Re:How evolutionary psychology went viral
by kijin on Thursday September 18, 2014 @11:05AM
(#8335590)
It's very difficult to avoid sampling bias and confirmation bias when you're looking for historical and contemporary events that seem to fit your curve. What about all the men throughout history who didn't massacre their neighbors? How do you control for massive confounding factors such as religious brainwashing, economic circumstances, poor education, and individual idiosyncrasies?
Re:How evolutionary psychology went viral
by tim333 on Thursday September 18, 2014 @12:16PM
(#8336027)
True. Difficult but even if there's some bias you can still get useful data I think. There are things that do not fit well with the basic evolutionary psychology model such as homosexuality. You'd think, using the EP model, that genes corresponding to that would die out however there are a few gay guys out there which suggests you might look for other explanations. Just to say it's not the case that you can find experimental evidence for all EP type hypotheses. Some fit, some don't.
Re:How evolutionary psychology went viral
by dragonwriter on Thursday September 18, 2014 @11:27AM
(#8335735)
> It's very difficult to avoid sampling bias and confirmation bias when you're looking for historical and contemporary events that seem to fit your curve.
"Looking for historical and contemporary events that seem to fit your curve" seems to be the definition of deliberate confirmation bias.
There is other evidence also. EP for example would suggest males would tend to massacre their neighbours and grab their females as this would be a genetic benefit. To study that experimentally you could look at the historic record of conquests and the genetic results, study uncontacted human societies, the stuff ISIS is doing now, chimp studies such as those recently in the news (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/science/lethal-violence-in...) and such like. You could also run MRIs on people brains to try to understand the mechanisms and so on. It's not college surveys and just so stories.
Indeed the fact that ISIS massacring the Yazidi's and rounding up women fits the evolutionary chimp style raiding hypothesis better than the loving God hypothesis is significant and might discourage the guys from doing if they realised that. Then maybe the massacres could stop through scientific enlightenment rather than us reluctantly having to go bomb them. Again it's more than Cosmo type stuff.