Tuesday, December 04, 2012

John Wilkins Defends Evolutionary Psychology

It's really hard to maintain one's reputation as a curmudgeon. John Wilkins is having a particularly tough time these days since most of his poss are quite reasonable and rational. I even agree with him on most days.

In an effort to correct this problem, John has decided to defend evolutionary psychology [Eww, I stepped in some evolutionary psychology and other crap]. I posted a comment explaining why he was wrong.

Those of you who are fans of this crap discipline might want to jump on over to Evolving Thoughts and help him out.

He needs you.
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1 comment:

  1. PedroWednesday, December 05, 2012 5:19:00 AM

    From the link:

    "But what some people, including (I know from personal contact) PZ and Larry Moran, object to about EP is what Gould called “panadaptationism” and “Just-So” storification."

    I agree with this. I don't agree, however, that EP in itself is an unworthy pursuit. What we need is on one hand to get rid of the idea that everything is the result of adaptation and on the other hand psychologists need far more background in evolutionary theory than they have to avoid the pitfall above. Right now EP is a young discipline going through its spasms. Evolutionary psychologists need to clean up their act or EP will indeed amount to little more than "just so" crap.

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