This philosopher is challenging all of evolutionary psychology

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https://gizmodo.com/this-philosopher-is-...1842248835

INTRO: It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem.

The field of evolutionary psychology is no stranger to critiques, given its central idea: that human behaviors can be explained in evolutionary terms and that the core units governing our actions haven’t changed since the Stone Age. But Smith’s paper garnered a particularly strong response after science journalist Adam Rutherford discussed it on Twitter and PZ Myers discussed it in his Pharyngula blog.

We at Gizmodo have long rolled our eyes at the often-nonsensical conclusions that some people come to when employing evolutionary psychology theory, so we were excited to chat with Smith about her work. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gizmodo: Your paper’s main refutation of the field is something called the matching problem. Can you explain what that is?

Subrena Smith: Evolutionary psychologists’ thought is that, for at least some of our behaviors, they believe that we have—dare I use this term—hard-wired cognitive structures that are operating in all of us contemporary human beings the same way they did for our ancestors on the savannas. The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring—the cognitive structure of the brain itself—is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn’t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance—that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors’ brains. The sameness in how our brains work is on account of genetic selection for particular modules that are still functional in our environment today. [Editor’s note: These “modules” refer to the idea that the brain can be divided up into discrete structures with specific functions.]

The matching problem is really the core issue that evolutionary psychologists have to show that they can meet: that there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors; that they’re working the same way then as now; and that these modules are working the same way because they are descended from the same functional lineage or causal lineage. But I don’t see any way that these charges can be answered... (MORE - rest of interview)

RELATED: 7 misconceptions about evolutionary psychology .... Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology (SciAm, 2012)

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Did a philosopher make evolutionary psychology impossible?
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com...mpossible/

EXCERPT (Jerry Coyne): . . . Her article has garnered quite a bit of approbation among those who think that evolutionary psychology is a worthless enterprise, including, apparently, the site Gizmodo, which published a worshipful interview with Smith [...]

Well, has she done what she aimed to: brought down an entire discipline? My judgment is “no—certainly not.”  She doesn’t even come close. What she does is list a set of standards that, Smith thinks, must be met for an evolutionary psychology explanation to be credible, and these standards are so rigorous and hard to meet that no study has met them or can meet them. Ergo, evolutionary psychology—done the way she wants—is “impossible.”

I believe that her overly excessive requirements bespeak Smith’s lack of understanding of how evolutionary biology is done. And that, I believe, comes from the fact that Smith is not a practicing scientist, but rather a philosopher, all of whose degrees were in philosophy. I usually don’t bring up credentials when discussing an argument, but I think her concentration on philosophy is relevant to her belief that evolutionary psychology fails to meet all tests of being a scientific field. Philosophers tend to be absolutists who require a claim to follow a set of strict rules.

Let me briefly say that I’m not a wholesale fan of evolutionary psychology, as a lot of it involves adaptive storytelling that is untestable. Often sample sizes are too small to be useful, and confirmation bias is strong. But that doesn’t apply to the whole discipline! [...] Evolutionary biology is not about finding absolute truth, but about inference to the best explanation, and that is what Smith fails to understand.

[...] Why is a philosopher critiquing evolutionary psychology? While other philosophers, most notably Philip Kitcher, have written valuable critiques because they were concerned about the lax standards of the discipline, Smith has another reason as well. As you might suspect, it’s because she sees Evolutionary Psychology (capital letters) as somehow vindicating racism and sexism. We can’t have that, and so we must dispose of the discipline.

Of course “is”s don’t imply “ought”s, as I keep saying, and no finding of evolutionary psychology could ever tell us how to treat other people morally and legally. But Smith doesn’t seem to see it that way. Rather, she presents a caricature of evolutionary psychology that might have applied in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but doesn’t apply any longer... (MORE - details)