Why is evolutionary psychology so criticized?

Note:
The following text is a small review of evolutionary psychology and its critiques, written by Sergio Morales, student of anthropology and epistemology at the Ciencias delsur site.
I decided to post this text here, because I see that there are some users here who attach studies of this discipline in an uncritical way. Also because, although the RedPill is not based on this discipline, it does use marginally some studies or literature from evolutionary psychology or uses terms/notions close to it, like a universal feminine psychology, biological determinism and innatism.  THE FOLLOWING TEXT IS NOT MINE.

Why is evolutionary psychology so criticized?

Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a discipline whose objective is to analyze human behavior from an evolutionary theoretical framework. As such, it has become established as a very controversial field: while some claim that it is a rigorous scientific proposition, others claim that it is closer to being a pseudoscience.

Despite the polarization generated -which complicates a fruitful and undistorted debate- EP is a very widespread discipline not only in academia, but also in popular culture. Why the controversy? The following essay reviews the most important criticisms of EP and provides some reflections on its epistemological status.

What is evolutionary psychology?

EP was founded in 1992, after the publication of The adapted mind, a book written by Jerome Barkow (anthropologist), John Tooby (anthropologist) and Leda Cosmides (psychologist). However, we can find an antecedent two decades earlier. In the 1970s, Barkow (1973), held that human beings were not level tables shaped by culture, but biological organisms "programmed by evolution" (p. 374).

For Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (1992), EP is that psychology "informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer" (p. 3). In its early years, it was considered a "new paradigm" of psychology (Buss, 1995a) and, in time, it was applied in diverse areas such as choice of partner, competence, affective relationships, parenting, or sociability (Buss, 2016a).

For its founders, EP is based on three premises: there is a "universal human nature" at the level of "evolved mental mechanisms" (not at the level of behaviors); such mechanisms are adaptations formed by natural selection over millions of years; and, the structure of the human "mind" is "adapted to the way of life of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers" (Barkow et al., 1992, p. 5).
Given that only 1% of human evolutionary time corresponds to modern life, it is "unlikely" that our species has developed complex adaptations in such a short time (ibid.*). For EP, the human "mind" and its "unique, universal and pan-human design" (Ibid.) are best understood from our hunter-gatherer past.

"By understanding the selective pressures our hominid ancestors faced - by understanding what kind of adaptive problems they had to solve - one should be able to gain some insight into the design of processing and information mechanisms that evolved to solve these problems" (Ibid., p. 9).

To fulfill its objective, EP begins by identifying some trait or behavior (jealousy or taste for mathematics) and linking it to some context of evolutionary pressure. Later, the adaptive advantage it would offer in such dynamics is speculated and a study is designed to address such advantage (in humans or animals) by predicting the expected outcome.

Finally, the study is executed and the results are interpreted.
As a proposal, it is very reasonable and constitutes the rough way in which any evolutionary science that wishes to explain human behavior operates. With such a scheme, several questions about many psychological traits can be answered. However, why is EP so resisted, and what criticisms have been made of this discipline?

Adaptationism and just so stories

What stands out most in the criticism of evolutionary psychology is its adaptationism: the a priori assertion that a certain psychological trait or behavior is an adaptation formed by natural selection millions of years ago. However, this overestimation of natural selection was denounced even before EP was EP, specifically towards its mother discipline: the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson.

Early on, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1977) warned that a kind of "vulgar sociobiology" conceived socio-cultural phenomena as equivalent to biological phenomena (and vice versa), that is, as products of organic evolution. Precisely, the title of his book "Use and Abuse of Biology", graphed the reductionism of those explanations.

In that line, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1978) described sociobiology as the "art of storytelling" and coined an influential adjective that encompasses this extreme adaptationism: "just so stories". As a result of his fundamentalist view of natural selection, Gould (1978) argued that "sociobiological tales are not true, but unfounded speculation" (p. 532).

The following year, the biologist Richard Lewontin (1979) conceived sociobiology as an example of adaptationism because it "assumes without further evidence that all morphological, physiological and behavioral aspects of organisms are optimal adaptive solutions to various problems" (p. 6).

Like Gould, Lewontin (1979) stated that sociobiology elaborated "adaptive stories" through "imaginative reconstruction".

In a classic essay, Gould and Lewontin (1979) called "Panglossian paradigm" that tendency to tell "stories" coherent with a restricted vision of evolution that overestimates the adaptive advantages of presumed traits and ignores the plurality of forms in which they could be generated: genetic drift, mutation, etc.

While these criticisms were directed at sociobiology, could EP be described as adaptationist or Panglossian?

Before any hasty objection, it is worth saying that its very founders clarified this point. For Cosmides and Tooby (1997), EP consisted in applying "an adaptationist logic to the study of the architecture of the human mind". For this discipline, the explanations referred to adaptive functions were called "distal explanations" or "ultimate explanations" because they presumably refer to evolutionary causes.

Recovering his critique of sociobiology, Gould (1997a) renamed adaptationism as "Darwinian fundamentalism". Thus, while the fundamentalists sought a "true path" (natural selection), the pluralists considered a "set of interactive explanatory modes". Part of that fundamentalism that overvalued natural selection was EP.

In fact, EP reinstalled the adaptationist vice of sociobiology almost three decades later. In its attempt to explain human behavior, EP resorted to an "adaptive narrative" composed of "speculative or narrative modes" and just so stories about our lithic life (Gould, 1997b). For arguing that the main features of human psychology were adaptations, Gould (1997b) called EP "ultradarwinian".

In EP we can find outstanding cases of adaptationism. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (2000) argued that rape is an adaptation as well as a byproduct of adaptive traits. In a similar vein, Max Krasnow and colleagues (2011) argued that the female "mind" has adaptations for food gathering, which explains why women are better at shopping.

Other studies went further and stated that cunnilingus evolved to detect infidelity by tasting traces of semen in the partner's vagina (Pham and Shackelford, 2013) or that the female counterpart evolved to generate sexual attractiveness (Pazhoohi et al., 2020). Although these constitute exceptional proposals (even within the EP), it should be noted that they are consequences of their particular research logic.

In her critique, anthropologist Susan McKinnon (2005) showed that for evolutionary psychology every adaptation was supported by certain genes. Thus, one could find genes to be faithful, genes to form clubs, genes to help relatives, or genes to be friendly, which appeared in popular PE books such as Robert Wright's The Animal Morality or Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works.

According to David Buss (2008), the main representative of the camp, the EP focuses on "psychological adaptations". This explains why they treat certain behaviors or traits as adaptations, even going against common sense. For example, for a man to think that if a woman smiles at him it is because she is looking for sex, it is an adaptation that serves to - oh surprise - look for sex (Ibid., p. 19).

For EP, the human "mind" is composed of adaptations or "evolved psychological mechanisms". Such mechanisms integrate a "set of processes" that solved specific problems of "survival or reproduction in a recurrent way throughout evolutionary history" (Ibid., p. 50). This proposal is maintained in the most recent books (Buss, 2019).

Here the problem is not to resort to evolutionary theories and concepts nor to suspect that all behavior is an adaptation. The objection lies in the forms, in how EP supports the existence of psychological adaptations. In this regard, what Russell Gray and colleagues (2003) have said makes a lot of sense: "a plausible story is not enough to meet the challenge of adaptive explanation" (p. 251).

For the biologist P.Z. Myers (2012), adaptationism reveals that EP was based on a "naive and simplistic understanding of how evolution works". Likewise, for Matthew Rellihan (2012), EP developed a "strong adaptationism" despite the fact that "there is little reason to believe that adaptive thinking can be used to infer our current psychology from past selection pressures" (p. 246).

As such, adaptationism results from an optimistic reading of Darwin. For EP, Darwin provided a "naturalistic explanation" of the evolution of organisms and the features of human psychology (Barkow et al., 1992, p. 8), while natural selection provided a "graceful causal account" of the link between adaptive problems and organismic design (Ibid.). As can be seen, this was no small feat.

"The theory of evolution by natural selection greatly expanded the range of things that could be explained, so that not only physical phenomena such as stars, mountain ranges, impact craters, and alluvial fans could be located and explained causally, but also things such as whales, eyes, leaves, nervous systems, emotional expressions, and the faculty of language." (Ibid., p. 52)

Despite the enthusiasm, in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin himself (1859) said he was "convinced" that in the evolution of organisms "natural selection has been the principal, but not the exclusive, means" (p. 6). Although several studies postulate the existence of non-adaptive mechanisms, adaptationism is a "simplistic caricature" of Darwin's work (Gould, 1997b) because it presumes that natural selection explains every trait or behavior.

For his part, the anthropologist Joseph Henrich (2016) criticized Pinker and Buss for considering natural selection as the "only process" capable of generating adaptations. As studies on cultural evolution indicate, "natural selection has lost its status as the only 'foolish' process capable of creating complex adaptations well adjusted to local circumstances" (Ibid., p. 114).

For EP, natural selection has shaped the human mind, just as it shaped the anatomy itself: through natural selection. Since natural selection is an adaptive mechanism, this argument leads to the assumption that various psychological traits or behaviors constitute adaptations. However, the scientific evidence does not support such an assumption.

For anthropologist Jonathan Marks (2015), "there is no reason to believe that any specific trait should have an adaptive explanation. In almost the same words, Robert Boyd (2018), also an anthropologist, held that "there is no reason why learning mechanisms should favor adaptive behavior in any particular case" (p. 60).

Rather than being assumed, adaptations must be tested and this is something that EP has serious problems with.

The massive criticism of mass modularity

As a result of its adaptationism, PE developed the hypothesis of massive modularity (hereinafter HMM). According to this proposal, the human "mind" is composed of different encapsulated neurological circuits or "modules"; innate "mental organs", formed by natural selection and destined to solve diverse adaptive problems (Cosmides and Tooby, 1997; Kurzban, 2010).

As well as several genes were proposed, several modules were also proposed: face recognition module, spatial relations module, tool use module, fear module, social exchange module, emotion perception module, child care module, friendship module, grammar module, etc. (Barkow et al., 1992, p. 113).

In The language instinct, Pinker (1994) made a list of modules, among which were modules for mapping, habitat selection, or infidelity detection, as well as for food, justice, kinship, or numbers [Figure 3]. This thesis was developed in depth in his book How the mind works:

"The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in a field of interaction with the world. The basic logic of the modules is specified by our genetic program. Its operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of hunting and gathering life that our ancestors carried through most of our evolutionary history". (Pinker, 1997, p. 21)

Such modules-which can be "hundreds or thousands" (Tooby and Cosmides, 1995, p. xiii)-exist because they solve adaptive problems faced by our ancestors (Cosmides and Tooby, 1997). This proposition is graphical in the phrase "our modern skulls contain Stone Age minds," coined by William Allman and considered a "very appropriate summary" of the EP (Ibid.).

Despite the good intentions, the HMM was highly criticized (Sterelny, 2003). Although the brain possesses some modularity, such modules are not genetic specializations, but the result of brain plasticity; they are adaptive responses to local conditions, not vestiges of prehistoric pasts (Buller & Hardcastle, 2000). In fact, strong evidence shows that the structure of the brain is determined by its interaction with the environment (Ibid.).

For James Woodward and Fiona Cowie (2004), "there is no reason to think that evolution 'should' produce modular minds" (p. 313). Moreover, MHM does not reflect important features of human cognition, such as its ability to plan or its flexibility. Although its proponents claim to refer to Jerry Fodor's work, even Fodor (2000) does not agree.

This makes discussions of HMM confusing (Frankenhuis and Ploeger, 2007; Chiappe and Gardner, 2011).

For Johan Bolhuis and colleagues (2011), the HMM "is not supported by neuroscientific evidence" (p. 3). Indeed, neuroscience does not conceive of the brain as a set of innate modules formed by natural selection, but as an interconnected network, linked to context (by its plasticity and learning capacity) and formed by culture (Bolhuis et al., 2011; Peters, 2013; Muthukrishna et al., 2018).

Although the EP states that, in order to understand the human "mind", we must understand the "mind" of our ancestors, multiple evidence shows that the socio-cultural changes that have occurred in the last 100 thousand years have modified multiple aspects of human cognition (Laland, 2017). This makes MHM empirically implausible.

"The idea that 'our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind' is also wrong at the contemporary end of our evolutionary history. The idea that we are stuck in a psychology adapted to the Pleistocene greatly underestimates the pace at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have shown that selection can radically alter the life history traits of a population in as little as 18 generations (for humans, approximately 450 years)." (Buller, 2012, p. 49)

By promoting a "caricatured view of the Pleistocene environment" (Gray et al., 2003, p. 248), the idea of prehistoric minds in modern skulls is far from the paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence. Already here it becomes clear that another of the vices of EP was to have neglected a central concept for the understanding of human behavior: culture.

Underestimating culture

If it is a question of culture, the EP repeated the mistake of sociobiology: rejecting its adequate treatment in the explanation of human behavior. Opposed to it, a group of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theories have recovered the importance of culture and defended its principal role in the understanding of human behavior (Morales, 2020).

That EP has been accused of underestimating culture is surprising given that, in his classic essay, Barkow (1973) referred to the work of the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, known for studying the feedback between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Something happened between 1973 and 1992 that the EP dismissed culture in favor of innate approaches.

Generally, EP associates culture with the idea of cultural difference (Buss, 2001). This explains why they believe that a behavior is innate if it appears in multiple cultures (Buss, 1989) or that there is a "universal human nature" underlying cultural differences (Gangestad, Haselton & Buss, 2006).

However, this conception produces what McKinnon (2001) called an "oversimplification" of culture.

As such, culture has been present since the genus Homo, 2.5 million years ago (Henrich, 2016). Since that time, based on the so-called Baldwin effect, various cultural practices have altered human evolution. Contrary to a universal human nature and underlying cultural differences, human nature itself lies in its genetic-cultural diversity, fostered by evolution itself (Brown et al., 2011).

In the last 50 thousand years, several changes have affected human beings at the genomic level (Williamson et al., 2007; Laland, Odling-Smee and Myles, 2010). Likewise, agriculture, domestication of animals or the increase in population density over the last 10 thousand years accelerated human evolution (Hawks et al., 2007) and modified our brain (Bolhuis et al., 2011).

EP's disregard for culture also has repercussions in methodological areas. According to a recent study, 70% of the samples used in EP studies (published in the journals Evolution & Human Behavior and Evolutionary Psychology) correspond only to university students (Pollet and Saxton, 2019).

It is difficult to speak of a "universal human architecture" with such a biased sample.

In the face of criticism, several Darwinian-oriented psychologists such as Andrew Whiten or Michael Muthukrishna have aligned themselves with other evolutionary theories that treat culture as a central element of human evolution (Morales, 2020). The fact is that contempt for culture was materialized in one of the most important topics of the EP: human sexuality.

Gender Indifferences

For Darwin, sexual selection (hereinafter SS) was an important mechanism in the evolution of species. SS took this reference and used it to explain various presumably biological and universal human behaviors (Buss, 2019).

Observed in many cultures with a marked sexual division of labor (male hunter/woman gatherer), EP held that gender differences (Buss, 1995b) and mating strategies (Buss, 1989) were universal. This universality was explained not by the influence of the environment or culture, but by the effect of the SS, that is, such differences are the result of biological evolution.

In A mind of her own, Anne Campbell (2002) criticized the "biophobia" of constructivist approaches that attribute gender differences to the social environment for not explaining where such differences come from. Far from those, the EP considers "the distant causes of the difference between males and females arising from disparate pressures on men and women several hundred thousand years ago" (p. 32).

Under this logic, the male/female preference for the colors blue/pink does not occur because of cultural codes, but because primitive women had to interpret the excited faces of their babies (Hurlbert and Ling, 2007). Likewise, the male preference for hard sciences (related to greater visuospatial ability) occurred because primitive men travelled long distances when hunting (Halpern et al., 2007).

Since many genus differences were found in other species, those were explained evolutionarily. For EP, such a pattern provides a "powerful reason" for asserting that "evolutionary forces are the primary cause of psychological differences between the sexes" (Stewart-Williams and Thomas, 2013, p. 143). Recently, in The ape that understood the universe, Steve Stewart-Williams (2020) reiterated that "many sexual differences have evolutionary origins" (p. 117).

Derived from the SS, the Bateman Principles (hereafter PB) were also employed by the EP (Buss, 2019). In order to test the mechanisms of SS, geneticist Angus Bateman studied fruit flies and postulated that in order to achieve reproductive success, it was necessary for males to be promiscuous and females to be passive.

The first to apply SS and PB to human behavior was the biologist Robert Trivers, creator of the theory of parental inversion. Although Gould (1978) warned about how sociobiology used Trivers' work, he quickly became an EP cliché author (Buss, 2019).

However, a fundamental problem of applying SS and PB to human behavior is to ignore the influence of culture.

Although SS is active in humans, it depends on many factors that can be categorized as cultural: mortality, population density, polygamy, monogamy, biparental upbringing, or even sexual dimorphism. It is precisely this complexity in the integration of factors, mechanisms and traits that makes human beings a "model species" in the study of SS (Wilson, Miller and Crouse, 2017, p. 8).

According to Wataru Nakahashi (2017), the classical SS models are inapplicable to humans because they refer to polygamous species (humans are semi-monogamous) and because human mating preferences are culturally transmitted.

For Nakahashi (2017), "it is important to discard the preconceived idea that any human mating preference is aimed at achieving good genes or direct benefit" (p. 9).

Something similar occurs with PBs. In fruit flies and other insects, the applicability of PBs was much debated. In humans, the same was true, since "human mating strategies are unlikely to conform to a single universal pattern" (Brown, Laland, & Mulder, 2009, p. 297). Indeed, for each sex, the relationship between reproductive success and mating success varies culturally (Ibid.).

Sex roles, theoretically linked to PB and long considered immovable, were also subject to criticism:

"Our traditional assumptions about sex roles (as defined by Darwin, Bateman, and Trivers) have been shattered by the realization that polyandry is common among women; that males of many species are demanding, while females are competitive; and that sex roles can change even within a species at different times due to demographic or environmental changes. (Tang-Martinez, 2016, p. 19)

Criticism of SS and PB influences the study of gender differences. Although these exist, this does not imply that they are without cultural influence, but quite the opposite: it is enough that some difference is present in humans to admit that culture played a fundamental role in their manifestation. This demolishes any innate or pleistocene explanation typical of PE.

Human brain development does not depend only on the intrauterine period, but also on the learning and experiences lived in the first 5 years of life, which is a feature that differentiates us from other primates (Liu et al. 2012). This allows us to understand why breeding biases and stereotypes explain gender differences better than a presumed biological inheritance from millions of years ago.

It also clarifies why the loose comparison of human and primate behavior - a common exercise in EP (Jarrett, 2017) - is bound to fail. Both the expression of emotions in young infants and the child's preference for certain toys and play practices are heavily influenced by parental gender, parenting biases, and cultural values (Li et al., 2019, Liu et al., 2020).

Popular science or pseudoscience?

In Adapting Minds. David J. Buller (2005) analyzed arguments for and against EP with the intention that all those interested in EP would know "both sides of the story" (p. 16). After weighing the evidence, Buller (2005) concluded that EP "fails to provide us with an accurate evolutionary understanding of human psychology" (p. 481).

Given its popularity, Buller (2012) coined the category "evolutionary pop psychology" to refer to a strand that makes claims about human behavior through evolutionary concepts for popular consumption (whose main representatives are Buss and Pinker). Since the evidence on which the pop EP is based is scarce, its claims are "deeply flawed" (p. 51).

Precisely because of the infallible nature of its claims, the EP has been linked to pseudoscience by the greatest exponent of the subject, the philosopher and PhD in genetics, Massimo Pigliucci (2006, 2008). However, here it is worth clarifying the following: identifying EP as pseudoscience will not make it disappear nor will recognizing it as science make its vices disappear.

Indeed, it is not necessary for a discipline to degenerate into a pseudoscience in order to be rejected. If one has to choose an adjective, the evidence and arguments reviewed here sufficiently suggest that EP is, at most, a weak theory about the evolution of human behavior.

Hypothetical or impossible?

The few works that develop an epistemology of evolutionary psychology cite literature from 4 or 5 decades ago, when sociobiology was in vogue (Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000; Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004). Even in recent studies it is notorious that EP narrative used to be more triumphalist and ambitious than the contemporary, more humble and probabilistic one (Ploeger & van der Hoort, 2015).

In this respect, one study suggests that the aim of EP is not to formulate evidence-based theories, but hypotheses that could later be corroborated (Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000) - a questionable process for a supposed natural science. Also, another study mentioned the term "hypothesis" 60 times (Ploeger and van der Hoort, 2015), which reveals the current epistemic nature of EP.

While real science aims at formulating theories, EP only formulates hypotheses. Although every theory has been a hypothesis, when a study is published, it is done because of its theoretical character and not because of its hypothetical character. That is why it is said that scientific theories are born proven, because it is assumed that they have already considered all the evidence.

On the other hand, the EP operates in a different way: it does not publish proven theories, but hypotheses that need to be proved. Its mistakes are cyclical because its academics are used to tentative explanations. This makes the quality criteria flexible, since it is not the same to publish a theory as a hypothesis. Moreover, it seems that in PE the peer review is not done before publication, but after.

"It would be a shame if scientific journals also published creationist garbage, but that is exactly what PE journals do: publish a onanistic mix of terrible, horrible, ridiculous articles with a few articles that try to refute them. It's a turbulent mess that keeps publishers in business, but does nothing to improve our knowledge." (Myers, 2018)

Some even claim that the EP is "impossible" to corroborate. For Subrena Smith (2020) there is a matching problem in the EP, a fundamental difficulty in matching the current mental mechanisms with those of our ancestors. Since 'n' cognitive mechanism or algorithm by which a certain problem was solved leaves no fossils, we have no access to it nor can we know if it is an expression of an ancestor.

Reacting to criticism

The main criticisms of EP have come from biology (Gould, 1997; Lloyd and Feldman, 2002; Myers, 2012; Laland, 2017), anthropology (McKinnon, 2005; Marks, 2015; Henrich, 2016; Boyd, 2018), psychology (Halpern et al, 2007; Bolhuis et al., 2011), neuroscience (Buller and Hardcastle, 2000; Peters, 2013) and even philosophy of science (Buller, 2005; Pigliucci, 2006, 2008; Richardson, 2007).

A not very positive record for those who claim to explain scientifically the biological evolution of the human "mind".

Another critical line comes from the theory of developmental systems or DST (Lickliter, 2008). By discussing the unidirectional view Gen→Fenotipo and incorporating the biosocial perspective, this theory discusses the existence of innate behavioral information in genes and bets on a plural and dynamic approach: permanent feedback loops between the different layers of an organism.

The DST objects that the EP assigns ultimate causes to a phenomenon of proximate causes (phylogenetic fallacy).

In contrast, the EP has not remained cross-modular (Schmitt, 2015; Buss, 2016a; Hagen, 2016; Al-Shawaf, 2019; Stewart-Williams, 2020). Although several objections were morally motivated, others - like the ones reviewed here - deserve a better response than the simple enumeration of other equally questionable studies (Al-Shawaf, 2020). There is no point in declaring oneself a supporter of the EP if one does not know its successes and failures.

When the criticisms are not answered, evolutionary psychologists prefer to state that, if you object to their arguments, it is because you deny evolution (Geher, 2015), you are politicized (Geher & Gambacorta, 2010) or you are ideologically biased (Buss & Von Hippel, 2018). This attitude has led to the belief that evolutionary psychologists prefer to ignore criticism rather than respond to it adequately:

"Evolutionary psychologists largely ignore the biological evidence that has the strongest scientific credentials and is most directly relevant to their claims about psychological mechanisms. This includes not only evidence from neurobiology, genetics, and developmental biology, but also any evidence from evolutionary biology, ethology, and population genetics that threatens to undermine their armchair adaptationism. (Woodward and Cowie, 2004, p. 331)

"Evolutionary psychologists often respond to their critics by suggesting that they misunderstand their field and that they should read the foundational texts of their discipline and the enormity of their research findings. However, this suggestion would seem to be no more than a theoretical biblical punch line. They want their research to somehow stand on its own - hoping that their critics will excuse or overlook the theoretical assumptions that were made to achieve their realization. (Peters, 2013, p. 317)

"T]he SP does not investigate the dynamic interaction between genes and context, which is essential for understanding the development and evolution of behavior. Therefore, EP does not conform to the rigorous standards of biology or psychology, often does not respond to methodological criticism, eludes theoretical controversy, and is disconnected from a large number of studies on issues related to behavioral evolution. (Grossi et al., 2014, p. 283)

"I have been complaining for years, as have others. Proponents of evolutionary psychology simply continue to do more and more junk science based on ignorance of evolutionary biology, publishing the same crap to pollute the scientific literature. It is shameful." (Myers, 2020)

Even worse, certain evolutionary psychologists have accused their critics of being constructivists or tablarasists, despite being evolutionists. Perhaps because of this sectarian behavior, the Santa Barbara school (which embodies the EP referred to here) was dubbed the "Santa Barbara church" (Laland and Brown, 2002, p. 154); one whose members should "act less as evangelists and more as evolutionary biologists" (Gray et al., 2003, p. 265).

Although for 20 years Buss defined EP as a "new scientific discipline," it is notorious that it has lost ground. The first books set out a concrete program with an object of study, a theoretical framework, and specific proposals. Today, however, several handbooks include topics incompatible with it, such as cultural evolution (Workman and Reader, 2014; Buss, 2016a, 2016b, 2019).

Perhaps knowing this, Buss himself recently published an article in which he referred to cultural evolution and gene-cultural co-evolution (Lukaszewski et al., 2020), two proposals that strictly disagree with the EP. Who would have thought that one of the most important evolutionary psychologists is now linked to this culture that he recently underestimated. Life does give lessons.

Something curious is that when Buss and colleagues refer to cultural transmission (the main mechanism of cultural evolution) and to gene-culture co-evolution (the main concept of cultural evolution) they cite Tooby and Cosmides (Ibid.), even though in their work there is nothing similar to such proposals. Evolutionary psychologists may not be great scientists, but they are good colleagues.

Final Reflections

Although many criticisms and replies have been left out of this essay due to lack of space, it is pertinent to note that the most objected to proposals of the EP have also been the most representative: adaptationism, modularity, SS and or the PB. This explains why critics of the EP have questioned the program as a whole -for example:

"In principle, there is nothing wrong with taking an evolutionary approach to human behavior or cognition. In practice, however, the impoverished view of evolution and psychology adopted by many evolutionary psychologists, as well as the weakness of their empirical science, is frankly quite embarrassing". (Gray et al., 2003, p. 248)

"Much of the appeal of EP derives from the fact that it seems to provide a way of 'biologizing' cognitive science with evolutionary considerations that supposedly provide powerful additional constraints on psychological theorizing. We believe that this appearance is misleading. (Woodward and Cowie, 2004, p. 331)

"The failure of evolutionary psychology to produce solid empirical findings [...] stems from problems with its theoretical framework - in particular, its reliance on 'reverse engineering' the mind from the remnants of our Pleistocene past, its assumption that the adaptive architecture of the mind is massively modular, and its doctrine of a universal human nature. (Buller, 2006, p. 282)

"It is unlikely that we will ever learn much about our evolutionary past by dividing our Pleistocene history into discrete adaptive problems, assuming that the mind is divided into discrete solutions to those problems, and then backing up those assumptions with pencil and paper data. The field of evolutionary psychology will have to improve." (Buller, 2012, p. 51)

After reviewing 2578 social science articles, Alvaro de Menard (2020) concluded that PE studies were "weak social psychology articles with an infinitesimally thin top layer of evolutionary paint. For de Menard (2020), PE was a "surprisingly bad" discipline with a low capacity for replication, unlike others such as economics, education or demography.

Generally, debates about EP resort to poisoning the well or straw men such as the labels "biophobia", "creationism of the mind", "Standard Model of Social Sciences", "constructivism" or "tablarasism". Although they are a source of amusing memes on social networks, they contribute little to scientific progress and to developing a serious opinion about human behavior.

About the EP, there are diverse positions: some say it is not the devil (Geher, 2006), others that it is not a theory but a meta-theory (Duntley and Buss, 2008), others ask that we all enact it (Burke, 2014), others demand that it be abolished (Myers, 2018), some want to throw it away (Eberle, 2019) and others claim that it provides a "solid scientific framework" that generates a "scientific revolution" (Buss, 2020).

If anyone agrees with the criticisms reviewed, but is interested in behavioral evolution, they should know that there are other PE schools that do not share the record of the one referred to here, nor do they share adaptationist, modularist, innate or anti-cultural approaches (Dunbar et al., 2007; Laland, 2017).

Does evolution impact on human behavior? Yes, as animals, humans are subject to the mechanisms of natural selection, genetic drift, etc. Critics and proponents of evolutionary psychology agree that evolution operates on organisms. The discrepancy, you understand, revolves around how this occurs, around the explanation given.

In science there is no subject free of controversy. The condemnations received by Darwin or Giordano Bruno themselves are clear examples of this. This epic serves to raise the statements invested with science as martyrs against the criticisms made at a certain historical moment.

If the avid reader noticed that this essay used verbs in the past tense to refer to the EP, it is because the critical evidence already exposed it as a finished theory. Even so, this essay will serve those who wonder what became of that discipline that swore to explain human behavior through adaptations, genes, modules and an incomprehensible contempt for culture.

-Author's note: This essay was made with the support of my colleagues Sientífiko (political scientist, Universidad de Santiago, Chile) and Miguel Ángel (biological anthropologist, Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales, Chile), who are co-authors.

By: Sergio Morales on website Ciencias delsur.