Is EvoPsych Bullshit ?

Couldn’t resist a cross-link to Intellectual Whores. Plenty of irony and humour in the site, but I daren’t stick my neck out and suggest this piece is a spoof. Serious or spoof it highlights the excluded middle.

Evolutionary psychology may explain how all real life (above and beyond theoretical physics and repeatable laboratory experiments) actually works and how it came to be that way, but that does not suggest how any individual or class of human(s) can “exonerate” itself from responsibilities. Understanding how and why those responsibilities evolved can indeed re-inforce why they are important and what makes some more important than others.

This is the usual explanation vs causality confusion IMHO.

This just in … a quote from Steven Pinker “An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.” … Even if it cannot reliably predict causal outcomes – but who can ? [Quote from John Brockman’s “Intelligent Thought” reviewed in Nature and publicised via his “Edge” site.]

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