The Darwinian Cage

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology speaks to a common intuition that the biology of the human animal will elucidate human beastliness. In this article I argue that, regardless of whether that intuition is correct, evolutionary psychology fails as an explanation of human action. It fails because, in attempting to replace our everyday moral vocabulary with a mechanical one, it loses sight of the constitutive role of norms in human conduct. In thus disregarding normativity, it sacrifices the ability to identify actions. Evolutionary psychologists respond with either reductionism or pluralism. Reductionism shows itself utterly incapable of providing an adequate account of human actions; pluralism only works by abandoning fundamental features of evolutionary psychology. This ought to convince us that evolutionary psychology. in any of its current guises, has little of interest to teach social science.