Stetson’s Reviews > Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives > Status Update

I've always hated science-based books that are like, "The New Science of....[insert highly subjective human experience]". I wonder how it alters the way people perceive and experience their own lives, disembodying them and distorting their interpretation of it when always viewing it through the lens of science, rather than through phenomenology. It seems to encourage people to externalize their own experiences onto someone else's interpretation of it, rather than trusting in their own individually unique, and potentially not so easily definable experience within it. I'm curious how you find the contents of the book by the end. Or perhaps I'm just judging a book by its cover.

MaatsFeatheredMouse wrote: "I've always hated science-based books that are like, "The New Science of....[insert highly subjective human experience]". I wonder how it alters the way people perceive and experience their own liv..."

I think that linguistic construction is a way of signaling a field-level shift in the preferred/dominant paradigm/model of the scientific thinking on a major question. In this case, it is meant to signal that the traditional evolutionary model, which suggests little-to-no fatherhood-specific adaptation in hominids is being revised or qualified by findings from contemporary brain imaging studies (which are methodologically weak and underpowered), behavioral endocrinology (more reliable but still challenging to measure and study in some ways), and theoretical revisionism (i.e. broader understandings of sexual and kin selection mechanism as social selection).

I think there is a type of person whose nominal worldview is very much informed by pop-science nonfiction, Ted Talks, and a trust-the-experts ethos that's ruthlessly parodied by memes about "midwits," but, these individuals will often depart from their declared views when it comes to their observed behavior. This is rarely processed as an inconsistency or hypocrisy. The other issue with this is sometimes the above scenario is the result of a deceptive signal sent cynically or simply because of other overwhelming incentives. This can be hard to disentangle from the actual thing we're talking about, which I agree does exist.

From the perspective of a shared social epistemology, I think our public discourse hasn't struck the right balance between standpoint epistemology (knowledge informed by personal experience) and science (combining empiricism and rational skepticism iteratively and at scale). There are also better and worse variants of both systems, where the histrionics of the 2010s and early 2020s were very much animated by malignant forms of both. No we've surrendered any attempt to pursue truth, and discourse is understood mostly as a cynical propaganda war.

Anyway, I like conversing with Darby on Substack as she is generally a good faith interlocutor from the American left who is grounded biological reality. Her book isn't packed with fluff so it isn't a waste of time to read even for someone like me who's familiar with most of the content. She covers topics pithily and ropes in her relevant personal experiences, which add human interest (something all general/pop books require). I think she makes some analytical or interpretative mistakes and perhaps trust her own research too much, but these are not fatal errors in my view. She also has responded to some or all of these critique. I don't view the responses as robust but she currently holds that they are. We can't definitively test every claim, and some of my positions depend on assumptions or interpretative differences with Darby.

I do have a final review up on the main GR page for the book. It is provisional, but it address the book in some depth.