Evolutionary psychology (EP) has generated substantial controversy and criticism, including: disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, alternatives to some of the cognitive assumptions (such as massive modularity) frequently employed in evolutionary psychology, alleged vagueness stemming from evolutionary assumptions (e.g. uncertainty about the environment of evolutionary adaptation, EEA), differing stress on the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, and political and ethical issues.
While Evolutionary Psychology has been accused of straw man evidence, ideologically rather than scientifically motivated, Evolutionary psychologists respond by arguing that these criticisms are also straw men, ideologically rather than scientifically motivated, are based on an incorrect nature vs. nurture dichotomy, or are based on misunderstandings of the discipline.
History of the debate
The history of the debate from the critics' perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). Critics of EP include the philosophers of science David Buller author of Adapting Minds, Robert C. Richardson author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, and Brendan Wallace, author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work. Other critics include Neurobiologists like Steven Rose who edited "Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology", and biological anthropologists like Jonathan Marks and social anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Marshall Sahlins.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology, in the same way it has for biology.
Evolutionary Psychology is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal published since 2003. It covers empirical, philosophical, historical, and socio-political aspects of evolutionary psychology. Its editors-in-chief are Todd K. Shackelford (Oakland University), Bernhard Fink (University of Göttingen), David A. Puts (Pennsylvania State University), and Rebecca Sear (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). In 2015 the journal moved to Sage Publications.
The journal is abstracted and indexed inSocial Sciences Citation Index, and Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences.