Evolutionary Psychology/Systems Thinking

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I've seen offhanded criticism of "evopsych" arguments on this forum and elsewhere, and I would be interested in hearing more specific objections.

Like psychology, it's by no means authoritative or scientific, but this type of thinking has helped me to make sense of a lot of things, particularly differences between races, racism itself, and differences between the genders.

Older generations rely on more individualistic thinking and assume that the system will work itself out if common advice is followed, but recently the system has destabilized in never-before-seen ways. Folk wisdom and religious dogma seem unable to keep up with the times (e.g. how are you supposed to raise a child properly any more?).

I think considering human populations as systems, proposing theories as to why certain attributes of the systems exist, and determining how to preserve desirable traits in a population is critical to our future. Conventional thinking even in modern times often tends towards cargo culting system effects: most people who object to degeneracy do so because they correctly associate it with other bad things, but they do not understand why or how they are causally linked.

Attempts to resist the warping of our culture often feel crude because they do not make these types of arguments, for instance "retvrn"ing to past traditions, even though it is not made explicit why exactly they were better, or how retvrning would be at all possible in practice. A systems approach could try to develop a novel solution that solves basic problems that re-emerged due to the decay of traditions, as well as modern problems that traditional culture was never equipped to deal with. This probably would look similar to traditional norms in some ways because our culture has simply regressed, but new strategies are also needed to contain the harm that chaotic forces like the internet can cause.

My guesses as to why "evopsych" is spoken of negatively are perhaps due to its similarities to critical theory (which I think is at times half-correct, but also largely unserious and bad faith), or maybe there was some particular NRx argument that was shared around. Leftists assert that because a system exists it is "oppressive" and must be destroyed (but they actually have a decent understanding of how it works). I can also see how there might be a naturalistic fallacy where it is asserted that because a behavior evolved, it must be desirable to keep it around even if it is obviously at odds with a happy society. Or maybe these arguments are seen as too arbitrary and unfalsifiable, although I could say the same applies to all of continental philosophy, and empiricism seems to be hopeless at confronting these sorts of topics. I think this mode of thinking has merit and should not be discarded, I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

[BillyONare]

You can see that black people and women are stupid based on logic, common sense, and empirical data. A lot of evo psych is bad because it is unrigorous "just-so stories".

For example:
"Men like big round boobies because flat chests don't produce enough milk and can accidentally suffocate the baby"
"African pygmies are actually genetically smarter than white people because they live in an uncivilized survival of the fittest lifestyle"
"Africa is undeveloped because you can't domesticate zebras"
"Human males have big cocks because we lived in peaceful bonobo gangbang societies and we had to scoop out each other's cum"
"Carbs are bad for you because hunter gatherers didn't eat them."

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

Good examples, I see where you're coming from. I think that while those statements probably have some degree of "truth" because the effect exists, the issue is that it's never the whole answer, and in fact may only have very slight significance or be refuted by other effects. If those example conclusions are correct they definitely have other causes too, and if they're incorrect it's because there are other effects working in the opposite direction. Whenever someone makes an evopsych claim even moderately confidently with words like "because", they're oversimplifying.

Despite this, I do think evolutionary reasoning can reach places that empiricism and basic logic can't, but its conclusions are less reliable. The state of mainstream psychology should be enough to demonstrate that there are things science can't measure, and what so-called scientists in these fields do instead by pretending surveys are valid data is laughable. If an evopsych argument conflicts even with common sense, common sense is probably right. Inconveniently, the situations where this type of thinking is more useful are situations where its inherently shaky claims cannot be easily verified by experiments or direct observation.

[turnip]

Vitalists have very different views on evolution, life, and history than what is common in modern scientific disciplines, so it may stem from that. That is a whole topic on its own, but to focus on the OP, I do not think that evolutionary psychology adequately understands the genealogy of most modern behaviors. I don't think that whole psychological tendencies are "selected," preserved or inherited through such simple mechanisms, either.

Modern human psychology has much do to with the particular pathways along which modern humans evolved. Our evolution builds out of atavistic memory, but it can't really be reduced to it in such a direct and mechanistic way as what passes in evopsych. All of this isn't to imply that biology, race or sex shouldn't be taken into account either - quite the opposite.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

This brings to mind how Darwin's theory of evolution is considered by biologists to be too simplistic even though Darwin and simple natural selection/speciation is what most people will think of when they hear "evolution". It gets very complicated and nuanced, and there were some things like epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer that Darwin never knew about. The prevailing theory became the modern synthesis and later the extended evolutionary synthesis. They should use semantic versioning.

[turnip]

This brings to mind how Darwin's theory of evolution is considered by biologists to be too simplistic even though Darwin and simple natural selection/speciation is what most people will think of when they hear "evolution". It gets very complicated and nuanced, and there were some things like epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer that Darwin never knew about. The prevailing theory became the modern synthesis and later the extended evolutionary synthesis. They should use semantic versioning.

Yeah, I find epigenetic memory and such things interesting.

The vitalist view of evolution can be illustrated, I think, by considering why mollusks and vertebrae both evolved eyes separately, despite having diverged in their evolution at a much earlier point. You could say that it is because eyes are advantageous, and both were under a selective pressure to evolve the capacity for sight, but the mechanistic view is insufficient here. An organ as incredibly complex as an eye must evolve through many small, incremental changes over time. Yet it is very unlikely that these changes would have each individually conferred a selective advantage before the whole eye had evolved, or that this process would have occurred twice independently in nature.

The vitalist understanding of evolution would be that, since mollusks and vertebrae have a shared origin (however far back in history), both contain the same primordial will - which isn't just genetic, although it is active in the germs of every organism. Thus, both were able to evolve their own will to see. Organisms contain both primordial and recent ancestral memory, hence they have the ability to evolve in any direction; they can converge with other organisms, approximate earlier forms, or evolve in completely new directions (such as human consciousness). Note this is also a rejection of finalism - the idea that anything is destined to evolve in a particular way.

Back to evolutionary psychology, there is an issue with its tendency for simplified, mechanistic, and abstract explanations for behavior, which end up being completely detached from the actual psychological reasons (conscious or otherwise) why people choose to live the way they do. If one isn't careful this quickly turns into the mirror-image of libtard sociology and history. The end result of both is to efface individual agency by explaining everything in terms of these abstract, mechanistic forces.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

Vitalism to me seems at best a metaphor for explaining common patterns that arise in living organisms via more complex mechanisms. There are some obvious ones, like the will to survive and reproduce, that can be helpful to anthropomorphize as a shorthand. It's sort of like an evopsych that does not claim to be scientifically grounded. Maybe there should be a merit to this because it discourages unwarranted overconfidence from closeness to The Science, but I nevertheless encounter a lot of overconfident claims that assert things without evidence anyway.

I highly doubt the literal metaphysical interpretation of vitalism is correct, and I find it easier to accept that ancient ecosystems can do complex and unexpected things that we struggle to explain. I more often than not see metaphysical generalizations used to mislead and bait for attention rather than explain, so I've always preferred to ground these sorts of arguments in the material world.

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Conveniently I just saw this "ostensible" tweet no doubt about to receive many likes and retweets.

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To offset this post with something I found interesting, domestication syndrome does seem to be a real effect occurring across species (has little to do with eye shape or predation though). I can't find the link, but I saw another article proposing that neural crest defects were a mechanism of domestication and that comparable to changes in animal pigmentation, Waardenburg syndrome or just a streak of white hair are examples of it occurring in humans. I noticed before this that I only get (very few) white hairs along the same streak too.

[Guest]

Metaphysics seems like a misnomer when people use it as just another module for physics to connect to. The only way that metaphysics would be beyond physics would be if it were closed from one side of causality or another or both. That which is always upstream of events in our physical world, or that which is always downstream, or that which is beyond us forever. All of these exist in my suspicions. Don't get me wrong I am interested in any "metaphysics" that is just really weird physics dependent on the true essence of things or belief or something like that.

Back to evolutionary psychology, there is an issue with its tendency for simplified, mechanistic, and abstract explanations for behavior, which end up being completely detached from the actual psychological reasons (conscious or otherwise) why people choose to live the way they do. If one isn't careful this quickly turns into the mirror-image of libtard sociology and history. The end result of both is to efface individual agency by explaining everything in terms of these abstract, mechanistic forces.

I think evopsych only gets really interesting once you consider the broad evopsych story as only a shape that molds the population- quirks of implementation and constraints of an entire different sort informing the actual character.

For example if there is a pressure on a group to form a sort of genetic equivalent of digital rights management software so they can detect when a person is too mentally divergent to suffer to live in their eusocial tribe, that is the broad evopsych part. I am highly confident that such a pressure has been applied to humans for a long time, which gives me the confidence needed to consider the specific part in depth. How do the genes actually implement interpersonal eusocial validation? What sort of failures occur when different divergent models are halfway implemented in a mutt population? Obviously false negatives and positives, but how long does it take for a population to stabilize a new standard mechanism? Can sufficient intelligence in a population bootstrap a temporary substitute through culture? If I had a few billion dollars to spare I would love to research the connection between different population genomes and the psyche through an evolutionary frame.

[turnip]

Vitalism to me seems at best a metaphor for explaining common patterns that arise in living organisms via more complex mechanisms.

I don't think it should be understood as metaphor, nor an anthropomorphization of nature, or even a "metaphysics" in the sense that you seem to mean. It is a philosophy of life that, for our purposes, begins with Schopenhauer's reconceptualization of the will in cosmic terms, as something that can be immediately seen to permeate all things (I refer you especially to his aesthetic theory). It was meant to oppose metaphysical thinking, including the naïve realism that implicitly views history as an orchestrated movement of abstract structures. But "vitalism" today is associated with thinkers as far apart as Nietzsche on the one hand and Bergson/Deleuze on the other, so I just consider it to be an umbrella term for a group of broadly similar ideas.

Anyway, I just wanted to give some context for why you might've encountered resistance to evolutionary psychology, which is also probably the most tendentious and least empirical field. I had BAP's tweet here in mind as well: https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/stat...7677058059

With that said, this isn't meant to throw out evolutionary science, but to properly expand and refine its scope. It can obviously be fruitful to scientifically study human populations and form hypotheses about their behavior, as long as we can avoid hbdchick-style "Europeans became smart because of manorialism."

[Guest]

What is desired most honestly by an organism? This will lead to its path. An "intelligence" across a species or group that is shared. This is probably the clearest way to understand "the other way" of thinking.

As for evopsych: Man lives only to breed, to perpetuate himself is the given. It's a given that I do not give, nor am I willing to associate myself with those who give such a thing either. Mass murder is preferable to mere reproduction, it is more impressive.

This is hyperbolic (I suppose.) But it should get the difference across. Any population that only cares about reproduction is endlessly malleable, and I find no worth in studying them or their "desires." They desire only that, to breed, so give it to them or don't. Use it as a carrot to push along your work-force. That's all they are.

These people do not aim anything. They are aimed.

Nature of the present moment being as it is, cattle enjoys navel-gazing and pontificating on differences in "muh breeding." It is best to ignore them, as they are simply aimless, since no one is aiming them.

Do you want to create a world where said aimless people enjoy that wonderful image of love, still represented sometimes in its plainest form in media? (Particularly in Japan.)
Then aim the people in that direction. Make it the default, the standard. They will simply comply. If you took two youths in their first love, and in a world where first love was always love, they would merely follow this path. They are aimless, but you can aim them.

Of course, the caveat is that when you aim things down a direction like this, you end up with very strong bonds between people. Even the most pedestrian of man might outdo himself when he is lifted by such bonds. And over time, then maybe you would see some positive evolution.

Currently, bonds are essentially weightless. If you are lucky, you have a family that is still a family, resembles something strong. Or friends, comrades, peers, etc.

Evo-psych as it is commonly expressed is a way to cope with being aimless.

The other way is very simple, in that the other type of life *will* not be aimed by anyone else. They may end up with nothing, but they will not be aimed. From this type, one might aim a group, country, etc. if all the stars align. Note that it is not a default and note that said defiant types are not guaranteed to want to do such a thing at all. Nor should they be expected to.

I find a particular disgust in how people pair, including people who are close to me in one way or another. In purest vanity: I would prefer people to suffer for a long era before I give anything to them. Why do people take pictures of themselves? When they are ugly...

[Guest]

to summarize an aspect of this thread: evopsych only sucks in the sense that sociology sucks. The implementations we see suck. The subjects themselves deserve geniuses of greater vigor and midwits of greater rigor.