The Super-Meaning of Romantic Relationships

[The Grand Nudger]

I've studied a fair amount of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and all the related stuff.  The more I learn about life, the less I believe that the people pushing these theories have anything of scientific value to tell us. Here are my four reasons:

So first, we make a hole, eh?  

1) Most of this "knowledge" comes with a heavy dose of confirmation bias, so they highlight the observations that match their theory's predictions and ignore observations that don't fit their theoretical framework.  

Who is "they"?  Who does this?  What framework are we discussing?  

2) Neuroscientists have failed to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" which is how a set of neurotransmitters and electrical signals translates to the subjective first-person experience of consciousness.  Talking about "neurotransmitters" gives me exactly zero useful information about what romantic love feels like, or about how to stop being attracted to women who treat me badly.

What are you objecting to up above if understanding nuerotransmitters tells us nothing about those things?  Think about it, take a moment.........  In any case, how would not having an answer to one question make someones answers to all other questions wrong....that's what you gave this as a reason for.   

3) All of this knowledge about evolution and brain function has failed miserably at helping us solve the basic problems of the human condition, such as war, poverty, divorce, suffering, etc.  

It hasn't eliminated them (if that's what you mean....we've certainly leveraged our understanding of both to improve conditions), but why would a failure to eliminate poverty mean that a scientific understanding of nuerotransmitters, for example...was wrong?  

4) The power of a scientific theory lies not it its ability to explain the past, but in its ability to predict the future.  Evolution in particular can give us detailed explanations about what's happened in the past, but can't tell us anything about what's going to happen next.   This is one of the reasons I like physics: it has the best predictive power of any scientific discipline.  

Evolutionary theory has been making predictions since Darwin.

I guess my real frustration with neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is that it never helped me to solve any of my personal problems, or most of the problems of the people around me.  

Fair enough.....but maybe it's you?  Other people have been doing all these things.  

That really doesn't have much to do with the meaning of romantic relationships.  Unless neuroscientists are able to identify a neurotransmitter that moderates a person's sense of meaning in life.

You mean something like a mind altering drug?

Also, take your nose out of AIG, for your own good. You've just regurgitated their ad copy verbatum.