Maggie's Farm

Our Editor forwarded me this 1992 paper by Tooby and Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, (here in pdf, without the typos), which he found at Overcoming Bias. I wish I had known about this paper years ago.

It's a dense and scholarly critique of what is known as "The Standard Social Sciences Model." The authors argued that this dominant model is obsolete and failing, resulting in a reactionary anti-scientific movement in the social sciences.

I found it particularly interesting that the authors suggest that the clinging to an obsolete model has more to do with emotion than logic - a "fear of falling off the world." Similarly, they indicate that social scientists are emotionally attached to their blank-slate, meliorative views of human nature (there is no "human nature" - environment is everything, and thus people, culture, and society can be perfected - by them, natch). Their desire to hold on to that illusion causes them to resist many sorts of new information which conflict with their ideas. That is very human, but it ain't science.

Indeed, what goes on in the social sciences would make for a fascinating sociological study.