ABSTRACT
Evolutionary psychologists claim that it is crucial to incorporate research in evolutionary biology into cognitive psychology, As leading proponents Leda Cosmides and John Tooby describe the motivation behind the overall project, "[tlhe human brain did not fall out of the sky, an inscrutable artifact of unknown origin, and there is no longer any sensible reason for studying it in ignorance of the causal processes that developed it" (Cosmides and Tooby (1994), p, 85,) The causal processes to which they refer include, most principally, the process of evolution by natural selection, This is a process they argue has heretofore been sadly neglected by cognitive psychologists in their research,
Even among the critical there is applause for this general goal of unilication (Sterelny and Griffiths (1998), p.328; Sterelny (2000),) Opinions divide, however, over the prospects for evolutionary psychology, and in particular over questions of methodology, In The Adapted Mind, Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby contrast the methodology of those who take a more predictive approach with that of those who adopt a more explanatory perspective, In this paper I consider the field from the perspective of these contrasting methodologies and discuss the degree to which these methodologies differ in terms of the objections to which they are particularly vulnerable, I conclude that a methodology that is subject to the fewest difficulties is one that combines the predictive with the explanatory approach, This methodology is promising, but it is one that may relegate the role of evolutionary reasoning in psychology to a relatively secondary position, This position may be inconsistent with some of the goals of evolutionary psychology's principal champions,
Two basic methodologies
As Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow portrayed the issue in their introduction to The
Adapted Mind (Barkow et al. (1992), p.IO), there are two basic research strategies available to the evolutionary psychologist: I. Explanatory evolutionary psychology: This general methodology argues from
the present to the past. Present observations direct us to the hypothesis of an adaptive problem from our ancestral past. The problem is then used to explain the existence of the present observations. As examples of the explanatory methodology Cosmidcs, Tooby and Barkow citc Boulton and Smith (1992), Nccsc and Lloyd (1992), Profet (1992), Shepard (1992).
