You would do better to engage and consider seriously the possibility that you might be missing something.
It looks to me as if either (1) you are taking pop evo-psych as literal unquestionable fact, in which case you’re making a mistake, or (2) you are deliberately being inexact and handwavy while others take you literally, in which case they’re making a mistake but you can correct it and move on.
If #1, then I think Lumifer’s objections really should be sufficient to make you reconsider. It demonstrably isn’t the case that men devote their lives to maximizing offspring, still less to maximizing the number of different women they impregnate; similarly for women and maximizing the quality of their offspring. So any set of ideas that leads you to say they do must be wrong.
If #2 -- e.g., if what you really mean is something like “there are evolutionary pressures pushing us toward maximizing offspring number for men and offspring quality for women, and maximizing these things is very different from thinking rationally and may sometimes be impaired by it, so we shouldn’t expect our brains to be well optimized for rational thinking” then I think you will find that (as well as getting a better reception here) you will think about this stuff more clearly if you’re more explicit and careful about what you’re claiming. E.g., it seems like rational thinking could be a useful tool for maximizing offspring number/quality so it’s not at all clear that being optimized for offspring has to be an obstacle to thinking rationally; there’s some pressure for men to optimize quality and women to optimize number too, which maybe makes some difference; there are such things as kin selection and (in special circumstances, whose rareness is disputed) group selection, and these can help genes to prosper even if their direct effect on offspring is negative; etc., etc., etc.; it’s easier to assess the impact of considerations like these on your argument if your argument is more precise and less handwavy.
I give up.
You would do better to engage and consider seriously the possibility that you might be missing something.
It looks to me as if either (1) you are taking pop evo-psych as literal unquestionable fact, in which case you’re making a mistake, or (2) you are deliberately being inexact and handwavy while others take you literally, in which case they’re making a mistake but you can correct it and move on.
If #1, then I think Lumifer’s objections really should be sufficient to make you reconsider. It demonstrably isn’t the case that men devote their lives to maximizing offspring, still less to maximizing the number of different women they impregnate; similarly for women and maximizing the quality of their offspring. So any set of ideas that leads you to say they do must be wrong.
If #2 -- e.g., if what you really mean is something like “there are evolutionary pressures pushing us toward maximizing offspring number for men and offspring quality for women, and maximizing these things is very different from thinking rationally and may sometimes be impaired by it, so we shouldn’t expect our brains to be well optimized for rational thinking” then I think you will find that (as well as getting a better reception here) you will think about this stuff more clearly if you’re more explicit and careful about what you’re claiming. E.g., it seems like rational thinking could be a useful tool for maximizing offspring number/quality so it’s not at all clear that being optimized for offspring has to be an obstacle to thinking rationally; there’s some pressure for men to optimize quality and women to optimize number too, which maybe makes some difference; there are such things as kin selection and (in special circumstances, whose rareness is disputed) group selection, and these can help genes to prosper even if their direct effect on offspring is negative; etc., etc., etc.; it’s easier to assess the impact of considerations like these on your argument if your argument is more precise and less handwavy.
See above.