Literature

The most trenchant and effective critiques of evolutionary biology have tended to come from scholars who are themselves advocates of evolutionary biology. Two books have appeared in recent years, both reviewed by Johan Bolhuis in the pages of Science. "In the end", says Bolhuis, "the two books are complementary, and together they constitute a formidable critique of evolutionary psychology." The theory of evolution is

"generally considered one of the most important intellectual achievements of the modern age. It therefore seems logical to extend the theory to cognition, as Darwin himself did in The Descent of Man when he considered human characteristics such as morality or emotions to have been evolved. Evolutionary psychology aims to do just that: applying evolutionary theory to the human mind. Specifically, it proposes that the mind consists of cognitive modules that evolved in response to selection pressures faced by our Stone Age ancestors. The approach has a wide popular appeal, perhaps because it often addresses such exciting topics as human desire, sex, and passion."

The archetypal evolutionary psychology perspective of human nature (Image source here)

The first book is Adapting Minds by David J. Buller. Since this was published in 2005, comment here will be brief.

Buller eventually concludes that the paradigm is not particularly well founded theoretically. One of its key claims is that "our modern skulls house stone-age minds" - that the human mind has not evolved significantly since the Pleistocene. Buller offers overwhelming evidence for the contrary conclusion. As he puts it, "There is no reason to think that contemporary humans are, like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, just Pleistocene hunter-gatherers struggling to survive and reproduce in evolutionarily novel suburban habitats."

The review offers a specific example, drawn from Buller's own analysis of child abuse data in the US.

"Buller devotes three chapters to the paradigm's interpretations of mate preferences, marriage and infidelity, and parenthood. In one, he focuses on Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's evidence for what they have called "discriminative parental solicitude." They provided data suggesting that children are much more likely to suffer abuse from stepparents than from their biological parents. Their findings are consistent with an evolutionary interpretation whereby parental investment is directed at increasing the chances of survival of one's own genes. Buller argues that Daly and Wilson's analysis is influenced by a reporting bias. He and Elliott Smith have analyzed a large dataset on child abuse in the United States, and they conclude that the evidence does not support the evolutionary psychology hypothesis."

The second book, by Robert C. Richardson, has the provocative title: Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology. Despite this, Bolhuis writes: "The merit of his critique is that it is not polemic in the way those of some of his fellow critics (such as Jerry Fodor or Stephen Jay Gould) have been." The approach is to consider the methodology of evolutionary psychology: "he criticizes mainly the methods used by evolutionary psychologists".

"Richardson evaluates in some detail whether particular human cognitive traits, such as language or human reasoning, can be seen as adaptations. He concludes that although it should be possible to find evidence to support such claims, evolutionary psychologists have generally failed to do so. [. . .] The main problem with evolutionary psychology is that it usually does not consider alternative explanations but takes the assumption of adaptation through natural selection as given."

This point is very important. A characteristic of Kuhn's "normal science" is that people work within the paradigm. They are typically blind to alternatives that can only be considered rigorously by moving outside the paradigm. Evolutionary psychologists have given priority to dogma by emphasising adaptation and presuming an evolutionary trajectory. But this approach leads to force-fitting data to theory and because the dogma reigns supreme, the system cannot be falsified.

A major problem is that critical data is typically lacking. Theory reigns unconstrained by data! Often, it is very difficult to contest the conclusions of the evolutionary psychologists. Thus far, the onus of proof has tended to rest on the sceptics, but this is methodologically very weak. It allows theory to dominate with the guise of empirical science.

"At various places in Evolutionary Psychology as Maladaptive Psychology, Richardson concludes that we simply lack the historical evidence for a reconstruction of the evolution of human cognition. For human language, an "explanation" favored by evolutionary psychology is that it evolved for use in complex social groups, that is, there was a functional demand for language. Richardson rightly suggests that paleontologists are unlikely to unearth the evidence that can inform us about the social structure of our ancestral communities."

Bolhuis reveals something of his own concern when elaborating on this point:

The study of evolution is concerned with a historical reconstruction of traits. It does not, and cannot, address the mechanisms that are involved in the human brain. Those fall within the domains of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. In that sense, evolutionary psychology will never succeed, because it attempts to explain mechanisms by appealing to the history of these mechanisms. To use the author's words, "We might as well explain the structure of orchids in terms of their beauty." In this excellent book, Richardson shows very clearly that attempts at reconstruction of our cognitive history amount to little more than "speculation disguised as results."

Piling On the Selection Pressure
Johan J. Bolhuis
Science 320, 6 June 2008: 1293 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1157403

A review of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology by Robert C. Richardson, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. 225 pp. ISBN 9780262182607.

We're Not Fred or Wilma
Johan J. Bolhuis
Science 309, 29 July 2005: 706 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1115209

A review of Adapting Minds by David J. Buller, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005. 564 pp. ISBN 0-262-02579-5.