The Game The Whole Family Can Play!

[Click image to enlarge, via the indefatigable The F Word]

Seriously, I’m getting a little upset by all the pseudo-evolutionary (Just So) psychology bullshit now. Oh yeah, and the Daily Mail. A work colleague today warned me that the Daily Mail might consider taking a restraining order out against me.

OK then, this one is from the Daily Telegraph: Men prefer websites designed by men. The very first sentence of this article?

The differences spring from our caveman ancestors, said Gloria Moss, a specialist in human resources.

Frankly, I am not going to dignify this article by pulling it to shreds. That first sentence is enough to condemn it to the shit heap it sprang from.

JOURNALISTS LISTEN: Just because it is the bicentennial year of the birth of Charles Darwin does NOT mean that you have to get the word ‘evolution’ into every science story. If your writing about evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology firstly, know the difference between the two and secondly, find out if the researcher you’re quoting/cut n’ pasting does too.

RESEARCHERS LISTEN: Just because you work in Buck-Nowheresville university (or a further education college) do you really NEED to use nonsense, sexist, pseudo-evolutionary failytales to get your research into the papers? If the answer is yes, then kiss your credibility goodbye.

I’ll be tweeting all future pseudo-hunter-gatherer ‘science’ stories with the hastag #bullshitbingo

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 12:22 pmand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Game The Whole Family Can Play!”

  • cromercrox Says:
    August 28th, 2009 at 6:11 am

    'A specialist in human resources'. Really, that says it all.

  • James Says:
    August 31st, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    I like to think of Neanderhal Man making sure his sites are W3C compliant, only to find it had no evolutionary advantage whatsoever.

  • JIGG Says:
    October 17th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    Evolutionary Psychology is more often than not just masturbatory pseudoscience.

    This is how it most often works, especially in regards to the blogosphere,

    Form Conclusion –> Find supportive sampling or just anecdotes –> Then speculate why it’s genetic/innate drawing on survival speculation from the Pleistocene Era.

    Of course, using the previous methodology is antithetical to the scientific method.

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