hm. there’s a lot to this...but let’s just say that when it comes to psychology the residual of non-universality seems really important to focus on in the area of individual differences. specifically, it seems entirely possible that frequency dependent personality morphs abound; e.g., all the stuff about drd4 that i’ve been posting on my weblog. of course, this is single-locus, but i think it’s just the locus of biggest effect. i suspect that what evolutionary psychology misses is that after you account for the substrate of human universals you’ve got personality morphs which are playing “games” with each other, and in particular there are a host of low frequency morphs running around. these morphs are “complex” to my way of thinking, though perhaps not complex in the way you’re implying (i know the evo psych argument against a lot of variation on traits). i happen to think epistasis might also be pretty significant in the transient.
second, i’m also getting curious about variation in traits we perceive as on-off, where those who are “off” are purely pathological. e.g., it turns out that 2% of the population might be “face blind” but have been cryptic because they develop techniques to mask this problem and don’t talk about it. i don’t think it is just a 2% vs. 98%, i think there are a few other steps “in between”, though there’s a skewness toward the “normal” facial recognition ability side. on the basis of this i’m willing to dig a little deeper into “human universals” to see what might crop up on the margins.
eliezer,
hm. there’s a lot to this...but let’s just say that when it comes to psychology the residual of non-universality seems really important to focus on in the area of individual differences. specifically, it seems entirely possible that frequency dependent personality morphs abound; e.g., all the stuff about drd4 that i’ve been posting on my weblog. of course, this is single-locus, but i think it’s just the locus of biggest effect. i suspect that what evolutionary psychology misses is that after you account for the substrate of human universals you’ve got personality morphs which are playing “games” with each other, and in particular there are a host of low frequency morphs running around. these morphs are “complex” to my way of thinking, though perhaps not complex in the way you’re implying (i know the evo psych argument against a lot of variation on traits). i happen to think epistasis might also be pretty significant in the transient.
second, i’m also getting curious about variation in traits we perceive as on-off, where those who are “off” are purely pathological. e.g., it turns out that 2% of the population might be “face blind” but have been cryptic because they develop techniques to mask this problem and don’t talk about it. i don’t think it is just a 2% vs. 98%, i think there are a few other steps “in between”, though there’s a skewness toward the “normal” facial recognition ability side. on the basis of this i’m willing to dig a little deeper into “human universals” to see what might crop up on the margins.