Quick Hate Mail Response Before Getting Back To Boudin and Brueggemann

IT'S RIGHT HERE in  this paper by the American psychologist Donald Dewesbury:

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Darwin and psychology at the bicentennial of his birth and the sesquicentennial of his publication of On the Origin of Species. His core contributions, as viewed today, were his theory of natural selection, his naturalistic philosophy, and his mass of evidence for evolutionary change.

It states it right there, crediting Darwin with giving psychology an ideology.   He certainly he doesn't mean "methodological naturalism" better known as the methodology of science.  Which predates Darwin by centuries and  which psychology seems to have little use for and, to be perfectly frank,  Darwin did not much practice.  He can only mean a philosophical view point, ideological "naturalism,"   That is what the author considers one of his greatest contributions to psychology.    

That any science would be said to have an ideological point of view is already a serious indication that the science isn't especially interested in objective description of reality but in propping up an ideological preference.  Which should be considered a problem when it pretends to be doing science but which, as the decay of this sort set in, people had a professional interest in continuing and people got used to it being there, unquestioned.  The history of psychology, which, apparently Dewsbury specializes in, is a testimony to the ephemeral "science" produced by that practice.  The history of psychology is about the opposite of the history of physics in terms of producing durable findings about the physical universe.

But even if you missed the real meaning "his naturalistic philosopy" the idea that evolution could properly be part of a scientific study of psychology should be rigorously criticized.  

It should jump out at anyone who gives it even a moment's thought that not a single one of our pre-literate ancestors who never left a even a fragmentary written record of their thinking can have their minds studied.  We have no access to their minds, not even a vague clue of it which is a product of our, not their minds.  Even their fragmentary manufactured or used artifacts can tell you little to nothing about what they were thinking.  You can't even reliably tell the gender of whoever made those, never mind their cultures or individual minds.   Yet psychologists and their allies pretend they can do something so necessarily specific as science about them when they definitely can't.

As bad and worse,  they propose to do so with the ancestors of non-speaking living species in the far distant past when evolution into what is scientifically defined species was ever the subject of any valid scientific observation or measurement.   

Anything which was said about the psychological aspects of those long-ago lives has never been witnessed by any scientist, never mind any psychologist.  Every single thing said about the lives and minds of those organisms for which psychology is even claimed to be relevant is forever unavailable to us and so everything that is said about the minds of those long, long ago dead animals and other possibly conscious organisms is entirely the product of the not at all objective and uninterested imaginations of the scientists who make such claims about them within science.   The derided "Clan of the Cave Bear" novels are no less valid than much of it.

Every single thing that psychology says about the minds of animals who they can't ask about their internal, unobservable experience is a product of the imagination of the psychologist or ethologist and is probably entirely more of a revelation about the scientists' own wants, desires and interests than it is about any organism they claim to be speaking for. 

It's all a just-so story.  Stephen Jay Gould got only a little way towards clarity that when he called out Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology for doing that.  It's a critique he could have made of far more that was being called "science" including much of conventional evolutionary biology, the entirety of the dogma of natural selection. 

In the case of the mainstream of psychology, of "evolutionary psychology" etc. it is told by people whose profession is and has been dominated by those who have an ideological and emotional attachment to materialism, to "philosophical naturalism" and, I'll point out, probably a sensed if not thought about professional interest in asserting that same ideology as a means of getting by and getting ahead in their professional lives.

That is exactly the kind of thing that scientific methods were invented to keep out of the formal practice and literature of science.   

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As I pointed out yesterday the use of natural selection to promote that kind of ideology and gross speculation as biological science is intimately tied to the introduction of natural selection within the study of evolution.   Ernst Haeckel's  History of Creation, is a book which Darwin, himself, held up as superior science to his own major work on the topic of evolution,  The Descent of Man,  

This last naturalist, besides his great work, 'Generelle Morphologie' (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edition in 1870), published his 'Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte,'[History of Creation] in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine. Wherever I have added any fact or view from Prof. Haeckel's writings, I give his authority in the text; other statements I leave as they originally stood in my manuscript, occasionally giving in the foot-notes references to his works, as a confirmation of the more doubtful or interesting points. 

Haeckel declared in that book that 

This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.

For this and more on it, read here. 

That certainly isn't a scientific declaration, it's a declaration of ideological triumphalism, one for which there is not only no scientific support now,  there was none in 1868 when he wrote that.  Yet that ideological point of view was being promoted as science, as if it had the same kind of verification that physics or chemistry had as a requirement, for which such ideological claims are now widespread, as well.

As I pointed out the genealogy of natural selection flows from the political-economic support for Malthus's most depraved interpretation of the British class system which is in no way a natural phenomenon but a system of laws put up starting under Elizabeth I to impoverish the English poor so as to enrich the aristocracy and the feudal rulers of England and whatever countries were unfortunate enough to have been under their boots which Malthus's pseudo-science made far worse in 1843.   It was born in what science was supposed to keep out and it was retained for largely ideological uses, covering up any discrepancies such as were needed to pretend that natural selection and, soon after, psychology was in any way a product of scientific method.  Wedding the two, natural selection and psychology has produced some of the most depraved of junk given the status of science in the history of science with the power to do some truly terrible things.  

Yet you wonder why I've spent so much time researching this and writing criticism of it.