[FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

 

So we are going to have to look out for our notions of causality as sources of confusion in the future because my notion of cause is:

 

An C is a cause of an effect, E, if, and only if C and E are classes of events, and

Class C events occur before and contiguously (for Immediate causes) to Class E events,      and

The occurrence of Class C events is statistically associated with an increase in the relative frequency of the occurrence of Class E events. 

 

Some consequences of this formulation are: 

 

1.       Simultaneous events (such as amygdala excitation and anger) canNOT be causes of one another. 

2.       The notion of cause and effect as we deploy it in ordinary language is a category error.  No single event can ever said to be either a cause or an effect of another single event.  

3.       The very notion of causality as applied to ANY historical science – history, evolution, history of the universe, etc., is placed in question.   I don’t know where that argument comes out.  I would like to be able to say things like , “The physical and behavioral dimorphisms observed in the human species are to some degree the result of differential selection upon the two sexes,” but I am not sure how I can. 

 

Nick

 

Nick 

 

                

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 6:09 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

 

OK.  It's good to have you respond directly to the physiology stuff.  Thanks.

 

Yes, I tried to respond to your causal model question.  My response is basically that any causal analysis should target the parts on the "critical path" ... the bottlenecks ... the "rate limiters" ... whatever your language.  In your example below, if happiness can be caused not only by the pill, but by thousands of other things, yet the physiological process is common to it all, then *that's* the important part, not whatever of the thousands of stimuli that might have stimulated it.

 

And, yes, I admit that causality is often thought of in terms of time.  But having struggled with parallelism and redundancy in my own thinking, time isn't what determines cause.  The determinant is the limited resource ... the bottleneck.  In biomedicine, it's the target of intervention.  Even if you think that's a perversion of the word "cause", you should still be able to grok my point.

 

 

On 02/22/2018 04:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Well, that was the point of my bee comment.  We start in the middle somewhere and work out from there.  There is no absolute boundary of the organism.  But as boundaries go, it's a pretty good one, and so we start there.  Once started, we don't switch without a good reason.  

> 

> Did you ever answer my question about how you understand "causality"?   So, let's say I give you a pill and you get happy.  At the behavioral level, I would say that the pill caused the happiness.  At the physiological level, I would say that the chemical in the pill slowed the uptake of serotonin.  Then I might say that the slowing of the uptake of serotonin mediated your improvement of mood.  I am not sure I would say it caused it because CAUSES by my definition have to occur BEFORE the events they cause and the up-take slowing and the mood-improving are going on simultaneously. 

 

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☣ uǝlƃ

 

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