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Von's avatar

I actually find it fascinating to listen to evolutionary psychologists, and marvel at their naivete.

First of all, they seem totally ignorant of how many of the things that they say 'evolved to do this' would work equally well with 'God designed to do this'.

The second is how much their language doesn't fit their thesis. "The pre-elephant saw that it needed a longer trunk to reach higher leaves' or some such. As if! They use design and intention language throughout their prose, tho it contradicts their thesis. I just heard a podcast with Dawkins and he did this continually.

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Clark Coleman's avatar

7. Realize that much of evolutionary psychology consists of providing an explanation that is plausible, which is not the same thing as substantiating an explanation. Then realize that scholarly domains that depend on getting others to believe your plausible claims, beyond all hope of ever proving them true, are inferior domains of scholarship, the kind of domains that usually end up with enforced conformity to a "consensus" opinion.

For example, evo-psych proposes that men are attracted to young women because they are fertile and have years of fertility left. But I can come up with other plausible conjectures, even a different evo-psych conjecture: In ancient societies, females were matched up with males not too many years after puberty, so if any male tended to prefer 30 year old women, he would find himself pursuing women who were already matched up, leading to his violent death.

There is also the possibility that aesthetics are involved. Maybe young skin looks better than older skin, and evo-psych has nothing to do with it.

Has anyone identified a gene or group of genes responsible for this male preference? Of course not.

Mere plausibility is a weak basis for any "scientific" field.

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