Philosopher of science David Buller has a bone to pick with evolutionary psychology, the idea that some important human behaviors are best explained as evolutionary adaptations to the struggles we faced tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago as hunter-gatherers. In his new book, Adapting Minds, the Northern Illinois University professor considers--and finds lacking--the evidence for some of the most publicized conclusions of evolutionary psychologists: Men innately prefer to mate with young, nubile women, while women have evolved to seek high status men; men are wired to have a strong jealous reaction to sexual infidelity, while women react to emotional infidelity; and parents are more likely to abuse stepchildren than their genetically related children.
Buller doesn't reject evolutionary studies of the mind per se. Rather, he contends that "Evolutionary Psychology," a set of assumptions about the nature and evolution of the human mind, has largely crowded out the possibility of a more pluralistic "evolutionary psychology." Writer JR Minkel recently spoke to Buller to get a bead on his argument. An abridged and edited transcript of their conversation follows.
JR Minkel: What was your initial reaction to the conclusions of Evolutionary Psychology, and when did you first start having doubts about them?
David Buller: When I first started reading it, it just all seemed intuitively right to me. But as I followed the citation trail and actually started looking at the primary studies that were cited in support of those conclusions--and thinking seriously about the methods that had been employed in the studies, the presuppositions behind them, and whether there were alternative evolutionary hypotheses for the things studied that were not in fact being ruled out by the experiments--I began to find that it wasn't all that convincing.
JRM: Why did you feel the need to write a book, given the criticisms the field has already received?
DB: I didn't feel that there was a broader framework in which the whole paradigm was viewed as fundamentally problematic. I saw the writing of this book just as a desire to synthesize a variety of the problems I saw with the paradigm, some of which had been pointed out by other people already.
What I thought needed to be brought out for a more general readership were some of the methodological problems involved in these very highly publicized discoveries that evolutionary psychologists claim to have made; things that get covered in the New York Times on pretty much a weekly basis. I wanted to show people that there are grounds for skepticism.
JRM: Why do you say the evolutionary psychology paradigm is problematic?
DB: There are three foundational claims that it makes. One is that the nature of [evolutionary] adaptation is going to create massive modularity in the mind--separate mental organs functionally specialized for separate tasks. Second, that those modules continue to be adapted to a hunter-gatherer way of life. And third, that these modules are universal and define a universal human nature. I think that all three of those claims are deeply problematic.
If anything the evidence indicates that the great cognitive achievement in human evolution was cortical plasticity, which allows for rapidly adaptive changes to the environment, both across evolutionary time and [across] individual lifetimes. Because of that, we're not quite the Pleistocene relics that Evolutionary Psychology claims. [Regarding universality,] all of the evidence indicates that [behavioral] polymorphisms are much more widespread in all sexually reproducing populations than the idea of a universal human nature would require. So I think the theoretical foundations from which a lot of predictions get made, about what our mate preferences are going to be, or what the psychology of parental care is, are problematic because the theoretical foundation is mistaken.
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Add CommentSee "Reply to David Buller by Martin Daly & Margo Wilson"
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Also see Delton, Robertson, and Kenrick (2006) "The Mating Game Isnt Over: A Reply to Bullers Critique of the Evolutionary Psychology of Mating"
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep042622732.pdf