Books on the human alpha male

[Pirian]

who is the alpha male of BG forums?

Chuck Norris.

[510Meeze]

"I hope they serve beer in hell" By tucker max

[Cyn]

who is the alpha male of BG forums?

Ivve.

[Tyche]

Outliers by Malcom Gladwell will provide some outside the box insight. Although more geared toward success than alpha male, the two do correlate well and it's shown in the book.

[Takedown3]

who is the alpha male of BG forums?

to many to name this is the internet isnt it

[Zalius]

uh, changed my thesis due to lack of sources. got 4 already for my new one, which is that men are significantly more likely to commit murder or suicide post-relationship than women

any additional ideas are good, but stuff about murder and suicide are easy to find

[Stilzkin]

there are some evolutionary psychology books that might fit your bill, but take them with a HUGE grain of salt because they're full of bs passed as "facts".

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What's wrong with evolutionary psychology?

[Darus Grey]

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What's wrong with evolutionary psychology?

Pretty much what she said.

It's one of those fields where you can't even make a solid educated guess, unlike bone structure and such, you can't go backwards in time to analyze the human brain to make assertions about why it evolved the traits it did.

It's all just made up BS for the most part. And yes, that's different than other sciences, they use math to model backwards in time. Granted what they say *could be true*, but in the end, how do they back it up?(they can't).

[Stilzkin]

Isn't alot of psychology sometimes hard to to get hard evidence for. Don't think evolutionary psychology should be completely thrown out.

Third Charge: Unfalsifiable hypotheses
Evolutionary psychologists are routinely accused of generating hypotheses that are both post-hoc and unfalsifiable. Many of these accusations revolve around the idea that we cannot prove anything about the past, so evolutionary claims cannot be verified.

Gould (2000), for example, asks: “…how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about the EEA6…We do not even know the original environment of our ancestors…” (p. 120). Similarly, Fausto-Sterling (2000) suggests that because we know so little about the ancestral past, “evaluating competing hypotheses becomes very difficult” (p. 214).7 (See H. Rose, p. 141 and Benton, p. 262, for additional examples).

Gould concludes that “…the key strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable and therefore unscientific.” (Gould, p. 120). This is a strong (but remarkably common) claim. I suspect that if I approached critics of evolutionary approaches and told them a psychic cat had planted a hypothesis in my brain, they would urge me to test it. However, if I approached them and said that I had developed this same idea from an evolutionary standpoint, I would earn their scorn as a “Just-so” storyteller. It is a serious indictment of a scientist when he or she does not understand that the origin of a hypothesis does not necessarily tell you how easy or hard it is to test, and I urge Dr. Gould to exercise care in his accusations along these lines.

Evolutionary psychologists use our limited knowledge about the past to generate hypotheses. However, as others have pointed out, evolutionary psychologists’ hypotheses about human psychology can be tested in the very same way that other hypotheses about human psychology can be evaluated. David Buss, on the basis of evolutionary ideas, hypothesized that there would be cross-cultural sex differences in a number of variables related to sex and mating. He collected data from 37 cultures to test these hypotheses (Buss, 1989), and many of his hypotheses were supported. If the data had turned out differently, his hypotheses would have been undermined. It didn’t stop being science because his hypotheses derived from an evolutionary analysis. (Holcomb, 1998, provides a very nice discussion of this, as do Ketelaar and Ellis, 1998).

As others have pointed out, from his own statements, it is clear that Gould himself does not really endorse the criticism that the lack of information about the past is crippling. He admits that eyes are adaptations for seeing (p. 105) but that humans don’t have adaptations for reading (p. 124). Why? He denies reading is an adaptation because he believes that we do, in fact, have “key information” about the past. In particular, he knows that because the historical record suggests writing is a recent human activity, natural selection has not had sufficient time to craft adaptations for reading. In contrast, he affirms the eye is an adaptation because he believes the archeological evidence indicates people have been seeing for a very long time, and because the eye has features that make it improbably functional for solving this adaptive problem. Gould here reasons precisely like an evolutionary psychologist, inferring an evolutionary history from what is known about the past combined with an appreciation for evidence of intricate design, as one observes in the human eye.

To claim that a hypothesis is unfalsifiable is to claim that there is no evidence that one could gather to support or refute the hypothesis. To claim that an evolutionary hypothesis is unfalsifiable, however, is just plain fashionable.

Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology: Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned by Robert Kurzban

In a recent popular book -- The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian view of parental love41 -- Daly and Wilson summarise their findings that children are at much higher risk of abuse and murder from step-parents than from genetic parents. Their explanation is that parental investment is a costly resource, and that the psychology of parents has been designed by natural selection to preferentially invest in one's own genetic children, and to be reluctant to invest in children that are not one's own. Within step-relationships, this reluctance can manifest itself in less harmonious relationships, or unwillingness to pay for such things as college education. But at the extremes this neglect can result in severe abuse and even murder.

Hilary Rose does not dispute the higher incidence of abuse by step-parents. Instead, her contention is that "[r]ather obvious matters of context" to do with the "psychological strain" and "financial pressures" of starting second families, "explain better why some men ill-treat their partner's children".42 Steven Rose chides Daly and Wilson for "ignoring [these] much more obvious proximal causal processes".43 And, writing in New Scientist, the Roses remark that their "obvious" alternative causes "are better grounded than untestable evolutionary speculations".44

Hilary Rose does not elaborate on these "obvious" alternatives, nor point to research that has "grounded" them. In fact, she does not make any references to any other studies of child abuse whatsoever. She seems entirely unaware that these "obvious" explanations have been put to the test, and that they failed. Presenting their research on the confounding effects of poverty in The Truth about Cinderella, Daly and Wilson write: "this initially plausible hypothesis was rejected, for it turned out that the distribution of family incomes in stepparent homes in the United States was virtually identical to that in two-genetic-parent homes".45 Having discussed other possible confounding effects,46 they conclude: "All in all, although several additional risk factors were identified, stepparenthood held its place as the most important predictor [of serious child abuse], and its influence was scarcely diminished when the statistical impacts of all the other risk factors were controlled."47 In their major work, Homicide48 they also discuss how blanket 'explanations' such as "strain" do not explain such nuances as the fact that in families where there are step- and genetic children present, the step-children are singled out for abuse.

Evolutionary psychology: "fashionable ideology" or "new foundation"? By Oliver Curry

A hypothesis about design should lead to testable
predictions (for extended discussions of this issue, see Buss et al., 1998; Holcomb, 1998;
Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000). The question is not whether we can know for certain what our
ancestral past was like. The question is whether or not we can use what we do know
about ancestral environments to develop new hypotheses (Barkow, 1989).

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/hase...s/haystraw.PDF

[Linliel]

The problem with evolutionary psychology is that people think up something that sounds generally sweepingly plausible and nice, like "the brain is the peacock's tail for humans" then go off finding statistically insignificant studies with which to back up these claims. Of course because it rings a sense of "oh that's cool" and "well that might just work" in peoples' brains, people jump on it because it makes for good watercooler stories and then it just gets bogged down in even more uninformed crap.

There's probably some really good evolutionary psychology going on at the lower depths of things (i.e. in the Real Science) but most of the pop psychology books you will buy and read are full of extraordinarily bad "science".

[Linliel]

There's an interesting overview of the controversy surrounding evolutionary psychology on wikipedia (it could be biased but at least it will give you some starting points for reading): Evolutionary psychology controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The biggest problem I find in evolutionary psychology is that it completely runs with and discounts the fact that people love to find patterns in things, but forget that correlation != causation.