The latest refutation of Pop Ev Psych

Any more, this is getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel, but things like this SciAm blog are still worth reading, because Pop Ev Psychers continue to make loony claims.

Here's the nut graf:

"There's been a lot of recent evolution—far more than anyone envisioned in the 1980s when this idea came to prominence," says Kevin Laland, a professor at the University of Saint Andrew's School of Biology in Scotland and co-author of the new paper. He and his colleagues argue that today's better understanding of the pace of evolution, human adaptability and the way the mind works all suggest that, contrary to cartoon stereotypes, modern humans are not just primitive savages struggling to make psychological sense of an alien contemporary world.

Of course, that's not just "cartoon stereotypes," but pop evolutionary psychology stereotypes.

Rapidity of change is part of the key in why Pop Ev Psychers are wrong, notes Kevin Laland, a professor at the University of Saint Andrew's School of Biology in Scotland:

"It seems implausible that all of that change has been going on without changing how the brain works," Laland says. And if the brain has been changing over the millennia, along with the climate, culture and other environmental conditions, then there might be far less so-called "adaptive lag" than early evolutionary psychology researchers—and the broader public—had previously assumed.

Finally, Laland notes one other key "tell." That is that Pop Ev Psychers have made assumptions about human passivity in restructuring environments. Given that fire was tamed hundreds of thousands of years ago, cave paintings are 50,000 years old and tools, at least primitive ones, have about the same age, that is a laughable assumption.

Let's let Laland say more:

The inner sanctum of the suburban shopping mall might bear little resemblance to the African savanna on which our ancestors are thought to have evolved. But Laland notes that it is unlikely humans, imperfect though we might be, would consistently design environments to which we are ill suited.

A traditional, more passive take on evolutionary psychology "fails to recognize that humans are changing their environment," and not at all randomly or haphazardly, Laland says. "We've built environments that are well suited to our biology, so we don't find ourselves massively maladapted for the contemporary world."

Indeed. Indeed.

That said, per my series of blog posts on the Dark Side of the Internet, and per things such as anthropogenic global warming, we don't ALWAYS build well-adapted environments. But, generally, the idea is true.

Finally, Laland says Pop Ev Psychers, at least of the past, haven't given enough credit to brain plasticity:

Scientific views of the nature of the human mind may be changing rapidly in sync with better understanding of our capabilities. Early evolutionary psychologists have often favored something like a "jukebox" model of the brain, in which it contains any number of evolved, preprogrammed behaviors waiting to be set off by various stimuli, as if at the touch of a button. Laland and his colleagues instead argue for "a very different model of how the mind works," he says, in which the human mind is much more plastic, and perhaps more akin to a collection of musical instruments awaiting a jam session; the tune they will play depends more on developmental and cultural experiences than on engrained compositions.

Robert Kurzban, also cited in the story, claims ev psych has been evolving along with brain studies.

Well, that may be true, but "classic" Pop Ev Psych touters haven't been.

For some other recent thoughts on this and related issues in what real evolutionary psychology could and should be, versus what today's Pop Ev Pysch actually is, go here and here.