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Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

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William Blake once registered his opposition to religious orthodoxy as follows: "I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen; A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door; So I turned to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be; And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires."

I often think of this poem, which laments the predilection of priests to legislate sensuality from our lives, when I come upon a philosopher who criticizes a school of scientific thought. The critique is almost always of the form "Here are the rules of science. You are violating some of these rules. Bad, bad, bad!" Such critiques are usually not worth much, because either what the school of thought asserts is correct or it is not. Every scientist knows the rules of scientific protocol and rarely makes an error. I don't need a philosopher to tell me about violating rules.

Richardson is such a philosopher. One strike against him. He gets strike two for a really stupid title to his book. Evolutionary psychology is not maladapted, in fact, so the title is just a snide slur.

Richardson wears the black gown of "adaptationism," which is a set of doctrines specifying what is an what is not a biological adaptation, and what is and what is not an adequate proof that a human characteristic is an adaptation. For instance, Richardson claims that we cannot call either language or cognition adaptations, because "a discussion of what we actual know about the evolution of either human language or cognition would be very brief." (p. 89) Really? I am not a expert in either language or cognition, but I know lots about their evolution, having read game theoretic treatments, comparative brain studies, paleontological studies, behavioral ecological studies of brain size and social group dynamics, etc. Very brief? What Richardson means is that we have little direct evidence, because the fossil record does not include much about soft tissues.

Only a wearer of the black gown could get away with this flamboyant degree of skepticism: "I do not doubt that human language and human rationality are evolved capacities, or even that they provided substantive advantages to our forbears. Perhaps they are adaptations; I do not claim to know. Indeed, I claim not to know." (p. 95). So, what then must something be to count as an adaptation, if not that it is an evolved capacity that provides substantive advantages? Richardson's answer is that an adaptation must be an adaptation FOR something. "The problem is, after all,'' he notes on p. 125, "not merely to show that language is an adaptation, but to explain it as an adaptation. Without a suitable explanation, we will not know what specifically it ia an adaptation FOR." The problem with language and cognition is that they provide so many benefits that we cannot single out what they were adaptations FOR. Richardson in fact vacillates in the book, sometimes denying they are adaptations at all, other times admitting that they are adaptations, but only bargain-store basement adaptations until we know what they are FOR.

Adaptations do not have to be adaptations FOR anything. It is true that Cosmides and Tooby think of adaptations as solutions to recurrent problems, but it is reasonable to call anything an adaptation if (a) it enhances the fitness of its bearers; (b) it is costly to maintain; and (c) it is an evolved trait. It is true that evolutionary psychologists tend to treat human characteristics as adaptations even if they appear not to satisfy (a), on grounds that they may have at one time in our evolutionary past, or appearances are misleading. For instance, since a significant fraction of males rape, this is likely an adaptation; since there are many sociopaths, sociopathy is likely an adaptation; since humans are subject to depression, depression is likely an adaptation. I do not share with evolutionary psychologists this predilection for seeing adaptations everywhere, but there are enough human adaptations to make Richardson's argument incorrect.

This book is really not about evolutionary psychology at all, but rather about the philosophy of adaptation. Evolutionary psychology is just a convenient hook onto which Richardson's treatment of adaption can hang. Moreover, I do not find much merit in this treatment.

Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that brings evolution into disrepute with non-scientists.

The author clearly lays out the case for evo psych not reaching the standards of research that evolutionary biology must reach. In this, the author should be applauded.

To be sure - and the author makes this clear also - there is likely to be some truth in evo psych. Some aspects of our psychology are possibly adaptations to past need. Yet the discipline routinely fails to examine how or why such adaptations might come about, nor the heritable bases for them, nor ways to distinguish sufficiently between alternative hypotheses or the null hypothesis.

Evolutionary psychology has the seductive appeal of storytelling, but broadly lacks scientific rigour. The discipline needs to grow up or move on.

This is one of those books where an author expresses his wondering thoughts without making a clear point or really suggesting or proving anything. His arguments are weak and his writing is unfocused.