general population and you know even some researchers who distort evolutionary psychology to serve their own bigoted or closed-minded or elitist perspectives it's also possible to have a researcher's bias expressed in their work without them even realizing it now again this is not unique to evolutionary psychology practically every area of study has bad actors who do real harm to the reputation of their field or you know they have misrepresentations and overblown ideas presented by the media to the general public and likewise bias exists in every corner of science whether we like to admit it or not but that doesn't mean that it's okay you know we should continue to be vigilant and snuff out prejudice when we're able to or rid ourselves of that malice and even though this is not going to be the focus of my criticism i do believe that it is the duty of evolutionary psychologists to make their science as clear and well supported as possible because those mistaken scientific theories lend themselves to political abuse the way that things are framed or discussed in a research paper don't always make a clear or precise transition when they're covered in news stories so researchers really need to be sure that they're careful about how their work is presented so you might be asking yourself if those aren't part of the criticisms then what are you worried about well this is the big one folks this is why i claim that evolutionary psychology as it stands today is mostly garbage it's because evolutionary psychology takes an adaptationist approach now let me explain earlier on i gave a simplified version of evolution that essentially pointed to natural selection as the process that got us to where we are today we adapted these advantages to address issues in our environment and that's what's most important this is the same perspective that most evolutionary psychologists take as well however natural selection is only one aspect of evolution and perhaps you'd be surprised to hear this it's not even the biggest one these other forces cause a huge amount of genetic variation and likely explain many changes in our population without selection even factoring in now i got nothing against darwin but evolutionary biology has come a long way over the last NUMBER_TOKEN years i mean even over the last NUMBER_TOKEN years and it's identified a wide range of non-adaptive mechanisms that greatly influence genetic evolution these have nothing to do with fitness okay fitness of the individual doesn't even factor in some of the bigger examples of these non-adaptive mechanisms include mutation recombination and genetic drift mutation is when our dna changes and this can happen either because the dna fails to copy accurately or like like a printing error or due to external influences such as specific chemicals or radiation changing the dna only once mutations happen can they be subject to natural selection but they also drive genetic changes that can be passed on for no adaptive reason like for example the the genetic mutation that causes attached or detached earlobes right whether or not your earlobes are attached has nothing to do with your ability to live long enough to produce healthy offspring or make you significantly more attractive to select for or against that recombination is similar at conception the sperm and egg combine their chromosomes in a combination that is different from either parent and during this combination process the chromosomes break and reattach and during this crossover the recombination of genes adds a lot of diversity to the gene pool this is great because recombination doesn't cause evolution to occur but it results in
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