Criticism of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.[1]

Evolutionary psychologists contend that many of the criticisms against it are straw men, based on an incorrect nature versus nurture dichotomy, and/or based on misunderstandings of the discipline.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] In addition, some defenders of evolutionary psychology assert that critics of the discipline base their criticisms on a priori political assumptions, such as those associated with Marxism.[9]

  1. ^ Plotkin, Henry (2004). Evolutionary thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Blackwell. p. 150.
  2. ^ Confer, J. C.; Easton, J. A.; Fleischman, D. S.; Goetz, C. D.; Lewis, D. M.; Perilloux, C.; Buss, D. M. (2010). "Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations". American Psychologist. 65 (2): 110–126. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.601.8691. doi:10.1037/a0018413. PMID 20141266.
  3. ^ Segerstråle, Ullica Christina Olofsdotter (2000). Defenders of the truth: the battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850505-1.
  4. ^ Alcock, John (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516335-3
  5. ^ Barkow, Jerome (Ed.). (2006) Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513002-7
  6. ^ Tooby, J., Cosmides, L. & Barrett, H. C. (2005). Resolving the debate on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpenetration of motivational and conceptual functions. In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Content. NY: Oxford University Press.
  7. ^ Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology by Edward H. Hagen, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5–67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
  8. ^ Saad, Gad. "The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology". Psychology Today. Retrieved 29 June 2020.
  9. ^ "The Ideological Subversion of Biology". 2023.