I read a whole lot of neuroscience as well. However, I have been having some level of reticence to their discoveries since our understanding of how the brain operates at a neurological level in still his infancy; the tools we have to measure brain activity doesn't give us a perfect picture of everything that is going on, our ability to interpret how the data we collect manifests itself behaviorally is limited as well. Honest neuroscientists would admit that their understanding of the brain is at best incomplete. Following that understanding, the insights they give us are always somewhat speculative. Theoretically speaking, I believe that we could understand everything about the human mind from a neurological standpoint, but the science is far from it at this point. In that vein, at this point in time, I believe we can get greater insights by analyzing behavioral phenotypes following an evolutionary reasoning since the human brain has been programmed through adaptations by natural selection. Therefore, by analyzing the human species patterns in behavioral phenotypes through cross-cultural and historical studies following an evolutionary framework, you should obtain great insights about how the brain operates despite lacking the actual comprehension of how it manifests itself at a neurological level. That being said, both can and should supplement one another in their understanding as we progress toward a unified scientific understanding of the mind.
What you pointed out about the effect of epigenetic factors is quite interesting, I don't exactly know how much it comes influencing the genomes in their phenotypic expression, for the most part, I don't believe it should affect too much our evolutionary interpretations of phenotypes. At least for now, it seems difficult to account for.
I do agree that modern psychology and anthropology are still often shackled by old dogmas. One of the reason is that academic institutions are slow to adapt to the rate of scientific discoveries. I found myself being less and less mainstream in my thinking the further I deepen my understanding of human nature. I am questioning a lot of what science has to offer because as you delve deeper, you find that within one field there is a great deal of disparities in their scientific beliefs, but moreover, you find even greater disparities between different scientific fields on subjects that overlap. I am very critical of whatever I read now. I am reading fewer books now, and more of the most recent scientific papers instead, incorporating them within my understanding of human nature.
What fascinates me right now is analyzing how much of our phenotypic expressions could by categorize as evolutionary mismatches (
Evolutionary mismatch - Wikipedia), when you take the time to think about it, nearly everything we do in certain aspects can enter this category since our world is so vastly different from an ancestral hunter-gatherer environment. Hence, I am not so convinced that the perpetual modernization of our environment is a desirable trajectory to follow in order to fulfill our fundamental human needs, although, driven by economic growth, this isn't a surprising phenotypic trajectory from an evolutionary perspective despite is broader deleterious side effects.
Drouin sucks btw.
