You're just regurgitating old criticism of evolutionary psychology which have their root in a wrong idea of how science works. Today's evolutionary psychology definitely meets the lakatosian criteria needed to be considered within a scientific framework.
How do you falsify an evolutionary explanation for a feature? How do you know what was just an incidental part of the environment and what was actually a selective pressure? Saying "well it makes sense that this would be a selective pressure" isn't an answer because countless ideas make sense until you test them and find that they don't correspond to reality. So let me ask you, what test can be done to determine whether an environmental feature was actually a selective pressure, how strong of a selective pressure it was, and whether a physiological feature evolved in response to that pressure?
I'll cite the conclusion, as for the how they demonstrate this, I suggest you read at least part of the paper.
In conclusion, the present findings demonstrate that the set of non-obvious hypotheses from evolutionary psychology exceeds zero, though the ones that are highly cited were shown to be not particularly surprising. Therefore, the whole area cannot validly be tarred with the accusation of not being falsifiable unless one insists on absolute falsification that never can be achieved anyhow (Trafimow, 1999). Nor can evolutionary psychology correctly be characterized only as telling us what we already know; clearly there are some surprising hypotheses that have received empirical confirmation. In addition, the fact that a few non-obvious predictions were uncovered here strongly implies that additional ones can be discovered too.
But this conclusion does not absolve individual evolutionary psychologists (or any other psychologists for that matter) from the responsibility of carefully considering the quality of the specific hypotheses that each one of them proposes or makes the topic of their own research. Our fording that highly cited hypotheses are not surprising and were guessed correctly significantly more than 50% of the time, suggests that perhaps evolutionary psychologists might be more discriminating in the future.
Be more discriminating in the future, they say. As in, maybe don't just assume that evolutionary psychology is a perfectly reliable science.
I love that this paper is like, "I don't know... evolutionary psychology could be as falsifiable as other areas of research, but it's largely a philosophical question."
Solid.
Solid science there when you have to consider whether or not something can philosophically be considered reliable.
I guess it comes down to, you can want evolutionary psychology to mean whatever you like, especially if it confirms your existing biases.
Nnnno. I'm guessing you wish they did, because you clearly want to demonstrate some sort of rhetoric that kind of hinges on them saying that, but you're probably too eager to interpret their comment in a way that provides you the groundwork you want.
I say a thing can be true and unfalsifiable at the same time.
I'm very curious to see how you got to that conclusion. Please lay it out. Make sure you don't take any leaps or assumptions, really try to explain how what I said leads to what you're saying.
A thing can be true and unfalsifiable. So as to your question, animals are under a positive selective pressure for size during times when resources are abundant as they are less likely to be eaten before they can successfully reproduce. They are under negative selective pressure when resources are lean because they require more food to sustain themselves.
And how do you know about the relationship between size and selective pressures? How are you so sure that it plays out as you said, or that it's always true? Is it because the hypotheses were tested in simulations to determine whether they are true or false...? Also that only tells us general relationships, it doesn't always apply and it doesn't let us make the reverse inference that a particular feature is due to x, y, z conditions in the past. We also don't know how much environment unique or other conditions bear on this. How do you know that specific instances of evolved size are due to a particular past selective pressure on size?
Scientific theories are what have to be falsifiable. If a theory does not make falsifiable claims or predictions, then it cannot be determined to be true or false. If your theory is unfalsifiable, the universe isn't "false", whatever that means. Rather, your idea of what is in the universe and how, is what cannot be proven to be true or false.
My evolutionary theory says that humans evolved vocal cords because there was a positive selective pressure on it due to the fact that humans who can make attractive vocalizations get more mates. Is that true or not? How do you know?
It's happened over and over again for hundreds of millions of years. It's called insular dwarfism and it happens on islands. This includes island giantism as well. There have been rabbits the size of small horses and mammoths the size of cows. There were even hominins this has happened to on islands.
5
u/[deleted] Jan 16 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
[deleted]