Using "science" to manipulate, indeed.

Rebutting münecat

Note: This post is a response to the video I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology by münecat

Epistemic Status: Evidence-based

Tone: Cheeky

Daniel Dennett likened evolutionary biology to a “universal acid” that eats away at our understanding of the world, breaking it down to a purely mechanistic account of natural causes. A knock-on effect is that an evolutionary logic dissolves many of the structures that guard people’s sacred values. Predictably then, as evolutionary biology spread across traditional areas of knowledge, turmoil ensued.

Dennett’s universal acid (Midjourney)

This is most noticeable today in the application of evolutionary principles to human behavior. From the jump, evolutionary approaches to social science got bogged down by misguided nature vs. nurture disputes, shoehorning the field as a form of “genetic determinism” that threatens social progress.

Amidst this confusion, evolutionary psychology was born into the crossfire of a morally valenced struggle between sociocultural and biological accounts of human nature. The “nativists” or “essentialists” viewed the mind as being “hardwired” whereas the “environmentalists” viewed the mind as highly malleable and being structured almost entirely by learning. The nativist account was culturally coded as maintaining the status quo whereas the environmentalist account was culturally coded as an optimistic promise for a more egalitarian future. Both are wrong.

Evolutionary psychologists have tirelessly railed against this false dichotomy since the field was founded:

“... every feature of every phenotype is fully and equally codetermined by the interaction of the organism’s genes (embedded in its initial package of zygotic cellular machinery) and its ontogenetic environments...As with all interactions, the product simply cannot be sensibly analyzed into separate genetically determined and environmentally determined components or degrees of influence..."Biology" cannot be segregated off into some traits and not others...The central premise of an opposition between the mind as an inflexible biological product and the mind as a malleable social product is ill-formed...Instead, any time the mind generates any behavior at all, it does so by virtue of specific generative programs in the head, in conjunction with the environmental inputs with which they are presented. Evolved structure does not constrain; it creates or enables.” – Tooby & Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 1992

Truth-seeking and Activism

When evolutionary psychologists make empirical claims and people reject those claims on moral grounds, the evolutionary psychologists are correct to point out that the moral implications of their claims have no bearing on its truth-value.

If we claim that physical aggression evolved, the fact that violence is bad has no impact on whether or not that claim is true. But that doesn’t stop people from acting like it does - because an explanation for why violence exists is often conflated with a justification for violence. This tendency often stems from an implicit or explicit assumption that because the world is socially constructed, our narratives are what manifest and perpetuate the bad things in the world - as if not having a scientific explanation for violence would make it disappear.

We think this maneuver is bad, because the truth is like a map in an unfamiliar and hostile wilderness - the map is the only thing that can tell us which direction to navigate to get the things that we need. But maybe, as David Pinsof suggests, we also think it’s bad because truth-seeking is the sacred value that props up our status-game.

Activism is important, but activism untethered from truth-seeking is like a surgeon attempting to perform an operation blindfolded. Not only is the surgeon unlikely to fix the problem, but he also stands a good chance of making it worse or even creating new, bigger problems. The takeaway here is that if evolutionary psychology gives you the “ick” for moral or political reasons, that’s not a good reason to dismiss it, especially if you want to protect the downtrodden, save the rainforest, or whatever. Of course, if you don’t actually want to change the world, and evolutionary psychology threatens the sacred values that prop up your status-game, then yeah, it makes sense to attack it for any reason you can think of.

Despite consistent attempts from evolutionary psychologists to clarify that the field isn't the ideological equivalent of a mustache-twirling villain in a smoke-filled room, the field remains entrenched in agenda-driven culture wars. A recent volley on this front comes in the form of a video with the click-bait title I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology by münecat.

The big picture

Münecat is talented: this video is approaching 700k views, 39k likes, and boasts a stellar production.

Throughout the video, münecat weaves seamlessly between humorous skits and straightforward science communication. But these contrasting elements bleed together, providing cover to play fast and loose with the facts on the science communication side – I’m only joking!

This makes the context of the reckless claims in the video hard to pin down: is this satire? Political propaganda? Journalism? It tries to be all of these things, and succeeds at *checks notes* two of them. It’s only journalism in the way The National Enquirer is journalism. Let us be clear - it’s legiterally impossible to watch this video and not come to the conclusion that it was made uncharitably. It's mean-spirited, and at moments, borders on sadistic, as münecat gleefully dances on the graves of various scientists whom she attempts to defenestrate.

To be fair, the sections that cover the replication crisis, p-hacking, data fraud, bad incentives in science, publication bias, etc., aren’t bad. These are real problems in need of real solutions – we need to do better. But this isn’t a dunk on evolutionary psychology per se, it’s a dunk on Science^TM. In fact, evolutionary psychology has one of the best replication rates in psychology.

Münecat also correctly identifies the inaccurate portrayal of evolutionary psychology among various fringe groups as a real and serious problem. If you hear the phrase “when we were cavemen” on some dark corner of Podcastistan, chances are good that it will be followed by some scathing remarks about women.

But münecat isn’t interested in constructive criticism or conflict resolution - this is asymmetric warfare. Consider the impressive feat of sophistry where münecat sandwiches clips of credentialed evolutionary psychologists like David Buss in between clips of manosphere influencers spouting distorted versions of the science. This sneaky editing technique creates the perception that evolutionary scholars are on the same footing as grifters who misinterpret their work, disingenuously painting these non-overlapping entities as a monolith.

Speaking of grift, münecat criticizes various hacks for hopping on podcasts or YouTube videos and misleading their audience with “bad science” just to plug their products. We agree, that’s bad.

Münecat airs this grievance in an intellectually dishonest YouTube video that egregiously misrepresents the science and ends with a plug for her own product: Nebula^TM.

Using “science” to manipulate, indeed.

Münecat wants you to think that evolutionary psychology is to blame for the way it gets weaponized on the fringe in an attempt to discredit the entire enterprise. But this problem isn’t unique to evolutionary psychology – a lot of science gets distorted and misappropriated via its low-fidelity transmission through popular culture (and münecat’s video is one of the best exemplars of that).

When you hear the word “quantum”, unless you’re at a physics conference, it should trigger your “woo” bullshit detector. That doesn’t mean actual quantum physics departments are a cesspool of quacks who want to sell you “healing” crystals. But hey, What the Bleep Do We Know?

Conceptual issues and factual errors

Münecat runs roughshod over every piece of evolutionary scholarship that she comes in contact with. If evolutionary biology is a universal acid, münecat is a universal tornado, flipping all facts upside down in her wake:

• For instance, münecat criticizes an article on human emotions that cites Paul Ekman, a person who she dislikes and disagrees with. To münecat, any paper that cites Ekman is trash. But the article in question was refuting Ekman. This is the academic equivalent of “retweets do not equal endorsement.” How can a scholar disagree with another scholar’s work without citing them? By this logic, münecat endorses evolutionary psychology because she heavily cites that literature in this video. The takeaway here is that münecat didn’t actually read the article or she’s being disingenuous.

• Or take münecat’s critique of multiple evolutionary psychologists for citing decades old papers, as if tracking the ideas that inform your theory back to their primary sources is bad scholarship.

• Or consider münecat’s assertion that twins studies, as a whole, are bad, based on the critique of Cyril Burt’s work at the turn of the 20th century…wait, I thought we weren’t allowed to cite decades old research! Münecat claims twins studies were doomed from the start, given how rare twins are, especially identical twins, and especially especially identical twins separated at birth and reared apart. What about the Twins Early Development Study, or the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, or the Sweden Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, not to mention other behavioral genetic paradigms, including adoption studies, like the Colorado Adoption Project? Modern twins studies are giant, thriving research programs, as evidenced by this review of twin studies, which looked at 18,000 traits in 2,700 publications and included nearly 15 million twin pairs.

• Let’s not forget münecat’s speculation that people may not have actively avoided pathogens but rather avoided them purely out of luck. This is beyond absurd for multiple reasons, one being that the evolutionary arms-race between pathogens and their hosts is ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom - all multicellular organisms have evolved defenses against pathogens.

• And don’t even get us started on the rollercoaster ride towards the end of the film where münecat randomly shifts from “destroying” evolutionary theory to concocting her own armchair evolutionary theory, whiteboard and all, that speculates biology creates variation to make populations more robust via a confused group-selection argument, and then pivots again to argue against scientific realism in favor of a solipsistic radical skepticism. Here, münecat argues that there is no “Truth.” Ok, in that case, we can disregard all the truth-claims in this video, right? We honestly didn’t realize münecat was serious when she told us we would go insane on this journey down the rabbit-hole with her.

If we were to do a point-by-point rebuttal and flag every particle of error and spin-doctoring that flows from the firehose of bullshit in this video, we would be here a long time. You don’t want that. We don’t want that. We can’t go on like this. But it's worth addressing some of the main conceptual issues here.

A fundamental misunderstanding of statistics

Münecat asserts that small sample sizes are more likely to yield significant results, which is the opposite of reality. Instead, small sample sizes reduce statistical power, meaning that they are less likely to yield significant results even if there is a true effect. It may seem nitpicky to note this error, because she is right to criticize studies with small sample sizes (which are less likely to be representative of the population, tend to have a greater margin of error, allow outliers to have a disproportionally large impact on statistical results, and make it more difficult to detect small, yet potentially meaningful effects). However, this is a prime example of a recurring issue in the video, which could be retitled: Münecat Convincingly Discusses Concepts She Doesn't Understand, Misleading Those Who Also Don’t Understand.

Münecat plays the “just-so story” card:

“...they try to defend their field by saying that they're doing the very thing that other behavioural scientists would say is extremely bad practice – the most common criticism of the field is that it's rife with just so stories which essentially means an untestable explanation for a theory...the very definition of a just-so story is something that's untestable and the very nature of evolutionary psychology renders all hypotheses essentially untestable because your hypotheses will include the contention that we evolved the trait that we're testing – that bit is the just-so story because you literally can't prove it.”

Correction: This confuses the scientific process.

The intuition here is that if a hypothesis reaches back into history, it’s untestable. By that same logic, cosmology, astrophysics, and geology are also rife with untestable just-so stories. We’re patiently waiting for an I Debunked Cosmology video...

We don’t need to go back in time to test an evolutionary hypothesis if it allows us to make predictions in the present that discriminate between competing hypotheses - including strictly sociocultural ones. That is the definition of a testable hypothesis. Münecat is right that we cannot prove an evolutionary hypothesis, we can only infer that it’s the best explanation (among the possible alternatives) from the available evidence. But if that’s the standard, we'll need to throw out the entire scientific enterprise, as science is scaffolded on inference to the best explanation, and never proves anything - hypotheses are always tentative and open to revision.

Evolutionary psychology wields remarkable explanatory and predictive power and has been an empirically fruitful enterprise – it generates new, precise, testable predictions that then lead to new discoveries about the mind. All of these points, and more, are addressed by Laith Al-Shawaf (see here, here, and here) and Ed Hagen (see here), a couple of which münecat cited in her video while conveniently overlooking these points.

The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness

Münecat:

“Evolutionary psychology bases its assumptions on the theory that our base traits were established in what is called the E.E.A...The E.E.A. in this context is the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the Pleistocene Savannah... And this is where humans first appeared a few million years ago. Once they'd started living in caves...they all had a meeting and agreed that they'd peaked and they should stop evolving there and then, so that future evolutionary psychologists could call this the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness to make their jobs a lot easier to do.”  

Correction: No.

The “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA) is not a place or a habitat, or even a time period. Rather, it is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations, weighted by their frequency and fitness-consequences...The concept of the EEA has been criticized under the misapprehension that it refers to a place, or to a typologically characterized habitat, and hence fails to reflect the variability of conditions organisms may have encountered. Humans, for example, undoubtedly encountered a variety of specific habitats during many periods of their evolution and should not be typologically characterized as adapted to living in, for example, the Kalahari desert...As a complex statistical composite of structurally described contingencies of selection, the idea of an EEA involves no oversimplication. – Tooby & Cosmides, The Past Explains the Present, 1990

Man the Hunter

One of münecat’s biggest beefs with evolutionary psychology is its claims about sex differences. She takes to task the well-documented finding that there is a division of labor between men and women in subsistence activities, where men engage in risky hunting of medium to large game and women pursue more reliable food sources, like edible plants, and may hunt small game.

Münecat’s big “gotcha!” for this is a recent study by Anderson et al. which challenges the notion of a gendered division of labor in foraging societies. They reported that women hunt in 79% of foraging societies, hunting large game in 33% of these societies. Ultimately, they conclude that “Women in foraging societies across the world historically participated and continue to participate in hunting regardless of child-bearing status. The collected data on women hunting directly opposes the traditional paradigm that women exclusively gather and men exclusively hunt and further elucidates the diversity and flexibility of human subsistence cultures.”

However, despite what Anderson et al. and münecat seem to think, no serious evolutionary scholar has ever said that men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather. Rather, this division of labor is what is typically seen.

Venkatarman et al. examined Anderson et al.’s study and found significant issues. For starters, Andersen et al. categorized women’s hunting activities in a binary manner, overlooking the complexities of how much effort women actually put into hunting and the success rates of their hunts. Their sample was not representative, as they selected only 63 societies from a larger pool of 391, and their sampling criteria were unclear and biased towards societies with documented female hunting, outright ignoring 18 societies where no evidence of women hunting was found:

“When we saw the Anderson et al 2023 PLoS ONE study published in July 2023, we realized we’d been studying the same material but coming to very different conclusions. We wanted to figure out why. So we tried to replicate the Anderson study. Unfortunately, we learned that their methods were not reliable and biased toward finding evidence for women’s hunting, and therefore their conclusions are not robust.”

Despite the fact that Anderson et al.’s findings were severely flawed and would not outright negate the extensive research showing the gendered division of labor even without these flaws, the media and many researchers quickly began citing the paper as evidence against this division of labor:

“The media storm around the Anderson paper in summer 2023 was completely unjustified and misleading. It was driven by an agenda that had little to do with science itself and did not accurately reflect the way most anthropologists think about this issue. In foraging societies men and women tend, on average, to do different sorts of activities. Anthropologists have long recognized that women sometimes hunt in foraging societies.”

Steve-Stewart Williams also covered this issue here.

Evolved psychological mechanisms on the one hand - environment, learning, and culture on the other. You need both hands to grasp the mind.

When discussing David Buss’ TEDx talk, münecat jumps on the fact that Buss himself points out that women report engaging in more infidelity than decades past, closing some of the gap between men and women, as if this variation spells disaster for an evolutionary account of sex differences. But evolutionary psychologists don’t seem particularly worried about variation like this, because variation like this has been a part of their model from the jump. In fact, they are predicting precisely this kind of variation in advance:

“In environments in which female economic dependence on a male mate is higher, male parental investment is more essential. In such environments, therefore, both sexes should value paternity certainty more and thus object more to promiscuity (because promiscuity undermines paternity certainty).” - Price et al., Female Economic Independence and the Morality of Promiscuity, 2014

Or consider predictions like these: men and women will shift their mating strategies as a function of a skewed sex ratio in the local mating market (also see here and here), men’s sexual jealousy will be greater in cultures characterized by greater paternal investment, cultures with greater pathogen prevalence will place greater value on physical attractiveness (also see here), and social emotions, like pride and shame, track the degree that behaviors and traits are valued locally and cross-culturally.

“No!” says münecat. “That trait didn’t evolve...it’s because we’re told these stereotypes when we’re children...or because we’ve let women leave the house more!” These factors probably do influence various traits, but the ability to learn and to react to the environment in any way requires evolved mechanisms that, for example: a) impose concepts on the world, b) determine which parts of the environment are attended to, c) determine how observations are categorized and represented, d) decide who and what to interact with, and e) determine which specific environmental influences trigger specific psychological and developmental changes. If a trait is influenced by the stuff we’re told as children, understanding that can help us explain how that trait works and develops, but it doesn’t explain why we react to that information in that specific way. Nothing in the environment can, because the environment affects organisms in different ways. More on the compatibility of evolution and learning, and the necessity to invoke both for a complete explanation of the mind here and here.

Another complaint we have with münecat’s strict sociocultural explanation is that merry-go-rounds make us dizzy: Sociocultural stuff causes human behavior →Human behavior causes sociocultural stuff. And round and round we go.

Conclusion

Münecat’s critique of evolutionary psychology is an agenda-driven, intellectually dishonest hit-piece. It's also incredibly effective in this endeavor. As the saying goes, a lie can make it half-way around the world before the truth gets a chance to put its shoes on. Her arguments are riddled with conceptual issues and factual errors. Hopefully, this piece will help set the record straight, although that’s probably a bit naive given that, unlike münecat, we don’t have the time to make a video that runs longer than the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings, nor do we have any cool musical ensembles to compliment our arguments. Thankfully, “A Capella Science” has our back, so we’ll leave you with this absolute banger as a parting gift: