In Evolutionary psychology: “fashionable ideology” or “new foundation”? Oliver Curry reviews (and counters) Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against evolutionary psychology, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose. Curry starts by giving a brief introduction to evolutionary psychology:
At the end of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation…Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” It took more than 100 years but, in the closing decades of the 20th century, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection began to be applied to minds, brains and behaviour. “Evolutionary psychology” argues that the mind is a collection of special-purpose software designed by natural selection to solve the problems of survival and reproduction that faced our ancestors — problems such as finding food, picking suitable habitats, attracting mates, learning a language and navigating the social world.