Name them.

“sexy” WALK? Are you f-ing kidding me?

All women are the same? We all walk this way when fertile and that way when not, and it’s because the most important thing we have to do is to catch a may-un? And to fool him into thinking we’re not ovulating because…why, exactly?

And we only want sex for procreation? That’s why we fight tooth and nail for birth control and freedom of reproductive choice?

Seems the authors of the study, as well as the (overwhelmingly MALE) commenters here, are completely discounting the small point that women have MINDS and FREE WILL (except when it comes to walking safely in public, but I think that’s because men are naturally evolved to rape?)

Idiots.

The charge that evolutionary psychologists are prone to just-so stories is a bit tired at this point. Such ‘stories’ produce hypotheses, and this is true of just about every science. They provide the theoretical entry way into their own exploration and potential refutation.

It’s important not to forget that all of us agree on the basic tenets of EP. Our minds are obviously the product of evolution; we know a good deal about the environments – and hence selective pressures – in which our minds evolved; and thus it is a good idea to think about this information when discussing how our minds execute the impressive array of cognitive tasks of which they are somehow – but obviously – capable. The issue of how we make reasoning tasks computationally tractable should be at the forefront of all studies of decision making (which includes the study of political psychology and political judgment). This is why scholars who take the evolution of the mind seriously (e.g. Richerson & Boyd, H. Simon, Douglas North) are inevitably drawn to cultural evolution and the crucial role that institutions play in reducing or shaping the cognitive tasks that actors choose to, and are capable of, taking on.

And don’t forget: most EP scholars are card carrying leftists.

It’s not a square on the bingo card, but it should be. There also ought to be a racism square or three – I remember Satoshi Kanazawa’s charming hypothesis that Africa was so poor because black Africans lack “cognitive abilities.” Feh. And double feh.

a) I’ve read the paper, have you?

b) The paper doesn’t find that men rate the walks of women in the ‘fertile’ late follicular phase as more attractive than the ‘infertile’ luteal phase. Everyone really needs to get this point – the fundamental basis of all these news articles is flawed because the study doesn’t make this finding, it finds that there is no difference

c) The press articles (all culled from New Scientist) are fairly accurate summaries of what the authors claim in the paper (despite their own evidence to the contrary such as the above).

d) The results in the paper suggest that women’s gaits may differ between the follicular and luteal phases, and that men may vary in the attractiveness they assign to different gaits. The relationship between these two findings is rather complicated and you should read the paper to understand it (I summarise it in post #101), but it is misrepresented by the authors themselves.

e) The New Scientist story also misrepresents the findings regarding hip movements and knees since the study itself finds no difference for these factors in the follicular and luteal phases.

I would also suggest that some of you are not very bright, and do not realize that a press story by random reporter X is not actually the study itself.

My card is almost full!

Haven’t there been at least a few such studies, though, e.g., certain body proportions (but not body weights) deemed attractive across a broad range of cultures? Yes, I am aware that one can criticise such studies by positing that, these days, even the denizens of Cimmeria and Shangri-La have seen pictures of Marilyn Monroe and so forth. But surely evpsych can produce some robust results. And just as surely, that’s not its greatest hurdle. Rather, the conclusions its practitioners draw from even robust data seem so often to be nothing more than, how shall I put this politely… intriguing speculation.

I would note that I don’t find the idea of evpsych offensive in principle, and don’t like the stance that evpsych is bad because it’s politically important to deny the existence of any sort of “hard-wired” human nature. (NB, I don’t think Daniel or the evpsych-critical commenters here are adopting that essentially Lysenkoist stance; but other fora in the contemporary world are alas not free of various sorts of neo-Lysenkoist.) If evpsych manages to produce fruitful, predictive results that tell us something about ourselves we couldn’t otherwise have known, well then hooray. I’ll keep an eye out.

That said, I liked it a lot better when it was still sociobiology. More emphasis on biology and less on psychology might not be a bad idea for current researchers in the field.

I think this ( and others have made the same move ) type of criticism of EP is weak because it overlooks that EPers are offering explanations that are not deductive arguments but rather inferences to the best explanation.

Generally speaking to point out that such ‘stories ’ are easy to produce or that both the story and its negation are compatible with the underlying hypothesis does not refute the hypothesis in question ( this follows from the fact that the explanation is not entailed by the hypothesis but stands in a looser relationship to it ).

What this means is that the appropriate way to put pressure on the proposed explanation is to offer a better one and say here is a better explanation of the same phenomenon and that shows that yours does not work.