A big wet guff from evolutionary psychology

I don’t really have much to say about this.

The evolutionary psychologist who believes incredibly daft things like Muslims become suicide bombers because they can’t get laid because of polygyny has absolutely excelled himself.

He has written an article for Psychology Today–which has since been pulled–which suggests that black women are ugly because they are manly, even when controlling for the fact that they are ugly and stupid.

At no point does the author address any of the following issues:

1. That black women are rated as less attractive by a completely subjective measure, of which we have absolutely no information about the raters. In fact, the author gushingly declares this method of rating as objective. Yes. Apparently Hot or Not is now a scientifically-valid instrument.

2. The relationship between race and intelligence is utter cock.

3. BMI is an equally poor measure, with limited utility even in epidemiological studies. It is not even a particularly good marker of “fatness”.

4. He throws around phrases like “mutation loading” willy-nilly. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Instead, he chooses to interpret dodgy data with a dollop of racism, concluding that evolutionary psychologists’ favourite hormone must be at play: testosterone.

Evolutionary psychology has a peculiar obsession with testosterone, and it is trotted out to explain everything from aggression  to bad relationships with your mum. Perhaps testosterone does explain these things.

Here, though, the explanation requires no hard-to-measure hormones at all: it’s bad data interpreted by a racist.

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Edit: This fantastic post at Racialicious gives a more thorough account of how to debunk this bollocks with 100% less swearing.