There's a subtle distinction between Answer Choices B and D. If you don't want to read my long breakdown, "evolutionary psychology" is meant to explain specific human behavior. "Evolutionary theory in general" (gene transfer, natural selection) explains how ALL life changes and adapts.

D is wrong because both authors accept the ideas of evolution (gene transfer, natural selection). They aren't Creationists or conspiracy theorists, and nothing suggests that either disagrees with the basic ideas of evolution as a whole.

B is right because the authors (specifically) disagree on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology, which is defined right away in Passage A. (Q: why do we have a certain behavior? A: bc that behavior helped ancient humans pass on genes - live long enough to get laid/protect our offspring.)

Author A endorses this theory in Paragraph 2 of Passage A. In fact, she uses its principles to explain altruism and its relation to "psychological states."

Author B, on the other hand, says that "such arguments [from Evolutionary Psychology] can appear persuasive" (P2), but the author is not committed to accepting the theory (P3) because it has weak explanatory power. An interest needs to be the only motivation to explain a behavior, and Author A doesn't account for that [also, see the last question in this passage set.]

I think this question is kinda nasty because it assumes some basic biology or at least history (Darwin) background knowledge. Are LSAT takers supposed to know vertical gene transfer and natural selection are "evolutionary theory in general?"

The reasoning of Wickard v. Filburn (1942).

I actually see three flaws in the stim, but interestingly we’re only tested on one in the correct answer.

1) the whole-to-part flaw, just because a whole has a quality (fairness, lower sales) the part doesn’t have to have that quality. [The Judge could be incredibly biased, the saleswoman could be exceptionally good.]

2) gambler’s fallacy. even granting the Judge was fair in the past on the first board, we cannot assume that he’ll continue to be fair in this instance.

3) fact v. belief - how can you 100% conclude that someone else’s belief is justified?

This is a perfect example of a POE question.

A is unsupported (nothing about corporations that aren't deterred by the threat of criminal sanction) and possibly anti-supported; the author believes criminal sanctions against corporations are very effective!

B - never mentions any main function of civil. don't mix this up with the end of P2, when author talks abt main function of criminal law.

C is unsupported (the author comments nothing about how frequent each remedy is.)

D is wrong first because it's a belief (we don't know what these civil fans from P1 believe about the wrongdoing by corporations.)

This leaves E. E is not airtight, but this is basically an MSS - it just needs some demonstrateable support. We find that at the beginning of P2 - "the fact that private civil litigation requires an identifiable victim with the necessary resources to commence litigation weakens its deterrent impact." The "significant number" part - it's not great, but I believe it's important. think about it: if an insignificant number of people were affected, then civil wouldn't have its deterrent impact weakened in this way. "...does not harm anyone with sufficient resources" does feel like a stretch. what if there are people affected with the resources who just don't sue for whatever reason? That made me spend 2.5 mins on this Q alone. However, the other answers were so unsupported I chose E.

The stimulus' scope is limited to assessing baby monkeys' responses to four kinds of actions. There are probably thousands of actions that were not tested or shown to the monkeys [actions that we have no idea the result of], so how can we conclude that baby macaques ONLY imitate human gestures also used by adults?

@loklokj816 I know I'm years late, but a LSAT tutor actually challenged this here. https://lsathacks.com/lsac-responses/

Most people in Atlanta, Georgia have red-painted houses. You have a red-painted house only when you are a rock singer. Therefore, it must be that most people in the United States are rock singers.

A (subset) --most-> B -> C.

Valid: A (subset) --most-> C

Not Valid: A (superset) -> C

I want to analyze this in good faith, and would very much appreciate if someone from 7Sage could comment and clarify these thoughts. (@MichaelWright? Your explanations are great.)

In my understanding, a WEAKEN doesn't have to destroy the conclusion. It just has to lessen the support between the premises and the conclusion, making the conclusion a little less likely. The most obvious flaw in this study would be self-reporting. "What if group A actually didn't exercise more, and they just were pretending that they did?" Then the conclusion becomes way harder to draw.

D is the only one that actually addresses this self-reporting flaw specifically by mentioning "over-reporting." In this AC, there are two substantive differences (reading v. exercising, watching your identical twin v. watching yourself), but it points out the same flaw at its heart (self-reporting) in a comparison by analogy. Analogy and principle are also fundamental to how case law citation works, and I do think this works on a logical level. It ain't pretty, but now that we have pointed out that an [arguably] parallel study had a similar over-reporting flaw in a similar situation, it makes the conclusion shakier.

C, I take to be wrong because it is vague, only deals with reporting, and uses an unrepresentative sample. Ok, if the people highly motivated to exercise didn't exercise more, so what? How big is this subset of people? For a correlative trend, it is still okay to have outliers - this is an illusory inconsistency. It's also unclear what group these highly motivated people were in, too. Also, this is solely about reporting and says nothing about the reported time relative to the real time.

In short, this is not a pretty question, but it has a arguable, logical basis and four answers that are demonstrateably wrong. It reminds me of the Homer/Odyssey authorship question with an AC referring to "modern writers."

Bare Bones Translation:

-Pattern: Weekends r cloudier than weekdays

-conclusion: humans caused this

-why? natural 7-day cycles couldn’t have caused this

This is a super weak argument, but you don’t need any diagramming or meteorology knowledge (or any outside knowledge, besides week = 7 days.) Stripped down, the NA becomes easier to pre-phrase. Ask yourself: “Why does the cause of this weather have to be a 7-day cycle? What about other natural cycles that aren’t 7 days?”

That is why E is right. It rules out any of these alternate possibilities with a conditional. If a weather pattern with a natural cause has a 7-day cycle (the cloud patterns stim), that [natural] cause is a 7-day cycle.

This question is max difficulty because E is written horribly [and refers to two “cycles”…] the other answer choices are tempting. Also, this notion of cloud-causing cycles is super abstract [what even are these cycles being discussed? An El Niño? Tidal gravity?] but we don’t need to know what these cycles are. But it’s not a bullshit question. The logic logics.

I have done thousands of LR questions, and this is probably the weakest weakener I have ever seen (besides maybe the one about watching your twin run.) I understand the other ACs are also poor, and maybe you can get this by POE and vibes. My explanation is that it makes it ~0.01% harder to apply the line of reasoning of "very different style = different author" to Homer after seeing a singular counterexample, but it is so unsatisfying. If someone could give/link me an explanation that convinced them, I would love to be proven wrong.

First, there is the difference between ancient and modern writers, which many have discussed. Second, the distinction between "writer" and poet would be an assumption that kills you on a more rigorous LSAT question. Even if you accept the ancient/modern and writer/poet comparison as analogous enough, so what if Stephen King one day decided to write a really sappy romance about homesteaders in 1850s Nebraska? Its tone and vocabulary and details would be different than his work in the horror genre, obviously, but how does that have any bearing on the attribution of the epics? I also think the qualifier in the stim of "almost certainly not" leaves open a little gap to where one counterexample won't disprove or hurt the statement - if the stim said "certainly not" I would pick C in a heartbeat. The negation of NONE is "at least one," which can weaken any NONE argument.

@Imtryingggggg To "strawman" is a technique in an argument where you purposely misrepresent someone else's argument so that it's easier to argue against. For example, imagine that Person 1 is arguing that we should have criminal justice reform. If Person 2 responds with: "So, you really support opening every prison and letting all criminals free! That's a terrible idea!", Person 2's response is a strawman argument. What Person 2 is responding to is not what Person 1 was arguing. The metaphor is that a "straw man" is way easier to knock down than a human man.

In this question, Arnot says that "by making certain fundamental changes in government, we would virtually eliminate our most vexing social ills. Answer D is wrong because the argument isn't a strawman. nothing in the stimulus really shows that the newspaper subscriber is strawmanning/misinterpreting Arnot's argument. (if the newspaper subscriber was doing a strawman, they might say "but what Arnot is really saying is that..." or "but clearly, Arnot's argument is wrong, and we can never eliminate every social ill.")

Rather, the newspaper subscriber challenges an assumption that the argument makes, which is logically fine. Where the argument goes wrong, however, is saying that because the assumption is wrong, then the conclusion is wrong. [See: 7 7sage's Lack of Support v. False Conclusion lesson.] Even if a very flawed or weak argument is made for a point, the point can still be true, and that is why A is the answer.

@AlizaGGG I like the way you think, but as it wasn't mentioned in the stimulus (and is not common knowledge for humanities students) I don't think convergent evolution would be a concept the LSAT expects you to know or assume.

Also, think about actually answering the question posed in D. If our answer is "yes," and the earlier species WAS in fact related to T-rexes, it doesn't help explain the discrepancy between features and weight. If our answer is "no," we also don't know - it's not really about being related. Compare that to actually answering the question posed in B. If the earlier dinosaur died as a baby, that would explain why the skeleton is really small and weaken the argument's conclusion (that we should abandon the scientists' "acommodation" theory. If it died as an adult, then we have reason to believe the conclusion. Does this make sense?

One of the most vicious LR sections I've ever seen.

@stephanietacos I would say "independent, parallel causes," but I've never heard of an official name.

This question is SO nasty, and I was extremely surprised I got this right. Doing this timed, I had less than a minute left at the end of this section, and my strategy was to do a really swift glance. The stim involves two parties, an "if-then" as a premise, and a "one party must be wrong despite a claim" conclusion. I think that is the easiest way to get this question right. Looking at this more precisely, only one question actually has a conditional claim as a premise.

Another point is to notice how extreme the author’s claim is: NO (0%) of contemporary artists are right and NO contemporary artist is necessary for people’s fulfillment. Negating All = Some, so you only need one exception to this statement to point out the authors flaw. D does this perfectly.

@PierceBerardi From the stim, Tania thinks that good art critics cannot separate that from emotion, and we can infer from the other premises that good art critics are sometimes biased. Monique thinks the best art critics "shed all their biases." The best art critics are, implicitly, going to be "good," so she thinks that good art critics are never biased. This does seem like kind of a relative. vs. absolute flaw, but 1) this is an MSS, not a Must Be True, the reasoning doesn't have to be airtight. 2) while in some cases the "best" person at something doesn't have to be good (i.e. the "best" human at lifting 100,000 lb boulders), I don't think the stim gives us a reason to doubt that the best art critics can be inferred to be good.

I feel like A would be perfect if it didn't mention "high-traffic areas," which narrows the scope of the answer's applicability.

Laughed out loud when I saw this answer. I actually have synesthesia - I guess it was meant to be that I can't accurately understand the words of this question because I can't understand anything at all. Knowing I'll get a 120 on the LSAT makes me feel yellow-orange, or maybe lamp.

What is this curve bro. 50% of people who scored a literal 120 got this right but ~25% of people who got a 174 got this wrong. A question so easy it's a curvebreaker.

@msingh0831x225 This analysis is not right - negating the conclusion (KLE -> /FP) is actually (KLE AND FP.) In other words, KLE and FP can both exist. To negate a conditional, you deny that the thing on the left side of the arrow is sufficient.

This Q feels logically flawed, and I would love to be proven wrong. The physicists in the first paragraph are specifically NOT pursuing a theory that can actually explain everything's future behavior (such as thunderstorms and human beings). In fact, that is a misleading characterization by popular reports. The theory would only explain fundamental interactions and their composite particles, not what those particles make or create on a huge scale.

D says that "all economic activity can be explained in terms of individual consumers and producers and how they interact." So a theory that explains everything based on individual components. I think D is a really weak analogy, because the real theory of everything WILL NOT explain all the universe's activity in terms of fundamental particles and their interactions. If anything, the theory of economics in D feels analogous to the popular mischaracterization of the theory of everything, not the actual theory of everything. I thought this a trap answer and marked it off.

Also, I feel the explanation for why B is wrong is very strange. I take B as somewhat analogous because the theory of meteorology predicts the broad events (global) but doesn't predict specifics (thunderstorms) just as the theory of everything would predict broad events (particles) but can't predict specifics (thunderstorms). I marked it off, though, because B says the specific events of the theory will "never' be consistently predictable, which is unsupported.

Where, like the explanation for B says, is there any suggestion that "If anything, physicists probably think the "theory of everything" can explain everything?"

Somehow this is the only one I got wrong in this section. The "laws should be fashioned" threw me off.

I got this right by diagramming, and what they're doing makes sense, but it really seems like a commonsense assumption that a "carefully conducted study" would have a control - I mean, that is the only way you can infer any conclusion.

@acastillo0395 D is wrong first because we are looking only at the author's hypothetical, where rattles are not brittle. ("So if they were not so brittle, one...")

E seems weird because it's about food, which isn't even mentioned in the stim. But it's correct. Why? If it wasn't true (which you can check by doing the Negation Test, to check that the assumption is necessary) you get: "rattlesnakes DON'T molt as often when food is scarce as they do when food is plentiful."

This means that the snake molting (which makes new sections) is not at a constant rate. Therefore, this destroys the conclusion (that you would be able to tell a rattlesnake's age just by the number of sections in its tail). In other words, E NOT being introduces another variable (food) that affects a rattlesnake's number of sections. Then you can't tell whether a rattlesnake has 5 sections because it molted, say, once a year for five years, or it's (say) a 2-year old snake which ate a lot and molted very frequently. Since E not being true destroys the conclusion, then E is necessary.