Jay Hanson wrote: > If you don't want to read evolutionary psychology, you certainly don't have > to.
Who says I don't read evolutionary psychology? I cited one book and I've read others. And I read the stuff you post to pen-l, including the one that you posted to pen-l twice. The problem that you seem to have is instead that I don't fall for uncritical thinking, for example of seeing work by people who claim to be "scientists" and then believing the validity of everything they write. Nor do I accept the idea that their view is the ONLY perspective on any subject, like claiming to be the ONLY truth in psychology. These errors would be like being back in the 1950s and believing the white-coated doctors in cigarette ads on TV about how cigarettes don't hurt people's health. BTW, I thought that critical thinking was central to science, rather than being some kind of inconvenience (interfering with winning converts to EP?) > Science eventually overcomes ignorance and superstition, one experiment > at a time. Thanks: it's nice of you to consider me to be ignorant (rather than stupid). But this "we know the truth, you must believe it" kind of statement reminds me of an ultra-dogmatic Marxist (from a sect calling itself the "Workers' League") who told me that if I didn't come to Marx's CAPITAL, it would come to me. BTW, "one experiment at a time" cannot be the sum total of scientific method, since experiments can only _falsify_ hypotheses (and then, sometimes do so only provisionally). They cannot prove hypotheses, because there may be alternative hypotheses that make the same predictions, etc.[*] In case there are any doubts, I am all in favor of biological _knowledge_ based on experiments and other efforts to verify and falsify conclusions. (Even there, almost all "conclusions" are really working hypotheses, not true conclusions.[**]) On the other hand, I reject biological _reductionism_ or _determinism_ which says that all of psychology, sociology, economics, and/or politics can be explained by reference to genes or biology, without any attention to the feed-back from social institutions to biology and its expression. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] Has anyone tested the "selfish gene" theory (popularized by Dawkins) using experiments? [**] In biology, the general vision of Darwinism seems to have graduated to be more than a working hypothesis, but a lot of the details still have that status. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
