When I think of evolutionary psychology I generally jump to sharp and well defined claims that “mental modules” exist that (1) enable superior cognitive performance in specific domains relative to what typical people can do when they rely on “general reasoning” faculties, (2) evolved due to positive selection on our ancestors to deal with problems we faced over and over in our evolutionary history, and (3) should be pretty much universal among humans who don’t have too many deleterious mutations.
When I think of people who focus specifically on innate human differences, I generally think of them studying much more abstract “traits” like performance on game theoretic tasks, or personality measures, or IQ. The sharp claims here mostly have to do with heritability numbers and whether a trait is “highly heritable” or “not very heritable”.
Having this perception of two broad “kinds of research” my impression is that they do not seem to “play nicely” together. In some senses they don’t address the same issues and in some senses they may have contradictory predictions.
First I’m curious as to whether you think different scientists really take generally different approaches in the way described here?
Assuming yes, do you think their research programs actually predict that people should see different things when examining “the same” phenomena?
Assuming yes, do you have a preference for one set of claims versus the other?
No matter where you step off of the train of questions, “Why or why not?” :-)
I think your perception is correct, but I am no expert. I sense that
evolutionary psychologists are really interested in human universals:
the famous experiments of Tooby and Cosmides go right to that
point. Why are we all afraid of snakes? Why are our babies do hard
to toilet train? But they generally don’t have a lot to say about variation
among humans in these traits.
The other sort that you and I both perceive are interested in human
diversity and aren’t much concerned with the bigger questions of
the ev psych people.
No, they don’t “play nice” with each other mostly. It is an
exaggeration to say that each regards the phenomena of the other
as nuisances. They certainly should see different things: C&T see
evolved cheater detection in a logic game while psychologists of the
London school see G playing itself out in the diversity of correct
answers.
The two areas will come together soon: they are already starting.
As some of the comments here indicate, we can’t really understand
what “Neanderthal intelligence” might mean until we understand the
evolution(s) of intelligence. We can examine data all day and still
have not an iota of insight about that bigger issue.
When I think of evolutionary psychology I generally jump to sharp and well defined claims that “mental modules” exist that (1) enable superior cognitive performance in specific domains relative to what typical people can do when they rely on “general reasoning” faculties, (2) evolved due to positive selection on our ancestors to deal with problems we faced over and over in our evolutionary history, and (3) should be pretty much universal among humans who don’t have too many deleterious mutations.
When I think of people who focus specifically on innate human differences, I generally think of them studying much more abstract “traits” like performance on game theoretic tasks, or personality measures, or IQ. The sharp claims here mostly have to do with heritability numbers and whether a trait is “highly heritable” or “not very heritable”.
Having this perception of two broad “kinds of research” my impression is that they do not seem to “play nicely” together. In some senses they don’t address the same issues and in some senses they may have contradictory predictions.
First I’m curious as to whether you think different scientists really take generally different approaches in the way described here?
Assuming yes, do you think their research programs actually predict that people should see different things when examining “the same” phenomena?
Assuming yes, do you have a preference for one set of claims versus the other?
No matter where you step off of the train of questions, “Why or why not?” :-)
I think your perception is correct, but I am no expert. I sense that evolutionary psychologists are really interested in human universals: the famous experiments of Tooby and Cosmides go right to that point. Why are we all afraid of snakes? Why are our babies do hard to toilet train? But they generally don’t have a lot to say about variation among humans in these traits.
The other sort that you and I both perceive are interested in human diversity and aren’t much concerned with the bigger questions of the ev psych people.
No, they don’t “play nice” with each other mostly. It is an exaggeration to say that each regards the phenomena of the other as nuisances. They certainly should see different things: C&T see evolved cheater detection in a logic game while psychologists of the London school see G playing itself out in the diversity of correct answers.
The two areas will come together soon: they are already starting. As some of the comments here indicate, we can’t really understand what “Neanderthal intelligence” might mean until we understand the evolution(s) of intelligence. We can examine data all day and still have not an iota of insight about that bigger issue.