Bret WeinsteinVerified account

Anyone who think that 'EvoPsych always disappoints' should have a look at the recent handbook edited by @davidbusspsych summarizing our field's amazing theoretical & empirical progress since 1990: https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Evolutionary-Psychology-Foundation-ebook/dp/B0178N0Q00/ …

That's one pricy handbook you got there

It's one of the cheapest academic handbooks I've ever seen, actually. Many handbooks are over $1,000 (sold mostly to libraries).

You are inadvertantly making my point. The racket of academic publishing is one of the structures that holds fields back.

And actually, if you read carefully the description tells you what you need to know. The field has amazing promise. It is on the verge of answering the most important questions. If you want to be current, you need this book. Should I check back in another generation, then?

This sounds like a conversation that's worth having at greater length in a more conducive medium. I'm surprised you're so negative about ev psych, when to me, it's just mainstream evo theory applied to human behavioral adaptations.

Agree about the venue. Before we drop it, though, let's be clear about what I am saying. Evo Psych should be earthshattering: Evo Bio of Humans. But the field is "stuck", as most fields are. The synopsis of Buss's handbook could literaly have been written 20 years ago.

I'm *not* saying that Evo Psych is uniquely stuck, or that there's something wrong with the field's leaders. And I'm not exempting evolutionary biology. Perverse incentives in the academic system have caused a widespread failure.

It seems like EvoPsych could easily fall into the naturalistic fallacy. (If it happens in nature, it must be good.) Is that a real risk? Can EvoPsych be looked at with a variety of "fitness terms" beyond just reproduction?

I don't think the field itself runs this risk, but it is always in danger of being misinterpreted as normative and prescriptive rather than explanatory and cautionary.

Skirting dangerously close to the eugenics movement. :)

Not remotely. But you can imagine the problem of a field that lives forever under that toxic historical shadow.

I may be ignorant regarding "good Darwinism", but isn't Darwinism a true test of survival of the fittest? Only the best and strongest truly deserve to pass on their genetic code? If that is true, then it would be ok to kill off weaker specimans to prevent inferior genes. Right?

Glad you asked. No, this isn't what I meant at all. My point: a high quality understanding of Darwinism (as it applies to humans) would allow people to live vastly better. I also believe that once we understand what selection has built us for, we'll have no choice but to rebel.

Are institutional limits the same in China, Japan, etc?

Great question. I don't think Japan is Independent enough. For historical reasons I suspect China will not lean toward clear-headed Darwinism, but who knows?

Sir, Motoo Kimura was a Japanese émigré. So is Masatoshi Nei. (So is Francis Fukuyama - an evolutionary thinker in political science in some respects and has been minting it). The Japanese are good at evolutionary theory.

"The neutral theory of molecular evolution holds that at the molecular level most evolutionary changes and most of the variation within and between species is not caused by natural selection but by genetic drift of mutant alleles that are neutral." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoo_Kimura …

Yeah. Evolution by natural selection (ENS) - aka Darwinism - isn't that important for biological change, let alone culture. And Bret is wrong about evo and academia. Most of the academics that have audiences outside the academy are usually evolutionists.