Friday, March 21, 2008

Evo Psych

Mike the Mad Biologist delivers the smackdown on Evolutionary Psychology pseudoscience:
One colleague, a male evolutionary biologist, characterized to me evolutionary psychology as "the discipline which justifies middle-aged professors sleeping with their younger graduate students."
The really sad thing is that it really is true that [per a comment on Pandagon]
evo psych is potentially useful, so it's really frustrating that its principle application appears to be putting a pseudo-scientific facade on social norms and gender roles that are really not organic at all. After all, there is clearly some evolutionary history behind human behavior, e.g. why we are social instead of solitary, why we need sleep, etc.

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