BoysToys

The patience of the people replying to slow is astounding

I'm not sure that one, short quote from The Origin of Species answers the question in any way.

Darwin's view of Psychology from 150 years ago isn't particularly relevant to evo psych as it is practised today.

Oh and your work sounds fascinating Lewji. I'm totally a dabbler in reading about these things now. Every now and then I think about doing further study, but as my dh has just reminded me, I'm a terrible student! I doubt very much I'd actually be able to finish a PhD which would be the logical next step for me.

Yes I was thinking of more sophisticated stuff, like belief (and gender preferences/prejudices!). My field is risk management, so why people think the way they do is fascinating to me, and that has certainly changed a lot over time. But I also have a masters in Public Health, so I'm very skeptical of most behavioural type studies as they are so open to interpretation and no one is immune from bias. Almost impossible to do blind or controlled studies really.

But as you need a record of people's thoughts and behaviours it doesn't make much sense to link it to evolution as we don't have records about how people think before people started to leave a record of their thought

That's not strictly true about evolutionary studies.
Such studies have been done about language and dna, even without physical records.
But the methodology used is specific for these studies, as I've explained before. And btw, it's a field I work on.

Such evolutionary studies won't (and couldn't) tell anyone specifically why their personality is x or y, but could unravel why humans in general tend to behave in certain ways.

It's certainly not the case of the study debated here, though.

Psychology is fundamentally about studying how we think and behave. You can study how that has changed over time, it's very interesting too. But as you need a record of people's thoughts and behaviours it doesn't make much sense to link it to evolution as we don't have records about how people think before people started to leave a record of their thoughts, and that's not a long enough time period to talk about evolution, at least in a biological sense. You can get some glimpses from burial sites etc, but they are really just glimpses and subject to a huge amount of interpretation.

The potential size of an animals brain doesn't tell you very much about the thoughts inside of it. Does a Great Dane have more complex thoughts than a Chiwawa?

Neuroscience is looking at some interesting stuff with regard to the possible functions of different parts of the brain which can tell us something about thought, but only pretty basic thinking really. So they have looked at which parts of the brain light up on MRI when people are encouraged to think about reward or fear, and use rather cruder and intrusive ways to see the same thing in rats and monkeys. Some things seem to use more 'primative' parts of our brain than others.

Oh and all social animals have some degree of socialisation (including interesting things like altruism which have been observed in primates). I'd not assume that baby apes were total blank slates (or if they were from experimental breeding stock and lived in captivity that their reactions would be the same as in the wild).

Slow - please design an evolutionary psychology experiment.

Psychologists have plenty of problems with evolutionary psychology as a subject too. As we've all pointed out its not about whether we believe in evolution or that psychological processes are subject to it to some degree - its about what questions can be meaningfully asked by the subject evolutionary psychology within the paradigm of scientific method.

whales have a much larger brain than humans do. Surely there is more to cognitive capacity than brain size?

there are cultures existing today who did not make the tools that the homo ancestors you refer to did. Do they belong to a different species than Europeans?

Again, I don't doubt that cognitive function has changed over millions of years. I do not think that evolutionary psychology is equipped to tell us how that happened, and you saying natural selection over and over isn't telling me how it happened.

We do not know what these ancestors' minds were like. We can find their leavings, (where they exist) and make inferences but there is no way to verify them

Lets split it down further then.

Evopsych as a concept - fine, could be interesting, really tough to get any valid data, but sure, knock yourself out

Evopsych as in every study I've read or seen widely reported then read - rubbish.

When you talk about our psychological function and processes do you mean the mind? The way the mind works?

It's an analogy

Evo psych is bunk

I still have lots of stuff going on in my head, some of which may have come about through evolution (urge to pee in a corner, fear of the dark), some by nature (food preferences, ability to sing in tune), and some by nurture (being able to remember ip addresses easily, look at a piece of knitting and figure out how it was done)

Evo psych is still bunkem.

Whether I believe aspects of my personality evolved at all, doesn't mean that an academic discipline is rigorous and scientific (much as phrenology wasn't)

Slow. We've given many examples of why we think evo psych is a load of nonsense.

Can you please give an example of why you think it isn't?

This will be me putting thoughts in writing.

The way we do evolutionary biology is to look at markers or traits along the evolutionary tree.
For example, comparing one protein sequence from a species of monkey with the human equivalent would tell us very little about how that protein evolved. We'd need to have the same protein along all branches of simians, and that included that species and humans.
Then, as I mentioned, there's the actual question and how it's tested. It's easy for the question to be biased or not valid at all. And to test you'll need appropriate controls.

Say you want to test if there are inate differences in toy preference between boys and girls and if so if those differences are something we inherited from our ancestors.

A) question. What is toy preference? A generic one won't cut it. We could instead ask if males prefer wheeled toys. Then you find a set of differently shaped and function toys and put on or take away wheels. So that the same toy is presented with and without wheels. Then you present each to males and females and note the choice. You try in different contexts and series and repeatedly.
B) evolution. You must do the same test in a large number of monkey species and in all apes.
That would be how you'd even begin to think of the experiment.

Let me put it this way.

Phrenology has been discounted as bunkum.

But people have lumpy heads. Kids born to people with long, thin heads, often have long thin heads. Heads evolved to be big and lumpy, people still have a 'phrenology' (to use the word the same way), and that phrenology is both nature, through random chance on an individual and evolved, and was nurtured (through the occasional bump on the head

Phrenology is still bunk.

Yes no answers don't work in this case - that's why people have it as an academic discipline and study it. If there was a yes/no answer there would be no point in study.

To me, your question reads like this:

If you accept that there has been species divergence from homo erectus, how then can you reject the idea that it was sky pixies which caused it, for the purpose of making us better at tennis, and that's why people of today have longer forearms than their evolutionary ancestors of yore?!?

quite easily, as it turns out, since evidence that us has occurred does not equate to evidence of that particular mechanism.

there isn't a fossil record for cognitive capacity, or psychology, however you choose to define it. having a problem with 'studies' carried out by evolutionary psychologists is exactly the problem- falsifiable hypotheses, which are then supported with robust data, which can be checked, are at the heart of the scientific method. I am not convinced they are in this discipline.

Again, evolutionary psychology seems like a bias justification factory: women love red lipstick because women love red because they used to pick berries because female chimps do now- it makes sense! Never mind the many cultures where women never painted their lips red, or where men have/did/do as fashions changed, it fits the bias.

It isn't about style guides. It's about considering and responding to people without condescending or trivialising what they say; inventing a straw monkey argument, claiming they said it and crowing about it.

This isn't debating class at school; no one is obliged to interact with you if they don't enjoy it.

Hope That Helps (HTH).

TTFN.

Slow typing doesn't account for separate posting. Cross posting is where you reply before somebody posts additional information. Which I didn't.

What you did was keep replying with increasingly passive aggressive posts to the same post.

It's fine though, it was entertaining for a while but I am bored of it now. I wouldn't have bothered explaining this (as I am sure you were aware of what you were doing) but earlier you did ask for clarification regarding the criticism of your posting style and I am always HTH.

As for your question - In my experience Most of the 'science' that chooses to term itself Evolutionary Psychology does tend to seem like a load of bollocks (pink/blue, toys, women's walking, male penis size/female breast size) and I am not alone in thinking this. A lot of these studies and theories have been criticised by accredited scientists. Evolutionary biology in particular has a fractious relationship with evo-psych.

That said I don't think all psychology that looks to evolution for explanations regarding human behaviour is bollocks.

Psychology is a fragmented discipline. Look at some of the 'aspects' you listed in your post. Google some of those terms and you will see that their very definition/existence is contested. Some of the things you are asking are wandering into the realms of philosophy. There is no straight yes or no answer because we don't actually know what the question is.