Things undergraduates with a burgeoning interest in evolutionary psychology say

"Men evolved to be promiscuous"

wait is this crosslisted with the "what assholes say" thread

can be

"Bullying is in our DNA"

"I've got a biological imperative to spread my seed widely!"

http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/201004071446.jpg

"black people, no look i'm sorry, but this is proven science, are (something racist here)”

"women are noisier than men while having sex to attract other potential mates in the area"

"man what kind of meds are you taking that turn you into a really incompetent troll on an internet message board"

whenever someone starts to get evo-psych in a conversation i automatically assume they're an MRA

*sigh*

Some of evolutionary psychology is obvious bullshit. (e.g. -- it doesn't even try to account for homosexuality.) Some of it is partly true, and fascinating reading. All of it is untestable and unprovable, so take from it what you will, but don't write another book about it, fer chrissakes.

Not even a book about how it's bullshit. I'm just tired of it.

CENSORSHIP

http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP11405414.pdf

evolutionary psychology, don't ever change.

(http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/hetero-cunnilingus-apparently-its-to-stop-you-cheating/)

gosh, how clever of them to solve this eternal conundrum with science

this shit is the 21st century equivalent of those 19th century anthropologists that went around measuring the skulls of "primitive" peoples

"Men may perform oral sex on their partner to detect her sexual infidelity by smelling and tasting other men’s semen near or within her vagina"

no homo

dunno about you guys but that would be the last reason for me to do that

the bibliography is spectacular, one hit after another, e.g. Pham, M. N., and Shackelford, T. K., 'The relationship between objective sperm competition risk and men’s copulatory interest is moderated by partner’s time spent with other men', in Human Nature.

thats the sort of premium scholarship everyone expects from the faculty of the #138 ranked research university in the midwest

dunno about you guys but that would be the last reason for me to do that

it's ok their research didn't support that hypothesis.

Schmitt, D. P., and Buss, D. M. (2001), 'Human mate poaching: Tactics and temptations for
infiltrating existing mateships' in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

evolutionary psychology turned into pick up artistry so gradually i oh who am i kidding.

m8ships

m8 do u even ship

D.P. Schmitt's paper 'Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism' couldn't possibly live up to what I'm hoping for.

m8ship infiltration has been shown to require a high level of homosocial affinity, possession of intoxicants and a repertory of quality bantz

Deleted scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey- 3 million years ago, extra terrestrial monolith teaching an ape about 'negging'. Scene ends with focus on a primitively fashioned fedora being tossed in the air in triumph.

D.P. Schmitt's paper 'Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism' couldn't possibly live up to what I'm hoping for.

i was all set up to do some academia.edu-based gawping but even trying to read the mate-poaching one filled me with such a terrible sorrowful feeling of the pointlessness of all human activity.

"I will now proceed to make wild-assed guesses about things I cannot possibly prove, and then claim that if you cannot disprove them they should be accepted as true."

No wait. They never say that, do they?

I'm going to struggle to articulate this, but they seem to find great difficulty in getting that, while something some people do today might be accounted for by some sort of evolutionary backstory, so can everything else people might do/have done/will one day do, to exactly the same degree.

At times I'm tempted to say that 'It has to be this way because we sciencey evolvey sciencey facty facty' is the new 'It has to be this way because heaveny goddy souly spirity mysteriousy fatey'

if you were to say that i would be likely to agree with you

we live in a scientistic episteme i guess!

aye xp

god i hate these ppl so much. seriously would rather hang out with creationists.

Coming up with massive handwavy generalised baseless explanations for things seems to be a fundamental human trait, there must be an evolutionary advantage to it. Which must have been ordained by God.

religion is often (usually!) aesthetically beautiful, nuanced, inclusive. the aesthetics of evolutionary psychology are null. on this basis they should be laughed at, for three seconds, and then completely ignored

kinda wish and what still posted, I quite fancy a flamewar. dammit though I got shit to write. another day

religion is often (usually!) aesthetically beautiful, nuanced, inclusive. the aesthetics of evolutionary psychology are null.

talking of handwavy sweeping baseless generalisations...

paleo diet jesus begs to differ.

At least within the 'sigh it twas ever thus because god soul mystery mysteriousness' paradigm there's a sense of 'this sucks', whereas in evo-psych there's a sense of 'so shut up'.

I suppose because there's an in-built 'we are totally not bulshitting to justify bullshit' idea in evo-psych. 'We're 'scientists' who deal with 'facts', not for us the foolish fanaticism of those people with whom we share 99% of our assumptions about gender, race and society.'

i like to think of this as a compulsion to turn contingency into necessity--the irony of that tendency being of course that it's a primary characteristic of evolving systems seeking stability, autonomy, reproduction, etc. and as i said on the other thread, it's this emphasis or search for underlying necessity which betrays some fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary theory as a new paradigm for "natural" (opposed to theological) necessity rather than as a re-introduction of contingency and chance into supposedly deterministic systems. (or that systems involve some complicated relationship between determinism and chance/evolution).

you could even go so far as to argue that, in contemporary understanding, both biological and communicational systems (like language or culture) are constituted through that very distinction between determinism and contingency (as in contingency represents the "environment" of the system--even that some "second order" systems understand themselves as that very distinction!

this literal-minded type of evolutionary psychology hasn't really progressed to that second-order move yet, and that's why it's stuck making simplistic claims for natural necessity.

I stole Bananaman Begins' 2001 joke and now I feel guilty, presumably because being a comedy hack slows the sperm.

https://theconversation.com/why-the-a-level-psychology-exam-is-already-out-of-date-48853

A-Level students learning a bit of bluntly racist evopsych, why not

Read the item and then answer the question that follows.

News correspondents in inner cities have remarked upon how young males frequently carry weapons and engage in threatening behaviour.

Using your knowledge of evolutionary explanations of aggression, account for these high levels of aggression in young males.

[...]

The sample mark scheme on the AQA website sets out the framework for marking the question as follows:

Male aggression derives from need to acquire/defend resources such as mates or territory (in the city) and/or to establish status (in groups of peers or between gangs); male aggression derives from sexual jealousy of other males who may have sex with or steal their mates.

"Arab women evolved to have beautiful eyes because it was the only thing you could see when they were wearing veils." is a thing I actually heard from another student in college.