Core Tenets Of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary Psychology (EP), capitalised E, capitalised P, is an approach within evolutionary psychology, that for at least two decades has been subjected to harsh criticism. David Buller, a philosopher of science, made the following statement about it: "Evolutionary Psychology is wrong in almost every detail. The problem isn’t that it rests on 'one big mistake,' but that it makes little mistakes nearly every theoretical and empirical turn." (2006, p. 481). This essay will examine the core tenets of Evolutionary Psychology, namely massive modularity, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), adaptationism and psychic unity. In particular, this essay will assess whether Buller’s (2006) assertion is justified by considering the empirical

Evolutionary Psychologists contend that the human mind is organised into some ‘hundreds and thousands’ of domain-specific modules, each with a specialised function and design that allow it to engage with the environment for some given aspect (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Buss, 1999; Pinker, 1997). This belief is a core tenet of Evolutionary Psychology deemed ‘’massive modularity’ and rests on the premise that our ancestors faced a varied and diverse range of adaptive problems, and for each of those problems, a novel solution was needed (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). For example, the behaviour that stops us from eating poisonous berries will be driven by an illness avoidance domain-specific module that is separate to a social exchange domain-specific module that will assist in forming social alliances (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994). Evolutionary Psychologists speculate that the modules’ inherent logic is dictated by genetics, while their function is shaped by natural selection. Indeed, two of the critiques against this view include the fact that the evidence upon which ‘massive modularity’ relies is flawed; and it gives little credence to the possibility of alternative explanations, such as domain-general

They conducted an analysis of child abuse reports provided by the American Human Association, an archive which houses some 20,000 reports (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Daly and Wilson concluded that a child in the United States in 1976 that was under three years old and lived with one biological parent and a stepparent was seven times more likely to become a child-abuse statistic than a child who lived with two biological parents. Overall, Daly and Wilson’s (1988) findings demonstrated that there is a higher risk of child abuse for children that live with a stepparent, all other factors held constant. There are several studies that support these findings, including a study conducted in Australia on unintentional fatal childhood injuries (Tooley et. al., 2006). In this study, information from the Australian National Coroners’ Information system (NCIS) was gleaned regarding 32 cases of intentionally, and 319 unintentional cases of fatal injury in children under the age of five, between 2000 and 2003. In congruence with what Daly and Wilson (1988) found, Tooley et al. (2006) found that children under five were to be at an significantly increased risk of unintentional fatal injury of any type. This illustrates that the proposed psychological mechanism of kin investment and