The Central Failure of Evolutionary Psychology

 
We wish to question a deeply engrained habit of thinking among students of evolution. We call it the adaptationist programme, or the Panglossian paradigm.
S.J. Gould & R.C. Lewontin (1979) p. 584There are lots of things wrong with evolutionary psychology. One of the most important is the tendency to construct just-so stories about the evolution of human behavior. Most of these stories don't make any sense to people who really understand evolutionary theory. A recent editorial in ScienceWeek makes this very point [History Denied: The Central Failure of Evolutionary Psychology].

On close examination, it becomes apparent that the central failure of evolutionary psychology as an effort to understand human behavior is that it essentially ignores two important corollaries of this major premise concerning universality of behavior across present-day cultures. The first corollary is that any behavior pattern that is NOT universal across cultures is NOT derived from Darwinian evolution, but probably derived from cultural evolution plus individual learned experience. The second and more important corollary is that any behavior pattern within a culture that is not universal across decades, or generations, or centuries, or even millennia is also NOT derived from Darwinian evolution, and more likely derived from cultural evolution plus individual learned experience. On these small time scales, Darwinian evolution just doesn't have enough time to work and cannot be responsible for any behavior changes within a culture.

Thus the central failure of evolutionary psychology is the failure to recognize that universality across both time AND geography are necessary to identify a behavior pattern derivable from Darwinian evolution.