A somewhat sneering post taking jabs at evolutionary psychology over at Crooked Timber. Check out this piece in The American Prospect suggesting that liberals shouldn’t take gratuitous potshots as evolutionary psychology, I guess that advice didn’t take everywhere. Not much time to comment on the post itself, but a good reminder that the Left, home of intellectuals opposed to “superstition,” have their own values that do not brook any empirical input. My favorite parts below:
Part of the issue here is that any form of psychology makes a poor sociology, and it’s only evolutionary psychology that tries to pretend that the distinction between individual and social psychology doesn’t exist.
…
And the other part of the issue is that, however much Steven Pinker would like it to be, the mind is not a Swiss Army knife and the division of psychological entities into modules is something without anatomical basis when carried out at the level of anything other than the broadest and most general ur-behaviours. The only things which are even a candidate for evolutionary explanation are the big drives; eating, reproduction, childcare, status, suppression of same-species aggression.
I suggest you read Kevin Drum’s comment-he’s pretty reasonable about this overkill-aimed-to-the-choir.
Now, compare and contrast with this post from Ideofact about the attitudes of Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb’s attitude toward biological science:
In other words, Darwinist biology — evolutionary theory — asks questions that shouldn’t be asked, puts data together that should be kept discreet and separate, and so on. Forget for a moment the question of whether Darwin was right — just consider the amount of research his ideas spawned.
Hm…well, evolutionary psychology teaches us that there are many human universals with common themes, though the particulars may differ, after all, all sins are one….
Posted by razib at 04:53 PM