I found a pretty interesting paper critiquing evo psych. While not directly related to gender issues, TRP uses evo psych a lot within it's views. A key point is that we are still running on our caveman wiring, that our brains haven't caught up to our modern lives yet. This is often used to argue/explain why men and women choose to marry and sleep with who they do. It's written by David J. Buller, a philosophy professor at North Illinois University. It covers a number of topics, and is fairly long. But today I want to talk about its section on just how old our brains really are. Buller is a harsh critic of evo pysch and questions many of its ideas, but for this section we are assuming that there were evolutionary forces shaping our pyschy, and questioning when they would stop acting.

Evolutionary Psychologists offer the following single argument in support of the claim that each human psychological adaptation is adapted to Pleistocene conditions. The Evolutionary Psychology: A Critique 205 10,000 years since the end of the Pleistocene, they argue, ‘‘is only a small stretch in evolutionary terms, less than 1% of the two million years our ancestors spent as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. For this reason, it is unlikely that new complex designs—ones requiring the coordinated assembly of many novel, functionally integrated features— could evolve in so few generations’’ (Cosmides et al. 1992, p. 5).

Buller points out a couple of issues with this line of reasoning. One, you don't need to completely rebuild our psyche, only modify it. Secondly, it's unfair to look at only how long a creature existed to judge how much it evolved. Evolution is very much a factor of the change in environment. Some creatures have stayed largely the same for millions of years, while others have undergone huge change. If their environment is stable, and no large changes are needed, they probably won't arise. But the environment changes, evolutionary forces ramp up.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions, for example, precipitated fundamental changes in the social structures of human populations, which in turn altered the selection pressures on a variety of interpersonal behaviors. For example, while Pleistocene humans lived in groups of 50–150 individuals, post-agricultural humans have lived in increasingly larger groups, which has affected the challenges humans face when mating, forming alliances, or negotiating status hierarchies. In addition, changing social structures have wrought radical 206 David J. Buller changes in the kinds of task that must be performed to acquire the resources necessary for successful child rearing.

There has clearly been vaste environmental changes since our cavemen history. This includes how we relate to each other as we went from small groups to large cities, what dangers we face, and how we get resources. Almost everything is radically different. If polar bears were transplanted to a desert and manage to evolve there, we'd expect these bears to be very different from the original polar bears because of how radically different the environment was. But then the other factor here is time. Was the 10,000 years, 400 generations, since the advent of agriculture enough time for human evolution to take place?

He points to the evolution of lactose tolerance. It's actually very unnatural for us to drink the milk (of a beast) well into adulthood. We use to be very lactose intolerant as a species, but we develop lactose tolerance. He then talks about niche evolution as a form of evolution acceleration. We edit our environment a little bit, adapt to it, and then edit it some more to continue evolving, rather than face a large, sudden change and adapt to that.

The evolution of lactose tolerance was driven by niche construction, a process in which a population actively modifies the niche it inhabits, thereby modifying the selection pressures driving its own evolution. Niche construction typically accelerates the pace of evolution as successive generations of a population continually modify the sources of selection acting on themselves and subsequent generations...

Recent work has shown that evolution by natural selection can occur very rapidly. Reznick et al. (1997) split populations of guppies living in high-predation environments, leaving a part of each population in its highpredation environment and moving the other part to a low-predation environment. Evolutionary Psychology: A Critique 207 They found that life-history traits of the transplanted guppies evolved significantly in a mere 18 generations. The descendants of the transplanted guppies matured to a larger size and achieved reproductive viability at a later age than the non-transplanted guppies, they produced fewer litters (with fewer and larger offspring in each litter), and they allocated less of their total resources to reproduction during their early reproductive lives. Moreover, Reznick and his colleagues identified both the genetic basis of this change and the mechanism by which selection drove it (namely, differential mortality by predation). If this much evolution can occur in 18 generations, the 400 human generations since the end of the Pleistocene has certainly been sufficient time for selectiondriven evolution in human psychological traits.

So we have no reason to believe that evolutionary forces stopped working once we started civilizations, and there's no reason to think that 400 generations isn't enough time to see significant changes. Consider the shunning and sometimes even murder of promiscuous and adulterous women during biblical times. If hypergamous women were killed off, that would be a selective pressure against hypergamy in women. It also calls into question all ideas of mating strategies based on how things use to be during our cavemen days.