Talk:Criticism of evolutionary psychology

A page about criticisms that does not seem to do a good job showcasing much of the criticism

Whether this is more a matter of formatting or not, this page could seem to use some big improvements in the way information is being presented, and with respect to the nature of the information discussed.

In the second paragraph from the first section on modularity, we have a paragraph that is clearly dedicated to criticism of massive modularity. Interestingly we see a reference to a response tacked on in a few words at the end. In contact, the third paragraph from this same section looks quite like a back and forth commentary between the debates or arguments of specific researchers. By the time we proceed through the section on EEA and hypothesis testing, the majority of the text becomes dedicated to showcasing incredibly specific responses to extremely short summaries of the EP's criticisms.

We find some of the paragraphs are dedicated to explaining a criticism, but it is always written to be about the views and arguments of a specific scholar. For people who are not used to reading about the works of specific people, this is not going to be helpful to orient naive readers to the issues around evolutionary Psychology. The issues need to be written in a more general fashion, like other wiki pages, spending less time explicitly mentioning the names of specific authors and more time spent clearly communicating the concepts and ideas. The only exception to this, for readability, should be when examples are warranted for the sake of illustrating something complicated to the reader.

I do not know my way around wikipedia, but I think these issues significantly compromise the quality of this page. At the very least, there needs to be some major formatting changes - like the introduction of more sub-headings, and a more principled way of writing the responses to these criticism (particularly as it bears on the amount of words spent on these responses).

As it stands, a skim read gives the impression that there is just as much, and possible more words spent on responses to criticisms as there are explaining the criticisms themselves. What's worse is that the criticisms and the responses are not clearly delineated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.96.87.101 (talk) 07:33, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

At least one of the responses to criticisms here seems to be really, really bad.

The article says

"Steve Stewart-Williams argues, in response to claims that evolutionary psychology hypotheses are unfalsifiable, that such claims are logically incoherent. Stewart-Williams argues that if evolutionary psychology hypotheses can't be falsified, then neither could competing explanations, because if alternative explanations (e.g. sociocultural hypotheses) were proven true, this would automatically falsify the competing evolutionary psychology hypothesis, so for competing explanations to be true, then evolutionary psychology hypothesis must be false and thus falsifiable."

The problem is that this assertion is that it doesn't really mesh with the way science is done. Alternative explanations will never be "proven true" in the sense that Mr. Stewart-Williams is describing-generally, an idea in science (other than math) is accepted when people try to prove it false a bunch of times but can't. Also, by his logic, "unfalsifiablity" can never be a real concern since if any other idea is "proven true," it would falsify every other idea. There's probably more really bad logic that doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the article, but that was what really jumped out at me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.189.168.53 (talk) 12:15, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree, the whole section on falsifiability strikes me as overlong and giving excessive attention to amateurish arguments. I'm reluctant to radically change it but would appreciate insight about how to handle it or determine if my impression is shared or not. CasualUser10 (talk) 23:15, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

This entire article reads like a "Response to criticism of evolutionary psychology" and not an article on the actual criticism. 76.144.81.249 (talk) 21:37, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot here and I haven't examined it closely, but in general it is NPOV that we would also have responses to criticisms if they are in academic sources. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:11, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Replication Crisis in Psychology

While most evolutionary psychology theories themselves haven't been affected (due to being untestable), some portions have become scientifically unjustified due to the psychology research they were based on failing replication. Would a link to the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology be useful, or even a small paragraph on what it was together with the testability criticism? The page is pretty confusing so I'm not too sure more should be added. Hihyphilia (talk) 19:36, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Detail Matters

Given evolutionary biology is scientific, evolutionary psychology still failed because:

• Evolutionary history often spans from thousands to millions of years. We do not know about the details, especially on the details of neuro-evolution.
• Detail matters: If we don't know about the details, it is likely to be misunderstand or misinterpreted. Cloud29371 (talk) 06:50, 3 October 2024 (UTC)