Behavioral Ecology Blog

Remember this Evol. Psych guy from London School of Economics that was the author of the widely criticized peer-reviewed paper entitled Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis. this is one in a long series of papers by kanazawa and Alan Miller that rely heavily on trends, anecdote, and untested theories. This is (generally speaking) not how science should be done…

1st off, there seem to be major flaws with the paper, both in terms of methodology, interpretation, and framework. The paper seems to illustrate all that is currently bad with the discipline of Evolutionary Psychology. there was a large, mostly negative (sceptical) response from the blogosphere, But rest assured that the strongest criticisms are cast forth by this; Letter to the editors regarding some papers of Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, by Andrew Gelman

turns out, that the paper in question turned into a book, and kanazawa has been giving interviews to support it… here is the link to the interview itself

ok, so a part of teh interview really struck me as evidence that SK really has no idea what he is talking about- at least in terms of evolutionary theory.. But don’t take my word- see for yourself.. here is an excerpt:

DC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form
long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these
impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For
example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates
the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely
continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly
playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a
species?

SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary
change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for
many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and
eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within
the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of
millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t
determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a
standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time
— stuck in the Stone Age.

Huh??? The wrongness of this statement coming from an apparently educated man supposedly trained in evolutionary theory seriously concerns me..