Rex Kerr
2 min readDec 14, 2022

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But my point is that you are (implicitly) holding this opinion, and thereby not debunking evolutionary psychology as a whole! (You have, I would argue, inflicted a deep stab-wound in the side of part of "Pop EP" as Buller terms that take on the field.)

EP in general endorses the statement that knowledge about ancestral conditions of humans gives us explanatory power for human psychology if we consider the evolutionary pressures associated with those conditions.

You make it sound like if only we were listening to Hrdy and Ryan instead of, say, Tooby and Singh, we'd have an awesome technique on our hands, because you make confident pronouncements about how things really were as part of debunking the conditions postulated by evolutionary psychologists.

Just to pick a few cases where your logic relies on the same kind of assumptions: (1) penis morphology is assumed to evolve at a similar rate to psychological preferences; (2) contemporary "primitive" views on children are taken as representative of ancestral human views; (3) evolutionary pressure for nonviolence in egalitarian groups is relevant for humans; (4) assessing health and symmetry in modern British 15-16 year olds is a good way to study the ancestral value of symmetry as a health cue.

This is not the thrust of an argument against "evolutionary psychology", not even against "Pop EP". If you read Buller's critique, you see that he's very careful to repeatedly point out the uncertainty in conditions, because that is what would render "Pop EP" actually fraught with danger. (For further critiques, see, for intstance, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/#BioVsEvoPsy.)

If it's just a matter of tossing out some bad assumptions and picking known-to-be-better ones instead, EP is in pretty good shape once it gets the right assumptions (e.g. the ones you offer).

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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