Steve Pinker has a video about evolutionary psychology that has a lot of information. Steve said there was no good theory for why we like music and rhythm. Some people have said that music-making men might leave more offspring because they get more mates, but that's just not true. It appeals to those mates.
The lesson to me is that we can understand a lot about our present behaviors if we look at how they were adaptive in the past. Evolutionary psychology includes non adaptive atavisms like our love of sweets.
The fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology are not true. I'm guilty of misrepresenting his views because he never said brains weren't evolved. P.Z. said this last week.
The brain is a material product of evolution, and behavior is a product of the brain. There are natural causes for everything all the way down. And further, I have great respect for psychology, evolutionary biology, ethology, physiology, anthropology, anatomy, comparative biology — and I consider all of those disciplines to have strong integrative ties to evolutionary biology. Does Coyne really believe that I am critiquing the evolved nature of the human brain? Because otherwise, this is a completely irrelevant statement.
Evolutionary psychology has its own special methodology and logic, and that’s what I criticize — not anthropology or evolutionary biology or whatever. Somehow these unique properties get conveniently jettisoned whenever a critic wanders by, only to be re-adopted without reservation within the exercise of the discipline. And that’s really annoying.
What I object to in evolutionary psychology is that their stock in trade is to make observations of behavior in a single species, often in a single population, and then to infer an evolutionary history from that data point. You don’t get to do that. It’s not that the observations are invalid (they’re often interesting in their own right), or that it’s not possible that human behaviors carry a strong genetic component — it’s that you simply can’t draw an evolutionary conclusion from the simple existence of a trait in a population. Yet evolutionary psychologists do, all the time.
I am not saying that the evolution of the human brain is denied by the author. How did he come up with that idea? The entire discipline of evolutionary psychology is bogus, doing weak experiments that aren't further tested, that it suffers from its own self-serving methods, and that hypotheses about the historical can't be disproven. It is not true that evolutionary psychology studies are limited to one human population or only Humans. Multiple populations are often used to test generalizations about our species and there are parallels with animals.
The field has had its share of shoddy work, but there are some strong conclusions to be found. The brain is a product of evolution and so are many of our modern behaviors, so brushing off an entire field because of some shoddy work at the field's inception is ludicrous.
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