Oh, wow. You first. And some Popper too while you're at it.
Severn
Severn
Sorry, but a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable. It's absolutely the most essential criteria. Speculation can form the basis of future research, but it's not safe to draw conclusions from it.
I'm not mistaken. Obviously current sexual practices are irrelevant to their theory, because their attribution for the correlation they observed is predicated on the biological consequences of sexual activity being greater for men than for women, which is no longer necessarily the case.
They'd have to come up with some actual arguments first. You can't just come up with a thesis and leave it up to other people to prove. Or rather, you can, but that doesn't make you a) a scientist or b) worthy of serious consideration by anyone.
Her (it's a her) hypothesis doesn't speak to the result, it speaks to the reason for the result. It's taking a result (correlation between feelings of shame and gender) and speculating as to the reason for that result (evolutionary history of higher consequences of sexual activity, despite the irrelevance of that…
No, it is. In many hunter-gatherer societies — the structure that formed the basis of many if not most societies around the world pre-recorded history — women are promiscuous without societal penalties.
Actually, I take that back. Speculation is not fine if you're a psychologist speculating about evolution in a professional setting. That makes you look like an idiot.
They're not the norm across all times and cultures. They're the norm in modern Judeo-Christian and Islamic societies.
Speculation's fine, as long as you identify it as speculation and not claim that your study supports this "hypothesis" (scare quotes because it's not a hypothesis unless it's formulated in such away that it can be disproven).
They're not unable to acknowledge that, they just refuse to acknowledge that this specific study provides any evidence to support a native biological basis for shame about female promiscuity. Which I wholeheartedly agree with.
And this study didn't do any of that, so I'm not sure why you object to the author calling out their speculative nonsense for what it is.
Why indeed? Could it be that evolution is not the sole explicatory factor in determining human behaviour? Is it conceivable that it's a complex interaction of biology, culture and environment?
But negative attitudes towards female promiscuity are not species-wide, nor are they shared by other primates, not are they adequately explained by evolution.
The study provided evidence for a correlation between gender and regret about sexual encounters.
Attitudes towards gender roles are not constant and universal. And female promiscuity is an evolutionary advantage, not a disadvantage, so it doesn't explain why some societies don't favour it. And, most importantly, none of this is at all testable.
Obviously changes to synapses won't be passed on to children. But brain plasticity demonstrates that adapted behaviour can modify the biological bases of behaviour. So evolutionary drives aren't the be-all and end-all of motivation.
It isn't universal, by any means. And, while it is explicable by evolution in one sense, there's also compelling evolutionary reasons for female promiscuity. And, more importantly, neither of these reasons are at all testable, so can't be considered scientific.
It's not a hypothesis because it's not testable.
They prefer to ignore that, because it undermines their "WOMEN ARE PREDETERMINED TO BE HOMEMAKERS" narrative.