Dags90 said:
BGH122 said:
Evolutionary 'babble' is perfectly valid. Evolution drives all organisms without exception. I've never heard a 'female brain' comment though, those sound pretty hilarious.
Evolutionary psychology is a fledgling field lacking enough strong data from which reasonable conclusions can be determined. Most of what people write as "evolutionary babble" is conjecture with no actual scientific backing. Many of the evolutionary psychology stuff that makes it to media use samples which are too small and culturally homogeneous.
Except I'm not defending evolutionary psychology. I'm saying that organisms select mates upon set characteristics that often present handicaps to the individual, but a selective mating advantage (Zahavi et al (1975) Kirkpatrick (1982) Iwasa (1991)... I could go on, the handicap principle is pretty well proved). There
is strong evolutionary evidence that mate selection can increase allele frequency of selected traits and lead to lower allele diversity in the selected groups. This isn't pseudoscientific evolutionary psychology.
Hagi said:
BGH122 said:
Evolutionary 'babble' is perfectly valid. Evolution drives all organisms without exception. I've never heard a 'female brain' comment though, those sound pretty hilarious.
The evolutionary babble is exactly that, babble.
Read up on epigenetics and learn that we're not nearly as static as we sometimes believe we are.
Read up on human history and learn that what's considered attractive has greatly varied and changed in the course of history.
Evolution isn't nearly so simple as to be able to be explained in a single forum post. It's not a finished theory. We're still learning new things every day about how exactly it works and what the subtleties are.
The evolutionary theory you hear in popular media is several years outdated and highly misinterpreted and because of that it's babble.
Yeah, I guess my pre-med course should really have stopped teaching gossip and should have taught biochem instead. OH WAIT.
Epigenetics does work to make genes a non-static conferrer of characteristics, but it does so through expression of specific genes to interact with the expression of other genes. As with all genetics, those genes exist because of a survival advantage. The argument that epigenetics obviates arguments in favour of selective advantages as the cause of genetics is simply false; those interacting genes exist precisely because of, and are governed by, typical evolutionary survival and reproductive advantages (ignoring genetic drift or linking here).
Furthermore, I didn't argue that genetics explains the entirety of human mate choice. I didn't argue that genes were static in their expression. I argued that evolutionary arguments for mate choices aren't just babble, which they aren't. There's a massive gap between "This theory doesn't explain everything" and "This theory is babble". What's that Hawking? Your theory of black hole radiation doesn't explain gravity? Your theory is babble!
See what I'm getting at here? Of course people can deliberately (or otherwise) misrepresent genetics and evolution so that it becomes painfully reductionist babble and fails to explain psychosocial trends, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily babble.
EDIT: That came off rather more defensively than I intended. No offence was intended.
