Re: Nutritional intake, psychiatric traits and pseudoscientific nonsense
Follow up:
Feierman and his friend James Gray are attempting to extend Feierman’s pseudoscientific nonsense to reach equally uninformed participants in a yahoo group that is owned by Robert Stonjek.
See for example: “As the moderator of this list you are one of the gate keepers of what is defined as human ethology.”
Feierman is the moderator of the human ethology group, but this supposedly was inadvertently posted to the evolutionary psychology group. It seems more likely that this was a deliberate posting to another group so that Feierman could then continue to misrepresent human ethology and introduce others to the following nonsense about what he calls Type I Behavior.
Feierman writes: “I don’t think there is a definition of ethology in general and human ethology in particular that has universal agreement. From my perspective ethology in general started (by Lorenz and Tinbergen) as a method to understand the cause of instinctual behaviors, especially in vertebrates. To do this, they redefined the concept of an instinct from a motivational concept to a behavioral (movement) concept, which then generated the concept of the fixed/coordinated/modal action pattern, or what I now call Type I Behavior (definable by form and function in a natural environment and species-universal in form).”
Feierman has previously claimed that “…ISHE is “HBES Lite…” He denigrates the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE), which is the organization that owns the yahoo group he moderates, and touts the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), as if evolutionary theorists knew more about the biology of human behavior than human ethologists know. See: “My own personal impression at these three meetings was that there is very little difference between the types of papers presented at HBES and ISHE. In many ways, ISHE is “HBES Lite,” as in lite beer, less calories for those thermodynamically inclined. Said slightly differently and using a baseball analogy, the “heavy hitters” are members of HBES.”
Is there a definition of human ethology? Human ethology focuses on the evolutionary and adaptive significance of human behavior.
Who are the HBES “heavy hitters?” What have they contributed to understanding of the adaptive significance of human behavior? The question arises: What causes significant adaptations in human behavior? I think the answer is that ecological variation enables the adaptive significance of human behavior. For example, with co-authors, I published this award-winning review: Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology
We attempted to make it perfectly clear that the neuroendocrinology of human behavior must be included in any representations of biologically-based cause and effect. Feierman wants others to continue to look at human behavior as if it somehow evolved like all other ecologically adapted animal behaviors that supposedly somehow evolved. Most others will not realize how twisted his thoughts have become.
For example, take the phrase (from his representation above): “definable by form and function in a natural environment and species-universal in form.” Compare that ridiculous misrepresentation of cause and effect to the fact that in any natural environment, ecological variation results in nutrient-dependent behaviors that are species-specific because the nutrients metabolize to species-specific pheromones that control the physiology of reproduction.
Why doesn’t Feierman simply admit to those facts? I claim that Feierman wants others to continue to believe that “Random mutations are the substrates upon which directional natural selection acts.” That means Feierman cannot admit to any biological facts because no experimental evidence supports the ridiculous idea that random mutations result in adaptations. And yet, Feierman now claims “…the Adapted Mind is really the Adapted Brain!”
What kind of fool ignores RNA-mediated events and claims that natural selection acts on random mutations that result in the adapted brain? That was a rhetorical question.
The unanswered question is: Why does the ISHE allow Feierman to moderate their yahoo group, and denigrate the works that include the accurate representations of its members?
