this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Why are you spending your time defending the least useful parts of your field? You're just making it sound more and more like people taking findings from neuropsychology (a science) and making historical guesswork around it (trying to guess what caused changes with zero evidence of how animals behaved in past environments). I'm aware of phylogenetics, but it seems to lose it's usefulness when most genes have such a weak correlation to behavior and when you can't actually observe historical behavior. Brains have too high plasticity to predict why a certain region would exist if you don't know the environment the animal lives in.
You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.
Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.