Because the mind performs many different tasks, it must, it is argued, consist of a large number of functionally specialized mechanisms, each of which embodies principles related to the domain for which it is designed to function. These principles have been discussed under many labels. This has been a source of some debate both within the evolutionary psychology community, and a source of criticism outside of it.

Because of the way that natural selection operates, genes are selected by virtue of the effect that they have on their own replication rate relative to alternatives in the population see Dawkins, , for a lucid discussion. Which genes lead to their own replication depends on how they contribute to the solution of adaptive problems , the specific tasks, such as finding food, avoiding predators, and so forth, faced by organisms of a given species.

Adaptive problems are diverse, and depend exquisitely on the life history of the species in question. That is, because different organisms survive and reproduce in very different ways, the features — and thus the genes — that are advantageous vary from one species to the next.

As a general rule, then, selection will cause the increase in frequency of genes that cause phenotypes that are better at solving adaptive problems faced by the organism. Crucially, adaptive problems can only shape selection when the problem is one that has been repeatedly faced by the species in question — this is a consequence of the generational time scale over which natural selection operates. Selection can have its effects only if it has a causal effect on replication of the gene in question through reproduction, though this pathway can be arbitrarily distal.

The idea that the brain is likely to consist of functionally specialized computational systems, taken together with the idea that selection operates over long time scales, suggests that the computational mechanisms humans possess are the ones generated by genes selected over the course of human evolutionary history. This in turn implies that the search for specialized computational mechanisms — adaptations — should be guided by the search for mechanisms that had plausible functions relative to the tasks our ancestors faced.

This is not to say that humans cannot do many things that are evolutionarily novel, such as drive cars and choose investment strategies. Because of the way that brains, and especially development, work, humans can do many things for which there was not specifically selection in the past. Indeed, because natural selection only functions on what has happened in the past, every organism, including humans, are in environments which are novel in some way relative to the environment in which their adaptations were selected.

A frequently-used example is the human taste for fats and sugars. In past environments, such appetites would presumably have led to adaptive outcomes; in modern environments, because of the easy availability of foods rich in sugar and fat, people consume foods that lead to unhealthful outcomes see Burnham and Phelan, , for an engaging discussion. Evolutionary psychology is a framework that allows researchers to operate at different levels of explanation.

Although various scholars have broken these levels down in different ways e. To illustrate why different levels are required, consider the different ways that one might explain the workings of a watch.

One explanation for how it functions is that someone designed the watch to perform the function of indicating the correct time. Another way to explain it would be to describe how it keeps track of and represents time, including how it represents the passage of time, the units it uses, and so on. A third way would be to give a physical description of the watch, including the movement of the gears. Because evolved psychological mechanisms have functions, they can also be explained at these three levels.

One of the most thoroughly described phenomena in psychology to be described is vision. The eye — including structures from the lens and pupil to the neurophysiological structures involved, such as V1 and other visual areas — functions to generate a representation of the physical world.

Usually — but not always — evolutionary psychology starts with an idea about function, the first level of explanation. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evolutionary Psychology.

Cosmides L, Tooby J. Evolutionary psychology: new perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annu Rev Psychol. Scary and nasty beasts: self-reported fear and disgust of common phobic animals. Br J Psychol. Being "in" or "out" of the game: subjective and acoustic reactions to exclusion and popularity in social anxiety. Front Hum Neurosci. Investigating evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli in preschool children.

Acta Psychol Amst. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Social exchange is a system of cooperation for mutual benefit and cheaters violate the social contract that governs social exchange Cosmides and Tooby The selection pressure for a dedicated cheater-detection module is the presence of cheaters in the social world.

The cheater-detection module is an adaptation that arose in response to cheaters. The cheater-detection hypothesis has been the focus of a huge amount of critical discussion. Cosmides and Tooby defend the idea that cheat detection is modular over hypotheses that more general rules of inference are involved in the kind of reasoning behind cheater detection against critics Ron Mallon and Fodor Some criticism of the cheater-detection hypothesis involves rehashing criticisms of massive modularity in general and some treats the hypothesis as a contribution to moral psychology and invokes different considerations.

For example, Mallon worries about the coherence of abandoning a domain general conception of ought in our conception of our moral psychology. This discussion is also ongoing. See e. Sterelny for a selection of alternate, non-modular explanations of aspects of our moral psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature. As noted above Section 1 , evolutionary psychology owes a theoretical debt to human sociobiology.

Wilson took human sociobiology to provide us with an account of human nature For Wilson human nature is the collection of universal human behavioral repertoires and these behavioral repertoires are best understood as being products of natural selection.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature is not a collection of universal human behavioral repertoires but rather the universal psychological mechanisms underlying these behaviors Tooby and Cosmides These universal psychological mechanisms are products of natural selection, as we saw in Section 2.

For example, he thinks of bi-pedalism as part of the human nature trait cluster. He shares the idea that a trait must be a product of evolution, rather than say social learning or enculturation, with both these accounts. Some critical challenges to evolutionary psychological accounts of human nature and the nomological account derive from similar concerns as those driving criticism of evolutionary psychology in general. In Section 4. Some critics charge evolutionary psychologists of assuming that adaptation cannot sustain variation.

Hull ; and Sober The idea here is that humans, like all organisms, exhibit a great deal of variation, including morphological, physiological, behavioral and cultural variation cf. Amundson Buller argues that the evolutionary psychology account of human nature either ignores or fails to account for all of this variation c. Lewens ; Odenbaugh Forthcoming; and Ramsey Any account that restricts human nature to just those traits we have in common and which also are not subject to change, cannot account for human variation.

The idea that to account for human nature, we must account for human variation is presented and defended by evolutionary psychologists see e. Barrett , anthropologists see e. Cashdan and philosophers see e. Griffiths and Ramsey Barrett agrees with Buller and others that evolutionary psychologists have failed to account for human variation in their account of human nature.

Rather than seeing this challenge as a knock down of the whole enterprise of accounting for human nature, Barrett sees this as a challenge for an account of human nature. Rather than human nature being a collection of shared fixed universal psychological traits, for Barrett, human nature is the whole human trait cluster, including all of the variation in all of our traits.

This approach to human nature is sharply different than the approach defended by either Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides or Machery but is also subject to a number of criticisms. The main thrust of the criticisms is that such a view cannot be explanatory and is instead merely a big list of all the properties that humans have had and can have See e. Buller ; Downes ; Futuyma ; and Lewens Another example of this broader discussion is included in Section 7.

Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. See Buss for discussion of Literature and Law and Saad for a detailed presentation of evolutionary psychology and consumer studies. In these contexts, evolutionary psychology is usually introduced as providing resources for practitioners, which will advance the relevant field. Philosophers have responded critically to some of these applications of evolutionary psychology.

One concern is that often evolutionary psychology is conflated with evolution or evolutionary theory in general see e. Leiter and Weisberg and Downes The discussion reviewed in Section 4. Evolutionary psychologists offer to enhance fields such as Law and Consumer Studies by introducing evolutionary ideas but what is in fact offered is a selection of theoretical resources championed only by proponents of a specific approach to evolutionary psychology.

For example, Gad Saad argues that Consumer Studies will profit greatly from the addition of adaptive thinking, i.

Many do not see this as an effort to bring evolutionary theory, broadly construed, to bear on Consumer Studies cf. Promoting disputed theoretical ideas is certainly problematic but bigger worries arise when thoroughly discredited work is promoted in the effort to apply evolutionary psychology. Owen Jones see e. Leiter and Weisberg Aside from monitoring the expansion efforts of evolutionary psychology, there are a number of other areas in which further philosophical work on evolutionary psychology will be fruitful.

The examples given above of work in moral psychology barely scratch the surface of this rapidly developing field. There are huge numbers of empirical hypotheses that bear on our conception of our moral psychology that demand philosophical scrutiny.

Hauser includes a survey of a wide range of such hypotheses. Also, work on moral psychology and the emotions can be drawn together via work on evolutionary psychology and related fields. Griffiths directed philosophical attention to evolution and the emotions and this kind of work has been brought into closer contact with moral psychology by Nichols see e.

In philosophy of mind there is still much that can be done on the topic of modules. Work on integrating biological and psychological concepts of modules is one avenue that is being pursued and could be fruitfully pursued further see e. Barrett and Kurzban ; Carruthers and work on connecting biology to psychology via genetics is another promising area see e.

Marcus In philosophy of science, I have no doubt that many more criticisms of evolutionary psychology will be presented but a relatively underdeveloped area of philosophical research is on the relations among all of the various, theoretically different, approaches to the biology of human behavior cf. Downes ; Griffiths ; and Brown et al. Evolutionary psychologists present their work alongside the work of behavioral ecologists, developmental psychobiologists and others see e.

Buss ; Buss but do not adequately confront the theoretical difficulties that face an integrated enterprise in the biology of human behavior. Finally, while debate rages between biologically influenced and other social scientists, most philosophers have not paid much attention to potential integration of evolutionary psychology into the broader interdisciplinary study of society and culture but see Mallon and Stich on evolutionary psychology and constructivism.

In contrast, feminist philosophers have paid attention to this integration issue as well as offered feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology see Fehr , Meynell and the entry on feminist philosophy of biology. Gillian Barker , shares some evolutionarily based criticisms of evolutionary psychology with philosophers of biology discussed in Section 4. She also adds a novel critical appraisal of evolutionary psychology. She argues that, as currently practiced, evolutionary psychology is not a fruitful guide to social policy regarding human flourishing.

Many evolutionary psychologists are aware of the difficulty variation presents for some established approaches in their field.

This issue confronts those interested in developing accounts of human nature, as noted above Section 6. For example, human aggression varies along many dimensions and confronting and accounting for each of these types of variation is a challenge for many evolutionary psychologists cf. Downes and Tabery Given that evolutionary psychology is just one, among many, evolutionarily based approaches to explaining human behavior, the most promising critical discussions of evolutionary psychology should continue to come from work that compares hypotheses drawn from evolutionary psychology with hypotheses drawn from other evolutionary approaches and other approaches in the social sciences more broadly construed.

Linquist introduces hypotheses from cultural evolution that appear to offer more explanatory bite than those from evolutionary psychology. The broader issue of tension between evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution here will doubtless continue to attract the critical attention of philosophers See Lewens for a nice clear introduction to and discussion of alternative approaches to cultural evolution.

Finally, philosophers of science will doubtless continue to check the credentials of evolutionary ideas imported into other areas of philosophy. Philosophers of biology in particular, still voice suspicion if philosophers borrow their evolutionary ideas from evolutionary psychology rather than evolutionary biology.

Barker also encourages philosophers, as well as social scientists, to draw from the huge range of theoretical resources evolutionary biologists have to offer, rather than just from those provided by evolutionary psychologists. Evolutionary Psychology: One research tradition among the various biological approaches to explaining human behavior 2.

The Massive Modularity Hypothesis 4. Philosophy of biology vs. Evolutionary Psychology 5. Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology 6. Human Nature 7. Individual human behavior is generated by this evolved computer in response to information it extracts from the environment.

Understanding behavior requires articulating the cognitive programs that generate the behavior. The cognitive programs of the human brain are adaptations. They exist because they produced behavior in our ancestors that enabled them to survive and reproduce.

The cognitive programs of the human brain may not be adaptive now; they were adaptive in ancestral environments. Natural selection ensures that the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs and not a domain general architecture.

The Massive Modularity Hypothesis Claims that the mind has a modular architecture, and even massively modular architecture, are widespread in cognitive science see e. Evolutionary Psychology Many philosophers have criticized evolutionary psychology. Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology Many philosophers who work on moral psychology understand that their topic is empirically constrained. Human Nature Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature.

Applications of Evolutionary Psychology and Prospects for Further Debate Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. Bibliography Arp, R. Barker, G. Barrett, H. Frankish and W. Ramsey eds. Bateson, P. Bjorklund, D. Buss ed. Booth, A. Brown, G. Buller, D. Buss, D. Hasleton, et al. Cashdan, E. Burke, D. An evolved spatial memory bias in a nectar-feeding bird? A new viewpoint on the evolution of sexually dimorphic human faces.

Pubmed Abstract Pubmed Full Text. The evolution of holistic processing of faces. Buss, D. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels. Confer, J. Evolutionary psychology: controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations. Cosmides, L. Evolutionary psychology: new perspectives on cognition and motivation.

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Kamil, A. Systematic foraging by a nectar-feeding bird, the Amakihi Loxops virens. Kanwisher, N. The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialised for face perception. Krebs, J. Krebs and N. Davies Oxford: Blackwell , — Kurzban, R. Grand challenges of evolutionary psychology. Mazur, A. Testosterone and dominance in men. Brain Sci. McNamara, J.

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