Post by Admin on Oct 11, 2021 10:15:23 GMT
What Explains the Resistance to Evolutionary Psychology?
quillette.com/2019/04/08/what-explains-the-resistance-to-evolutionary-psychology/
A recent study conducted by evolutionary psychologists, David Buss and William von Hippel, has found empirical support for the claim that evolutionary psychology is a controversial field among social psychologists.1 Their study titled, “Psychological Barriers to Evolutionary Psychology: Ideological Bias and Coalitional Adaptations,” posed questions to social psychologists to assess their political orientation and their attitudes towards evolutionary psychology, specifically, the extent to which evolutionary theory applies to humans. The responses of the social psychologists to the question of whether Darwinian evolution applies to human minds were highly variable despite being in near unanimous agreement that Darwinian evolution is not only true, but also applies to physical human traits.
Further questions revealed that their discomfort with the notion of evolved minds was neither due to religious beliefs nor to beliefs in human specialness, but were due to their varying opinions on “hot button variables” in evolutionary psychology. These included topics such as genetic tendencies for violence, universal standards of beauty, and psychological sex differences. In other words, evolutionary theory becomes contentious when it veers away from the human body to the human mind.
In his article for Quillette, Colin Wright wrote that evolutionary theory is and always has been controversial among the general public, but not to scientists. However, the branch of evolutionary theory that has proved most controversial to scientists is evolutionary psychology.
While evolutionary psychology may be controversial among social psychologists, evolutionary theory in general is one of the most well-substantiated theories in all of science. Only evolutionary theory can explain the organized complexity of life in contrast to simple, nonliving matter. Scientists unanimously agree that the intricately designed human eye is an adapted organ, one that arose not by chance, but through the gradual process of natural selection. However, many fail to expand this argument to the far more complex organ of which the eye is an extension, and into which the eye carries all its information, the human brain. This is especially concerning given that scientists almost exclusively invoke evolutionary theory in order to understand the mental processes and behavioral patterns of all other animals.
While Buss and Hippel’s study only found some empirical support for their hypotheses about ideology and evolutionary psychology, since its inception, the field has unfairly received an unfair amount of criticism. Since the field has existed, evolutionary psychology, then referred to as “sociobiology,” has received enormous pushback from academics. It came under fiery criticism in a letter written in the 1970s titled, “Against ‘Sociobiology,’” which was signed by a number of prominent scientists such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who were particularly hostile to the field. This letter sparked a big debate in the scientific community of the relevance of evolutionary analyses on human psychology. The chain of pushback against the findings of evolutionary psychology has continued right up into the present day especially when it comes to psychological differences between the sexes.
Recently, psychologist Michael Reichert, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times suggesting that boy’s “tendency towards violence isn’t innate.” He writes, “Boys don’t come into the world with some inborn tendency toward domination or violence” rather, “violence springs from what boys learn about what it means to be a man.”
quillette.com/2019/04/08/what-explains-the-resistance-to-evolutionary-psychology/
A recent study conducted by evolutionary psychologists, David Buss and William von Hippel, has found empirical support for the claim that evolutionary psychology is a controversial field among social psychologists.1 Their study titled, “Psychological Barriers to Evolutionary Psychology: Ideological Bias and Coalitional Adaptations,” posed questions to social psychologists to assess their political orientation and their attitudes towards evolutionary psychology, specifically, the extent to which evolutionary theory applies to humans. The responses of the social psychologists to the question of whether Darwinian evolution applies to human minds were highly variable despite being in near unanimous agreement that Darwinian evolution is not only true, but also applies to physical human traits.
Further questions revealed that their discomfort with the notion of evolved minds was neither due to religious beliefs nor to beliefs in human specialness, but were due to their varying opinions on “hot button variables” in evolutionary psychology. These included topics such as genetic tendencies for violence, universal standards of beauty, and psychological sex differences. In other words, evolutionary theory becomes contentious when it veers away from the human body to the human mind.
In his article for Quillette, Colin Wright wrote that evolutionary theory is and always has been controversial among the general public, but not to scientists. However, the branch of evolutionary theory that has proved most controversial to scientists is evolutionary psychology.
While evolutionary psychology may be controversial among social psychologists, evolutionary theory in general is one of the most well-substantiated theories in all of science. Only evolutionary theory can explain the organized complexity of life in contrast to simple, nonliving matter. Scientists unanimously agree that the intricately designed human eye is an adapted organ, one that arose not by chance, but through the gradual process of natural selection. However, many fail to expand this argument to the far more complex organ of which the eye is an extension, and into which the eye carries all its information, the human brain. This is especially concerning given that scientists almost exclusively invoke evolutionary theory in order to understand the mental processes and behavioral patterns of all other animals.
While Buss and Hippel’s study only found some empirical support for their hypotheses about ideology and evolutionary psychology, since its inception, the field has unfairly received an unfair amount of criticism. Since the field has existed, evolutionary psychology, then referred to as “sociobiology,” has received enormous pushback from academics. It came under fiery criticism in a letter written in the 1970s titled, “Against ‘Sociobiology,’” which was signed by a number of prominent scientists such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who were particularly hostile to the field. This letter sparked a big debate in the scientific community of the relevance of evolutionary analyses on human psychology. The chain of pushback against the findings of evolutionary psychology has continued right up into the present day especially when it comes to psychological differences between the sexes.
Recently, psychologist Michael Reichert, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times suggesting that boy’s “tendency towards violence isn’t innate.” He writes, “Boys don’t come into the world with some inborn tendency toward domination or violence” rather, “violence springs from what boys learn about what it means to be a man.”