When I thought to criticise Rebecca Watson's talk on evolutionary psychology I was aware that I might be jumping to conclusions in regard to those areas where I was uncertain of her source. I have had a couple of conversations with people about Rebecca's talk, some of them critical of her and some of them supportive, and none of them found much of substance to object to regarding my critique.
This is nice because I like being right about things. In the spirit of keeping myself honest though, it does seem that I have been overgenerous to Satoshi Kanazawa and overly suspicious of Rebecca in regard to one of her claims about him.
I have been talking to Ed Clint about our varied objections to Rebecca's talk, and he has pointed out to me that in the following blog post Satoshi Kanazawa does make the claim that "in Africa, where our ancestors evolved for most of their evolutionary history, people (men and women) mostly stayed naked".
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200810/barbie-manufactured-mattel-designed-evolution-vi
Therefore the claim I made in my last blog about Rebecca "making it up" when she claimed that Satoshi's argument "is that in Africa they don't need blondes to tell which women are young and healthy because they're all naked" is lacking in generosity. It is a bit of a strawman of his argument, I suppose, but not much.
So if anyone is following this blog to get a better idea of all the errors in her talks (not very likely, I know, but the stats are showing a few repeat visitors and I would hate to mislead them) then please be aware that I dismissed her too blithely on this particular point.
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