In Defense of Evopsych

A friend of mine recently posted a critique of my recent comparison of the scientific legitimacy of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy with the complete illegitimacy of the entire field of Evolutionary Psychology. This is a perfectly reasonable response; no one, including myself, understands the full range of the various implications of the mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection. So let’s see what he has to offer:

In his latest post on Sigma Game, he characterises Evolutionary Psychology as “fake science squared” and his SSH as proto-science.

I would tend to agree with the description of the SSH. After all, as readers here or of Caveman Theory are aware, I had developed my own version of the SSH long before I knew of Vox at all. So the observation of the traits he ascribes to different types of men is absolutely founded in reality and proper observation.

That said, while I don’t necessarily put a lot of stock in evolutionary psychology, as a model, it can and does predict certain things, if at a different scale than the SSH.

Furthermore, logically, you cannot pretend to have one set of measurements for the competing theory and excuse your own from it:

Regarding the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), he says:

“Verification of the causal mechanism: zero. Nobody has ever observed a Pleistocene male choosing a mate. Nobody has identified the neural substrate of the alleged module. Nobody has demonstrated the heritability of the preference. Nobody has shown the selection coefficient that would have driven its fixation. The entire causal chain from ancestral selection to modern preference is inferred, not observed, and the inference rests on assumptions about ancestral environments and reproductive payoffs that are themselves unobserved. What’s actually being measured is a correlation between a stimulus and a rating. The evolutionary scaffolding is decoration.”

But is the SSH put under similar testing? Short answer: No.

No one has identified the neural substrate of a Gamma compared to a Delta either.

No one has demonstrated the heritability of any part of the SSH either. Nor any other mechanism that would explain why someone becomes a Gamma instead of Lambda. There has been no empirical study of this any more than anyone has demonstrated heritability in EEA, and arguably quite a bit lees in fact.

As a model that predicts certain behaviours, the SSH works, and at a granularity that is higher resolution than EEA, but EEA also predicts things accurately probably at a similar rate as the SSH just at a different granularity. We could posit that the EEA model is mostly accurate at a macro scale and the SSH is mostly accurate at a micro scale. The REASON as to why the SSH or the EEA “work”, that is the details of the model, are basically opaque in both instances. The why, if you like, that Vox studiously avoids looking at. At least as far as his public posting on the issue goes, as he has repeatedly stated that he does not concern himself with the WHY, only the WHAT.

In which case, whether a model is real or not, becomes academic. If it works use it and if not, ignore it. If you look at the EEA as a large model predictor, it certainly appears to work.

Read the whole thing there. I will respond to this in detail in a post later this week, but I will give you a hint: the distinction between the focus on the WHAT rather than the WHY is not only all-important here, but it completely defangs the attempt to claim that I am pretending “to have one set of measurements for the competing theory and excuse your own from it”.

I’m not doing anything of the kind. I absolutely welcome precise apples-to-apples comparisons between the experimental performance of the SSH and of evopsych. I already know, with mathematical certainty, that evopsych does not exist because human psychology could not have evolved from anything, since evolution didn’t happen.

Whatever the mechanism that causes variations in human psychology and behavior may be, we know it absolutely is not evolution, for the same reason we know it wasn’t pink, polka-dotted Quiggers who were responsible, although ironically the Quiggers hypothesis is more probable than evolution, because while we have no information supporting the idea that Quiggers ever existed, we know for a certainty that evolution by natural selection, or by genetic drift, did not take place.