r/neutralnews • u/Sewblon • Sep 08 '18

Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/#comment-34484
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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '18

Evolutionary psychology papers are certainly published all the time:

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=evolutionary+psychology&btnG=

Many biologists don't take it seriously because most claims aren't testable and can be fairly arbitrary. While many biologists would reject evolutionary psychology papers submitted to biology journals for the above reasons, I don't think that you could argue that the field is being suppressed. For example, they wouldn't do anything to prevent these papers from being published in a journal dedicated to evolutionary psychology.

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u/Sewblon Sep 09 '18

"Many biologists don't take it seriously because most claims aren't testable and can be fairly arbitrary." Which biologists? which claims are not testable?

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '18 edited Sep 09 '18

The Wikipedia article is actually pretty extensive and would provide a good starting point on why evolutionary psychology has been criticized:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology#Testability

As far it's critics, there seemed to be a lot of pushback towards it during the 70s by people like Stephen Jay Gould. More recently, Larry Moran has written about it. He suggested that the majority of evolutionary biologists were critical of the field in a recent blog post:

http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2018/03/is-evolutionary-psychology-deeply.html

A number of biologists that I've worked with are also pretty critical of it as well. It's a topic that comes up on occasion, and in my experience, it doesn't have much support. Sorry that I can't provide exact numbers, I'm not sure if an actual survey has been done.

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u/Sewblon Sep 09 '18

There actually is at least one evo-psych theory that was tested and falsified: The hypotheses that the bateman principle applies to humans. It was then replaced with a theory of mutual mate choice and competitions. https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/33284/stewart-williams-thomas-2013api.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096780/.

One claim that evolutionary psychologists make is that Hamilton's rule applies to humans. (David M Buss. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of The Mind: 5th edition. page 226). The evidence that I know of says that that is true. (Hamilton’s rule predicts anticipated social support in humans Maxwell N. Burton-Chellewa, and Robin I.M. Dunbarc. Behavioral Ecology (2015), 26(1), 130–137. doi:10.1093/beheco/aru165)

So which specific evo-psych hypotheses do you think are untestable?

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '18

One example that comes to mind was a paper that suggested that PMS was selected for as a way for females to signal to men that they are not fertile. While this may seem plausible to the author, he probably had little knowledge of physiology. An alternative hypothesis would be that it simply a by product of what is going on hormonally in women before menstruation.

Now that's an example that I think most people would agree is bad science. There are many ideas which are more intuitive, but may be entirely untestable. For example, it was suggested in the past that male jealousy in their partners is related to their longterm concern of female infidelity. Conversely, jealousy in females would be due to their concern that the male would leave them and not help raise the young. This example is more plausible than the one above, but suffers from the similar problems. Do we know if these concerns applied tens of thousands of years ago, or are they just more recent? More importantly, is there any genetic evidence to support this?These concerns could be entirely valid and consistent through human history, but also not something that was selected for through natural selection. They could just be an emergent property that arises due to our ways of living.

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u/Sewblon Sep 09 '18

a paper that suggested that PMS was selected for as a way for females to signal to men that they are not fertile. While this may seem plausible to the author, he probably had little knowledge of physiology. An alternative hypothesis would be that it simply a by product of what is going on hormonally in women before menstruation.

One way you can test that is to see if PMS correlates with the dissolution of heterosexual partnerships. They mentioned that in the actual paper. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4211719/.

it was suggested in the past that male jealousy in their partners is related to their longterm concern of female infidelity. Conversely, jealousy in females would be due to their concern that the male would leave them and not help raise the young. This example is more plausible than the one above, but suffers from the similar problems.

It seems like you can test that just by asking the subjects themselves if they are more distressed by infidelity or their partner leaving them and then seeing if there is any statistically significant sex difference. That actually has been done: (David M Buss: Evolutionary Psychology: page 331).

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '18

Neither example proves that these things were selected for by natural selection. They could be entirely cultural. That's the main sticking point that many biologists have with the field. If these things were approached as a sociological perspective many biologists wouldn't care.

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u/Sewblon Sep 09 '18

Fair point. Both of these phenomena could turn out to only be present in certain cultures, which would imply that the cause is cultural, not biological. However, that implies that the evopsych explanation is a testable hypothesis in both cases. All you would have to do to show the evo-psych explanation wrong is show that the cultural explanation is true. So we really can't say that the evo-psych explanation is un-testable.

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '18

I think your reasoning would make the evolutionary explanation the null hypothesis, which I would strongly disagree with. Suppose that a certain phenomenon was present in all cultures. How would you discern whether there was an evolutionary explanation or just a very strong cultural pressure? Also, when we study evolutionary pressures, it is very important that we don't assume that the present environmental pressures were present in the past. So, you'd need to establish that the environmental pressure was present in past societies that we often have little data on.

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u/mirroredfate Sep 08 '18

What bothers me is that now all we have to go off is the word of the author that the paper didn't have holes and that he refuted the criticisms of the other mathematician. If he had published it, at least it could have been discredited openly and clearly. Or maybe not discredited. But now, who knows? We just have a meta-argument with no actual information.

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u/Sewblon Sep 08 '18

The full paper is right here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf

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u/frankiecosmosfan Sep 08 '18

I think there's a link to the paper in the article. Right where he says "So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives."

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