{"id":5890,"date":"2013-09-28T15:31:31","date_gmt":"2013-09-28T15:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5890"},"modified":"2019-05-19T11:52:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T11:52:21","slug":"does-evo-psych-explain-anything-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/does-evo-psych-explain-anything-at-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Does evo-psych explain anything at all?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology have long struck me as arrant nonsense, because they ignore human free will and self-reflection, and thus our ability to rise above our own nature.   There are no pianos on the savanna, as I have remarked before<\/a>, so an evolutionary psychologist will have a major challenge to explain a desire to play the piano in evolutionary terms.
\nChristopher Booker, in a review<\/a> of E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth<\/em>, views similarly the flaws of evolutionary theory when applied to human behaviours:<\/p>\n

It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to \u2018conquer the Earth\u2019 far more comprehensively than ants.
\nBut it is this which also gives us our disintegrative propensity, individually and collectively, to behave egocentrically, presenting us with all those problems which distinguish us from all the other species which still live in unthinking obedience to the dictates of nature. All these follow from that split from our selfless \u2018higher nature\u2019, with which over the millennia our customs, laws, religion and artistic creativity have tried their best to re-integrate us.
\nNothing is more comical about Darwinians than the contortions they get into in trying to explain those \u2018altruistic\u2019 aspects of human nature which might seem to contradict their belief that the evolutionary drive is always essentially self-centred (seen at its most extreme in Dawkins\u2019s \u2018selfish gene\u2019 theory). Wilson\u2019s thesis finally crumbles when he comes up with absurdly reductionist explanations for the emergence of the creative arts and religion. Forget Bach\u2019s B Minor Mass or the deeper insights of the Hindu scriptures \u2014 as a lapsed Southern Baptist, he caricatures the religious instinct of mankind as little more than the stunted form of faith he escaped from.
\nHis attempt to unravel what makes human nature unique is entirely a product of that limited \u2018left-brain thinking\u2019 which leads to cognitive dissonance.
\nUnable to think outside the Darwinian box, his account lacks any real warmth or wider understanding. Coming from \u2018the most celebrated heir to Darwin\u2019, his book may have won wide attention and praise. But all it really demonstrates is that the real problem with Darwinians is their inability to see just how much their beguilingly simple theory simply cannot explain.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology have long struck me as arrant nonsense, because they ignore human free will and self-reflection, and thus our ability to rise above our own nature.   There are no pianos on the savanna, as I have remarked before, so an evolutionary psychologist will have a major challenge to explain a desire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,71,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-religion","category-science","p1","y2013","m09","d28","h15"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9811,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890\/revisions\/9811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}