Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ethics and evolutionary psychology

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Weak Delete. Cbrown1023 talk 00:07, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ethics and evolutionary psychology

Ethics and evolutionary psychology (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This article isn't about anything. Or, its title is an unencyclopedic intersection of two things, and its content is mostly something else entirely. It's like having an article titled potatoes and cheese that talks about whether or not cows will eat yams.

The article describes, briefly, several evolutionary phenomena that are almost entirely unrelated to ethics. The single sentence that does attempt to make a connection has a {{fact}} tag. Arguments like what this article is trying to advance - that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are relevant as formative processes in the evolution of human psychology - have been made in the literature, but aren't covered at all here, and belong in the evolutionary psychology article in any case. This is an AfD instead of a merge tag because there's really nothing here worth preserving, and the title's worthless as a redirect. Opabinia regalis 05:19, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletions. -- Pete.Hurd 05:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete as original research between two mildly related articles. The article has sources on ethics and sources on evolutionary psychology, but—as of now—none on the relationships between the two.--TBCΦtalk? 06:05, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
• Very Strong Keep The title is wrong: it should be "Evolutionary ethics" but I do not want to move it during the AfD. (There is a name problem, because of an article "Evolutionary Ethic", meaning something altogether different.) Under the right title, there are 80,000 ghits, most of them real, starting off with the article "Evolutionary ethics" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as R an S as it is possible to get. There is many books, and I haven't even started looking for journal articles--There's one back in 1895! They are in journals of philosophy mainly, but also psychology religion, and biology. (It is in fact so well known that the creationists have been writing articles against it. I'll add one for NPOV) , This is an elementary but still encyclopedic article, well sourced. and the books in the reference list are exactly on point. Evolutionary psychology is a very much broader topic. It would be good to have a much more detailed explanation, of course, but the article can and should be improved. If it is notable and sourced, there is no basis for deletion. I added a landmark article. I'll add Stanford and a few dozen books or so tomorrow., DGG 06:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. The article can use improvement, but the subject of evolutionary ethics and the question of why ethical behavior has evolved are, as the article's Further reading section shows, encyclopedic topics and not original research. As DGG has suggested, it would not be at all difficult to find and add additional sources. — Elembis (talk) 07:21, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

  It's not a matter of turning up sources, but of using sources to write an article. Remove the irrelevant cruft from this article and what's left might be enough to qualify as a stub called "Evolutionary ethics". The references are nice, but renaming this article to "List of sources that could be useful in writing an article about Evolutionary ethics" just doesn't seem to be a real option. Pete.Hurd 00:19, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment but I'm not claiming that this is original research; I mentioned above that the evolution of ethics in human psychology has been discussed is a legitimate subject. (Maybe the potatoes and cheese was too cutesy to make the intended point ;) I am, however, claiming that a) such content belongs in evolutionary psychology (which is a total mess, but that's beside the point), and b) this article is so devoid of content that it's useless as a seed of the appropriate coverage. Sometimes nothing is better than something, and this article so thoroughly fails to document its intended subject - from the title to the reading list - that it's not worth keeping 'until someone expands it'. Do you not agree that an article on the evolution of ethics that basically consists of 'kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and group selection might exist' is useless? It's as if protein contained 'Protein is a chemical found in meat. Amino acids are small molecules that are zwitterions.' (Is that a better analogy?) Opabinia regalis 07:44, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

What I liked about the article at first glance was the careful effort at sourcing it. Most of the vague subject articles we tend to see here don't have good sourcing--if they have any at all; here, the ed. got most of the classics. The article can be expanded--there are a lot of details to talk about. Kin selection is obvious once you understand it, but not otherwise. And the balance been altruism with respect to different size units (band/population/species) can create some interesting dilemmas--both with apes and with people. . The problem in writing an article is picking out which examples to present. I think we have a usable outline. If the general art. is as bad as you say, it might be better to keep new content separate---but this is an editing question we dont have to bother everybody with. I've been doing AfDs too long--I may try some writing for a change. DGG 08:47, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Really? I don't find the sources particularly compelling - nothing from Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, for example, who largely initiated and popularized the field. Selfish Gene and most of Trivers' early work really have nothing to do with this, except that they informed later hypotheses about the evolution of ethics. Shermer's book is pop-science, good for a further reading list but not much good as a source. It'd be great if you want to write a good article on the topic, but it's hard to imagine that this material would be useful to work from. Opabinia regalis 03:06, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep And rename as suggested. - Denny 17:07, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Opabinia has it right, the topic is not unencyclopedic, but the article is exceptionally poor. Contra DGG it is very poorly sourced, there is only one sourced statement in the whole article. That the Further reading section contains all the classics (could also do with Lee Dugatkin's Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees IMHO) does not equal a well referenced article. As TBC points out, there is no reference linking the two aspects, and therefore the article qualifies as OR by synthesis. The lead section could form the core of a proper article, were it properly referenced (at least the first sentence absolutely must be supported by a reliable source). The rest of the article is a really poor collection of thumbnail sketches of other "main" articles on related topics which together do nothing to support the claims made in the lead section. It would be a very good thing if DGG wrote a decent article to replace this, but it's current state is unacceptably poor. Pete.Hurd 17:29, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. I agree with Opabinia regalis - this article does not document its subject at all. There is nothing to merge and its useless as a redirect anywhere - so it should be deleted until a real article can be written. If anything, it almost seems like a POV fork from Evolutionary psychology, because the author writes about about the ethical question and then tries to make connections for which there are no citations. --Mus Musculus 14:49, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep/Merge. This article (apparently) is a discussion of "evolutionary ethics" and should be merged with the existant (but stubby) article of the same name. Evolutionary ethics is a significant area of research - I count at least a dozen textbooks from notable university presses on the subject including Farber (1994) The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics and Bradie (1994)The Secret Chain: Evolution and Ethics. A merge tag and cleanup tag are more appropriate. Irene Ringworm 21:12, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

  comment Evolutionary ethics redirects to evolutionary ethic, which is another page of unacceptably poor quality containing nothing to do with the (totally encyclopedic) topic of "Evolutionary ethics" after the first sentence. Pete.Hurd 22:26, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

• comment As Pete Hurd points out, to get the result intended, it would be by keeping & renaming the page. As for "Evolutionary ethic", I will AfD it immediately upon finishing discussion of this page; just waiting to avoid confusion. DGG 22:30, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete unreferenced POV fork--Sefringle 04:27, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. OR POV essay.--ZayZayEM 03:21, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.