Evolutionary Psychology and Its Critics

Abstract

Abstract Evolutionary psychology has been criticized by scholars and scientists in biology, philosophy, behavioral ecology, genetics, and many other disciplines. Critics typically focus on the claims that human cognition has a universal complex evolved design, which, to critics, flies in the face of human variation; that there was an environment of evolutionary adaptedness, which critics argue is unknowable and in any case never existed; and that the complex structure of the human mind has not evolved much in the past 10,000 years, which seems to conflict with the burgeoning evidence of recent genetic evolution. This chapter responds to these criticisms: It is the complex, genetically‐based design of the human brain that is invariant, whereas the individual is unique; the human ancestral environment is knowable, and usually not too different from the modern environment; and there is no evidence for the evolution of new complex cognitive adaptations in the past 10,000 years, and little reason to expect any to be found.