> Indeed, the ease with
>which the clever people on this list are able to generate explanations
>that go either way seems to me to be a bad sign for evolutionary
>psychology.
Hi Alex,
It was a bad sign for EP 25 years ago when that was virtually all there was to EP
(then called socio-biology) but EP these days does a lot more than generate
interesting explanations. Today's EP practitioners use their explanations to generate
predictions for laboratory behavior of humans today and then test those predictions.
They are sometimes quite startling.
Perhaps the best example is the many many experiments that show that an
elementary logic problem can be posed in dozens of different more and less familiar
ways and most people will get it wrong. But pose the problem in a form in which it
involves identifying cheating on social exchange, even if the setting is very
unfamiliar, and almost everybody gets it right. This pattern was a prediction of EP
theory of social exchange.
In other examples, women have been asked in laboratories to select the pictures
of men they find most appealing for short affairs and for long term relationships.
There is a very strong tendency for them to choose men with physical characteristics
typical of those with higher testosterone levels for affairs than for long term
relationships. Also, the tendency to choose higher testosterone goes up when women are
ovulating. (Both EP predictions.)
There are some examples where predictions have been less spectacularly
successful. For example, attempts to establish an evolutionary explanation for
aesthetics have been less than fully successful (I'm being generous).
Still, there can be no doubt that EP is a real science which is making real
progress in understanding human behavior. This from someone who only 7 years ago was
about as die hard an environmentalist as there could be. The more I've learned the
more I've been won over to the view that there are important insights to be had by
studying the genetic origins of behavior.
- - Bill Dickens (DC based)
William T. Dickens
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 797-6113
FAX: (202) 797-6181
E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
AOL IM: wtdickens
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/09/01 06:31PM >>>
Why not deny the empirical fact - given all we have for data is a
second-hand report about a newspaper column!
Alex
--
Dr. Alexander Tabarrok
Vice President and Director of Research
The Independent Institute
100 Swan Way
Oakland, CA, 94621-1428
Tel. 510-632-1366, FAX: 510-568-6040
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
