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Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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I’m not familiar with evolutionary psychology but I clicked the link and checked out the page. It seems… not an immediate and total brand of evil? It’s a very broad concept at the high level: that features of human psychology can be survival adaptations and say something about the conditions during our evolution. I read the reactions and criticisms section too and I can see how some sus claims about biological essentialism could be taken too far.
But I guess my point is that just invoking the term and posting the Wikipedia page do not seem to be the immediate character assassination you seem to want them to be. “Look at this guy! He believes our psychology is informed by survival adaptations during our evolution! What a bigot!”
I don’t get it. I think I would need you to say more about what specific cases he has made under this umbrella that you find objectionable. Because on the face of it, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that people have an instinct to be helpful to one another because that turns out to be a positive population evolutionary trait.
I teach evolutionary psychology and show a scene from.Planet Earth where birds of Paradise dance for mates. Food's plentiful, so going "hey, girl. I can get food." Isn't an asset. They gotta do a silly dance to attract a mate in such a food-loaded environment, instead.
I guess you can spin that kind of stuff to poorly explain human behaviors, but from everything I've read and prepped, it's a very broad but innocuous field of psych, if relatively nascent.
It's kind of like string theory. It has a bunch of interesting conjectures but nobody can figure out a way to test any of it.
Take the "selfish gene" (the idea predates Dawkins). One of the theories states that it may be evolutionarily advantageous for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the group if they share enough DNA. They lose the DNA in their bodies but save the exact same DNA in the bodies of their extended family. That's a nice idea and you can get the math to work out in game theory models but how do we test if that's why ducks sometimes lag behind when a hunter tries to shoot them?
That's not to say it can never be tested. There are other cases where we needed to wait for technological breakthroughs until theories could actually be tested.
I guess I’m a humanities guy so when someone writes about patterns of human behavior that could be survival adaptation, I think “hm that’s interesting, I’ll think more about it.”
I don’t think: but this theory can’t produce testable predictions!
It just seems like an anthropological concept, not a scientific theory we can write an equation for. But eh.
That makes sense. Not everything needs to be testable. There are many interesting and important ideas outside of science.
The main problem would be if someone wanted to set policy based on it. That includes the implicit experiment of, "If we adopt policy A we can expect outcome B." If we haven't tested that before turning it into a policy, the policy itself becomes the experiment, and then we need to be very careful about the ethics surrounding such an experiment.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll just add that the scientific method is not how we set policy in general, though perhaps it should be.
oh yea frank green was still pedaling that theory in all his talks, and many physicist already kind debunked it and said he had no actual evidence. ironically its interesting amongst conservatives. so basically pinker is the frank green of psychology.
Friendly spelling disambiguation:
Pedal: to turn a crank or lever by foot
Peddle: to sell
I think you mean the latter. When someone is promoting an idea they are selling others on it, not riding it like a bike.
Evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience to affirm conservative beliefs. It's unfalsifiable conjecture
I mean it's very often used in that way, but evolutionary psychology isn't quite the same as phrenology. To be clear, there are definitely people who are using evolutionary psychology to justify their racism, but like... how would you discuss the evolution of depression unless you're speculating about something that could be considered to be evolutionary psychology?
I mean I guess you could argue that all psychology is sort of just a byproduct, but that hardly seems scientific at all.
So while I'm equally concerned about racists and bigots using pseudoscience to justify their backwards beliefs, I don't believe the whole approach of evolutionary psychology is complete bunk.
Please do enlighten me if you can.
You know what else is pretty unfalsifiable, but still pretty darn usable? Proto-Indo-European, but I'm pretty sure they've got some of it right.
Yeah that's not what it is.