[eseehausen]

This is a really important point. Evolutionary psychology and associated disciplines have come to replace psychoanalysis and God in the popular imagination as a teleological force that's making rational decisions about what to do in a given moment. This makes it into a bludgeon for reinforcing the status quo (just as the other two were before that).

While I'm not necessarily 100% in agreement with this formulation, I do think a useful and simple corrective is this: "natural selection" isn't a positive choice for the "fittest"- it's the elimination of unfit adaptations before they can be passed on. This article references "sexual selection", which may well be a positive choice, but it has very little to do with utility or health, as I'm sure many of us recognize from our own lives and the studies of animal mating choices.

[ralusek]

Why would you dismiss evolutionary psychology outright? Case in point, rabbits are typically extremely skittish, and that seems to serve a function. In chimps, overly aggressive males tend to dominate packs, but if they're compromised in any way, the other chimps tend to brutalize them. The entirety of most complicated animals' mate selection process is highly predicated on psychology...why would human psychology not be subject to similar systems?

It's easier to go with the psychology of women, as they're the "discriminate selectors," in most species, and humans are no exception. If you disagree with this, you are not aware of dating site data. A good example of a psychological trait involved in attraction is that a woman will often find a man having a good sense of humor as being sexually attractive. A reasonable cause is that a good sense of humor is often a proxy for intelligence, pattern recognition, and creativity. Finding this to be an attractive characteristic very likely assisted in the evolution of the species by serving as a basic proxy for useful survival attributes.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it strikes me as odd to simply dismiss an entire element of gene expression as somehow not having been subjected to similar principles as others.

[whatshisface]

Evolutionary psychology got a bad rap for writing a bunch of "just-so" stories. Without experiments or the confirmation of predictions, it is very easy to fall in to the trap of inventing a story that makes sense to people when they hear it but that isn't particularly aligned to the truth.

Inventing stories that activate the culturally and individually subjective feeling of "that makes sense," is the lowest form of knowledge-seeking. Now, I'm not judging whether or not the accusation is deserved, but that's the substance of the bad reputation.

[eseehausen]

I didn't dismiss evo psych outright in that comment- I said it's often being used in the way psychoanalysis and theology were being used to naturalize the current social order. Though you do engage in the kinds of problems that I was trying to outline in this comment. That is to say, you're looking at social phenomena and then working backwards to make unfalsifiable claims that it may be beneficial using a lot of cultural intuition rather than hard data. While I don't find the implications of your feelings about humor particularly problematic, it's the same process that leads to more harmful ones.

As others have noted in the thread, it's just as possible that a predilection for humorous mates isn't such a deleterious adaptation that it kills the people who have it before they die. It may well serve no practical function, and it doesn't need to.

I'm definitely not saying it's not interesting to look at the ways that a penchant for humor manifests itself across species and cultures and whether there are any genetic markers that determine whether somebody is more or less interested in a humorous mate. At that point, it'd be interesting to see how those markers were propagated over time, when they developed, etc. Otherwise, though, this just does the same thing as psychoanalysis and theology- it takes the current order and asks how it fits the narrative you've already assumed.