Evolutionary Psychology is Not Evil! (… and Here’s Why …)

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology has faced ‘implacable hostility’ (Dawkins, 2005)from a number of intellectual fronts. Critics of evolutionary psychology have triedto paint this perspective variously as reductionist and overly deterministic, at best,and as sexist, racist, and downright evil at worst. The current paper argues that allpsychological frameworks which assume that human beings are the result of theorganic evolutionary forces of natural and sexual selection are, essentially,evolutionary in nature (regardless of whether they traditionally fall under the labelof evolutionary psychology). In other words, the perspective presented here arguesthat all psychology is evolutionary psychology. Two specific mis-characterizationsof evolutionary psychology ((a) that it is eugenicist in nature and (b) that it is afully non-situationist, immutable perspective on behavior) are addressed here withan eye toward elaborating on how these distorted conceptions of evolutionarypsychology are non-constructive and non-progressive. A final section focuses onhow the social sciences in general could benefit from being evolutionized.