Or maybe it’s because they think it needs practice? I’m in Los Angeles. I’m going to be speaking at 11am and 4:30pm in two different places about Bad Biology: How Adaptationist Thinking Corrupts Science. It might piss some people off, which leaves me unperturbed, since I’m right.
I was actually amused the other night in Fargo when my creationist opponent regurgitated some of the bad claims I’ll be rebutting today. I anticipate getting hate mail from evolutionists and creationists, atheists and Christians after this. But then, that’s nothing new anymore.
Facts are so trollish!
It’s interesting that the CFI advertisement for PZ’s talk in Los Angeles is written in British English (“programme”, “exercize”) .
Will there be video of your talk posted on the web?
By adaptionist you mean someone who thinks everything is an adaptation, correct? It seems an unfortunate word since everyone thinks some things or most things are adaptations of some sort (I would think).
‘Programme’ is British English, but ‘exercize’ ? No way.
You’re just so right Dave. Exercise isn’t British, whether with a Z or an S (note that that proves I’M British).
“Take a walk on the wide side”
That sounds like a much needed talk. I sometimes wonder the degree to which a desire for teleology lurking behind some of the appeal of looking for adaptation everywhere.
#7 @rturpin
I agree. Most “woo” probably emanates from either the desire for, or the misguided inference of, teleology. This might have helped us evolve as a social species, but it wreaks havoc with some people’s internal model of how the universe works. Oh goodness, was that an adaptationist interpretation?
jacksprocket @6 (also davem)
“Exercize” ain’t ‘Merican neither.
Either that, or CFI is being a forth grade English teacher, “Now do it again, but CORRECTLY!~”
Last Embryo @8: it’s the critical principle behind The Secret, isn’t it? If you ask the universe for something the right way, the universe will feel a social obligation to give you what you want.
As to exercise/exercize: I looked it up in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (after donning my ceremonial robes, bowing three times, and removing from its golden box) and it confirms “exercise”, not “exercize”. There are general rules for which words should use -ise and which -ize – apparently going by the etymology of the word rather than anything grammatical – but it’s already lamenting that universal -ise is creeping in, and says “the sacrifice of significance to ease does not seem justified,” which I’m going to disagree with. I certainly don’t see (or miss) -ize much in modern British-English writing. I blame spellcheckers.
So, are you going to make the text of your talk available, then? (That’s Minnesota syntax, not Brit)
I very much enjoy your blog, but I’ve always thought your criticisms of evolutionary psychology to be borderline bizarre, so I am very curious to know what you had to say about it in this particular lecture. Any chance it was taped?
#8 @chrislawson
Interesting. I had not known about “The Secret” until you mentioned it. From what I read of it just now, I would expect it is based on a whole lot of confirmation bias.
I don’t think it was taped. But my views aren’t bizarre: they’re a fairly common opinion among people who know anything at all about evolutionary biology. Here’s a good summary from Russell Gray.
The gist of my talk is that proponents of HBD, EP, and the ENCODE project seem to have a very poor understanding of basic principles of evolutionary biology, and rely on a caricature that omits all mechanisms other than adaptation (and yes, I included lots of examples of them doing just that).
To bad it wasn’t taped, I would have liked to have seen the examples.
As for EP, I read the book “The Atheist and and the Bonobo” a little while back and the researcher was using experimentation to see how attributes like altruism evolved in bonobo’s, chimps and other non-human primates. Although this probably wouldn’t fall under EP, but behavioral primatology, it is an area EP should be working in.
That part was an interesting read, but I couldn’t get through the book because he would complain about new atheist, which for the most part began an ended with Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. He had a narrow view of new atheist and I don’t remember finding his critique of any of them very persuasive. Even more annoying he had a bit of a spiritual new-age slant to some of his writing.
At my institution, EP has been presented as a valid line of inquiry into studying human behavior. The work i’ve read for my classes both by researchers here, and elsewhere, is quite rigorous at least from my limited perspective. While you have said previously that you have read the literature, you may want to check out Daniel T Fessler and Robert Boyd (anthropologists who take the role of culture and of evolution seriously).
Some common criticisms I have seen of EP (lack of field work, too focused on college students, too ready to propose adaptive significance) have not been widely present in my introduction to the field. Perhaps this new eve psych that is proposed in your quote already exists? Or maybe I have been sheltered from particularly awful work in the field?
Ian Boucher, I don’t think anyone (apart from creationists) thinks that evo psych is *inherently* bad science, and it’s certainly possible that there are people doing excellent work on the subject, but unfortunately what gets the most prominent reporting has been invariably *terrible* papers. Seriously, Kanazawa’s paper on sex and colour perception is one of the worst papers I’ve ever read in any field (that wasn’t outright fraudulent) — and yet it got written up completely fawningly in newspapers around the world, The Economist (which prides itself on being highly intelligent and analytical), and even in science journal news columns.
“I don’t think anyone (apart from creationists) thinks that evo psych is *inherently* bad science,”
Well, other than any woman who has ever had the misfortune of encountering it as a justification for keeping the 50s forever, so no one who counts, no.
Seriously, google “evo psych” and “feminism” and discover that evo psych is damn near a curse word to people who want to understand gender in any meaningful way.
But yeah, no one who counts.
Michael Kimmitt@20: Are you being deliberately obtuse? I know exactly why evo psych has a bad reputation. I even wrote about it in the comment you responded to. Most scientists, even the most ardent critics of evo psych, would say there is no *inherent* reason why the influence of evolution on psychology could not be a valuable field of scientific research. The problem is that the work that has been published is generally of terrible quality that tends to support conservative moral positions with utterly flawed research and that as a result, the field has a huge credibility problem. Which is what I said. Unambiguously. I even specifically pilloried Kanazawa’s evo psych paper as one of the worst papers I’ve ever read.
You response was, “how dare you acknowledge even the *possibility* of evolutionary psychology being worth studying? You obviously think feminist opinions don’t count.” To which my reply is, fuck off you smarmy intellectual bigot.
I’ll take smarmy, but bigot’s a bit weird for someone who’s tired of just-so stories to keep women barefoot and pregnant.
At this point, evo psych is just so utterly tainted by the transparent agenda of its proponents that it needs to go to sleep for a few decades and wake up again later when we are capable of studying it. Yes, there’s probably some good mileage to be gotten doing empirical work comparing us to other animals, and once we’ve done a lot of that, someone can burn everything that says “evo psych” to the ground and start over and maybe come up with something useful.
But right now? It’s pseudoscience designed to harm women.
Michael Kimmitt, heard of the naturalistic fallacy?
Bringing up “just so” stories again and again seems like an easy way to write off the field “just because.” “Burning EP to the ground” would, in my opinion, destroy a lot of good stuff and at least a few good researcher’s entire careers. While I see your point and agree that science should not be motivated by, or justify sexism, you have blinders on if you are not widely read in the field. We can safely do research in the field without waiting a “few decades” if we are careful to distinguish what is natural from what is moral/ethical. And this is done routinely in science.
Michael, your bigotry is not towards women, but towards evo-psych. I’m more than happy for evo-psych papers to be criticised — I’ve done so myself, venomously in some cases, and I think the field has a huge credibility problem that is entirely deserved — but you’ve claimed that the entire field has to be put to sleep for decades and then the old studies burnt to the ground. The only way you could possibly justify that is if you can show that every paper ever published in evo-psych and every paper that will be published in evo-psych for the next few decades is “pseudoscience designed to harm women.” And since I don’t believe you have can possibly demonstrate that, I’m going to continue to classify the statement as bigotry.
so… you’re Gould now?
delusions of grandeur indeed.
;)
in the 70s it was sociobiology.
likewise, since it was a logical extension of evolutionary theory, there was nothing inherently wrong with the premise.
it was people, just like Kanazawa, who did really stupid shit and gave it a bad name.
some of us are old enough to have seen this cycle repeat itself.
You’ve got your cause and effect backwards, Michael.
There are people out there right now who want to harm women, and they grab evo-psych as a tool to do it because it happens to be there. You can burn evo-psych to the bedrock all you want, and these people will simply grab another convenient tool to do what they want to do, which is harm women. If you start over, you will not “come up with something useful”, so long as those people who want to harm women still remain, as they will simply take whatever it is you come up with, and use it to harm women.
Conversely, remove the people who want to harm women and the societal attitudes that motivate them, and the problem of evo-psych being used to harm women goes away.