David Brooks's column yesterday provided more evidence that he's a total fathead. (You can read it here, if you get TimesSelect.) Summarizing Louann Brizendine’s new book The Female Brain, Brooks takes his readers on a whistle-stop tour of the current wisdom on the physiological basis of gender differences, which segues into a summary of evolutionary psychology:
The prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.... Happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.Where on earth did Brooks get the idea that evolution wants us to be happy? Evolution wants our genes to survive. To that end it has equipped us to be dissatisfied almost all the time, but to imagine that satisfaction is just around the corner if we can just find an attractive mate, eat some food, or improve our social status. (A creature that can easily make itself happy in a lasting way is an evolutionary dead end.) If we want to be happy, our best shot is to fight "the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long ago" as best we can.
This is a classic fallacy of pseudoscientific thinking -- the idea that what is natural is by definition desirable. Why does this guy get to write about stuff he doesn't understand?
