Evopsych vs SSH
One is fake science squared, the other is a proto-science
Evopsych mate preference claims. Hypothesis: men in the EEA who preferred low-WHR women left more descendants, so modern men inherited a WHR-detection module. Evidence: cross-sectional surveys and ratings of stimuli, mostly from undergraduates, mostly Western. Test: ask people to rate pictures. Verification of the causal mechanism: zero. Nobody has ever observed a Pleistocene male choosing a mate. Nobody has identified the neural substrate of the alleged module. Nobody has demonstrated the heritability of the preference. Nobody has shown the selection coefficient that would have driven its fixation. The entire causal chain from ancestral selection to modern preference is inferred, not observed, and the inference rests on assumptions about ancestral environments and reproductive payoffs that are themselves unobserved. What’s actually being measured is a correlation between a stimulus and a rating. The evolutionary scaffolding is decoration.
And now that evolution by natural selection has been conclusively and comprehensively disproved, it follows that an evolutionary process that never occurred in the past cannot be responsible for psychological behaviors that are observed in the present.
SSH claims. Hypothesis: adult male social behavior sorts into a limited number of recognizable patterns, and those patterns predict outcomes across social, sexual, professional, and organizational domains. Evidence: direct, observable behavior of men in actual social settings, replicated across cultures, industries, decades, and observers. Test: identify a man’s pattern, then predict his behavior in a new context, then check whether the prediction holds. Verification of the causal mechanism: not required at the descriptive level, but the predictive reliability is what matters for the hypothesis to qualify as science. The framework makes specific, falsifiable predictions — the Gamma’s secret king behavior, the Delta’s pattern of self-justification, the Alpha’s indifference to explanation, the Sigma’s lateral relationship to the hierarchy — and those predictions are confirmed or disconfirmed by direct observation in ordinary social life. Anyone can run the test, repeatedly, on people they actually know.
By any criterion that distinguishes science from non-science — falsifiability, predictive power, observability of the underlying phenomena, replicability of the test — the SSH outperforms the evopsych canon, and it isn’t close. The SSH makes risky predictions about specific behaviors in specific situations and the predictions come true. Evopsych makes safe predictions about aggregate preference ratings on Likert scales and then garlands the result with unverifiable ancestral storytelling.
