Article ID: CBB481995352

Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? (2020)

unapi

In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that the mind has an architecture that has been conserved since the Pleistocene, and that our psychology can be fruitfully understood in terms of the original, fitness-enhancing functions of these conserved psychological mechanisms. But for evolutionary psychological explanations to succeed, practitioners must be able to show that contemporary cognitive mechanisms correspond to those that were selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that these present-day cognitive mechanisms are descended from the corresponding ancestral mechanisms, and that they have retained the functions of the ancestral mechanisms from which they are descended. I refer to the problem of demonstrating that these conditions obtain as “the matching problem,” argue that evolutionary psychology does not have the resources to address it, and conclude that evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is therefore impossible.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB481995352/

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Authors & Contributors
Lockhart, Jeffrey W.
Cech, Erin A.
Bruch, Elizabeth E.
Antonella Tramacere
Polonioli, Andrea
Henrich, Joseph
Concepts
Evolutionary psychology
Human evolution
Biology
Behavioral sciences
Philosophy of science
Controversies and disputes
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
France
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