this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Well duh, curve fitting isn't new, that's why we try to make predictions before we know the result and try to keep the hypothesis simple. Of course falsifiability isn't enough alone, but it certainly hasn't lost its place.
Your comparisons are ridiculous because you're comparing things which are testable (genetic variances, etc) with hypothetical differences between ancient brains we don't know the structure of. We still don't even know enough to make deep comparisons between brains of related animals. Until you can both synthesize and simulate the brain of ancient genomes you have absolutely no idea if you're on the right track, you can't know at all. There's so many different ways a brain can implement the same behavior with so many different unpredictable side effects that you can't say more than "they behaved in a way that kept them alive long enough" with any reasonable certainty. Do you know at what rate brains have changed biologically? No?
Ugh, your comments are everything I hate about the internet. Both of us know that only one us does research on cognitive science, and it's not you. Yet, because it's the internet, you think you can get by with bluster and false confidence.
Of the many mistakes you make: No cognitive neuroscientist would say, without huge caveats, that we can't make deep comparisons between animal and human brains — not after all the groundbreaking work finding deep functional similarities between bird brains and human brains in the last 10 years. These are groundbreaking findings in comparative neurology, and it's pretty obvious you know nothing about them. You go on to propose a standard of evidence which require that we can predict protein synthesis based on genetic variances, which is laughable. You also seem to be completely unaware of phylogenetic analysis, which is actually the standard way we make many of our evolutionary inferences.
Look, I'm not even an evolutionary psychologist. I have no skin in that game. But I do hate bullshit artists on the internet.
Why are you spending your time defending the least useful parts of your field? You're just making it sound more and more like people taking findings from neuropsychology (a science) and making historical guesswork around it (trying to guess what caused changes with zero evidence of how animals behaved in past environments). I'm aware of phylogenetics, but it seems to lose it's usefulness when most genes have such a weak correlation to behavior and when you can't actually observe historical behavior. Brains have too high plasticity to predict why a certain region would exist if you don't know the environment the animal lives in.
You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.
Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.