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There Will Be No Rosetta Stone
Oct. 27th, 2021 08:46 amWhat the caves are trying to tell us
https://theoutline.com/post/2209/what-the-caves-are-trying-to-tell-us
Evopsych, as it’s referred to, is no longer particularly popular in the fields of biology or psychology, but as the Google memo shows, it still has an instinctive zombielike following among the kind of people it was always destined for: engineers, software developers, unthinkingly reactionary science-fetishists, tech pedants of every stripe — people, in other words, who would never think to worship a picture of a horse or wonder what made people draw strange figures on the holy rock. It’s easy to see why. Evopsych combines every unscientific pop-science trope that makes people feel smart for believing in bullshit: a fetishism of geneticism and evolutionary processes, a refusal of diachronicity, and a dogmatic insistence on the cosmological principle that blankets the universe and its past in crushing sameness.
I hate evolutionary psychology as much as I'm capable of hating anything, and this essay takes some sharp shots, which I appreciate. The author transfers his own intellectual fetish to Derrida and Freud, which is unfortunate. Still, in the end, this is some solid writing about cave paintings.
https://theoutline.com/post/2209/what-the-caves-are-trying-to-tell-us
Evopsych, as it’s referred to, is no longer particularly popular in the fields of biology or psychology, but as the Google memo shows, it still has an instinctive zombielike following among the kind of people it was always destined for: engineers, software developers, unthinkingly reactionary science-fetishists, tech pedants of every stripe — people, in other words, who would never think to worship a picture of a horse or wonder what made people draw strange figures on the holy rock. It’s easy to see why. Evopsych combines every unscientific pop-science trope that makes people feel smart for believing in bullshit: a fetishism of geneticism and evolutionary processes, a refusal of diachronicity, and a dogmatic insistence on the cosmological principle that blankets the universe and its past in crushing sameness.
I hate evolutionary psychology as much as I'm capable of hating anything, and this essay takes some sharp shots, which I appreciate. The author transfers his own intellectual fetish to Derrida and Freud, which is unfortunate. Still, in the end, this is some solid writing about cave paintings.
