Heading north to #ehbea2025 where there’ll be a Stand Up For Science panel session on Wednesday. So attendees, please bring your best ideas for how evolutionary behavioural scientists can push back against political misuse and suppression of science
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Please can you discuss why it fell on two graduate students to stand up against the gross misrepresentation of the evolutionary social sciences by Münecat. Those who initially championed her video (which has ~1.6 million views) should be embarrassed to have done so.
Relatedly, since I’ve been banging on about pronatalism today, worth noting that, though no academic demographers attended the pronatalist conferences, evolutionary psychologists were on the programmes of both. And, while demographers have been vocal critics, EPers mostly have not
EPs and psychologists more generally have been the backbone of eugenicist movements in my observation, though other psychologists have done a lot to push back on them.
I think the two mentioned in that article have had a lot of push back in general but it doesn't seem to have made a difference (ofc I don't know what push back there has or has not been in e.g. reviewers.)
And there are also EPs, including senior ones, who recommend their public communication skills and engage with them online as if they were still scientists
One obvious action evolutionary behavioural scientists can take to push back against misuses of the discipline for political purposes is to actually critique those who misuse the discipline for political purposes…
If you’re on this app, you probably don’t need more examples of the political misuses of the evolutionary behavioural sciences, but the paper referred to here was published in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lmkavurujs2v
I did my PhD in Ecology/Evolution/Behavior at UT Austin in the behavior concentration, right? Right in David Buss' back yard. But I can tell you that not once in eight years did I ever see an "evolutionary" psychologist in the audience of a seminar, taking classes in evolutionary genetics, etc.
About once in five years I get up and start actively looking in evopsych for something I like, given that I have deep interests in gender, sexuality, sex diffs, reproduction, motivation and decision-making, etc in animal work from ethology to neuroscience.
Anyway, I wish it was better here at UMN, but I spent a year on a behavior genetics training grant and I would say that very eugenics - oriented work just like the linked piece was about half of what I saw. It was extremely frustrating & again, there was NO teaching of population genetics concepts.
Like, a semi-common segue was "why do so many genes impact X behavior of interest and why do almost all of them have such small effects?" Took me a while to realize that Fishers geometric model is totally absent from training curriculum — instead, curriculum is based almost entirely off twin models.
This for people whose entire research methodology amounts to GWAS + survey questions. I can't even. How can you build a career on GWAS and arguing how to estimate how genetic behavioral traits are without teaching students how to calculate heritability and how fast heritability measures change?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8r5efHXjQo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31e0RcImReY
https://bsky.app/profile/williamcostello.bsky.social/post/3lmur7oz76c2i
It's always a struggle. Most is very lazy.