David Buller has written a book, Adapting Minds, which critically examines some of the claims of evolutionary psychology. He’s summarized three of his analyses for Skeptic Magazine, looking at the a few of the important questions about our behavior that evolutionary psychology attempts to answer. (Actually I should adopt his usage; he uses “evolutionary psychology” to mean “the evolutionary study of mind and behavior”, while “Evolutionary Psychology”, or EP, represents a particular set of beliefs about the evolution of the human mind and human behavior. So what he’s critiquing is three claims of EP.)
The first claim he examines is that women’s extramarital affairs can be explained by a psychological adaptation aimed at seeking out genetically superior males to father their children (while keeping a reliable long-term partner around to help her raise the children). The second is that males and females have evolved different triggers for jealous behavior (males being more sensitive to sexual infidelity while women are more sensitive to emotional infidelity); the idea behind this is that males are more aware of threats to their paternity, while women are more aware of threats to the continued availability of a male’s resources for her children. The third is that a stepparent (often a stepfather) is more likely to physically abuse a child than the child’s genetic parents. He refutes all three of these, illustrating the shortcomings in the data that have been used to support them and providing alternative explanations of what might be going on. It was a fascinating look at some of the detail behind things I’ve read about in other places.
It’s not a short piece, but it’s well worth reading, especially in light of the frequent news stories about the ways our most important relationships are supposedly shaped by our evolutionary history. It’s hard for me sometimes to evaluate some of the news on this topic that I read (and write about here); I’m hoping that Buller’s book will be helpful in educating myself. Meanwhile, I learned a lot from this article.
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_sex_jealousy.html
