How's it going! Hope everyone's had a good summer and even better conversations.
Sorry I disappeared, online discussions can become very addicting and time consuming, and I had too much stuff that needed my full attention. So I had to quit cold turkey lol.
But right now I need help with a class paper if anyone is interested.
The professor asked us to find any currently standing psychological theory or idea that we disagree with, and refute it and argue against it. Probably to no one's surprise here, I chose evolutionary psychology lol.
Thanks for your help.
EDIT: I took down the paper cause as Nyar pointed out, it might be flagged for plagiarism.
But here are my main 2 arguments.
1. Evolutionary Psychology does not have evidence to support it. There are no "fossils" for the mind, or for language. So the psychology of our ancestors is unknown to us.
2. Evolutionary Psychology suffers from the Infinite Regress fallacy. For example, saying we see faces in clouds, because seeing faces helped our ape-like ancestors spot predators. But if that's the case, then our ape-like ancestors should have also been bad, because their cognitive abilities were inherited from earlier rodent-like ancestors, and so on.
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I don't want to quote your paper here, as sooner or later you'll be turning it in and it might be ran against a plagiarism checker and I don't want to create the possibility of a false positive:
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Page 3, paragraph 1, last sentence (about ants, bees, and spiders): is a dubious argument from analogy. Ants, bees and spiders have been living in those conditions 10's of millions of years. Humans have been living with computers for about 40 years (at best).
Page 3, paragraph 2, first sentence (brain being 1 evolutionary step behind): is a strawman.
Page 5, paragraph 2, sentence 1 (brains not being or on time) is a strawman (that you built in the previous paragraph).
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You are consistently missing the point that technology is changing very quickly. For example the world wide web is barely 1 human generation old. There is no way any meaningful evolutionary adaption through selection can possibly keep up with that; let alone propagate throughout the species in one generation.
If you want to attack the subject, I'd suggest more of what you had earlier in the paper: attacking it for being untestable.
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PS: glad you are back
Very true, I didn't think about the plagiarism checker.
The technology argument that I'm trying to make, is that technology itself shouldn't be considered a new "environment." If a new Ice Age were to come along, or Climate Change does some changes to the very surface of the earth, then that would qualify as humans stumbling upon a new environment we haven't adapted for.
But technology is different. We are the ones who design it. We adapt it to ourselves. So in that sense, we are perfectly adapted to the internet, because we designed the internet to be adapted to us.
We use technology to tame the environment, and basically adapt the entire earth to ourselves. With technology, natural selection is dethroned.
Capitalism thrives by making technology more and more adapted to us.
This whole concept is quite problematic. How can you be sure X is perfectly adapted for Y?
Also consider the following silly example: Are human being perfectly adapted to atomic bombs, nuclear waste, etc? As you said, "we are the ones who designed [them]".
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And a final silly comment (from me):
Clearly you are not perfectly adapted to the world wide web.
I agree, you can't be sure X is adapted to Y. Unless of course X designed Y, and adapted it to itself. Think of it this way, are we more likely to survive out in a forest, or in an air-conditioned room? Are more likely to avoid harm in person, or through text? Technology is our anthill.
The internet doesn't exist without us. You can't even say the words "world wide web" without using a language we created.
And the fact that now I know about the plagiarism checker, shows how easily I adapted. Try teaching a chimpanzee to browse the web, and debate on this forum. It won't work, we didn't adapt the internet for them.
You claimed that we were perfectly adapted to the internet. But now you have acknowledged adapting since the start of this thread. So clearly you were not perfectly adapted when you started the thread; so your statement that we are perfectly adapted to the internet must be false.
Do you think you are perfectly adapted to the internet now?
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You should abandon this notion of perfect adaption. That dog don't hunt.
Let me backtrack, because I agree that "perfect" is a meaningless word here. The argument I'm making is in terms of direction. Does A have to adapt to B, or does B have to adapt to A.
Steven Pinker is saying that A (humans) have to adapt to B (technology). I'm arguing no, that B (technology) is what adapts to A (humans). So for example, lets say I am bad at using the internet. Does that mean I have to evolve and adapt? Or does that mean we need to redesign the internet so that its easier to use?
Clearly, we just need to modify the internet. Phones get "smarter" not humans.
Lol I need this dog to hunt. Because evolutionary psychologists have made a career out of using how bad we are at our own tools, like math or driving, to argue we're stuck in the past.
Nothing "has" to adapt. Also human being do adapt to technology. Consider the technology of wheat farming: developed in the Near East and spread to Europe. Modern people who's ancestors come from those regions have much lower incidents of gluten intolerance.
The suggestion is that large numbers of people with gluten intolerance in those areas were selected out of the gene pool, because they had problems eating what was being produced (wheat). While modern people who's ancestors come from Asia and North America have much higher incidents of gluten intolerance; because they were not selected out, because they weren't trying to surviving on wheat. The key is these changes take a very long time; but wheat has been farmed for at least 12,000 years, so maybe that is what happened.
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Individuals basically can't evolve through natural selection.
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There is a good criticism for your paper: bad as compared to what? Imaginary super humans of the future? But I would say that our common sense is notoriously unreliable when it comes to mathematics.
@John 6IX Breezy: " Try teaching a chimpanzee to browse the web, and debate on this forum. It won't work, we didn't adapt the internet for them."
I beg to differ.
Hey John. Good to see you here again.
Welcome back John!
WB breezy John :)
GL on your paper.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it looks to me like humans can (and must) adapt, but I'm unsure if we are still evolving. Evolution requires survival of the fittest. Modern medical science and social services have rendered that point moot in much of the world.
Btw welcome back John.