Now I want to see the graphs for these terms used in the humanities. While you're at it, include such terms as "chaos theory," "strange attractors," etc. I'd be curious to see how my approach to the arts and humanities is faring.

When agnostic says "the near-future looks pretty bright for those interested in the biological approach to studying humans and their ways", what he really should be saying is "this approach has a certain amount of fashionable interest at the moment", and I will add that it, too, will go the way of post-modernism and other fashions as time passes.

Agnostic says "Notice that while "IQ" goes through cycles about an increasing trend, its synonym "cognitive ability" shows exponential increase." But agnostic's own graphs show that the counts for "IQ" and "congnitive ability" combined in the most recent data is less than the counts for "IQ" alone back in the 1970s. Thus he is misinterpreting his data.

Agnostic says ""evolutionary psychology" is a safe term politically". I say evolutionary psychology is an unmitigated crock of you-know-what, and I'm totally uninterested in listening to anybody who's got something to say about it. Evolutionary psychology is as rubbishy as freudianism, and ain't the least bit scientific. Because a whole lot of other people agree with me, it's actually a politically dangerous term in many quarters.

what he really should be saying is "this approach has a certain amount of fashionable interest at the moment", and I will add that it, too, will go the way of post-modernism and other fashions as time passes.

Hopefully not, in the deep sense (obviously in the shallow sense, all theories are improved upon). Then again, maybe it will -- until then, though, it will be nice to enjoy the enlightenment before civilization collapses under the weight of barbarian hordes once more.

I wonder what Peter Turchin or Ibn Khaldun would say about the rise and fall of big theories and the rise and fall of agrarian states -- like, maybe the triumphant Darwinian people will begin to in-fight too much, fall apart as a group, and be taken over by a Marxist mob whose solidarity had grown due to their position on the frontier of academia.

We'll just have to wait and see!

"Evolutionary psychology is as rubbishy as freudianism, and ain't the least bit scientific."

What's not scientific about it?

It is fascinating that academics can adhere to the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin and be taken seriously, while anyone who would do so for the ideas of Mussolini or Hitler would be made a total pariah.

I think the equation of Marx to Hitler (Stalin is fine, but I don't think the academics are exactly falling over themselves in praise) is facile. It took intellects like Hayek's to refute socialism back in the day. Anyone with more than shit for brains can refute Hitler.

The destructiveness of an idea simply isn't the same thing as its stupidity, nor is either directly related to the malevolence / moral depravity of the people who thought them up. I don't see what is gained by conflating obviously different concepts.

D

Self-identified "Marxist" governments were generally at their most popular in Western leftist circles precisely when they were at their most vile. The Webbs' "Soviet Communism: A new civilization?" (1935) writes approvingly of Stalin's regime at its moment of maximum evil. Similarly, the moment when Western leftists like Jean-Luc Godard were most likely to self-identify as "Maoist" was during the Cultural Revolution.

You need to watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s...8EE60F7& index=0

Insofar as evolutionary psychology is scientific, it can be verified and/or falsified. And, insofar as biological approaches to literature involve testable hypotheses, it will have more longevity than mere fashions such as Marxism and deconstruction. For example, I developed a theory that meaningful words in literary texts will have a fractal distribution through the text. I tested that theory on Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," and was able to show that there did seem to be a fractal distribution of theme words such as "friend," but not of non-theme words such as "love." One could prove or disprove this by showing that literary texts do or do not have fractal (and I would also include biotic) patterns of word distributions across texts throughout time, and in different languages. So these scientific approaches are not in fact anything like the fads of the past any more than Newtonian physics or Darwinian theory of evolution are fads.

What about Executive Function (EF)?

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/...06/25/winner-4/

Nice try georges, but here's one time when the comparison is apt, since lots of academics *did* support the communist counterparts of Hitler and Mussolini.

one should read Wolin's "The Seduction of Unreason" to see that the postmodernists' ideas are primarily founded in a combination of fascist and Marxist ideas. Heidegger, for example, was an unrepentant Nazi, and one simply cannot have pomo without him.