ABSTRACT
The brand of Evolutionary Psychology that the author considers today is the programme developed by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss and a few others, and popularised with great effect by Stephen Pinker and, with rather more sophistication, by Robert Wright. An extraordinary difficulty for any form of evolutionary psychology is that there are no relevant species for evolutionary comparison. To the extent that cognitive mechanism evolved, as evolutionary psychologists propose, several million years after the division of the human lineage from that of the chimpanzees, and given that everyone agrees that all contemporary humans belong to one species, this lack is indisputable. One of the common accusations against evolutionary psychology is that it is panadaptationist, or Panglossian. As evolutionary thinking begins to catch up with the revolution in molecular biology, the decades old evolutionary theory on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built can now be seen to be of largely antiquarian interest.
