I've watched a couple episodes of a Discovery Channel show called "Head Games" (not the game show from a few years back):

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/head-games/

I think it's moderately interesting, but there are a number of things where the science starts to sound a little bit off to me. They use a lot of explanations from evolutionary psychology, which is probably contributing to this sense. They use a lot of explanations that sound like "We evolved X because of Y." I don't see how any of these claims are "scientific" in the sense of being testable. It sounds very hand-wavy and speculative. The one that I have in mind is that we notice red more because we have biological cousins in the animal kingdom with whose butts turn red when they're ready to mate. Can you really point that one feature in the animal kingdom and be justified in saying THIS is the reason?

It also makes me wonder in the broader sense, how such a claim is justified for a strictly biological/physiological explanation of something. Is there a way to further justify these types of reasoning beyond the level of "it kind of makes sense that..."?

I don't want to be snide, but I think I've found the problem.

No. Seems especially suspect to me since red is so often associated with danger (isn't it?). I'd imagine the colour of our blood is a more likely candidate (if noticing red more isn't just circumstantial).

LOL -- It's on right after Mythbusters, so after I get my guns/explosion TV fix, it's easy to just keep on watching.

[ ] Head Games
[X] Mythbusters

The reason they do head games after mythbusters is do you dont write into mythbusters asking them to bust the show you just saw on the same network.

One person making a bad argument on some TV show probably does say much about anything. However,

Really how interesting. Did they expand on why they believe this to be true.

I would expect there is more than this.

If its a good theory yes. If its just the TV presenter making a guess, not necessarily.

Blood is red. It can be very useful to spot when you are bleeding. Could there be a link?

What comes first, a firm scientific understanding of evolutionary mechanisms responsible for psychological traits, or a firm scientific understanding of cognitive mechanisms responsible for psychological traits?

+1

TV shows like this frequently dramatically oversimplify a given hypothesis or set of evidence to the point that it's almost unrecognizable. It often takes me a lot of effort to reconstruct how some random statement in a show was included, based on what we know. I usually end up thinking "well, ok, I suppose that statement is defensible, if not an entirely accurate representation of the underlying science."

I suppose if the goal is to make science/evolution more widely acceptable/interesting to an otherwise unknowledgeable segment of society, fine, whatever. Anything to spread some interesting "truths."

i think the biggest problem is that these things are presented as actual fact (if the presenter even recognizes it really isn't a fact) rather than say that it's the best explaination available (then again my limited experience suggests that the average joe doesn't think that our best explanation is important) . there is evidence that some of these X evolved because of Y are likely, largely it's determine when the trait came about, correlate that to environmental changes that came about the same time, then go, "it kind of makes sense that...".

in it's defense most of science (at least biology) does the "this makes sense" thing, we just wait for other things that also make sense to come up and then come up with ways to eliminate other hypotheses. some things we can do experimentally, but with others, we just have to look at the existing evidence and say, "this kind of makes sense, but that makes more sense, so until some more evidence or a new explanation comes up, we'll go with that". multiple rounds of the process does give some confidence though.


my problem with the blood idea is that i don't believe all organisms that can see red have red blood (not sure if their red vision came from the same ancestor or originated independently though, i'm sure someone knows, just don't care enough to look it up) or if they actually know that blood is bad. without more info, i'd put my money on mating or food before

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oib2...ilpage#t=1267s

I don't know how long this will be up, but for now this link takes you to the beginning of the segment. The actual claim comes up at around 22:30.

To me it would seem that the claim '(trait) X makes the species fitter because of Y', is a claim that can be researched. This is of course not the same claim as the one made in OP, but close enough for this kind of show.

Alternative hypotheses tho.

This article says most of these human colour/evolution studies have been inconclusive, but that the link is likely due to colours of fruit (red stuff tastes good). This was published in 2005 though.

http://www.imaging.org/ist/publicati...porter20_1.pdf

Red is supposedly not linked to female genitalia because men like pink vaginas not red ones (lol sick research bro?).

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0034669

This does happen in evolutionary linguistics (and correctly so IMHO), so why not in biology?

One thing you can be sure of is that a TV show like this will be presenting just the conclusions of a huge amount of detailed study (hopefully that got published in scientific journals, although these channels also do have rubbish like alien ancestry)