Evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, & the law
Douglas Cooke Dobbins on how psychology has taken over family law
Doug’s series continues with an important argument: 1. Courts of law rely on psychologists for judgments in family law, what to do about children, especially. 2. Those psychologists pretend to be experts, to have scientific knowledge of human beings on the basis of which they make proposals which judges mostly accept. 3. That psychology is some kind of speculation about evolution, but it's not at all obvious what evolutionary biology has to do with deliberating about the lives of people today & making decisions that will change their lives. (More theoretically, evolutionary biology has a specifically modern prejudice, that human problems have to be explained in terms of sub-human concepts. For example, human behavior is reduced to the behavior of genes. Rationalism can be applied to irrational things like genes, but not to potentially rational things, like human beings. But how can learning about genes tell you what happens with a mother, a father, & a child in a specific case where a decision has to be made?)