Evolutionary Psychology: The Academic Debate

This book examines some ideological issues behind the academic debate that surrounds the new field called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists make three key claims about the mind. The first is that the mind is massively modular; the second is that this massively modular mind is shaped by the processes of natural selection over evolutionary time; and the third is that it is adapted to the Pleistocene conditions of our past. Evolutionary psychologists seek to elevate these three claims to the status of meta-theoretical assumptions making them the starting place from which our deliberations about human cognition should proceed. These claims would constitute the framework for a new paradigm in the ultimate sense. However, elevating these claims to paradigmatic status is not only premature but also unwarranted on the available evidence. This result is justified by evidence produced outside evolutionary psychology by researchers in biological anthropology, empirical linguistics and developmental psychology from whom the evolutionary psychologists explicitly seek to distance themselves.