Is evolutionary psychology (total) bullshit?

[Romanophile]

From the lurking that I have done, I am under the impression that most leftists believe evolutionary psychology to be a bourgeois pseudo‐science. What is evolutionary psychology and why is it incorrect ?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to explain psychological facts as evolutionary adaptations; most scientists, bourgeois or not, are somewhat suspicious of it, since it has few, if any, testable prediction - I would go as far as calling most of these hypotheses etiological myths, stories about how certain traits might have been selected for. And, of course, there people have no real concept of culture and cultural change and, lo and behold, whenever they discover some universal psychological trait, it just happens to coincide with their values.

[Sea]

It's not so much that a bunch of evil capitalists gathered around a big huge table to invent evolutionary psychology as the latest and greatest way to inject bad ideas into the left. Because think differently and ideas change the world and all that.

If you hear someone bantering on about bourgeois pseudoscience, the main question you have to ask yourself is weather or not the topic at hand is inherently partisan. ;)

[Blake's Baby]

I don't think anyone's claiming that anyone consciously sat down and thought of it, but if people who conform with existing paradigms are given research grants and teaching positions, and people who don't are not, then what is researched and taught will conform to existing paradigms. So the majority of research backs up the status quo. Even if no-one does it on purpose (and some people are doing on purpose) then the tendency is to repeat what we already think we know and re-inforce the dominant ideology.

[TiberiusGracchus]

It's a totally legitimate scientific field. But it's immature and it's current paradigm contains many dubios assumtions and conclusions.

Check out this interview with science philosopher David Buller:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psyching-out-evolutionary

And his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Adapting-Minds-Evolutionary-Psychology-Persistent/dp/0262524600

[Yuppie Grinder]

They don't understand that human social formations evolve independently of biological evolution. They eternalize the bourgeois way of life, assuming that it's the only way we've ever lived and they only way we ever will life. Arguments that all women are more attracted to wealthy men because of their evolutionary development are fucking laughable.
I like the idea of drawing a connection between evolutionary biology and the study of the mind, but it's yet to be done well.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Like any new movement in social science, it's bound to be a mixed bag. Since Marxists often don't really have modern social scientific standards, we risk dismissing something real by giving it the old "bourgeois" label and rejecting it from there.
However, there is certainly a tension between Marxism and current evolutionary/biological models of social behavior: much of this material does abstract current notions about human psychology into atemporal universals (blah blah blah), and that certainly has an ideological bent. Some of it is certainly ridiculous but it would do well for us to engage with it.

Modern Marxists are wrong to deny that there is any such thing as a biological human nature of some kind, and I don't even really think this "no human nature position" is Marx's own. Marx's points about how we shape our nature not withstanding, there is a minimum biological threshold of needs we need to meet independent of cultural norms that are necessary for the worker to reproduce herself and her labor that serves as a foundation for new needs. Also, it is unclear just what is so bad about exploitation and alienation if it's not unnatural and life-denying on some universal level; otherwise, proletarians could just fully adapt to capitalist relations (to whatever level they find themselves reduced) and there would be no inevitable class struggle. Total relativism about human nature destroys historical materialism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Modern Marxists are wrong to deny that there is any such thing as a biological human nature of some kind, and I don't even really think this "no human nature position" is Marx's own. Marx's points about how we shape our nature not withstanding, there is a minimum biological threshold of needs we need to meet independent of cultural norms that are necessary for the worker to reproduce herself and her labor that serves as a foundation for new needs.

And history demonstrates that those needs can and have been ignored or suppressed; not to mention that it is not at all clear how they translate into some sort of "human nature".

I am curious, what do you think human nature is?


Also, it is unclear just what is so bad about exploitation and alienation if it's not unnatural and life-denying on some universal level;

Exploitation is bad because it hurts the workers. That is all. I do not see why something would need to be "unnatural" or "life denying" in order to be bad - ptomaine poisoning is neither, but it is still singularly unpleasant.


otherwise, proletarians could just fully adapt to capitalist relations (to whatever level they find themselves reduced) and there would be no inevitable class struggle.

Except when the workers want to improve their conditions, which they tend to want. And that can't be achieved by peaceful reforms.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Basic biological needs cannot be ignored or suppressed forever; eventually workers will either die or revolt if the situation does not improve. I don't see how Marxism works without this basic tenet of human nature, at least without lapsing into idealism. Materialism necessitates these biological truths that ideology and culture cannot overcome.

If there was no human nature, why couldn't someone adapt to "being hurt" by exploitation? There is no ideological device that can fully adapt a worker to ptomaine poisoning because of its biological harmfulness to the human body, and I'm saying the same thing about unmet basic human needs: workers may accept the 'ptomaine' ideology, but they'll either die from poison, or grow tired of being poisoned and lash out (and I don't know how lethal ptomaine is, so I'm not sure how well the metaphor translates, but I hope you get my point).

Also, what accounts for the alienated condition of humanity if not from a basic drive for meaningful labor that is negated by the relations of production? I just don't see why alienation and exploitation are a problem without some biological/cognitive base to human nature – unless we want to talk ethics, which I don't at the moment.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Basic biological needs cannot be ignored or suppressed forever; eventually workers will either die or revolt if the situation does not improve. I don't see how Marxism works without this basic tenet of human nature, at least without lapsing into idealism. Materialism necessitates these biological truths that ideology and culture cannot overcome.

If there was no human nature, why couldn't someone adapt to "being hurt" by exploitation? There is no ideological device that can fully adapt a worker to ptomaine poisoning because of its biological harmfulness to the human body, and I'm saying the same thing about unmet basic human needs: workers may accept the 'ptomaine' ideology, but they'll either die from poison, or grow tired of being poisoned and lash out (and I don't know how lethal ptomaine is, so I'm not sure how well the metaphor translates, but I hope you get my point).

Also, what accounts for the alienated condition of humanity if not from a basic drive for meaningful labor that is negated by the relations of production? I just don't see why alienation and exploitation are a problem without some biological/cognitive base to human nature – unless we want to talk ethics, which I don't at the moment.

At this point, I am not even sure what you're trying to say. Yes, people die if they do not eat, and hunger is unpleasant to most people. But this does not mean that there exists a "human nature" of the sort the evolutionary psychologists are trying to find.

And people can adapt to exploitation, and throughout history, most have done so. In fact, if exploitation is "unnatural", it is a small wonder that most economic systems throughout history have involved exploitation.

[BeingAndGrime]

Just to reiterate what has been said, I think that probably a lot of ev. psych. research is passable, but it is completely misinterpreted and blow up by popular science.

Anyways whenever I read about ev. psych. I always think that of course there are some basic human drives, but there is an infinite amount of ways these are reharnessed, redirected, perhaps towards some kind of social end.

I'll just leave this Nietzsche quote here:

There is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put, its actual application and integration into a system of goals; that anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it… all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation, in the course of which the previous ‘meaning’ and ‘aim’ must necessarily be obscured or completely effaced... So the entire history of a ‘thing’, a custom, an organ does not in the least resemble a progressus, the most economical in terms of expenditure of force and cost… the form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ even more so.

[Arakir]

I don't see how evolutionary psychology is bullshit. Since biological evolution is almost certainly fact, it makes sense that certain behaviors and mental states could be more biologically successful than others. An example of this is how humans desire to reproduce.

When you ask if it is bullshit, are you referring to the science as a whole, or just certain details of it? It is certainly possible that capitalists could try to use it to justify oppression, trying to pass off inequality and oppression as natural, inevitable, or just. However, I see no reason why evolutionary psychology as a whole should be rejected.