The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology - Konrad Lorenz Institute

A Continuing Critique of Evolutionary Psychologyrelated species will be absolutely essential for all conclusions—apoint acknowledged by several of ourcommentators (most prominently PITCHFORD).Most importantly, in the target article we arguedthat it is counterproductive to generate claims thatdo not take all the available evidence into account.Non-biologically based accounts for the evolutionaryhistory of the human mind/brain cannot work if assertionsare not consistent with existing neuroscientificevidence. Thus, our guiding principle was thatit is much easier to steer a corrective course duringthe early phases of any intellectual journey ratherthan when the passage is already well on its way. Wethink most scholars will agree that current revolutionaryvariants of Evolutionary Psychology, in theirenthusiasm to modify the prevailing and highlyflawed standard social science model, have also beenmaking a variety of obvious mistakes that now needto be rectified. To the extent that the discipline canachieve corrective action, it will flourish. To the extentthat it cannot, it will increasingly become a scientificcult.One of the greatest risks to future progress is prematureclosure on conceptual issues that are not yetempirically resolved. It is probably fair to say thatwould include essentially everything evolutionarypsychologists have suggested about the mind/brain(including most prominently the neuro-evolutionarynature of language). This is not as obviously thecase in the cognitive, behavioral and affective neurosciences,where the abundance of converging humanand cross-species findings gives greater confidencethat lasting knowledge bases have beenachieved. Evolutionary psychologists should find itextremely beneficial to pay attention to these findings!We were disappointed that there were few commentson the sampler of ‘solutions’ that we sharedin the target article, but we were delighted that RusselGARDNER emphasized the importance of such evidence.It will certainly behoove evolutionary psychologiststo assimilate the facts that have beenaccumulated from ‘lower’ species, even though everyfinding remains open to various alternative neuropsychologicaland neurobehavioral explanations.Since most individuals in neuroscience are receptiveto evolutionary views, it should be informative forevolutionary psychologists to pay close attention totheir interpretation of the neuronal evidence. Indeed,this passage is being achieved on some cognitiveissues (DUCHAINE/COSMIDES/TOOBY 2001; GALLIS-TEL/GIBBON 2001), but not, to the best of ourknowledge, for the abundant knowledge concerningour basic emotional and motivational systems. Suchneglect resembles the disturbing bias evident in thestandard social science model, where evidence derivedfrom our fellow species has traditionally beenmarginalized. Also, since most investigators of humanbehavior do not have causal manipulative accessto the underlying brain systems, they tend toassiduously ignore the relevant neural evidenceculled from other species. However, since we aresuch a contentious and self-centered tribal species,it is hard to coax those interested in more etherealhuman issues to pay attention to such fundamentallyimportant infra-human evidence.Since the publication of our target paper, we haveall experienced the impressive publications of the HumanGenome Projects (LANDER et al. 2001; VENTER etal. 2001) and many have been humbled by the findingthat the best estimate of the total number of genesin the human species was more than halved. Others,like ourselves, have been delighted with the evidencethat at a genetic level, we are not all that differentfrom our fellow mammals—a conclusion that haslong been obvious to many. Thus, our vast intellectual/cognitive abilities cannot be explained by a massivelymore sophisticated genome, but rather by our massivelyexpanded cortex, the mushrooming of which probablyemerged through comparatively modest genetic changesrather than any new and detailed genetic constructions.One should repeat this as another mantra wheneverone ponders what evolution did or did not constructin the highest cortico–cognitive reaches of the humanbrain/mind. Although one might fall back onthe emergence of new gene–gene interactions andheterochronic neural progressions in the human species,we again submit that the simplest explanation isthe flexibility of mind that general-purpose corticalmushrooming provided. The many ancient attentional,emotional and motivational read–only–memory(ROM) type systems we share with other animalsnow have access to more abundant general-purpose,random–access–type memory (RAM) spaces that allowcomplex re-symbolizations of our basic urges.Due to our massive ignorance of how the cortexreally works to generate conscious perceptions,memories, plans and intentions, taken in conjunctionwith the similarities in the local circuits of sixlayeredneocortex in all mammals, we believe thisRAM-type metaphor should be the default assumptionconcerning the function of our heteromodalcortices. Although there is no question that corticalareas become specialized for a variety of adaptiveand even maladaptive functions during development,to assume that specialized, sociobiology-typemodules evolved in the higher cerebral areas via ge-Evolution and Cognition ❘ 57 ❘ 2001, Vol. 7, No. 1