Evolutionary psychology is mostly garbage.

Did our psyches evolve? Are human behaviors and thoughts subject to natural selection? If you ask an evolutionary psychologist, they would say yes, nearly every human action has a biological explanation. And yet, many take issue with this perspective and with the field of evolutionary psychology as a whole. It's sometimes seen as a fringe field. In this video, I outline my own thoughts regarding evolutionary psychology and some of the big issues that hold it back from being taken more seriously.

Sources:
Buller, David J. “Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology.” Scientific American, doi:10.1038/scientificamericanhuman1112-44.

Burke, Darren. “Why Isn't Everyone an Evolutionary Psychologist?” Frontiers in Psychology, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00910.

Holcomb, Harmon R. “Just so Stories and Inference to the Best Explanation in Evolutionary Psychology.” doi:10.1007/bf00389657.

Lloyd, Elisabeth A., and Marcus W. Feldman. “COMMENTARY: Evolutionary Psychology: A View From Evolutionary Biology.” doi:10.1207/s15327965pli1302_04.

Lloyd, Elisabeth A. “Evolutionary Psychology: The Burdens of Proof.” doi:10.1023/a:1006638501739.

Sterelny, Kim, and Julie "Fitness. From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology." Psychology Press, 2014.

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[neurotransmissions]

Sorry about the audio from 4:39 to 7:39. Those clips got boosted accidentally, so apologies if it blows out your eardrums!

[rodriguezelfeliz]

I think that Robert Sapolsky explains it well... it's just one of the many buckets we have to explain behaviour. On it's own it's not that great, but in the context of all other buckets it can help us to understand behaviour.

[goclbert]

Humans evolved as social animals and they derive value from caring relationships. The fact that we care for a pets is a byproduct of our relationship with our own species. Pets initially provided a material benefit of keeping pests away, etc but now this emotional comfort is the primary driver of pet ownership.

[MaxMcAdams]

pet-keeping evolved so we had someone to practice our werner herzog impressions on

[shamanahaboolist]

The biggest problem with EP isn't EP. It's the interpretation of EP as a "so born this way" premise for justifying destructive behaviours. Genetic determinism is false. Genetic influencing there is a strong case for.

The reality is that psychology is information. The overwhelming influencing factor behind it is environmental information.

There is observably a feedback loop which preserves patterns forged in a living entity's life time and passes those patterns on to the next generations. Some point to epigenetics and there maybe clues there. But the truth is we don't understand the mechanisms behind preservation of behaviours into the genetic code (if that even really is a part of the mechanism since it only really preserves protein structure). All we can really say for sure by looking at studies of identical twins is that genetic influencing is a thing, but is absolutely overridden by environmental influence and the elusive "free will" or "qualia" which commands and directs the mind.

[MegaSudjai]

21 minutes in: a significant anti-bias bias, which explains the obviously click bait headline.
There is a fundamental flaw in the "essence" part of this argument: the impact that chronic Fear has on how organisms evolve/de-evolve. Something that this guy is high in I think

[paulfoss]

Humans evolved to have pets to keep them calm during bad trips, enabling them to consume more shrooms which gave them a selective advantage because they were able to galaxy brain their non pet owning opponents back into the pre-stone(d) age.

[comradetortoise]

Note: I'm an entomologist and behavioral ecologist. I don't think there *is* a strictly adaptationist explanation for our keeping pets. I can't even come up with a Just-So Story about it. My brain just refuses. It's a combination of exaptation and spandrels that itself may have been the subject of diffuse selection pressures and co-evolution. We are incredibly social. Humans will form parasocial bonds with a mars rover because its optical sensors give it a cute face.

That's probably a spandrel. It's just a byproduct of the fact that our brains want to form social bonds. Some bold/friendlier wolves begged for campfire scraps. Those wolves were selected for because we thought they were cute and fed them. It turns out, having wolves in your corner helps you hunt and fend off predators. That's an exaptation. So we integrate our social groups with these friendly wolves, and start co-evolving with them. It's a similar story with cats when we started doing agriculture (except now, the expansive sense of empathy we have has been defininitively extended to non-humans) and on it goes.

[bobboby]

I feel like you're assuming that what is natural is what is right even though there is no reason to assume so, for example even if rape turned out to be a natural cause of evolutionary psycology it wouldn't mean people will think "oh since its natural it should be legal"

[michaelmills]

I am an evolutionary psychologist (one of the 6 who watched it). We have heard many of these critiques repeatedly... and it is tiring to repeatedly rebut the straw men args, misunderstandings, misperceptions, mischaracterizations, etc..

Suggest those interested do web searches for these articles:

“Yes, but…” Answers to Ten Common Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology

Seven Key Misconceptions about Evolutionary Psychology

[PrashantMaurice]

I am finding hard to understand this. So evolutionary psych is garbage because it over emphasises on fitness and less on variance. But isn't variance part of the fitness function when viewed at species as a whole ? what am i missing.

[dantheman]

I think, evolutionarily speaking, our relationship with pets began somewhat symbiotically, particularly with Wolves as they would receive food, warmth and the companionship of a pack while we used their heightened senses to help us hunt or alert us to dangers, and also for companionship.

Edit: You tricked me! You knew I was going to write this!

[Sean-lijm]

A newborn’s instinct to nurse is evolutionary psychology the question is how much further into consciousness does it go. I believe evidence of reaction to stimuli like the fear of public speaking resulting from ancient fears of rejection and being exiled are too strong to not see them as fact.

[GeneTakovic]

It would be ill-advised to reduce the whole of evolutionary psychology to its misgivings, as literally all fields make fallacious assumptions and pass them off as fact. I'm far from the biggest fan of evo-psy, but I do see its utilty. Its problem is the same as any other discipline. Those in the field who do not account for other related fields, make these false assumptions. We can see the same with sociobiology, which used to be behaviorism. Despite changing its name, its back to its old tricks, social constructionist proponents are denying the reciprocity between biology and environment. They are pushing an ideology. Everytime a field denies other fields, they are pushing an ideology. Same happened with genetic determinism, trying to push that old eugenics canard.

As a scientist, you should stray away from such generalizations and reduction. Yeah, it does need to be criticized, but going sensationalistic and calling it garbage, is going a tad too far imho.

[dantheman]

Man, you absolutely nailed the Werner Herzog narration!

[carloslunaofficial]

I usually love the content in these videos. My only issue with this one is assuming that the current field of evolutionary psychology just focuses on cognitive psychology from an evolutionary or “adaptiveness” standpoint. As a neuroscientist who was thought by people such as Louise Barrett (would definitely recommend her book and articles on these issues) and Peter Henzi, I found that even though many researchers and academics seem to fit into the “Swiss army knife” analogy or “the gene for” etc. with reductionist models (which true, this is a very common misconception and I don’t agree with many of these ideas) these aren’t the only approaches to evolutionary psychology and they are often critiqued by evolutionary psychologist themselves. People such as them and many others (can definetely reference them as a student on this field as well). I would definitely recommend reading into these views as they could bring a more scientific, clear, reliable and more complete approach to evolutionary psychology. These views often build themselves from the behaviour itself and not from antropocentric views seeking to be confirmed through an evolutionary lens (like the examples you reference in the video).

So I appreciate clearing out the garbage in the field but I think it’s a bit unfair to reduce the field to the mistake some people made in the field. So I wouldn’t say this field is mostly garbage. In fact, these perspectives are growing among researchers and are finding a stronger place in science. Just my thoughts, I hope this sparks some discussion or looking more into this :)

[RacheyBabes]

The most plausible explanation in my eyes for us keeping pets is that as we initially developed symbiotic relationships with animals based on survival and utility (domesticating wolves to help us hunt etc) that the cognitive algorithms that predispose us to identifying with and empathising with other humans and our young had the side effect of us doing this to the animals as we kept close proximity to them (bit like how we can see faces in things that aren't even living because our brains are finetuned to find those patterns) - we began to relate to their experiences as if they were humanish essentially, anthropomorphising them enough to become invested in their wellbeing as sentient beings instead of just a means to an end, meaning we began to develop the care for them to some extent like we do now.

This in turn increased our desire to breed them for more companionable/desirable traits as well as utility based ones, further increasing this dynamic by making this experience more mutual between the animal towards us.

I'm typing this whilst being cuddled by a cat - she would not be doing so if her species had not been bred to be less hostile and more affectionate towards humans. I in turn give her pronouns and a name and talk to her much like I would a human child because of a part of my psyche sees her as some weird pseudo human to bond with and care for.

In other words, I think pet keeping is an extension of human need to bond and nurture other humans and we domesticated animals enough that our brains experience them as being close enough to humans to want to care for.

[solarmoth]

My first introduction to evo psych was seeing it used in highschool to reinforce sexism that could be better explained by social structure than innate brain biology. I’m probably significantly biased against it to today. I don’t think it’s all bad probably but I am very skeptical of it.

[ArtturiSalmela]

Natural selection is survival of the fittest, though, "fittest" doesn't mean the 1st place as the word may imply.
As Richard Dawkins put it "It is more of a survival of the good-enough."

Also, implying the many traits our genomes provide us, like our appearance or behaviours, wouldn't affect selection completely ignores how humans choose their mates.
There are certain things men find attractive in women and vice versa.

[KilgoreTroutAsf]

I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who said that the vast majority of traits in an animal are there not because they have been selected for but emerge from the interaction of other traits that have, like the empty space between the columns of an arc hasnt been "designed".
A bit like there is no specific gene that makes you afraid of tigers.
Evolutionary psychology seems to fall prey to this style of fallacious reasoning way too often.