Comment by throw4847285
4 months ago
Unfortunately, I think this article is not pessimistic enough. If it were true that academic fraud is important for establishing the boundaries of respectable scholarship in a field, then behavioral economics wouldn't exist anymore. And evolutionary psychology would be a fraction of its current size.
Trendiness trumps all notions of academic rigor, and as long as a field "feels like" it's on the cutting edge it can go pretty far before collapsing in on itself.
I'm wondering how someone knows the size of the field of evolutionary psychology and what it should be instead of what it is so well that they feel no evidence is necessary. Are you in the field yourself? Or do you have questions about evolution in general? Or none of the above?
Evolutionary psychology is highly speculative and is widely known to be full of questionable results.
So much so that there's a wikipedia page for how bad it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_ps...
The SEP page is a slightly more rigorous take, though unlike Wikipedia it is clearly primarily authored by one person, a philosopher of biology who I don't know much about. Still, I think it's a fair and detailed overview of the field, from a methodological perspective.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/
Just cut out everybody who is studying "sexual selection" and I think the field is way healthier. Weird that so many evo psych scholars of a certain persuasion are fixated on that. I have a theory, but it veers into armchair non-evolutionary psychology, and it's not very nice.