Natural selection therefore can be thought of as a process that retains genes that interact with the environment — i. This view makes some broad predictions about development, and can be used to make more specific predictions in the context of a particular theory of function. For example, interactionist notions of development entail that to the extent that the environment relevant to a particular aspect of the phenotype changes, the developmental outcome is more likely to change.
For example, Gangestad and Buss began with the premise that many factors can be used as criteria in selecting a mate physical appearance, personality characteristics, etc.
They reasoned that a well-designed mate-choice system should take into account cues to the levels of pathogens in the local ecology and put more weight on physical attractiveness, which itself is a cue to pathogen resistance.
They predicted, and found evidence for, a developmental system that calibrated preferences to a specific feature of the local ecology. In this way, theories of function can guide hypotheses regarding environmental influences on development. Although evolutionary approaches are often equated with strong versions of nativism, these characterizations do not capture the theoretical commitments of the approach.
Evolutionary psychology does not hold that neural systems — or any aspect of the phenotype — will be present at birth, will develop independent of the properties of the environment, or will require no environmental input for proper development of the system in question. Evolutionary approaches — in humans and non-humans — take selection to shape how genes interact with the environment by virtue of feedback loops between the genes in question and the structures that they cause to develop.
Because evolutionary psychology is an approach rather than a content area, researchers in the discipline use a variety of techniques. These include laboratory experiments, field experiments, mathematical and agent-based simulations, surveys, neuroimaging , and so on. While much of the research focuses on humans, comparative analyses and research with non-human animals are also important parts of the enterprise.
Evolutionary psychologists do not differ in their methodological commitments from other researchers in the social and natural sciences. They rely on middle-level theories to develop hypotheses, and the nature of the hypothesis determines what methods are most usefully brought to bear to address the hypothesis in question.
A number of examples illustrate this point. Daly and Wilson used archival data about infanticide to address a hypothesis derived from inclusive fitness theory.
Cosmides and Tooby used a method common in cognitive psychology , the Wason Selection Task, to address their hypothesis about cheater detection. David Buss collected a corpus of cross-cultural questionnaire data to address a set of hypotheses about evolved human mating psychology.
The techniques used by evolutionary psychologists are diverse because of the variation in the nature of the questions they are trying to answer. Following conventions in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychologists tend to follow Williams in taking an adaptationist approach. Functional hypotheses necessarily require predictions regarding the way in which the function is accomplished.
Each additional design features that is accurately predicted is evidence in favor of the posited function. For example, features of the eye — including its transparent lens, dilating pupil, photosensitive receptors, and so on — are all evidence in favor of its function to recover information from the world to construct a representation of the physical environment. As Williams stressed in his original work, adaptation is a strong claim, and requires evidence.
The adaptationist program requires evidence that the object of study is designed for the specified purpose, rather than some other purpose. The theoretical commitments of evolutionary psychology described here are often misunderstood.
A small number of the most frequent misconceptions are very briefly discussed here, though this is not intended to be a complete list. As indicated in the section on development above, this does not accurately characterize the interactionist view of the field. Stephen Jay Gould , among others, have understood evolutionary psychologists to hold that all parts of all organisms under any descriptions are adaptations. In contrast, evolutionary psychology, like evolutionary biology, takes natural selection to be the only known source of organized functional complexity, but does not take all features of organisms to be functional features.
Any functional aspect of the phenotype must necessarily have concomitant byproducts, features that are incidental consequences that were not selected by virtue of a functional role. The colors of internal organs are examples. The fact that the liver is brown is a byproduct of the physiology, but its color does not contribute to its function per se. It is worth noting that identifying byproducts requires the same type of rigor as identifying adaptations: a hypothesis that a trait is a byproduct generally requires an account of the adaptation or adaptations of which the trait in question is a byproduct.
Variation has many sources, including genetic differences, contingent responses to the environment such as language learning, in which a putative universal language acquisition system leads to differences in the specific language leaned depending on the environment , and so on. Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. Most sociobiological research is now conducted in the field of behavioral ecology.
Related Stories. It's aimed at giving scientists, In a project that blended Instead, new But a new study The study says crocodiles and alligators came from a variety of surroundings beginning in the Using the same mathematical Researchers investigated the fossil record and evolutionary history to report that larger herbivore competitors were one evolutionary Cosmides and Tooby defend the idea that cheat detection is modular over hypotheses that more general rules of inference are involved in the kind of reasoning behind cheater detection against critics Ron Mallon and Fodor Some criticism of the cheater-detection hypothesis involves rehashing criticisms of massive modularity in general and some treats the hypothesis as a contribution to moral psychology and invokes different considerations.
For example, Mallon worries about the coherence of abandoning a domain general conception of ought in our conception of our moral psychology. This discussion is also ongoing. See e. Sterelny for a selection of alternate, non-modular explanations of aspects of our moral psychology. Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature. As noted above Section 1 , evolutionary psychology owes a theoretical debt to human sociobiology.
Wilson took human sociobiology to provide us with an account of human nature For Wilson human nature is the collection of universal human behavioral repertoires and these behavioral repertoires are best understood as being products of natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature is not a collection of universal human behavioral repertoires but rather the universal psychological mechanisms underlying these behaviors Tooby and Cosmides These universal psychological mechanisms are products of natural selection, as we saw in Section 2.
For example, he thinks of bi-pedalism as part of the human nature trait cluster. He shares the idea that a trait must be a product of evolution, rather than say social learning or enculturation, with both these accounts. Some critical challenges to evolutionary psychological accounts of human nature and the nomological account derive from similar concerns as those driving criticism of evolutionary psychology in general.
In Section 4. Some critics charge evolutionary psychologists of assuming that adaptation cannot sustain variation. Hull ; and Sober The idea here is that humans, like all organisms, exhibit a great deal of variation, including morphological, physiological, behavioral and cultural variation cf.
Amundson Buller argues that the evolutionary psychology account of human nature either ignores or fails to account for all of this variation c. Lewens ; Odenbaugh Forthcoming; and Ramsey Any account that restricts human nature to just those traits we have in common and which also are not subject to change, cannot account for human variation.
The idea that to account for human nature, we must account for human variation is presented and defended by evolutionary psychologists see e. Barrett , anthropologists see e. Cashdan and philosophers see e. Griffiths and Ramsey Barrett agrees with Buller and others that evolutionary psychologists have failed to account for human variation in their account of human nature.
Rather than seeing this challenge as a knock down of the whole enterprise of accounting for human nature, Barrett sees this as a challenge for an account of human nature. Rather than human nature being a collection of shared fixed universal psychological traits, for Barrett, human nature is the whole human trait cluster, including all of the variation in all of our traits.
This approach to human nature is sharply different than the approach defended by either Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides or Machery but is also subject to a number of criticisms.
The main thrust of the criticisms is that such a view cannot be explanatory and is instead merely a big list of all the properties that humans have had and can have See e. Buller ; Downes ; Futuyma ; and Lewens Another example of this broader discussion is included in Section 7.
Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. See Buss for discussion of Literature and Law and Saad for a detailed presentation of evolutionary psychology and consumer studies. In these contexts, evolutionary psychology is usually introduced as providing resources for practitioners, which will advance the relevant field.
Philosophers have responded critically to some of these applications of evolutionary psychology. One concern is that often evolutionary psychology is conflated with evolution or evolutionary theory in general see e.
Leiter and Weisberg and Downes The discussion reviewed in Section 4. Evolutionary psychologists offer to enhance fields such as Law and Consumer Studies by introducing evolutionary ideas but what is in fact offered is a selection of theoretical resources championed only by proponents of a specific approach to evolutionary psychology. For example, Gad Saad argues that Consumer Studies will profit greatly from the addition of adaptive thinking, i.
Many do not see this as an effort to bring evolutionary theory, broadly construed, to bear on Consumer Studies cf. Promoting disputed theoretical ideas is certainly problematic but bigger worries arise when thoroughly discredited work is promoted in the effort to apply evolutionary psychology.
Owen Jones see e. Leiter and Weisberg Aside from monitoring the expansion efforts of evolutionary psychology, there are a number of other areas in which further philosophical work on evolutionary psychology will be fruitful. The examples given above of work in moral psychology barely scratch the surface of this rapidly developing field. There are huge numbers of empirical hypotheses that bear on our conception of our moral psychology that demand philosophical scrutiny.
Hauser includes a survey of a wide range of such hypotheses. Also, work on moral psychology and the emotions can be drawn together via work on evolutionary psychology and related fields. Griffiths directed philosophical attention to evolution and the emotions and this kind of work has been brought into closer contact with moral psychology by Nichols see e.
In philosophy of mind there is still much that can be done on the topic of modules. Work on integrating biological and psychological concepts of modules is one avenue that is being pursued and could be fruitfully pursued further see e.
Barrett and Kurzban ; Carruthers and work on connecting biology to psychology via genetics is another promising area see e. Marcus In philosophy of science, I have no doubt that many more criticisms of evolutionary psychology will be presented but a relatively underdeveloped area of philosophical research is on the relations among all of the various, theoretically different, approaches to the biology of human behavior cf.
Downes ; Griffiths ; and Brown et al. Evolutionary psychologists present their work alongside the work of behavioral ecologists, developmental psychobiologists and others see e. Buss ; Buss but do not adequately confront the theoretical difficulties that face an integrated enterprise in the biology of human behavior. Finally, while debate rages between biologically influenced and other social scientists, most philosophers have not paid much attention to potential integration of evolutionary psychology into the broader interdisciplinary study of society and culture but see Mallon and Stich on evolutionary psychology and constructivism.
In contrast, feminist philosophers have paid attention to this integration issue as well as offered feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology see Fehr , Meynell and the entry on feminist philosophy of biology. Gillian Barker , shares some evolutionarily based criticisms of evolutionary psychology with philosophers of biology discussed in Section 4. She also adds a novel critical appraisal of evolutionary psychology. She argues that, as currently practiced, evolutionary psychology is not a fruitful guide to social policy regarding human flourishing.
Many evolutionary psychologists are aware of the difficulty variation presents for some established approaches in their field. This issue confronts those interested in developing accounts of human nature, as noted above Section 6. For example, human aggression varies along many dimensions and confronting and accounting for each of these types of variation is a challenge for many evolutionary psychologists cf.
Downes and Tabery Given that evolutionary psychology is just one, among many, evolutionarily based approaches to explaining human behavior, the most promising critical discussions of evolutionary psychology should continue to come from work that compares hypotheses drawn from evolutionary psychology with hypotheses drawn from other evolutionary approaches and other approaches in the social sciences more broadly construed.
Linquist introduces hypotheses from cultural evolution that appear to offer more explanatory bite than those from evolutionary psychology. The broader issue of tension between evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution here will doubtless continue to attract the critical attention of philosophers See Lewens for a nice clear introduction to and discussion of alternative approaches to cultural evolution.
Finally, philosophers of science will doubtless continue to check the credentials of evolutionary ideas imported into other areas of philosophy. Philosophers of biology in particular, still voice suspicion if philosophers borrow their evolutionary ideas from evolutionary psychology rather than evolutionary biology.
Barker also encourages philosophers, as well as social scientists, to draw from the huge range of theoretical resources evolutionary biologists have to offer, rather than just from those provided by evolutionary psychologists.
Evolutionary Psychology: One research tradition among the various biological approaches to explaining human behavior 2. The Massive Modularity Hypothesis 4. Philosophy of biology vs. Evolutionary Psychology 5. Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology 6. Human Nature 7. Individual human behavior is generated by this evolved computer in response to information it extracts from the environment.
Understanding behavior requires articulating the cognitive programs that generate the behavior. The cognitive programs of the human brain are adaptations. They exist because they produced behavior in our ancestors that enabled them to survive and reproduce. The cognitive programs of the human brain may not be adaptive now; they were adaptive in ancestral environments. Natural selection ensures that the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs and not a domain general architecture.
The Massive Modularity Hypothesis Claims that the mind has a modular architecture, and even massively modular architecture, are widespread in cognitive science see e. Evolutionary Psychology Many philosophers have criticized evolutionary psychology. Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology Many philosophers who work on moral psychology understand that their topic is empirically constrained.
Human Nature Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature. Applications of Evolutionary Psychology and Prospects for Further Debate Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. Bibliography Arp, R. Barker, G. Barrett, H. Frankish and W. Ramsey eds. Bateson, P. Bjorklund, D. Buss ed.
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