|
Post by Tamrin on Mar 15, 2013 5:36:06 GMT 10
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” - Murray N. Rothbard. The same may be said of many disciplines. See the Dunning-Kruger effect.Evolutionary Psychology has raised the Dunning-Kruger effect to the status of an pseudoscientific discipline. It's devotees blithely presume to expound on matters which are the bailiwick of Evolutionary Biology, empirical Psychology, Neuroscience, Genetics, Anthropology, Ethology, Ethnology, etc. and on which experts in those fields differ.
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 18, 2013 12:41:32 GMT 10
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 18, 2013 13:25:10 GMT 10
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 18, 2013 13:36:42 GMT 10
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 23, 2013 21:41:24 GMT 10
Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic Philip Zimbardo American professor of psychology (Stanford Prison Study) (Born this day 1933)
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 29, 2013 18:46:18 GMT 10
The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells
The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states
There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists
It is characteristic of the design of scientific research that exquisite attention is devoted to methodo- logical problems that can be solved, while the pretense is made that the ones that cannot be solved are really nothing to worry about. On the one hand, biologists will apply the most critical and de- manding canons of evidence in the design of measuring instruments or in the procedure for taking an unbiased samples of organisms to be tested, but when asked whether the conditions in the labor- atory are likely to be relevant to the situation in nature, they will provide a hand-waving intuitive argu- ment filled with unsubstantiated guesses and prejudices because, in the end, that is all they can do
The division between those who try to learn about the world by manipulating it and those who can only observe it had led, in natural science, to a struggle for legitimacy. The experimentalists look down on the observers as merely telling uncheckable just-so stories, while the observers scorn the experimentalists for their cheap victories over excessively simple phenomena. In biology the two camps are now generally segregated in separate academic departments where they can go about their business unhassled by their unbelievers. But the battle is unequal because the observers' consciousness of what it is to do "real" science has been formed in a world dominated by the man- ipulators of nature. The observers then pretend to an exactness that they cannot achieve and they attempt to objectify a part of nature that is completely accessible only with the air of subjective tools
An important consequence of the unique interaction between internal and external forces ... is that knowledge of genetic differences contain no information at all about whether a characteristic can be changed by environmental and social arrangements. The most elementary error about genetics and development is to suppose that "genetic" is the opposite of "change- able" and that an answer to the question "how much can a trait be changed by social, historical and individual circumstances" is given by an answer to the question "how important are genes?"
To say that genetic differences are relevant to hetero- and homosexuality is not, however, to say that there are "genes for homosexuality" or even that there is a "genetic tendency to homosexuality." This critical point can be illustrated by an example I owe to the philosopher of science, Elliott Sober. If we look at the chromosomes of people who knit and those who do not, we will find that with few exceptions, knitters have two X chromosomes [women], while people with one X and one Y chromosome [men] almost never knit. Yet it would be absurd to say that we had discovered genes for knitting. ... n our culture, women are taught to knit and men are not. The beauty of this example is its historical (and geographical) contin- gency. Had we made our observations before the end of the eighteenth century (or even now in a few Irish, Scottish and Newfoundland communities), the results would have been reversed. Hand knitting was men's works before the introduction of knitting machines around 1790, and was turned into a female domestic occupation only when mechanization made it economically marginal
Richard C. Lewontin American evolutionary biologist and geneticist (Not in Our Genes) (Born this day 1929)
Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Mar 29, 2013 18:51:41 GMT 10
The conduct and actions of every individual are dependent upon the character, manners, and modes of thought of the nation to which he belongs. These again are, to a certain extent, the necessary product of external circumstances under which they live and have grown up Ludwig Büchner (Born this day 1924)
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Apr 2, 2013 19:08:56 GMT 10
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan. Evolutionary Psychologists claim to challenge the so-called Standard Social Science Model (S.S.S.M.). In other words they claim to oppose what they over-state to be a long-established standard model of all the other social sciences. That qualifies as an extraordinary claim. Where all other evidence have been found wanting and they are left depending on subjective and non-empirical Bayesian analyses and on misapplied and vague epigenetic appeals their case scarcely qualifies as having extraordinary evidence (more an instance of wishful and creative thinking). What is required is at least one specific example of a complex human behaviour rooted in an innate psychology. This is no more than asking an anatomist to specify and describe a body part of their choice. Without that Evolutionary Psychology has no subject matter. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_social_science_modeland tamrin.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=maths&thread=2106&page=2#19626and tamrin.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=biology&thread=2246&page=1#19696
|
|
|
Post by Smithee on Apr 4, 2013 11:21:05 GMT 10
L.O.L. I do not expect they will find specific and innate sites for waist/hip ratio preferences or for gender differences in driving skills. Nor do I expect Evolutionary Psychologists to abandon the field. After all they have persisted this far despite a lack of valid evidence.
|
|
|
Post by Tamrin on Apr 4, 2013 20:06:31 GMT 10
Nor do I expect Evolutionary Psychologists to abandon the field. After all they have persisted this far despite a lack of valid evidence. I see an analogy with Egyptology before and after Champollion. Before Champollion, what has been described as “Hieroglyphic delirium" held sway and people could and did assign weird and fanciful significance to the “sacred glyphs” for their own purposes. After Champollion, Egypto-mania received a dose of reality and evidence based Egyptology came to the fore. I'm hoping that with the Brain Initiative, EP will undergo a similar transformation.
|
|