Catch Your Hare

Dragonmeet didn’t seem like fun at 6am, when I needed to get up to go to it. I nearly didn’t.

I was working For The Man, in his guise as Pelgrane Press. The Man gave me a Pelgrane Press T-shirt to wear, a little like working for McDonald’s, and I went to give Dying Earth rules to the queue.

In retrospect, we timed this badly. Last year, people in the queue seemed happy to chat. This year, we were giving stuff out at 9.45am, and I think that, by that stage, people were more interested in going inside.

At 10.30am, I played Steve’s demo of Trail of Cthulhu. It was excellent: we met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is always a bonus. Since I was running that demo later, I asked Steve for his notes, and he showed me a bit of paper with ten words on it.

For the remainder of the morning, I did Pelgrane duty. I was rather superfluous, since Ken Hite and Robin Laws were there and, understandably, people wanted to talk to them rather than me.

At 1.30pm, I ran my Trail of Cthulhu demo for some very pleasant Italians. I made lots of hand gestures, in case their English was at the level of my Italian. The demo went well.

3pm was Houses of the Blooded, with one Mr Wick. Interesting. It was an excellent play group and a fun game. I’m still wondering how much came from the system and how much from the group. I’m keen to play again and for longer.

Then final duties on the Pelgrane stall. I sold my last copy of Play Unsafe, which was deeply satisfying.

The charity auction afterwards lasted far too long – over two hours – and the crowd were rather hard work.

It was a superb day. Then on to Wagamamas. And so to bed.

I’ve now finished this book. Good God, it was a chore.It is one of those books that comes recommended as “readable” and “witty”, but, to me, wasn’t at all. The first half was rather turgid; the second half interesting but long.Oh well. The information in it was extremely useful: evolutionary and cognitive stuff. I’m glad I’ve read it. I’m also glad I won’t have to again. 

Criticism of evolutionary psychology is usually by sociologists. The more stuff I read by sociologists, the less respect I have for them.

The criticism usually stems from postmodernism. This is rather cheating, of course. You can argue against anything with postmodernism.

So, anyway. Criticism of evolutionary psychology often takes this form:

Evolutionary psychologist: You can explain X by natural selection.

Sociologist: Aha! Look at his language! Look how he uses the language of religious fervour! He considers no other explanations! He is a knowledge fascist! I make snide remarks and jokes that are barely funny!

And it gets nowhere. It’s a shame. There are very valid criticisms to make of evolutionary psychology, but they’re difficult to find amongst the language-based critique and postmodernist stuff.

First, evolutionary psychologists talk a lot about evidence, and how it works differently in evolutionary psychology. This is, to some extent, fair. It is difficult to do experiments in evolutionary psychology, because they take millions of years, by which time lab technicians will all have gone home.

Also, sometimes, evidence is used very well, and evolutionary psychologists will bring forward so many convincing arguments about their evolutionary explanation of something that it’s hard to argue with it. (I would give an example, but it’s 1.30am and I can’t be bothered to dig it out. Also, of course, by omitting the explanation, I avoid the possibility that people will prove me wrong.)

However. Evolutionary psychologists also argue like this:

1. Here is phenomenon X.

2. How can phenomenon X be explained by natural selection?

3. Because of Y!

This is, to a limited extent, also fair enough. Viewing things through the lens of natural selection explains a bit more about the world.

However, this eventually leads to the argument:

1. What evidence have we got that evolutionary psychology is true at all?

2. Because it explains X!

This is a little circular.

In general, my problem with Evolutionary Psychology is that it works in various ways:

• Sometimes, it’s all rigorous and evidence-based: this phenomenon can be explained by X, which is backed by evidence Y1, Y2 and Y3.
• Sometimes, it’s just a model and a base for hypotheses: if we consider this phenomenon in terms of natural selection, it could be explained by X, and we might look at Y1, Y2 and Y3 as support.

And it’s usually unclear which of those two is actually happening.