21Jan/09Off
The problems with Paleofantasies
Marlene Zuk in the New York Times attacks a core belief of Evolutionary Psychology:
Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.
(...) In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called "paleofantasies."
January 21st, 2009 - 12:13
nice : ) another personal bugbear now has a label
January 21st, 2009 - 17:41
Hi Rachael,
Yeah – the whole Environment of evolutionary adaptedness idea is also one of my pet hates. It’s such a stupid assumption (we know things evolve rapidly, we don’t know what the environment was like, humans didn’t spend that much time on the savannah in the Pleistocene), and it’s used mainly in the crappiest of crappy Evolutionary Psychology studies. It deserves to be made fun of.
–Simon
February 8th, 2009 - 18:23
paleofantasies are the product of self-arrogating gliterati blindly copycatting nonsense
a.