Quickies
Quickies: Evo psych, women in Star Trek, and the Intolerant Jackass Act
- Evolutionary psych is neither – “It’s presumably better than creationist psychology, but nobody practices creationist psychology – so presumably the word “evolutionary” is doing a bit more work here than it may seem at first blush. Indeed, the word seems to encode, in this context, a series of propositions that most people actually working in human evolution believe to be false, if not ridiculous.” From Will.
- Women at Warp – A great new geeky podcast. “Women at Warp is a twice-monthly podcast where four women talk about Star Trek, its representations of women, contributions of women behind the scenes, and other fun Trek topics.”
- The Intolerant Jackass Act – A clever response to a previous ballot measure filed by a California attorney that, “if passed, would require that gays “be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”” From Jamie.
- How to time travel to a star – A new episode of Shelf Life by the American Museum of Natural History.
Lovely to see an anthropologist skewer evo-psych – anthropology being the field that eco-psychs should probably be in if they actually gave a fuck about doing science.
Also, I keep meeting anthropologists wherever I find myself for some reason, and in my experience they’re lovely people. I’ve never met an anthropologist I didn’t like. And I’ve met so many anthropologists I’ve thought about going into anthropology myself just so I can write an anthropology paper about anthropologists.
I remember reading a bit of actual scientific evo-psych research before I ever knew about the bigots seizing hold of it and justifying a bunch of bigoted views.
It was ants. Not humans. Ants. Understanding how certain collaborative behaviors might have developed. The source mentioned how it was controversial, and my mind boggled how that could possibly be.
Then I learned about the “1950s gender roles are natural” crowd and the “cold weather evolves IQ” crowd and the “alpha/beta male” crowd. And those people ruined it for me.
Most pop evo psych (as in, stuff dealing with humans rather than ants) should probably be labeled anthroporn, with all the focus on sex.