Before the main body of my post, let me state that for the record that I do think there can be an evolutionary psychology.
Humans evolved and human brains are also evolved organs. Why would we think because brains got a bit larger that we were somehow immunized from evolutionary pressures and limitations? Not too damn likely. Thinking anything else is kinda idiotic.
That said, most evopsych is claptrap. Just poor, poor science. Misogynistic, retrogressive, deleterious to humanity.
But it does speak to the extreme nutritional pressures humans have experienced in the past that now people would rather spend time convincing themselves that being fat is attractive and desirable rather than attempting to improve themselves where that’d actually be true.
That is to say, food trumps sex/reproduction for humans in the right economic conditions. Interesting in its own way. But pretending humans haven’t evolved is as offensively funny as the image above. And pretending that being the size of the average tractor-trailer is a natural human desirable state is just lunatic.
This post is a trainwreck but I worked too much this weekend and I ain’t care.
Well an awful lot of evolutionary psychology reads like just so stories, but…. there’s a core that makes some sense.
I don’t believe in inherent, metaphysical essentialist differences between the sexes, but I’m a big believer in distributional differences (this is true not only of the sexes, but of cultural and ethnic groupings as well). That is, in observable reality, strategy X is more beneficial to one group than strategy Y (or more members of group X have one set of values while more members of group Y have a different set).
As one blogger (and generally excrable human being) put it: sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. In bare terms of reproduction it makes no sense for women to follow male patterns of sexuality (or vice versa).
In terms of fatness, humans seem to be hard-wired to prefer some tastes over others (dating form our forager days) and sugars and fat are really, really appealing to most people. In an insecure food environments this makes sense (eat while the going’s good) but in a post industrial post scarcity economy it’s going to lead to lots of over-indulgence.