#evopsych

[mercurialbadger]

"Evolutionary psychology is a belief that human and mice are more or less the same, but men and women are incomparably different" ©Stolen

[not-terezi-pyrope]

you need to let go of evopsych immediately

Is this about that war ptsd post from like a week ago? Believe me, the fairly uncontroversial statement of "human beings are probably in some sense wired to be able to handle some intergroup conflict and violence without falling apart" does not imply that I accept any of the woo associated with pop evopsych, and it's honestly fairly insulting to assume otherwise.

But the fact that there's a bunch of nonsense that gets peddled under evopsych doesn't mean that it isn't true that the human mind and its modes of operation were, in a broad sense, shaped by survival pressures. That's just a thing that is self-evidently true, our minds didn't just emerge from the void. It's clear that pretty much all of our underlying emotional responses and so forth directly cater to some survival imperative, it's just that you can't really extrapolate from that truths about our broader culture or individual personality quirks like you're reading a horoscope.

[hardnekkig]

Birth of the Ruderal

Nature creates fast-types and slow-types. You would think there are uppers and downers too. This is how it goes. So, I propose we call liberals changers. I do not like the terms liberals or progressive (the latter: it is not certain the change is truelly progressive or not). Changers are the rule breakers, while conservatives are the rule makers. Conservatives stabilize the system. Following Marco del Giudice, I see past orientation besides present orientation and future orientation. I also see competitive attitudes besides his cooperative and exploitative attitudes. Following Avi Tuschman, perhaps rule breakers are (more often?) outbreeders, while rule makers are (more often?) inbreeders. Following Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock I see a conflict between the maternal and the paternal. Is there some link between the patriarchy and this conflict?

Without natural selection, according to the Zero-Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL), a system will complexify and diversify. Can we expect this to happen with our societies once threats are gone? I see order, disorder, edge of chaos, and chaos. Following Scott Page I see exploiters vs explorers and redundancy vs diversity. In this, redundancy is possibly conforming while diversity might be non-conforming. This seems to be about hunters (conservatives) vs busybodies (changers). Autistic people see the details, creative people the whole: what is this about?

Conservatives do not like greens: maybe they are on average more easily poisoned? It are greens which contain (light) toxins after all. Conservatives seem to have higher disgust and threat sensitivity. Perhaps they have weaker immune systems and (some of them) are not as strong. That having said, there are hints that highly attractive people and men with high upper body strength support rightwing politics. They seem poised for both dangerous and ordered environments. (However upper body strength also goes with redistribution views.)

According to Crespi and Badcock, extreme female brains and extreme male brain exist. If there is an extreme male brain, there should be an extreme male body. If so, that seems to suggest there should be an extreme male, male body and a extreme female, male body.

I also speculate how the c-s-r model fits into the framework. Not just with the paternal vs maternal model but also as fast-type vs slow-type. Both competitive and ruderal seem to be fast-type, whereas survivor seems to be slow-type. Perhaps a competitive slow-type exists. Both competitive people and ruderal people should probably have fast growth rate and also age faster. We could argue some people are born older or younger. Perhaps survivor people are tougher as according to the c-s-r model survivor plants have tougher leaves. It seems possible surivor people retain fat more, while competitive people have higher muscle growth. Perhaps survivor people have a higher pain treshold. There is probably more to the c-s-r model.

The system creates personalities, which in turn changes the system.

Next: what type of environments can we distingish and what type of personality usually comes out of it? According to the c-s-r model there are high stress + low disturbance environments, low stress + high disturbance environments, low stress + low disturbance environments. About the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map: I speculate the traditional and survival have to do with stress and disturbance. Self-expression seems to do with signalling and sexual selection. As the guppies become more colourful when they are without predation, so people can become more self-expressive when the environment is safe. I call it the peacock. Secularity is perhaps related to intelligence.

I can think of the following environments: chaotic, high stress or harsh/poor, unpredictable, rich, dangerous and ordered. So where does this lead to? Changers seem to do better in messy and/or chaotic environments. Following Dick Swaab there is rich and high stress biological context to sensitivity. Following Tim Low it seems that rich environments create aggressors. Conservatives seem to be about creating order or thriving in order.

As for the (by Jonathan Haidt) moral foundations I suggest we reduce harm to threat sensitivy, fairness stays fairness, authority to dominance, ingroup to ingroup and purity to disgust sensitivity. I am also fascinated by trade-offs and allocations. I think it needs to add flaws and errors, in which flaws are imperfections and errors are mistakes. Besides that, I wonder what to do with the terms leftwing and rightwing. How many leftwing orientations are there? How many rightwing orientations are there? What can we reduce them to? Could avoidant personality cluster with the autistic spectrum? Could dependent personality disorder cluster with the psychotic or autistic spectrum? I think dependent personality is about – following Scott Page – exploiting, while avoidant personality is about exploring.

Yaneer Bar-Yam says: 

Most animals have many offspring. The number of offspring that survive to adulthood tells us something about how complex an animal’s environment is compared to its own complexity. Mammals have several to dozens of offspring, frogs have thousands, fish have millions and insects can have as many as billions. In each case, on average only one offspring per parent survives to have offspring. The others made wrong choices because the number of possible right choices is small. In this way, we can see that mammals are almost as complex as their environments, while frogs are much less complex and insects and fish are still less complex when compared with their environments.

Following the above, it seems logical that people with a lot of babies are also less complex (but I think this does not necessarily mean less intelligent).

I call schizophrenia system-failure, following the below (by Scott E. Page): 

In systems with capacity constraints a tradeoff arises between redundancy and diversity. Greater diversity entails more responsiveness—think back to the law of requisite variety—but increases the odds that the failure of any one entity could cause the system to collapse. Greater redundancy implies less ability to respond to new disturbances but agreater ability to withstand the loss of any one entity in thesystem. On balance, a system must trade off redundancy with diversity much in the same way it trades off exploitation(doing what it does well) and exploration (continuing to look for something better). Redundancy guarantees that the system can keep doing what it’s doing. Diversity enables it to respondto new disturbances.

I think I might be wrong here. But I see schizophrenia as having more diversity and at a higher risk at systemfailure (collapse).

Turchin cycles

[junewild]

Watching Sam & Brennan talk about the beauty of frivolity, of adults playing silly games just as seriously as they fight to survive, and... yeah. There are some things that keep us alive, and there are some things that make life worth living, and I think games are one of those things that fall into both categories. Games make our lives better and they make us better at being alive. I think that's pretty cool.

[gothhabiba]

the concept of a bodily organ, for example, having a "purpose" is one that we impose post hoc on a bunch of processes that just sort of happen. and you'll often hear people talking about how an animal evolved a specific organ in order to do a specific thing, while in fact the concept behind evolution by natural selection is that a near-infinite host of more or less 'random' things is happening at all times, but those few processes that cause other processes like them to be replicated in the future are, obviously, going to become more common in the future, because (tautologically) they are the ones that have replicated themselves.

sometimes this could arguably be a pretty harmless oversimplification or misunderstanding, but it really starts to skeeve me out when people start talking about sex organs as if they have an inherent "purpose," or sex as though it has a certain baseline, natural "form". all kinds of sexual behaviors happen all over the place all the time. the fact that some of them have a chance of leading to the conditions that allow them to replicate themselves is relevant from the standpoint of studying evolution, but it does not impose a inherent "purpose" on any of them.

(as a side note it is not at all uncommon for a feature to prove useful for one thing at one point and then prove useful for something entirely different later; nor is it uncommon for genetic "drift" to occur where changes that are neither helpful nor unhelpful in replicating themselves become more common in a population; nor is it uncommon for some genes to become more common in a population not because they have a direct effect on phenotype in a replication-chance-enhancing way, but because they're encoded for on close-together bits of chromosome with something else that does. so you double extra can't work backwards from a behaviour to an explanation of why it must have been evolutionarily valuable.)

things do not evolve for a specific "purpose" btw. if anyone says that they do, then they are at best engaging in a useful but dangerous and obfuscatory shorthand that they must constantly remind themselves is untrue--at worst they are demonstrating that they do not understand how evolution works while attempting to use said misunderstanding to further reactionary evopsych-style arguments

[kaftan]

I bet amy has really normal thoughts about how homosexuality fits into a theory of evolutionary biology

[weepycat]

a post i made three years about how you shouldnt find teenagers sexually attractive as an adult is blowing up, and i swear to god i was filled with dread until my activity page loaded and the notes were full of people agreeing with me

[hecata]

i have such an irrational hatred of studies on human (hetero)sexual behaviour. "women speak in a higher voice when they're ovulating" shut the fuck up and go research something that actually matters

[niqaboy]

the evolutionary psychology fandom is dying. reblog to kill it faster

[baravaggio]

I'm deep in the erotic art entry on stanford encyclopedia of philosophy rn and I can't believe there's people who are still doing aesthetics in this way in the 21st century....imagine knowing anything about art history & sincerely arguing that eroticism doesn't tend to be part of some of the greatest masterpieces. me when I'm wrong

[winepresswrath]

whenever I see discourse and it's like "she DESERVED to be fried alive" I briefly understand the evopsych crowd*. I really do want to make up a cute just-so story about the human instinct to see a made up little woman who tried to fuck a made up little man and put her in the deep fryer and then pretend it's science.

*my ancestral enemies. best detested. will fight them on the beaches etcetera

[iscratchdoors]

it always bugs me so bad when some piece of educational media about wildlife says something along the lines of "the purpose of an animal's life is to reproduce and pass on its genes" like... no tf it isn't? that just Happens? animals aren't out there thinking "ohoho i must outcompete my rivals so my genes pass on and continue my lineage" and neither is the abstract concept of nature directing them with that intent. they're just following their little animal brain instincts and just... living life. you could just as easily say that the purpose of an animal passing on its genes is to give another animal the opportunity to live life. just because chance and likelihood works out in such a way that certain traits are more likely to be passed onto future generations doesn't mean that that is some kind of innate purpose that some traits are fulfilling and others are failing. it's just chance. it just happens.

[bredforloyalty]

evolutionary psychology is a plague. and it rots the brain<3

[cosmogenous]

should look into the psylocibin monkey evolutionary theory

[starlightkun]

reading scientific articles on human scent glands to write one scene of a fic. sigh. guess what fic this is for.........

[niobiumao3]

I realize the the Essential Guide to Warfare, Author's Cut blog posts are maybe not strictly canon, but literally why did Disney make a whole-ass blogpost about 'clone troopers can't be sterilized it makes them worse soldiers'. Why. WHY? Who thought this was good worldbuilding.

They could have just said 'yes they all have a birth control implant, it releases a chemical that prevents gamete production, it lasts N years and is easily replaced/recharged.'

Boom! Done. Nothing about WELL SEE IF WE MAKE THEM STERILE THEY'RE LESS AGGRESSIVE and none of this 'just don't let them near civilians abstinence will fix it'.

<drags hands down face>

Anyways I cannot believe anyone fucking wrote that when implanted time release birth control hormones as a concept is something WE ALREADY HAVE RIGHT NOW IN THIS WORLD extrapolating it into scifi for men IS NOT A RADICAL FUCKING IDEA when we're literally talking about mind control chips and one million clones!!!!!

okay I'm fine. anyways of all the parts of SW canon I have slam dunked into the dumpster that one is at the top.