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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

Who is “the cognitive community”, and does it include the evolutionary psychologists?

The way you do evolutionary psychology scientifically is that you think about which physiological traits ought to have been produced by selective pressure and then check your predictions. Coming up with a post hoc justification after the evidence is in just isn't science.

So the distinction is post hoc reasoning, not evolutionary explanations? I interpreted the OP’s comment as condemning the latter.

The vast majority of people making evolutionary psychology arguments in Hacker News threads or newspaper op-eds or such are also doing the later so the bad associations are understandable, even if they're not really the fault of evolutionary psychology the academic field.

My point (albeit awkwardly stated) was that evolutionary psychology is fraught with post hoc reasoning. The post to which I was replying is one such example.

The result is that neighboring academic fields are (rightly, IMHO) skeptical of EP theories.

That's the parent posters point. There's no such thing as "evolutionary psychologists". At least so far as academics within psychology and neurology recognize it.

These disciplines examine behavior from two different angles, one looking at more proximate causes while the other looks at ultimate causes.

You can dismiss evolutionary psychology as irrelevant to other social or neurological cognitive sciences (which I would argue is also wrong), but it doesn't mean interesting and useful research is not being done.

Paleontologists and archaeologists can do research by looking at old things and comparing them to other old things and also to current things. They can be very precise. "This process of this bone was so many millimeters wider, probably indicating a stronger attached muscle." "The clay in these pots comes from this particular remote river valley, indicating a trade network between these locations." Etc.

How does a psychologist do anything like this? Mental processes of living things and how those respond to environment can be observed. How can mental processes of millennia ago be observed?

Not sure about psychology, but the comparative method is also used in linguistics to reconstruct dead languages.

That's true, and this linguistic work is in some sense "between" the hypothesized evopsych work and the rigorous work we see with genetics. When the geneticists tell us that a particular population underwent a bottleneck at a particular point in time, they're probably correct about that. Linguistics is like genetics in that, because of writing, experts have something physical they can study to infer how languages have evolved over time. Perhaps something similar might someday be used to see how non-linguistic mental processes have evolved over time, but at this point it's difficult to imagine what that might be. Psychology itself is on a fairly tenuous footing as a science, so it's hardly a sufficient foundation for whatever has been envisioned by evopsych enthusiasts.

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