You’re interpreting this as “some scientists got together one day and asked Canadians about their grief just to see what would happen, then looked for things to correlate it with, and after a bunch of tries came across some numbers involving !Kung tribesmen reproductive potential that fit pretty closely, and then came up with a shaky story about why they might be linked and published it.”
I interpret it as “some evolutionary psychologists were looking for a way to confirm evolutionary psychology, predicted that grief at losing children would be linked to reproductive potential in hunter-gatherer tribes, and ran an experiment to see if this was true. They discovered that it was true, and considered their theory confirmed.”
I can’t prove my interpretation is right because the paper is gated, but in my support, I know of many studies very similar to this one that were done specifically to confirm evo psych’s predictions (for example, The Adapted Mind is full of them). And most scientists don’t have enough free time to go around doing studies of people’s grief for no reason and then comparing it to random data sets until they get a match, nor would journals publish it if they did. And this really is exactly the sort of elegant, testable experiment a smart person would think up if ze was looking for ways to test evolutionary theory.
It’s true that correlation isn’t causation and so on et cetera, but if their theory really did predict the results beforehand when other theories couldn’t, we owe them a higher probability for their theory upon learning of their results.
Bruce and Waldheri, you’re being unfair.
You’re interpreting this as “some scientists got together one day and asked Canadians about their grief just to see what would happen, then looked for things to correlate it with, and after a bunch of tries came across some numbers involving !Kung tribesmen reproductive potential that fit pretty closely, and then came up with a shaky story about why they might be linked and published it.”
I interpret it as “some evolutionary psychologists were looking for a way to confirm evolutionary psychology, predicted that grief at losing children would be linked to reproductive potential in hunter-gatherer tribes, and ran an experiment to see if this was true. They discovered that it was true, and considered their theory confirmed.”
I can’t prove my interpretation is right because the paper is gated, but in my support, I know of many studies very similar to this one that were done specifically to confirm evo psych’s predictions (for example, The Adapted Mind is full of them). And most scientists don’t have enough free time to go around doing studies of people’s grief for no reason and then comparing it to random data sets until they get a match, nor would journals publish it if they did. And this really is exactly the sort of elegant, testable experiment a smart person would think up if ze was looking for ways to test evolutionary theory.
It’s true that correlation isn’t causation and so on et cetera, but if their theory really did predict the results beforehand when other theories couldn’t, we owe them a higher probability for their theory upon learning of their results.