Steve Fuller on Human Nature

Steve Fuller is a Sociologist at the University of Warwick in Conventry, UK., and an old Internet acquaintance of mine. Which is to say I use to argue the virtues of Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and etc. with him on the HOPOS e-mail list.

Steve has written numerous books on Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and the Governance of Science. Most famously, perhaps, he argued for the Pro-ID forces in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. In this taped lecture he discusses the resurgence of the concept of Human Nature in the work of Linguists such as Pinker, and Evolutionary Psychologists like E.O. Wilson.

Quite enjoyable. He contends that, within the last 20 or so years, the Political Left has embraced what was previously a right wing idea, and that Evolutionary Psychology has difficulty explaining (because it is difficult to assign a survival value to) the development of scientific thinking.

About an hour long, with the lecture itself going about 40 minutes, plus 20 minutes of (mostly inaudible) questions.

PS. Normally I would embed the file but I couldn't get it to work in this case.

Evolutionary Psychology Or How To Get Paid To Watch Strippers

Nice series of short take-downs of Evolutionary Psychology from the "women of Slate magazine". Meghan O'Rourke puts her finger on it when she says:

The trouble with evolutionary psychology is that there are no (or few) ways of testing its theorems. With enough ingenuity on the part of the researcher, nearly any finding about gender can be twisted to suit the evolutionary lens.

Incidentally, here's a new bit of research that puts paid to the notion of women as the more talkative sex. A good portion of the evo psych edifice is starting to look bit crumbly.

My title, by the way, refers to this.