[FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

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But, again, testosterone obviously plays more roles in our behaviors than a behavior pattern of "tad more assertive".  Do you mean animals with ZERO testosterone are the control and those with some tiny amount are a tad more assertive?  Or do you mean the (fictitious) average person who takes an external dose of it becomes a tad more assertive than they otherwise would be?

Your position is confusing.  Testosterone is a ubiquitous part of a *complex* of structure and behavior.  And it's the complex that is selected for or against.  It seems to make perfect sense to suggest that "the complex of physiological processes of which testosterone is a part" has been selected.  Formulating it into something testable would mean (in my naive view) checking for animals that don't use testosterone and finding where they relate, how they interact, if they compete, etc. Again, naively, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Other_animals might imply that testosterone is more competitive than androstenedione, 11-ketotestosterone, and ecdysone (whatever the hell those are).  If it helps you, I'm happy to say "systems involving testosterone are more competitive than systems involving ...".

Then again, maybe it doesn't imply that, at all.  Maybe one could argue that each different male hormone is the most competitive in the niche we find it in.  Fine.  We'd have to explore the other (systems involving) other hormones that have gone extinct or are rare variants in those niches.  But to claim some *vague* "behavior pattern" is a more clear topic in the context of natural selection seems strange to me.  It seems like you're piling vague concepts on top of vague concepts ignoring huge swaths of available data.



On 02/21/2018 10:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Let's imagine that (as I believe) that testosterone is an aggression hormone.  It's effect on the nervous system is, other things being equal, to make a person a tad more assertive in all domains of action.  Let it be the case that a little more assertiveness in all domains leads to reproductive success.  The nature will be selecting not for the individual behaviors but for the "style" of behaving.  Now, I call a style of behaving, a behavior, or a behavior pattern, or a meta-behavior, or a behavioral design.  What have you.  So talk of selecting for behavior doesn't bother me.  I am not quite sure what "selecting for testosterone" would mean.  When it comes to evolution, behavior functions, physiology mediates.  


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