Evolutionary Psychology As a Science And Fidetious Genuises

From the Globe and Mail:

Fidelity and Smart Men
“Researchers at a British university found that men with higher IQs place greater value on monogamy and sexual exclusivity than their less intelligent peers,” Matthew Moore reports for The Daily Telegraph. “But the connection between conventional sexual morality and intelligence is not mirrored in women, it seems. The researchers could find no evidence that clever women are more likely than the general population to remain faithful. The patterns were uncovered by Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science in a paper published in the March edition of the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. … Dr. Kanazawa claims that the correlation between intelligence and monogamy in men has its origins in evolutionary development. Sexual exclusivity is an ‘evolutionary novel’ quality that would have been of little benefit to early man, who was programmed to be promiscuous, he argues. The modern world no longer confers such an evolutionary advantage to men who have several sexual partners – but it is only intelligent men [who] are able to shed the psychological baggage of their species and adopt new modes of behaviour.”

Perhaps it is true that loyal men are smarter. But, note Dr. Kanazawa's explanation of the connection. In giving an explanation in keeping with the current vogue of evolutionary psychology (EP), he claims the correlation between intelligence and monogamy has its origins in humanity's evolutionary development. Kanazawa claims that the modern world no longer confers such a evo adv to men who have many several partners. Really? Wouldn't evo adv be afforded to those who could most successfully and frequently pass on their genes? The more of your offspring in the next generation, the greater the chance of them, in turn, passing on your cheating genes.

I can understand it being socially advantageous not to have too many partners in a monogomaus society. But socially advantageous does not mean evolutionarily advanatageous. For example, the childless Isaiah Berlin had the benefits of many social adavanatages as an upper crust British intellectual, but, did he also have evolutionary advantages? What is an evolutionary advantage for humans anyway, if it is not just simply reduced to having a lot of fertile children? Anything else is an environmental or social advantage.

Even if it was evolutionarily advantagous to be monogomous, why then would monogamy make us more smart? For example, being immune to a disease could be seen as an evolutionary advantage (although it seems to be more of an environmental advantage as it does not necessarily lead you to babies, and an immunity could hypothetically leave you sterile), but it doesn't make you any smarter.

Further, he says that only intelligent men are able to shake off their biological urgings and comply with monogamy. Really? Then, if that is the case, why have children at all? After all, any type of sex could be seen as a biological urging to be freed from.

The problem here is that evolutionary psychology is not much of a science. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain both a given social behavior or tendency and its contrasting social behavior (ex. polygamy and monogamy) using the same terms. Behavior X is present in our society because it is or was advantagous to us at some point in our history. Likewise, Behavior -(X) is also present for the same reason. Within this framework, there are no conditons that an EP explanation could be wrong. It is not falsifiable in Popperian terms. Karl Popper noted that any scientific theory must be falsifiable - that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment. What experiements would prove EP false? It seeks to explain all examples of behavior and their counter-examples, so a test for falsifiability would be difficult to imagine.