One of the most vicious and misinformed attacks on evolutionary psychology I've ever seen. But, unlike the mentality on Twitter / X, in science the mob doesn't get to vote. The data does.
Good but she engages in so many misunderstandings of EP, mis-citations of studies, logical fallacies and repetitions of leftist myths/untested myths from fields like feminist literary criticism that this barely scratches the surface.
Agreed. We had limited time/energy/interest, and wanted to get something out quickly that counters it. A comprehensive piece also would have been too long of a read for this format. But more commentary should be forthcoming from others in the field!
“... 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.”
this + a variety of other considerations destroy the 'heritability' predictions that are routinely misinterpreted as INheritability; as precise generalizable estimates of how much genes and environment additively 'cause' traits/behaviors. the entire field of behavioral genetics is plagued by QRPs, extremely unrealistic assumptions and failed reproducibility/replicability, to ridiculously simplify (distort; misrepresent) the complexity to be able to publish papers.
One of the most vicious and misinformed attacks on evolutionary psychology I've ever seen. But, unlike the mentality on Twitter / X, in science the mob doesn't get to vote. The data does.
DaTa dOeS
Good but she engages in so many misunderstandings of EP, mis-citations of studies, logical fallacies and repetitions of leftist myths/untested myths from fields like feminist literary criticism that this barely scratches the surface.
Agreed. We had limited time/energy/interest, and wanted to get something out quickly that counters it. A comprehensive piece also would have been too long of a read for this format. But more commentary should be forthcoming from others in the field!
“... 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.”
this + a variety of other considerations destroy the 'heritability' predictions that are routinely misinterpreted as INheritability; as precise generalizable estimates of how much genes and environment additively 'cause' traits/behaviors. the entire field of behavioral genetics is plagued by QRPs, extremely unrealistic assumptions and failed reproducibility/replicability, to ridiculously simplify (distort; misrepresent) the complexity to be able to publish papers.