience.

you can predict that i will respond favorably to the stimuli of seeing my friends without an EP reason. a 5 year old can predict it. we already have a good account of human motives that we rely on every day (which is what distinguishes the string theory example). at best, the EP explanation is superflous; at worst, it’s wrong.

and our normal account of human motives seems to me to be a superior framework in other ways for the kind of testing you’re talking about. it can include cultural factors and historical change. i can predict that a woman in the 18th century will respond more favorably to seeing a dude in a powdered wig than a 21st century woman will; i can give you historical and cultural reasons for the prediction and you can test it. just imagining the EP explanation for that scenario makes my head hurt

I’d never heard the term “Darwinian Psychology” used before (“evolutionary psychology”, yes, but not Darwinian) and i couldn’t help be reminded of the Creationist / Intelligent Design rants which label evolutionary scientists as “Darwinists”. Identifying a scientific field by the name of a founding author makes it sound much more cult-like and so easier to dismiss.

There’s bad scientists, bad science and covert ideology in every field (maybe not mathematics?). Intelligent critiques don’t need straw men.

Oh, Also, a significant portion of our those responses will be adaptive, though, and some of those are among the most interesting.

Nor does evolution have to be adaptive. All that is required is that the trait be heritable. In addition to selection, either natural or social, the modern theory of evolution includes ideas like mutation to introduce new genes, genetic drift which would affect your “non adaptive” traits, and admixture, the movement of genes between semi-isolated gene pools.

Genetic drift can happen when a mutation produces a change to a gene that has no adaptive value whatsoever, such as changing the specific arrangement of the amino acids in a protein that does not result in any phenotypic change, or that produces any change that doesn’t affect fitness. A random walk can take such a neutral change in the expression of a trait to any frequency from 0 to 100 percent within a population over time, even though they are most likely to disappear. Also, you need to consider the idea that since genes tend to be conserved that the particular variant you are looking at was adaptive at some time in the past. And in any case, maladaptive traits would be removed over time.

Gouldian “just so stories” about the adaptive value of complex behaviors are more a product of the publish or perish paradigm of academia than they are a central focus of evolutionary psychology.

The real potential of the field lies in understanding neurochemical responses to environmental stimuli, how those responses affect behavior, and, eventually, how to produce or moderate those responses in ways to improve peoples lives. In this sense, the “evolutionary backstory” provides a framework for understanding the observed responses and can produce testable predictions of responses we would expect to see. They are complementary to understanding the actual physical mechanisms of the interplay between genes, environment and behavior. The value of the research is in the biological side of evolutionary psychology, and while explanations of why a given response is the way it is has value in helping to understand the data and in suggesting paths of research, it can be and often is taken to absurd extremes. The very complexity of the subject can lead to useless flights of fancy.

Anything that would call itself science must be testable, but having a framework within which to develop testable hypotheses can give an idea of what to test for. EP is hardly alone in having this seemingly dualistic nature. Witness string theory, which many physicists think may be the holy grail of understanding the physical universe, but which has been hard pressed to develop testable hypotheses.

Now I’m reading ‘Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind,’ by Gary Marcus – and it’s clarifying why I kept being unconvinced. Marcus’s main point is this: evolution produces solutions and systems that work at the time, and then has to build on those as it goes along. As a result, things are often inelegant, imperfect, flawed – but so long as they work, they stay.

Well, that’s how I’d always *thought* evolution worked! But so much of the evolutionary psychology I’d been reading seems based on the assumption that every little detail of the human mind is adaptive – as though evolution were some kind of all-knowing master crafstman who always builds the perfect system. Too often the argument went something like “we do x, therefore x *must* be beneficial to our survival and/or sexual selection. Which proves my totally speculative theory as to the ‘purpose’ of x.” Marcus is a lot more persuasive in pointing out that x might simply be a side-effect of the peculiar way our minds have evolved over time.

I’m quite prepared to accept that our minds, behaviour and societies have emerged through evolution. But too often evolutionary psychology can sound absurdly similar to Intelligent Design…

The adoption of the term “evolutionary psychology” was an attempt to distance the concept of biological causes of behavior from the firestorm of criticism that “sociobiology” generated from the anti-eugenics crowd and I’ve always thought it was a mistake, specifically because of the reasons you name. The “evolution” part of biochemically driven behavior was never, to my mind, the most interesting part of sociobiology in the first place, and by choosing that as an umbrella title for the concept emphasis was placed on what is the most problematic aspect of whole idea. The most useful part of the evolutionary idea for biochemistry is in molecular evolution, not species evolution, but that is where much of the emphasis has ended up. Perhaps the term should be discarded, since the concepts are being explored across a whole range of disciplines now anyway.

BTW, sociology isn’t real science.

Explaining a human behaviour as having an adaptive significance does not preclude an explanation at a personal level. Understand the difference between ultimate and proximate explanations and how they can explain the same thing without contradicting each other.