ABSTRACT
Writing in 1969, the biologist Michael Ghiselin bemoaned the failure of the majority of his contemporaries to take a Darwinian perspective on the mind. At the same time, he expressed concern that the end result of such a shift of attention might be disappointing, especially when compared with Darwin’s own achievements in this area:
Nearly forty years on, there is no shortage of work that goes on under the banner of ‘evolutionary psychology’. Steven Pinker’s decision to take ‘How the Mind Works’ as the title for his commercially successful popularisation of this field shouts the promise that many see in the evolutionary stance (Pinker 1997). But evolutionary psychology has met with stiff opposition in the last fifteen years, much of it recapitulating the debate of the 1970s and 1980s that E. O. Wilson ignited with the publication of his 1975 work Sociobiology. This resistance cannot all be explained away as a struggle over turf. It is true that anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists often regard evolutionary psychology as
embodying an overly simplistic picture of human individuals and human societies. But biologists, too, have opposed evolutionary psychology on occasions, and for just the reasons that Ghiselin foresaw. In some cases, they have not been shy in expressing contempt for the subject. Jerry Coyne, a Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Ecology and Evolution, has remarked that: ‘If evolutionary biology is a soft science, then evolutionary psychology is its flabby underbelly’ (Coyne 2000). For Coyne and others, what David Buss (1999) has enthusiastically termed the ‘New Science of the Mind’ is no science at all.
