Comments on: Never Is A Long Time

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:05:50 +0000

in practice I think this reduces to the far-less-rigorous position of retaining our ordinary intuitive presumptions about this topic

Maybe that’s true for parts of the general public. But not at all for psychologists. Cognitive psychology has made huge advances in understanding how the mind works – but for some reason, the public only ever wants to hear about brain scans and evolutionary psychology.

By: Frank Hirsch

Frank Hirsch — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:23:16 +0000

wolf:
100% agree with your analysis.
Our brain is shaped to provide evolutionary advantage. The ability to learn the things good and well, which happen to be crucial for the survival of our (individual, both ways) genes at large. There’s good slack in that requirement. Humans have gone the way of understanding (everything they can do, we can do meta in a way probably unparalleled by any other species in our biosphere. We are better at abstracting than all our relatives (the rest of live on earth). But all the reflection we’ve got only allows us to intellectually transcend our evolutionary past. With a bit of education, that one’s quite easy (well, for us). So far, so good. The problem lies in emotionally transcending our past. That one is nigh impossible, I fear. But we are working on the problem… =)

By: wolf

wolf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:19:59 +0000

First time commenter. I believe there is a straw man in Bolhuis quote — the one Eliezer repeated and mocked appropriately: Bolhuis puts up the evolutionary psychologist as a fanatic, blind to alternative explanations. That is weak. There may be ignorant fools among evolutionary psychologists — but you will find those in any other field.

But on the other hand, some evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists (EP/SB) have made fools of themselves, thereby really endangering the discipline’s reputation as a whole. I mean those EP/SBs who fail to recognize that humans are not only driven by primitive evolutionary pressures, but that culture, education, societal values and the like may sometimes e.g. produce a male capable of being faithful or whatever other primitivisms the earlier EB/SBs have ascribed to us.

Dawkins has argued that evolution is really acting blindly — it may produce something that has consequences beyond promoting the welfare of the genes as an “unintended” consequence (QMs because evolution is not an entity — it does not have any intentions, not even promoting the survival of the fittest). Thus, natural selection in the direct survival-of-the-fittest-way is surely not the only thing that shaped our cognitions. We humans may take the opportunity to act against the blind adaptionisms incorporated in our brains, because our brains are able to that. Still, that our brains are able to do that is surely also a consequence of evolution.

By: Frank Hirsch

Frank Hirsch — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:28:52 +0000

Senthil, you’re right that evolutionary psychology could adapt to any new findings in the field of evolution.
But all confirmed biological phenomena are fully explicable by modern evolutionary theory. To swallow fictions a la Gaia theory you’d have to prefer consoling falsehoods to the uncaring truth, as people like Mary Midgley do.

By: Caledonian

Caledonian — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:21:02 +0000

It stresses on coevolution of species rather than natural selection.

Um, natural selection is a process or method, coevolution is a result. One is not an alternative for the other.

By: Senthil

Senthil — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:07:01 +0000

There's another way of looking at evolution which is explained in Darwin's blind spot. It stresses on coevolution of species rather than natural selection. If what this book says explains the evolution of one or more species better than natural selection, a similar approach may be taken in evolutionary psychology as well.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:52:31 +0000

What serious academic evolutionary biologists spend pretty much all day doing is asking how they can show that something is an adaptation for some specific purpose P. As opposed to being an adaptation for some other purpose, or a side effect of an adaptation, or a coincidental property, or a result of pollutants in the drinking water, etc. Academic evolutionary psychologists are a special case of academic evolutionary biologists. Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin systematically misrepresented the nascent field of sociobiology to the public because it got in the way of their Marxism. Roughly, quoting Gould and Lewontin about how evolutionary psychology doesn't consider alternatives to adaptation, is on the order of trying to refute evolutionary psychology by citing Margaret Mead on how the Samoans lack sexual jealousy.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:29:43 +0000

I don’t know the quality of the field of evolutionary psychology, by they have some cool journal article titles, judging by this list of recent Pinker publications:

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/

By: Caledonian

Caledonian — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:26:31 +0000

Cyan, the philosopher says field of inquiry X fails because it does not do Y, and then Eliezer mocks the philosopher as being an ignorant fool. Let us assume for the sake of argument that Eliezer has a good reason for doing so.

Given that information and that assumption, what is a likely and relevant conclusion we can reach about X?

By: Frank Hirsch

Frank Hirsch — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:07:23 +0000

So this guy is actually saying that our knowledge about the processes that formed the receipe for our brain is in no way relevant to the formation and evaluation of hypotheses about the inner workings of said organ?
If that’s the case he’s throwing potentially valuable evidence right out of the window…