Luke Smith

Chugging along and it’s absolutely brilliant. This will be the go-to for accessible, introductory, non-textbook, psychology books moving forward. Everyone should read this. @paulbloomatyale @HarperCollins

1. After I posted my critical review of @Anthrofuentes Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7' Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧵

I stay off X for months and months and come back to this version of Shermer…..

the ending of interstellar

It’s going to be pretty difficult to top this.

"But if you didn’t know Tooby had a heart of gold you’d be forgiven for thinking he made a pact with the Devil to get a mudslide of hardcore, real-life outrages to help him illustrate this or that point in his book." -@dsznycer cep.ucsb.edu/2024/03/23/rem…

Part of my life I don’t really show. Started playing in a band doing covers about a year ago and recently started playing live (after 20 years). Lots of fun.

@Evolving_Moloch Ebert, surprisingly, hated it

One of my favorite films. I say this all the time but the emphasis on costumed deception as a tool of social control was incredibly insightful.

There is no legit evolutionary psychology podcast. My friend @DavePietrasz and I thought this was a dire situation, so we set out to fix it. I’m excited to announce the start of Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast). I wrote a little something about it on my blog. (Link below).

My worldview in four texts

Are you a student or professor in psychology -- or any of the social sciences? If so, you've definitely seen this mistake before. It's all over the textbooks and journal articles. You might have seen it formulated in any of these ways: - Is that behavior evolved or learned? - Innate or acquired? - Biological or environmental? - Evolutionary or sociocultural? This is 100% the wrong way to think about it. My newest publication (out now in American Psychologist, @APA_Journals) shows exactly why this is wrong and suggests a better, more accurate alternative: laithalshawaf.com/uploads/1/3/5/… Pls consider RTing for greater spread. Thanks! 🙏

In my opinion the reason why film critics are overwhelmingly worthless is because they care too much about narrative and not enough about the technical stuff

The first four books I read on evo psych were The Blank Slate, The Red Queen, The Moral Animal, and Buss’s The Evolution of Desire. I’ve been learning from @ProfDavidBuss for 10+years, and the fact he’s constantly teaching the next crop of evolutionist thinkers is so inspiring.

@StefanFSchubert I've got a list here though it's biased towards hunter-gatherers and needs updating. The attached images are all good ones from different parts of the world with very different cultures traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/12/1…

New, hot-off-the-presses! Delighted to share this new paper about why the ubiquitous "Evolution vs. Learning" dichotomy is the wrong way to think about things. Out now in American Psychologist (@APA_Journals). The paper avoids the boring, underspecified claim that "both matter" or "the answer is in the middle". Instead, it takes a concrete, specific look -- with lots of animal examples -- at why evo & learning are best thought of as explanatory partners rather than competitors. A short thread 🧵 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi…

Blanket dismissal of 'cultural' explanations for human behavior as being 'blank slatist' are so unbelievably stupid. Of course genes/instincts/etc all matter but effectively everything you do is in fact influenced by culture. You learned to read and write because you grew up in a cultural context where these traditions exist and are socially transmitted, not because you have an innate instinct to do these things (again, of course having a cognitive and visual system that can recognize patterns, hands that can reproduce them, individual differences related to abilities and interests, etc all matter for this. But you had to be taught and learn to recognize and manifest these things in particular ways, as orchestrated by your cultural context).

In my view the most frustrating blind spot of evo psych as a field—which, to be clear, is an important & necessary field—is that most practitioners don’t consider the ethnographic evidence to be of essential & indispensable evidence *required* to evaluate their models (which I personally do). This is especially unfortunate since many of the first evolutionary psychologists were trained anthropologists (Symons, Tooby) or otherwise drew on the ethnographic evidence (eg Daly & Wilson making use of HRAF for their work on infanticide). If you want to trace the genesis of evo psych back to Darwin he drew extensively on the ethnographic evidence as well, somewhat comparatively meager though it was at the time. Edward Westermarck, who is known for the Westermarck effect, wrote a massive synthesis of marriage practices across societies. Alfred Russel Wallace did field work in Amazonia and Southeast Asia. I don’t want to be a hater about this because again I think EP is an important and necessary field, but I think it would benefit a lot from regularly integrating ethnohistorical evidence. I genuinely do find it unfortunate that there is a seemingly institutionalized general disinterest (by most professors, journals, peer reviewers, researchers, etc) in giving the ethnographic evidence the weight I believe it deserves within the field. Many evolutionary psychologists want or already consider EP to be the unifying framework for all the social sciences but it cannot possibly live up to that promise without substantially integrating the ethnohistorical evidence as a norm.

I do often think of how his book ‘A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century’ contains basically zero discussion of any actual hunter-gatherer societies

@Evolving_Moloch 100%. I think style is important; maybe not as important as the substance, but Ebert used to exclusively focus on substance, which I thought was a mistake. I can watch a Kubrick film and I may not be enthralled narrative wise, but how it’s shot and the frames are magic.

Can't speak to film schools but it bugs me that film critics don't seem to know anything about filmmaking craft & technology. I'd love to learn more about it from reading reviews for example but critics almost exclusively focus on narrative, which is the easiest stuff to notice.

ME