lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

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This is what the founders of evolutionary psychology are doing these days, BTW

The new science of human nature: explaining why your face contorts in the way it does when you are angry, and not in some other way

It seems a bit uncharacteristic of you to scoff at a paper without giving reasons.  The authors propose a specific, falsifiable hypothesis for why expressions of anger contort the face in the way that they do.  It’s right there in the title.  

And as a problem in evolutionary biology, the evolution of human emotions has a pretty august history, so I don’t get what’s prima facie ridiculous or even unusual about trying to study it.  I could very easily imagine some of my colleagues doing a similar paper on birds, with no one batting an eye.

This isn’t to say that there couldn’t be specific problems with this paper, but what are they?  

My post was really unclear, but I’m not scoffing at the paper, which is actually pretty cool.  I’m scoffing at my many-years-old memories of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which is roughly 500 pages of “if only people took ev psych into account, they would agree with my specific political positions on a great variety of topics,” and also with Tooby and Cosmides’ claims that their research program is taking psychology back to the drawing board in an attempt to correct the massive defects of an otherwise pervasive “Standard Social Science Model.”

Stuff like the linked paper is in fact cool, but it is a bit of a downer to realize that it is what evolutionary psychology actually tends to be when you have been told that evolutionary psychology is so revelatory as to radically constraint which political, moral, and aesthetic views are reasonable.  (The latter is pretty much what The Blank Slate actually says, as far as I remember; then again, I am recalling the memories of a 16-year-old in search of grand unified theories, who found Pinker instead of Ayn Rand or whoever)

(via lambdaphagy)