Are Evolutionary Explanations Unfalsifiable? Evolutionary Psychology and the Lakatosian Philosophy of Science

By Timothy Ketelaar, Bruce J. Ellis. 2000

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05bb1a92a7252d7f275a21ef18b1f91aa0335b8f

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In History and Philosophy of Science

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Citations in the corpus

Timing of pubertal maturation in girls: an integrated life history approach. (2004, background): “The current review demonstrates how these theories compete to achieve the best operationalization of the core logic of life history theory as it applies to variation in pubertal timing (see Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000, for further discussion of metatheoretical research programs).”
Prehistoric dangers and contemporary prejudices (2003, background): “But to be useful to psychological scientists, evolutionary psychology must do more than simply explain the historical origins of existing phenomena; it must produce novel hypotheses pertaining to psychological processes in the here-and-now (Conway & Schaller, 2002; Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000).”
Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour (2002, background): “Many evolutionary psychologists characterize Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory as the cornerstone of modern evolutionary thinking (Cosmides and Tooby, 1987; Ketelaar and Ellis, 2000), yet this represents a small subset of models used for special purposes in evolutionary understanding, and which ca”
Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior (2006, background): “In this way, rituals may reinforce not just cohesion but public commitment to cohesion, which in itself constitutes a powerful incentive for other agents’ display of commitment (Kuran 1998).”
Human Natures, Nature Conservation, and Environmental Ethics (2002, background): “…on 28 July 2018 32 BioScience • January 2002 / Vol. 52 No. 1 has been long on psychology, but it’s based on a distorted view of evolutionary theory (e.g., Ketelaar and Ellis 2000a, 2000b) that puts too much emphasis on inclusive fitness (CavalliSforza and Feldman 1978, Lloyd and Feldman 2001).”
Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (2007, background): “Ketelaar and Ellis (2000, 13) explain what they think is the crucial shift away from falsification this way: According to Lakatosian philosophy of science, then, the key scientific criteria for evaluating evolutionary psychology’s guiding metatheory is not whether its core assumptions are false or…”