That sort of information can only be found by ordinary empirical research,
Certainly. But don’t evolutionary psychologists know this? And I’m talking about what evolutionary psychologists write in peer-reviewed publications, not speculation in popular books.
and ordinary empirical research doesn’t need evolutionary psychology for anything else than suggesting interesting hypotheses
No, but your language here seems a bit strange, because a method for generating interesting hypothesis is a really important part of science. Having great procedures for testing ideas is no use if you have no ideas.
It seems that the ideal evolutionary psychology research paper would start with some well-known fact about human nature—a fact empirically verified by ordinary psychologists. From this fact, plus the fact of evolution under natural selection, plus the fact that none of our fellow apes exhibit this human idiosyncrasy, the paper would infer some hypothesis about our recent selective environment—a plausible hypothesis, given what we already know from physical anthropology. Then, assuming that our hypothesis about the past is true, the paper would reason forward to some new, previously unsuspected hypothetical fact about modern human nature. Finally, the paper would conclude with new empirical research showing that human nature really is like that. A hypothesis about the present generated by evolutionary psychology is found to be true by the methods of ordinary psychology.
That would be great. That would be science. Does anyone have a citation to such a paper?
It seems that the ideal evolutionary psychology research paper would start with some well-known fact about human nature—a fact empirically verified by ordinary psychologists. From this fact, plus the fact of evolution under natural selection, plus the fact that none of our fellow apes exhibit this human idiosyncrasy, the paper would infer some hypothesis about our recent selective environment—a plausible hypothesis, given what we already know from physical anthropology. Then, assuming that our hypothesis about the past is true, the paper would reason forward to some new, previously unsuspected hypothetical fact about modern human nature. Finally, the paper would conclude with new empirical research showing that human nature really is like that. A hypothesis about the present generated by evolutionary psychology is found to be true by the methods of ordinary psychology.
That would be great. That would be science. Does anyone have a citation to such a paper?
What do you think of the experiment cited in this post of Eliezer’s?
It seems that the ideal evolutionary psychology research paper would start with some well-known fact about human nature—a fact empirically verified by ordinary psychologists. From this fact, plus the fact of evolution under natural selection, plus the fact that none of our fellow apes exhibit this human idiosyncrasy, the paper would infer some hypothesis about our recent selective environment—a plausible hypothesis, given what we already know from physical anthropology. Then, assuming that our hypothesis about the past is true, the paper would reason forward to some new, previously unsuspected hypothetical fact about modern human nature. Finally, the paper would conclude with new empirical research showing that human nature really is like that. A hypothesis about the present generated by evolutionary psychology is found to be true by the methods of ordinary psychology.
That would be great. That would be science. Does anyone have a citation to such a paper?
What do you think of the experiment cited in this post of Eliezer’s?