Rationally Speaking #18 - Evolutionary Psychology
Rationally Speaking Podcast
New York City Skeptics
4.6 • 787 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2010
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You’ve heard the claims: men are inclined to cheat on women because natural selection favors multiple offspring from multiple mates, especially if you don’t have to pay child support. Even rape has been suggested to be the result of natural selection in favor of “secondary mating strategies” when the primary ones fail. Welcome to evolutionary psychology, a discipline curiously situated at the interface between evolutionary science and pop psychology, where both wild and reasonable claims seem to clash against the wall of an incredible scarcity of pertinent data.
The issue is not whether it makes sense to apply evolutionary principles to the study of human behavior. Of course it does, human beings are no exception to evolution. But the devil is in the details, and the details deal with the complexities and nuances of how exactly evolutionary biologists test adaptive hypotheses, as well as with the nature of historical science itself.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education. |
| 0:22.4 | For more information, please visit us at NYCCEptics.org. |
| 0:31.2 | Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlines between reason and |
| 0:40.0 | nonsense. I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host Julia Galev. |
| 0:46.0 | Julia, what are we going to talk about today? Massimo, today we're going to talk about the field of |
| 0:50.5 | evolutionary psychology, which, in the words of two of the field's founders, |
| 0:54.8 | Tubian Cosmides, is simply psychology informed by the fact that the inherited architecture |
| 0:59.9 | of the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process. But that innocuous sounding |
| 1:05.0 | statement hides a mountain of controversy. The field has more than its fair share of critics |
| 1:09.7 | who charge that evolutionary psychology |
| 1:11.5 | is unscientific, inventing all too convenient explanations for human behavior that they either don't |
| 1:17.9 | test rigorously or can't test at all, even in principle. Right. I think we should clear the air |
| 1:24.6 | right at the beginning from a couple of misconceptions. I think that, for instance, |
| 1:29.2 | although I count myself among the critics of evolutionary psychology, broadly speaking, |
| 1:34.6 | the statement you read by Tubian Cosemites is in fact very reasonable. I mean, it would be |
| 1:40.3 | unreasonable to imagine that, of all things, human behavioral traits are the only |
| 1:44.2 | things that didn't evolve. |
| 1:46.1 | Since evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory in general is the way we explain the characteristics |
| 1:51.9 | of modern-day living forms, it seems bizarre to say that something like at least partial |
| 1:58.9 | aspects of human behavior did not evolve, and it would be even |
| 2:02.0 | strange to claim that they didn't involve by natural selection. Surely some aspects of human |
| 2:06.6 | behavior evolved by natural selection. Of course, the problem is in the details. The devil is in the |
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