On the Verifiability of Evolutionary Psychological Theories: An Analysis of the Psychology of Scientific Persuasion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary psychological theories have engendered much skepticism in the modern scientific climate. Why? We argue that, although sometimes couched in the language of unfalsifiability, the skepticism results primarily from the perception that evolutionary theories are less verifiable than traditional psychological theories. It is more difficult to be convinced of the veracity of an evolutionary psychological theory because an additional layer of inference must be logically traversed: One not only has to be persuaded that a particular model of contemporary psychological processes uniquely predicts observed phenomena, one must also be persuaded that a model of deeply historical processes uniquely predicts the model of psychological processes. This analysis of the psychology of scientific persuasion yields a number of specific suggestions for the development, testing, and discussion of evolutionary psychological theories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".