Evolutionary psychology - bunch of horseshit or a legitimate field of inquiry?

t. social psychologist

Some it it probably raises interesting points, but the whole field is built of pseudoscience. Because there's no way to test their hypotheses, evolutionary psychologists usually resort to reductionist ways of arguing their claims.

A lot of people only see value in it because it agrees with them.

Neo-reactionaries love it, Marxists hate it.

For obvious reasons - it asserts that mind is not blank, it's filled with, um, what's the right word, notions of group identity, preference and certain social roles.

Why do you want to fuck young pretty girls?
Rather trust an evolutionary psychologist than a psychoanalyst

Horseshit but still much better than psychoanalysis or whatever Veeky Forums likes lol

Drawing a bunch of inferences from the behavior of cave apes and extrapolating them to a society exponentially more complex.

Another form of mind games to say I know you and you don't even know yourself. Only valid branch of psychology is neuropsychology. If you can't correlate your hypothesis to the brain it's not worth talking about.

Yes, a lot of it is not testable. But neither is a lot of things in the social sciences/humanities that don't get the hate that evo psych gets from the political left.

every field of psychology is horseshit

>there's no way to test their hypotheses
"Despite this difficulty, there have been many careful and informative studies of human social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price, altruism, and the allocation of parental care have all been explored by testing predictions derived from the idea that conscious and unconscious behaviours have evolved to maximize inclusive fitness. The findings have been impressive." "social behaviour, animal." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 23 January 2011. [1]

>But neither is a lot of things in the social sciences/humanities
Evolutionary psychology is different because it lacks a way to even present a compelling argument. There's no way to gather evidence and present it in support of an argument; most of the field is just people making backwards-casted inductive arguments and using circular logic.

For example, in archaeology, if you want to argue that a site was used to butcher animals, you could present evidence of butchering on bones, hunting and butchering tools, and a lack of evidence of continued habitation. One time a TA gave me a lecture on how evolutionary psychology proves that women are attracted to men with new shoes; this is because evolution favored women chosing men who could provide resources and having new shoes demonstrates that a man has money. Short of inventing a time machine to ask women throughout human history if that premise was accurate, there's absolutely no way of getting evidence to prove that conclusion.

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Some of it common sense - the presence of hierarchical structures in all human societies, for example.
It's an obvious left-over of our primate nature.

It triggers social constructivists and christcucks, so it gets a lot of hate.
While not without its flaws, it's a legit field of study.

Do you not see how that's a statement without support? If evolutionary psychology's methods were universally accepted as valid, there's wouldn't be such a controversy about the subfield within psychology itself.

A lot of evolutionary psychologists try to connect that controversy to politically-based suppression, but that's really not that case. Criticism of methods is a huge part of criticism of the field. Here are a couple of popular-focused articles that give sources and go over some of the most obvious problems:

scientificamerican.com/article/four-fallacies-of-pop-evolutionary-2012-12-07/
evoanth.net/2014/12/30/75-of-evolutionary-psychology-cant-be-trusted/

I wonder what it says about hierarchies...

It's in its dark days.

Now use the same standards for gender theory. Is it better than evo psych?

What do you mean by "gender theory?"

They're both awful stabs in the dark that pose nothing and answer nothing in reply.

literally everything we do, think, and are has an evolutionary basis.

Psychology as a whole is bullshit psuedoscience. You fucks need to get your replication crisis in check.

m8 if we're having to use the same standards to evaluate gender theory as we're using to evaluate evo psych, evo psych has already lost