If you accept that evolution really happened and that humans are a product of it, then that should surely be uncontroversial. It’s surely the case that if we had evolved from bats, or whales, rather than apes, we would be very different, psychologically speaking. But evolutionary psychology is an astonishingly controversial field. It’s “pseudoscience”, or “unfalsifiable”, according to some.
The idea that the mind is evolved goes back to Darwin himself, but it was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, a wife-and-husband team of academics, who really developed the field in The Adapted Mind, a book of essays they edited in 1992.
Insofar as I can tell, evolutionary psychology is no more pseudoscientific or unfalsifiable than evolutionary biology in general. It’s harder to do, because brains and behaviour don’t usually leave fossils, but in principle it’s the same. You come up with some hypothesis, you make predictions using that hypothesis, and you test those predictions against reality.
For instance: one hypothesis within evolutionary psychology is the “psychological immune system”, the idea that we have an evolved tendency to behave in ways that reduce our exposure to dangerous pathogens. That’s pretty obviously the case in certain situations — for instance, faeces and rotting meat smell bad to us and we want to get away from them. But one more specific hypothesis was that people who have recently been ill, and therefore less able to fight off new diseases, would be hypersensitive to that tendency, and would want to (for instance) avoid people whose faces showed signs of disease.
One study found evidence that that was the case; a later, larger replication found that it wasn’t. Hypothesis (so far) falsified. This is bog-standard science.
It is true that there are a lot of comedy-sounding studies, into nipple erection and sexiness or a correlation between intelligence and semen quality, and some of them have failed to replicate.
But if having some strange-sounding studies published, or studies that have failed to replicate, is enough to render an entire field pseudoscientific, then very few fields will survive. The field of medicine contains studies like this, in the medical journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine, which claims that to heal the body we need to study “the human energy field” and especially “organ-associated frequencies instrumental in the endocrine/chakra systems”. (It was eventually retracted, after two years.)
And this, in the same journal, encouraging “shamanic journeying” in paediatric palliative care, “in which the patient or the shaman moves into an altered state of awareness and encounters … ‘power animals.’” Or this paper, in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, which looked at five (5) human brains, used no control group, did frankly weird things with the numbers, and used that to claim that aluminium in vaccines causes autism.
Those papers — which took me five minutes to find — are bad, and silly, and potentially harmful. But we don’t throw out the entire scientific field of medicine because there are weird, bad papers published on its fringes. Evolutionary psychology has its cranks, and its amusing or weird-sounding papers, but so does every field. Demanding that it alone be pure is an isolated demand for rigour. It’s not fair to apply uniquely stringent rules to evolutionary psychology, and I think the only reason people do is because evolutionary psychology is associated with a particular kind of reactionary politics.
It is, of course, true that evolutionary psychology can have obvious political implications that other fields, chemistry or astrophysics, say, might not. And some of them are unpalatable. The James Damore “Google memo” based its suggestion that women are, on average, less interested in tech than men explicitly on an “evolutionary psychology perspective”, for instance.
But there is lots of perfectly good, and politically uncontroversial as well as scientifically uncontroversial, science that goes on, looking at psychology through an evolutionary lens. Daniel Kahneman’s great work of popular psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow, explicitly describes human psychology as an evolved thing: “The questions are perhaps less urgent for a human in a city environment than for a gazelle on the savannah, but we have inherited the neural mechanisms that evolved to provide ongoing assessments of threat level, and they have not been turned off.” He links our ability to read faces to a crucial evolutionary need to assess the intentions of people around us. This is evolutionary psychology, unadorned.
More importantly, though: whether something is politically convenient or not doesn’t affect whether it’s true. The Damore essay is a case in point. It certainly doesn’t seem to be unambiguously false: Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender and a populariser of feminism-inspired science, told the Guardian that Damore’s summation of the difference between men and women was far from perfect but “more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature” and “not seen as especially controversial”.
One problem is that if you say things like “Some of the differences between men and women are caused by evolution,” it sounds as though you’re saying “And therefore there is no point in working to reduce the gender pay gap”, or “and therefore women are supposed to have babies and not work”. It’s very hard to avoid people hearing those things.
And it’s absolutely true that some people do use evolutionary psychology as a crutch for their beliefs; human beings are, indeed, not lobsters. (Mind you, they’re not clownfish either.)
Charles Darwin, the historical figure, is interesting to study, and it’s worth remembering that he was a man of his time. But Darwinism, the great insight of evolution by natural selection, is separate. It is true (or false) regardless of Darwin’s own views, and so are the many insights which have followed it. We can go back and forth over whether he was a racist, but the more interesting question is: was he right?
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe