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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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I really don't understand the Evo Psych guys. Maybe I'm missing something, but it really seems like their argument goes,
"The Tabula Rasa model is highly unlikely to be a complete explanation of psychology... therefore, we're going to dismiss it completely and focus only how genetic evolution explains people's behavior."
which just seems nonsensical??? I mean, in a modern exceptionally new and recent computerized industrial age, how can you say that with a straight face, much less make an academic career out of it? Learned behavior just has so damn much more explanatory capacity.
The initial purpose of evolutionary psych was to find the reasons humans would evolve mental illnesses with the intent of creating better treatment. For example, Bipolar Disorder may have evolved in areas where humans had limited time outside each season. So bipolar people would have only a few months to do a year's worth of work stockpiling food and firewood. Then they'd be cooped up somewhere safe for months while it snowed and dropped below freezing.
It would make sense, then, if they had bursts of mania followed by bouts of depression. Manic episodes to DO ALL OF THE THINGS NON-STOP CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP and then depressive episodes to increase sleep time and suppress their appetite. Fast forward tens of thousands of years where humans can stay indoors or outdoors all year round. Bipolar conditions that used to be evolutionary necessities are more like vestigial organs, thus causing people distress.
Of course, evolutionary psychology was immediately hijacked by racist eugenicists to do phrenology.
The problem you run into there is that the hypothesis is non-falsifiable - it sounds reasonable, but there's no way to test it, so you get what evolutionary biologists call a "just so story."
The other issue, and what makes it so appealing to "scientific racists," is that it becomes an exercise in justifying social stereotypes, and you get papers like "the reason the women are worse at math is because they didn't need to count mammoths like the men did."
The thing about learned behaviors is that they can be heritable and subject to evolutionary forces in epigenetic ways; if I avoid eating pork because there's a cultural taboo and I'm in an area where trichinosis is prevalent, I have a better chance to survive and produce lots of offspring than my pork-eating neighbors. No need to involve any hypothetical baked-in genetic tendencies to avoid pork. Dawkins talked about it a lot before he went off the Cultural Christianity deep end.