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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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Hm, I generally had a decently positive opinion of Pinker. Is this a case of him not knowing what this was and getting ambushed? Or did he know what was up going in?
This is who he is. Check out evolutionary psychology. He’s a proponent of this theory that has strong tendency towards racial biases.
Idk, I mean I'm not a fan of Pinker (his whole book on why violence has declined seems to ignore structural violence all around us, especially lower classes, and heavily supports capitalism) but evolutionary psychology seems pretty legit to me?
Geographically isolated groups of a single species will show variations of behavior and psychology that is affected by their environment and genetic predispositions -- that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
Yeah, when people take that to racist extremes, its problematic. You can't assume a person's quality because, when it comes to individuals in a particular, geographically originated group, you don't know where they landed on the spectrum re: genetic predisposition, and then you don't know their current environment either. It all comes out in the wash. I don't really think that means evolutionary psychology is total bunk, though. Its useful to put humans along with other animals when we think about their how their behavior and psychology are affected by evolution.
call it reasonable or plausible or whatever you want, but for it to be science it needs empirical evidence and predictive value. Failing that you just have "reasonable" hypotheses, and one person's "reasonable" is another person's racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever, especially when the hypotheses emphasize nature over nurture. That's the problem with evolutionary psychology.
Eh, I don't necessarily disagree with your statement -- and sure, I'd probably agree that evolutionary psychology has a problem in that it's not super testable -- then again, what does my word mean since I'm a lay person.
It does fit into our understanding of evolution though, and it fits into how we analyze behaviors of other animals. Its clear that some portion of our psychology is genetic, and therefore evolutionary, and it only follows that there's is going to be variability in each individual's initial psychological makeup, even within geographically adjacent groups of individuals. . When you plop nurture on top, that variability becomes even wider. Idk, it seems kinda nonsensical to claim that one person can't be more genetically predisposed to feeling anxiety than another, right?
You can and should call out racists, but just because there are some racists who use evolutionary psychology to be racists, doesn't mean it's all bunk. Just like it doesn't make Darwinism all bunk when it's used by social darwinists to oppress others.
Edit: obviously anyone who says "this race is more likely to act like this because of this" is whack. I guess I'm thinking of evolutionary psychology on more of a macro scale, where it could be used to explain (colloquial "explain," scientific "hypothesize"), for example, why humans experience social anxiety, where feelings of shame or embarrassment come from, how we deal with rejection, or acceptance, etc. in a real scientifically grounded way.