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Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Evolutionary psychology: The scam getting nailed at last?

Can this really be happening? Or am I going to wake up from some Nutcracker Suite fantasy tomorrow morning to discover that the cat is violently sick, due to a regrettable attempt to eat the Christmas flower arrangement?

Get this: In Scientific American (December 19. 2008), a load of evolutionary psychology rubbish gets nailed. In Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology, David J. Buller notes, "Some evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence".

Well, that is an appropriately scientifically modest way of putting it. And my best guess is that David Buller will not lose his position at Northern Illinois University over his effort to enforce some distinction between science and science fiction. Long overdue, of course.

Read the article here, and especially enjoy the fact that Scientific American will not likely be put under huge pressure to disown it. The Age of Nonsense about the Mind may be ending, and none too soon.

Thee are lots of serious questions to address, like how to fight off the debilitating effects of late life brain diseases. Foolish stories about cave men won't help. Few cave men lived to an age where late life diseases even become an issue.

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