In a message dated 1/27/00 12:16:57 AM Dateline Standard Time,
rylander@prolexia.com writes:
>>>Evolutionary psychology is often very speculative, but I think it's
>>>surprisingly insightful in its comments wrt human sexuality in
>>>general, even if not -necessarily- in this particular case.
>> I think it only has the appearance of being insightful due to the
>> plastic-wrap
>> nature of darwinism.
>Agreed, it's vague and speculative, but that's not the same as saying it's
>meaningless. It's not even in the same ballpark of predictive specificity
>as physics, say, but it's a whole lot better than just taking all of human
>nature as a non-predictive given, I think. (Certainly from a scientific
>perspective, no?)
I don't see any way in which evolutionary psychology has been predictive.
It's all "after the fact" type of rationalizations. Standard just so story
stuff.
>>But the question is why not in this case? What's
>> the evidence with an insightful claim and what is missing in the
>> rape claim?
>An insightful claim: men will naturally tend to seek quantity of sexual
>contacts, women quality. This seems backed up by common sense (men seeking
>sex, women love, etc.), and strongly supported by evolutionary theory.
Okay, now imagine men did not seek quantity of sexual contacts. It
would be easy to come up with a darwinian explanation for this too.
Like I said, it's plastic wrap.
>This rape claim is more speculative simply because there's less evidence for
>it, and because the evidence has been less well scrutinized. Again, even
>its proponents see it only as one hypothesis amongst competitors right now,
>even if it's the one they see as most plausible.
The rape claim simply builds on the men want quantity of sex explanation.
Drop the moral concerns and it *is* the quantity of sex explanation.
>> BTW, it wouldn't take much to come up with an darwinian justification
>> for racism, now would it?
>If you mean racism as an empirical claim, I think those issues are
>independent of evolutionary theory. I.e., if one thinks racism is true, one
>can fit that into evolutionary theory easily enough, or one can just take it
>as a given. And if one rejects racism, ditto.
>If you mean racism as a moral claim, that's even less connected with
>evolutionary theory. (Historically, slaveholders, in the US and the world,
>haven't relied a bit on evolutionary theory.)
What I mean is that one could just as easily support a hypothesis that
racism is in our genes and was selected by darwinian evolution. Thus,
it could be said that we were created as rapists and racists.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 27 2000 - 08:35:24 EST