Studying evolutionary psychology fucked me up when I was younger. I really believed that people were out to self-maximize on behalf of their genes, that altruism wasn't real and the appearance of kindness was ultimately self-serving.
It took closeness with a lot of good people in my life for me to reject those ideas and believe in empathy and kindness again and be able to trust people.
Now my attitude is that genes screwed themselves over when they made brains capable of caring about things other than reproducing genes, and that's good from my perspective. So evolutionary psych notions give too much credit to genes (and are undisprovable pseudoscience)
@frm Well, genes can't really plan ahead
I think it's more like the singularity hit at some point (certainly by the time when brains started being able to talk to one another and record knowledge) and then we totally outpaced the ability of genes to make changes since genetic evolution is hella slow for things that reproduce as slowly as humans
@aprrrl the explanation makes sense. From my sci-fi perspective, it would be scary if the rules governing genes would predicted the possibility of being outpaced, thus putting we thinking beings in a situation where we can't win, no matter how hard (and fast) we think.
@aprrrl hear hear! Especially the untestable nature of evopsych, yikes
@Egg yeah, it is way too easy to come up with a narrative that sounds plausible because it supports your biases, and no one can prove you wrong but people take it seriously because it supports what they want to believe!! </rant>
@aprrrl what if genes gave us brains capable of caring about things other than reproducing genes, because of a form of population control for the genes themselves? I don't know, never studied this stuff anyway.