Explaining Human Psychology Evolutionarily: Recent Criticisms and New Lines of Defense

Evolutionary psychology aims to fulfil Darwin’s vision—articulated towards the end of The Origin of Species— of providing a new foundation for the scientific study of human psychology. The field holds that human behavior should be explained using the same biological principles and empirical approaches applied to non-human animals, emphasizing how different evolutionary forces have influenced the functioning of their psychological mechanisms. Scholarly debate has long centered on issues such as adaptationism, testability, cognitive modularity, and the role of culture. More recently, however, evolutionary psychology has faced a new wave of critiques. These include that it presupposes, but cannot support, that human psychological mechanisms are “vertically homologous” with those of their ancestors; that it neglects several important evolutionary processes; that it relies on an outdated computationalist view of the mind; and that it does not yet satisfy the criteria for a mature, normal science. This article aims to present a balanced account of these emerging critiques, along with a set of original responses that, to date, have not been fully articulated in the literature. In general, we argue that the critiques involve unsound argumentation with false premises, attack a straw man position, are vulnerable to reductios , or rely on an implausible philosophical model of how scientific works ought to be evaluated.