[FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

[uǝlƃ ☣]

OK.  But I believe I merely asked the question: Why talk about these vague behaviors like "dress for sex", when we can talk about reasonably well-defined things like hormones and neurotransmitters?  What explanatory power does evopsych have that, say, evolutionary neuroscience would not have?

One possible answer is that evopsych allows us to tap into folktales like Jungian archetypes, even if only so we can trick people into believing our rhetoric.  That trickery is power of a kind, explanatory or not.  Science popularizers walk that thin line all the time.  But is there something *more*?

Re: thread pollution --
I don't think it's a big deal.  The forum is asynchronous.  Anyone can read or not read, reply or not reply, to any post at any time.  It was easier, I'll admit, when the archives worked.

On 02/21/2018 12:37 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> my argument should be more
> correctly that *IF* we are going to make a drastic oversimplification of
> natural selection,reducing it to *selecting for form* to the exclusion
> of *selecting for function* is not warranted, except perhaps to make the
> point that the vice-versa is also bogus?  I responded (reacted) to your
> seeming to prefer the form over the function and suggested that bias
> might be because it was more easily measured/quantified?
> 
> I agree that natural selection is multiscale and that one must consider
> selection of the "ecosystem of self" which would include the human
> microbiome, which based on generational scale alone would be presumed to
> evolve much more quickly than humans whose characteristic reproductive
> time scale is on the order of decades rather than days or even hours.
> 
> I can't tell if we are converging or if we are refolding in the
> subthreads that Dave and Nick (and others) intended.  Threads here seem
> to easily/naturally diverge (fray?).


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☣ uǝlƃ