Interesting but I wanna hear how it's received by a *full* spectrum of people who truly suffer from the problems - if not all voices and experiences are fully and equally included in the convo it's just privileged people going back and forth about the "other". That is an additional power dynamic that must be factored in - without exclusion of - other power dynamics.
A useful starting point for me is to consider that there is no cell, organ or system that works perfectly in everyone all the time. While we could perhaps try to unpack what "works" and "perfectly" might mean in this context, I think most people from across the nature-nurture spectrum would nevertheless find the above assertion broadly acceptable.
If you then further accept that human expression is entirely dependent on biology (i.e. that there is no independent non-physical element), then the idea that the most complex system we know of - the brain - has never deviated from perfect functioning in any aspect in anyone anywhere and never will, is much harder to accept. The debate therefore is about how to detect and define these "malfunctions", not about whether they might exist at all.
Thanks for the excellent points! As you point out, how to conceptualize the type of dysfunction that is involved in mental disorders is a challenging theoretical issue. Evolutionary psychology has a lot of defenders and it is an active research program. For a recent attack on it, I recommend Subrena Smith's essay "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?", where she argues that the answer is a resounding no. Here's a link to the paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4
There are also very sophisticated attempts to explain the nature of dysfunctions without appealing to evolutionary explanations. I'll discuss some of those alternatives in upcoming posts.
I am curious about something: how does one reconcile the impossibility of an evolutionary psychology with the overwhelming fact of the brain's being produced by evolutionary processes? I definitely think that *what is called* evolutionary psychology *now* feels like a cheap post hoc sciency justification for social injustice - kind of like how I feel economics is something similar for capitalism. But on the other hand, it seems inescapable that as a result of that fact, there must be *some* way in which psychology connects to evolution, even if the way it is imagined as happening there is not it and it may be much more complex than anyone thinks so far.
That is to say, if we accept as a fact the brain as a product of evolutionary forces, what *does* that imply about psychology *actually*? Not something we presume in advance - just *what follows from that simple axiom*? And would it be fair to call trying to understand that, i.e. without any further dogma adduced, a study of "evolutionary psychology"?
Interesting but I wanna hear how it's received by a *full* spectrum of people who truly suffer from the problems - if not all voices and experiences are fully and equally included in the convo it's just privileged people going back and forth about the "other". That is an additional power dynamic that must be factored in - without exclusion of - other power dynamics.
A useful starting point for me is to consider that there is no cell, organ or system that works perfectly in everyone all the time. While we could perhaps try to unpack what "works" and "perfectly" might mean in this context, I think most people from across the nature-nurture spectrum would nevertheless find the above assertion broadly acceptable.
If you then further accept that human expression is entirely dependent on biology (i.e. that there is no independent non-physical element), then the idea that the most complex system we know of - the brain - has never deviated from perfect functioning in any aspect in anyone anywhere and never will, is much harder to accept. The debate therefore is about how to detect and define these "malfunctions", not about whether they might exist at all.
Thanks for the excellent points! As you point out, how to conceptualize the type of dysfunction that is involved in mental disorders is a challenging theoretical issue. Evolutionary psychology has a lot of defenders and it is an active research program. For a recent attack on it, I recommend Subrena Smith's essay "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?", where she argues that the answer is a resounding no. Here's a link to the paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4
There are also very sophisticated attempts to explain the nature of dysfunctions without appealing to evolutionary explanations. I'll discuss some of those alternatives in upcoming posts.
I am curious about something: how does one reconcile the impossibility of an evolutionary psychology with the overwhelming fact of the brain's being produced by evolutionary processes? I definitely think that *what is called* evolutionary psychology *now* feels like a cheap post hoc sciency justification for social injustice - kind of like how I feel economics is something similar for capitalism. But on the other hand, it seems inescapable that as a result of that fact, there must be *some* way in which psychology connects to evolution, even if the way it is imagined as happening there is not it and it may be much more complex than anyone thinks so far.
That is to say, if we accept as a fact the brain as a product of evolutionary forces, what *does* that imply about psychology *actually*? Not something we presume in advance - just *what follows from that simple axiom*? And would it be fair to call trying to understand that, i.e. without any further dogma adduced, a study of "evolutionary psychology"?
Nice points.
"More time reading and less time writing". What a mic drop.