A truly evolutionary view of our species recognizes that variation is not some noise in the system, but is the system itself. And so in an important sense there's no such thing as the human mind, which an evolutionary perspective on will illuminate us about, but rather there are a variety of different kinds of minds out there, all of which have evolved, and in many cases the variety of kinds of minds are maintained by frequency dependent selection. In the nontrivial sense, there's simply no such thing as human nature if you take evolutionary theory seriously. What's common at one particular time in the [evolutionary] process won't necessarily be common at a different time in the process within the same species.
JRM: Does the idea of evolved differences between the sexes stand or fall with the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm?
DB: These are tentative answers. I don't think that it does stand or fall with Evolutionary Psychology, even though they have been the principal purveyors of the idea of evolved sex differences. I don't think there's good evidence for the sex differences that I examine most in the book, namely in the design features of the mind underlying jealousy and mate preference. The extent to which there's good evidence of evolved sex differences is actually my next book project.
JRM: What hope do we have of understanding how evolution shaped our minds?
DB: One approach is to work from the past forward, which is the approach taken by the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm; to try to think about the adaptive problems that drove human psychological evolution, and how ancient problems are reflected in the current design of the mind. But another approach is to work from the present backwards; to look at how humans make decisions regarding things like mating and parental care; to model, from an adaptive standpoint, the decision making that humans make in contemporary environments; and to try to get a fix on the nature of reasoning involved. If you can identify ways in which people are behaving in a highly adaptive manner, that can perhaps--perhaps--inform you about some of the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to it. But that's still always going to be a rather highly speculative step of the process.
Only when the community of researchers who are applying evolutionary theory to human psychology begin to broaden the ways in which they do that will good answers begin to emerge. And if my book can have any positive effect I would hope it would be to prompt people to think about alternative hypotheses and different ways in which evolutionary theory might inform psychology.
JRM: What value can philosophers add to science?
DB: I have no doubt that some readers are going to say that I've brought nothing to these issues, because philosophers should stick to what they know--namely, nothing. And there's an extent to which I agree with them. Philosophy as a field is not a body of knowledge to be known. What we philosophers do get trained for is analysis of reasoning. I think philosophers can contribute quite a bit to ongoing scientific research in this respect, becausc theory and evidence aren't tightly and obviously connected to one another. Evidence usually only speaks to theory after some tortured chain of reasoning to connect the two. And it's that tortured chain of reasoning [that] philosophers are trained to look at with a critical eye.
I'm not telling the world that everything in my book is right, so everyone should stop listening to evolutionary psychologists. I propose something different: Inform yourselves. Please. Go out and read the stuff by evolutionary psychologists and read my book, then make up your own minds about what you think is right and wrong. I think people should look at both sides before deciding.
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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