Reddit Reddit reviews Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind

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1 Reddit comment about Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind:

u/Flaming_Bear_vagina ยท 1 pointr/Incels

No, a couple evolutionary psychologists agree with your opinion, not the entire field. Specifically, it's pushed by Mark Van Vugt. A dissenting opinion from the field:

> The warrior hypothesis assumes there was constant warfare in our evolutionary past, but some anthropologists argue that ancestral populations were too sparse for frequent contact. It also presupposes that warfare increases male fertility, when it may actually reduce fertility for all. Fertility is probably maximized when men are non-violent and share in childcare, but in many societies men beat their wives, neglect their children, and practice sex-selective infanticide against girls. The authors perpetuate the myth that evolution prefers men to be polygamous and females to be monogamous, but we see every variation in other species. In chimpanzees, both sexes seek multiple partners.

Further:

> the authors claim that men are biologically programmed to form coalitions that aggress against neighbors, and they do so in order to get women, either through force or by procuring resources that would make them more desirable. The male warrior hypothesis is alluring because it makes sense of male violence, but it is based on a dubious interpretation of the science. In my new book, I point out that such evolutionary explanations of behavior are often worse than competing historical explanations. The same is true in this case. There are simpler historical explanations of male violence, and understanding these is important for coping with the problem.

Emphasis added. The 'authors' referred to in the first sentence include Van Vugt, and the work is consistently called to question by much more senior members of the field. Also, if you're interested, the new book referenced is this one.

You're not going to care, I just want you to know that this is not what the entire field is like. Much the opposite. Due to the nature of studying it (it's almost purely theoretical) dissent is rampant, and just because someone has a hypothesis, does not mean it's automatically dogma. The mere existence of an idea is not validation that it's correct.