The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag

[Prophet 451]

10. EvoPsych is, at best, an emerging science

I think you and I might have discussed this before.

The main problem with EvoPsych is that it takes our social and gender roles now and tries to extrapolate them backwards to find evolutionary bases for them. Now, that would be all fine and dandy if human social and gender roles had been in any way static in the last 10k years (which, with a couple of minor exceptions, they haven't) and if human behaviour wasn't able to be consciously modified as we see fit.

Example of the first part: Most of our "traditional" gender constructs used to be the exact opposite. In the classical world, it was women who were believed to be the sexually insatiable sex (actual research says that both sexes are pretty insatiable but that's a different story). Blue used to be a feminine colour and pink was masculine. At one point, women were considered to not be tough enough for nursing or midwifeing. I'm not entirely a social constructivist, I think there are certain inherent differences between men and women but they're few, slight and more what you might call guidelines than actual rules (research data says there is more of a difference between members of teh same gender than there is between the averages of male and female).

Example of what I mean with the second part of that: It may be the case that rape originally came into existence to allow less successful males to spread their genes. That's not an unreasonable supposition because we see that in animals all the time. But A) that would have been back when humans were little more than a slightly less hairy ape and B) neglects that most of human history has been a flight away from nature. In other words, just because our distant ancestors used rape as a reproductive strategy doesn't in any way mean that it's acceptable for modern humans to do likewise.

There's also the uncomfortable fact that much of EvoPsych amounts to a wild ass guess. It makes no predictions that can be tested, just offers possible explanations that maybe could be plausable explanations for some gender roles. If they were consistent. And if we hadn't been changing them for thousands of years.

Thank you for listening to my frustrations from the EvoPsych module I had to do last year.