Graphic from a pseudoscientific website using EvoPsych to argue nonsense about the thermodynamics of human marriage bonding, showing a pretty girl in a short skirt in flirtatious pose, with ratio lines showing the perfect ratios of her body parts, with the words Perfect Body, Perfect Genes.

Evolutionary Psychology is the study of how attributes of human psychology evolved biologically by natural selection. I and others have averred many times that it is mostly a pseudoscience. EvoPsych proponents balk and take offense. We cite numerous papers by experts in evolution and psychology who agree with us. They claim they’ve been refuted. We ask where. They suddenly stop talking to us.

That’s a common sequence of events. I’m going to here collect all the information backing our claim. Any and all rebuttals to what I here argue, that you think are worth reading, I want to have collected in comments, so do please add any. Just make sure they actually address what’s here, and not just repeat what’s here refuted.

Also be aware that this article is as long as it is because EvoPsych proponents employ whack-a-mole apologetics (“But you didn’t address x,” and it’s always a different x the moment you do address x). Consequently, I am covering all the bases.

The Basic Problem

The basic thesis of EvoPsych is sound: some attributes of human psychology must have evolved biologically by natural selection. The problem is, figuring out which ones did, in which respects, and to which extent, and what the actual selection process was (i.e. what function was being selected for). There being virtually no data available to answer any of those questions, leaves EvoPsych a vain dream in most cases. We simply can’t know. And claiming to know when you can’t is a defining feature of pseudoscience.

There are more criteria of pseudoscience met by EvoPsych in practice, as I’ll show shortly. But first I want to point out that the qualifiers are important: not all EvoPsych is pseudoscience. Some of what gets through is good science, or at least as scientific in its suggestions as we find in cosmological science (the bulk of whose results do not consist of claims to have discovered what’s true, but rather what possible hypotheses fit the data and thus need to be tested in future). And also: A lot of what people find eyerollingly stupid about EvoPsych is actually a product of the media (as famously demonstrated by Rebecca Watson), or almost as often pseudoscientific loons (like these guys), misreporting or misusing the results of EvoPsych. For which EvoPsych proponents can’t be blamed, other than for not doing more to combat this abuse and misrepresentation of their field than they should be (the way ordinary evolutionists do to combat the misinformation about and misuse of their research by creationists). Indeed EvoPsych proponents should be more involved in publicly combating the nonsense that their science is abused for (including racism, sexism, and misogyny).

But the good stuff is there. For example, mathematical demonstrations of kin selective and other effects on differential reproductive success (or DRS) of having a small ratio of homosexual members in a family or social group, combined with some corroborating sociological and biological studies (neurology, genetics, fetal development), makes a plausible case for a selective pressure causing a more-or-less stable cross-culturally observed ratio of homosexuality in a population (varying also by cultural confounding pressures). It is not a proof. We cannot claim to know this is the case (after all, homosexuality may just be an accidental byproduct of normal genetic mixing that has no particular evolutionary purpose other than the experimental variation that sexual reproduction itself partly evolved for in the first place). But it’s at least good science to say it’s a viable hypothesis that has some support, as long as we admit it has not been confirmed, and more research is needed.

Notably, this example also illustrates the pseudoscientific aspects of EvoPsych as well, as attempts to refute this hypothesis have relied on studying modern homophobic societies with family structures and economies not at all like our biological ancestral regime, as if these reflected the societies in which the attribute evolved—and not even acknowledging that these cultural confounding factors nullify the value of their result. Ignoring culture is a major cause of EvoPsych pseudoscience. If not the major cause. (You can now read The Marshmallow Test for examples illustrating why.)

Another example of where EvoPsych has scientifically plausible ideas (even if still again not proven) is explaining the many multiply and cross-culturally confirmed cognitive biases. Though notably not all have been confirmed to exist in other cultures, some have to some extent, like Agency Overdetection. Here much less support has been gleaned from biology and other studies. But the phenomenon is well confirmed, both as existing, and as more likely being a genetic attribute of brain architecture and not a cultural product. And mathematical calculation can show it benefits DRS over any other setting on the sensitivity to agency detection (from positive to negative across the range), without requiring many unproven assumptions. In the statistical aggregate, it costs more to under-detect agency than over-detect it. So there is a very plausible selective pathway for our brains to have evolved into limited over-detectors.

Notably, this example also illustrates the complexity of EvoPsych that gets lost in translation to the public. Much speculation is promulgated about the EvoPsych origins of religion, much of which is just that, unproven speculation, sometimes implausible speculation, or even disproven speculation. How much of that is the fault of EvoPsych proponents not policing their own enthusiasm, vs. amateur and media misrepresentations, would be a chore to determine. But in reality there are not likely any evolved psychological traits for religion. Not only because “religion” is a conglomerate of too many disparate things (from actual physical institutions to ritual behaviors to belief systems, all highly varied and complex), but also because evolution is far more likely to have selected much more fundamental cognitive behaviors than that, which only happen to contribute to religion as a byproduct.

Agency over-detection is an example: if it is an evolved psychological feature, it was not selected for because it promoted religion; it was selected for because it promoted survival in a much more expansive way than that, wholly apart from religion. That it also happens to cause us to erroneously believe the world is governed by spirits (and after the cultural construct of one-leader hierarchical governments influenced us, “spirits” became “Spirit,” though still assisted by an administrative apparatus of “spirits” called angels and saints, and often even opposed by yet more spirits called demons, Satan, ghosts, etc.) was an accidental byproduct of the function, not something it was selected to produce. And EvoPsych proponents often fail to distinguish between selected and accidental traits (in fact, they frequently don’t even realize that they need to, before they can ever generate a valid result), producing a common fundamental flaw in their methodology, which also contributes to its frequency of pseudoscientific results, in the form of declaring unwarranted certainty in results that are so wholly fallacious that they cannot even be said to be supported by the evidence presented, much less confirmed.

Again, not all EvoPsych exhibits these flaws. But a lot of it does.

Defining Pseudoscience

Some defining features of pseudoscience are:

  • It pretends to be science (rather than philosophy or science fiction).
  • It declares a certainty far out of proportion to the evidence (it is not properly empirical).
  • It relies on, and continues to defend, fallacious inference procedures (it does not learn).
  • It makes claims that are unfalsifiable in principle.
  • Or declares as known, claims that are unfalsifiable in practice.
  • Or never subjects its claims to falsification tests.

Not all of these features must be present for a claim (or a particular research paper) to be pseudoscience. But the more that are present, the more pseudoscientific it is. The only features that must be present are the first two: it must be pretending to be science; and it’s declarations of certainty must be out of all proportion to the evidence presented. Thus, for example, when cosmologists publish papers on the Ekpyrotic Theory of the Big Bang, proposing that the Big Bang is the outcome of two universes having collided, they do not claim to know this is what happened or even that it’s likely. They merely show that the theory is consistent with existing data and therefore warrants further testing if any tests can be devised (and some of their published research indeed involves finding ways to test it). That’s not pseudoscience. If, however, they claimed that this is probably what happened, simply because it fits the data, they would be promulgating pseudoscience. Indeed, by then they would also be meeting the third criterion: fallacious inference-making. And if they argued it is true and no further tests were needed (or could even rebut them), they’d be meeting one or all of the last three criteria: asserting nonfalsifiable conclusions can be known.

Pseudoscience can also be identified when it relies on false claims (the way Creation Science does). Though I hope that does not commonly happen in EvoPsych, experts have found examples (as Jerry Coyne has documented twice; and admittedly, I found several examples myself—as we’ll see). Pseudoscience can also be identified by the rhetorical tactics used by its defenders. For example, they will use the Esotericism Fallacy, e.g. “Only an astrologer can criticize astrology.” They will insist no one is qualified to judge the merits of EvoPsych as a science except proponents of EvoPsych as a science. Which is, of course, a circular argument, and actually a uniform example of actively avoiding falsification tests. Other tactics include quote mining (e.g. misrepresenting what critics have said so as to avoid responding to what the critics actually said) and goal post moving (e.g. admitting most EvoPsych is only speculative; then elsewhere claiming most of its conclusions are known facts, or acting as if they are) and ad hominem (e.g. “I despise that particular evolutionary biologist; therefore I don’t need to respond to their scientific arguments”). Any science that has to be defended with such devices is automatically suspect as a pseudoscience. Keep an eye out for how many EvoPsych proponents resort to them (even in response to this very article).

But in published research, EvoPsych’s most common failing is its fallacious methodology, often consisting of not even acknowledging the need to describe, much less pass, any adequate falsification test. (1) This is most commonly the case in its frequent failure to even confirm that a behavior widely exists cross-culturally (i.e. universally), a fundamental requirement of assuming it is biologically evolved and not a product of culture. (2) EvoPsych also rarely finds any genetic correlation to a behavior, even though that would almost be necessary to verify it is an evolved trait and not a cultural one (since even a universal behavior could still be a product of convergent cultural evolution, and thus not in fact a sign of biological basis). (3) More problematic still is the rarity of ever even acknowledging the need to rule out accidental (byproduct) explanations of a behavior, much less actually doing so, yet this is one of the most important falsification tests for EvoPsych claims, the failure to pass which guarantees an evolutionary causal claim will always remain speculation and not fact (thus placing it in the same camp as Ekpyrotic Big Bang Theory: a useless result to all but future researchers).

(4) And one of the most common confounding factors for creating accidental behavior effects will be the sudden radical changes in our environment caused by civilization and technology. Genes selected for small-scale tribal survival in the wilderness with primitive technologies will certainly interact with modern civilization and technologies in wholly unpredictable ways, which cannot have been selected for as if magically known in advance. Thus, if you cannot confirm a behavior existed pre-civilization, or was evolved within the very short span of civilization, you cannot confirm that it is a behavior selected for, rather than an accidental byproduct of some other behavior that was selected for.

Agency Overdetection and its pathway to scripture-based monotheism is an example: in no way can we say we were biologically evolved to believe in scripture-based monotheism. We evolved to use language and tools (which combined to accidentally produce writing) and to over-detect intelligent agents in nature (among other things), which just happened to have the accidental byproduct of producing scripture-based monotheism in some cases (in fact, pretty much only once, the others just being developments thereto: Islam came from Christianity which came from Judaism), and, by mere historical contingency, the cultures that acquired that just happened, again by accident, to be the ones that gained rapid advantages in the technological leveraging of power (political, economic, and thermodynamic), thereby overrunning the earth. Cross-culturally, and historically, we can confirm that monotheism is in fact bizarre, not the human universal, and likewise any scripture-based religion in general. It therefore is not a selected-for product of evolution. It is an accidental byproduct of it, and indeed only when conjoined with other unrelated accidents (such as of the rise of civilization and its corresponding technologies and structures).

This makes EvoPsych almost impossible to practice as a genuine science. What it wants to know, is almost always simply impossible to know (at least currently). And consequently, much of its research product ends up more on the pseudoscience end of the spectrum.

To demonstrate this, I will first show why we can expect this to be the case even before examining specific examples illustrating it. Then I will examine what expert critics have said. Then I will look at the best defense of EvoPsych to date, and show that it does not in fact answer these criticisms. Sometimes it even validates them. (I may in future complete a survey of an issue of a popular EvoPsych journal to illustrate these problems as well, but I found that too excessive in time and word count to include here. The following content is sufficient to make the necessary points clear.)

First, Psychology Itself Is Not That Reliable

Based on recent realizations that scientists don’t do math as well as they think,  mathematicians who know what they are doing have started predicting that published papers passing peer review in fields like psychology can actually have an expected false positive rate of at least 30% (or worse). This is known even apart from the findings of John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLoS Medicine 2.8 (2005), which found this problem pervades the sciences; but psychology is known to be among the worst. Multiple studies show that roughly 1 in 3 results claimed to have been “confirmed” by any psych paper’s data, won’t actually have been. Add in more causes of error, besides not knowing how math works, and that rate goes up.

That prediction was empirically proved for psychology by the Reproducibility Project, which found that only 36% of peer reviewed science papers in psychology could be replicated (see also Lots of Bad Science Still Gets Published at Vox). And that’s not the predicted 1 in 3 failure rate but almost 2 in 3; so the reality is even worse than mathematicians expected. That project also found that even of the replicated papers, on average the effect size of the phenomenon reported was half that claimed by the original paper. Overall, original papers were more likely to have given false results when the effect size reported was small—in fact showing a relationship: stronger effect sizes correlated with higher rates of replication (when the original study had a large enough sample size). That’s a significant observation when we realize that EvoPsych papers often find rather small effect sizes (e.g. variances of just ten to twenty percentiles, rather than, say, forty to eighty). And this is all apart from the growing problem of scientific fraud plaguing all fields of study now.

The RP report made this sound observation:

It is too easy to conclude that successful replication means that the theoretical understanding of the original finding is correct. Direct replication mainly provides evidence for the reliability of a result. If there are alternative explanations for the original finding, those alternatives could likewise account for the replication. Understanding is achieved through multiple, diverse investigations that provide converging support for a theoretical interpretation and rule out alternative explanations.

This is crucial, because this is also a criticism of Evolutionary Psychology, which is almost entirely based on inferring causal theories to explain a documented phenomenon, without performing any adequate tests to rule out alternative explanations. The RP researchers note that you can’t do this. If you document a phenomenon, that’s all you have done. You have not therefore confirmed any explanatory model of why that phenomenon exists. Moreover, these researchers found that even just trying to document a phenomenon is highly unreliable in psychology. Only 1 out of every 3 times will an effect be confirmed when double-checked. They admit that failure to replicate does not entail the original results were false, but what it does do is eliminate the ability to claim the effect has been documented. With one paper confirming and another disconfirming, you are back to square one: no reason to believe the effect exists.

Second, Adding Evolutionary Hypotheses Increases That Unreliability

This is basic law of conjunction: the probability of two things being correct must necessarily always be less than the probability of one of them being correct. Famously illustrated by the Conjunction Fallacy. So, since EvoPsych depends on claims being correct in both Evo and Psych, and the latter alone has a reliability rate of only 1 in 3, then the conjoined reliability rate must necessarily be less than 1 in 3. How much less?

Evolutionary Psychology is probably at least twice as unreliable as psychology alone, because EvoPsych makes a double claim: not just that an effect exists, but that it was caused by evolution (and not even merely that, but usually it claims a specific scenario as to how evolution produced the effect, and why). That is what makes it “Evolutionary” Psychology and not just Psychology. We now know that barely 1 in 3 of the effects claimed as documented in psychology actually hold up. That means we can expect the same in EvoPsych: only 1 in 3 of its claimed effects can be trusted to hold up under further scrutiny. But EvoPsych also makes claims about what caused that effect, highly specific claims at that, and notably those claims are almost never based in evidence.

It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Evo side of EvoPsych is more reliable than Psychology. Psychology has access to observable data, and abundant data at that. And yet it only succeeds 1 in 3 times. The evolutionary hypotheses proffered to explain that data have nearly no access to any observable data. And even at their wildly best, never have better access to it. That means the rate of success on that side cannot plausibly be higher than 1 in 3 as well. The conjunction of both therefore will have a reliability rate of 1/3 x 1/3 = 1/9. That means we can reasonably expect only 1 in every 9 claims made under peer review in the field of EvoPsych will turn out to be true. That translates into the success ratio of 10% to 90%.

Which means we can reasonably expect 90% of all EvoPsych is false.

And presently we have no means to determine which claims of EvoPsych are in that 90%. Because the Evo side of it cannot be replicated at all, for lack of access to the data. At most we might be able to bump its success rate closer to 1 in 3 in some cases, if we can at least confirm to a very high certainty that a claimed psychological phenomenon exists. But then the rate of success of proffered explanations of that phenomenon will remain the base rate of success for that side of the equation, which we just determined cannot plausibly be greater than 1 in 3. In fact, it almost certainly must be less.

Unlike the psychological effect itself, which can be confirmed by a direct observation of data, and confirmed to ever greater certainty by increasing the sample size, claims as to how and why it evolved are often based on zero data because scientists cannot observe the population in the past as it was evolving the psychological trait, and usually cannot observe any data pertaining to that process either, and generally EvoPsych researchers never do the next best things, such as make comparative behavioral studies of genetically similar species (e.g. apes) or isolate any genes correlating with and thus causing the studied behavior (and studying their variation within the current population and from our other ape relatives).

And that’s even after assuming that the behavior evolved at all, as opposed to being a product of culture—or a new interaction between genes and the now completely changed environment we live in owing to civilization. If—often unbeknownst to us, because we don’t have time machines with which to check—the behavior is a new one, caused by this change in environment, it is even less likely to have been selected for biologically, at least to produce any fundamental change within the global human population, since civilization as an environment is 4,000 years young at most, or even 200, or even 30 years young depending on which social structures or technologies may be causing the new behavior. EvoPsych almost never rules out either alternative cause (culture rather than genes; or changing behavior caused by recent, and comparatively radical, changes in environment that were not selected for but are, in consequence of the unexpected side-effects of civilization, accidental). After all, we can’t go back 10,000 years and conduct double blind psych studies on people of the time to confirm the effects are the same as observed today. And unless we were so lucky someone had already done it, we can’t do that even for people of thirty years ago.

There is one other thing EvoPsych can do to compensate for this near complete inaccessibility of the data, or the extreme difficulty of conducting fruitful genetic or multicultural or interspecies behavioral studies, and that’s demonstrate mathematically that a behavior will increase Differential Reproductive Success as against alternative variants of the behavior. That isn’t easy to do—often the alternative behaviors are too varied to control for; often the actual effect on DRS requires too many unchecked assumptions on the part of the researcher; etc. But this is also rarely done anyway. And it is not always very reliable, not only because of those confounding problems, but also because it only confirms that a behavior could have been genetically evolved by selection, not that it did. If a behavior arose from cultural selection, it would have the same effect on DRS, without having been genetically coded at all.

The most obvious example of that is modern science: we were not biologically selected to invent vaccines or grow crops without the sun (as we now can do) or colonize outer space (and thus survive an extinction impact event). Yet these things have had, will have, or can have, a positive effect on the DRS of the human populations with access to them. In fact, it will be the exact same effect as if these behaviors had been genetically selected for. But how much of human behavior is like this? Mating behavior, for instance, is highly cultural. In fact, most of what we think of as “marriage” is actually a product of the radically altered conditions of civilization, being a product of the invention of land ownership (and other property, such as herd possession), a very recent change in our genetic history. We thus find radically wide variations in practice—from the polyandry of Nepal and some areas of rural China (and the wife sharing known among various tribes across the world), to the monogamy of the Greco-Romans (which we inherited), to the polygyny of the Israelites and other cultures. Never mind the phenomena of homosexuality and bisexuality, which defy straightforward EvoPsych narratives of what sex evolved to be for. And yet EvoPsych depends on a lot of unproven assumptions about, for example, the biological evolution of sex-related behavior. Reality is likely to be more complicated. We can already observe that it is.

When we consider all of this, claiming the Evo side of EvoPsych is as reliable as the Psych side sounds farcical at best. It surely cannot possibly have a reliability as good as the 1 in 3 psychology has. I therefore have to conclude the percentage of published EvoPsych results that are actually false or unproven must exceed 90%. Probably by a lot.

Third, Many Qualified Experts Concur

Okay. Let’s survey. I will here only quote actual scientists (of evolution, anthropology, or psychology).

  • Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne himself (ironically as you’ll soon see) wrote a paper about “The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology,” called “Of Vice and Men,” for the New Republic in 2000. His opening line is, “In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics,” and then he declares, “The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is ‘evolutionary psychology’, or the science formerly known as sociobiology.” That’s a damning assessment.

Coyne is an evolutionary biologist. His conclusions include:

  • “Evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection.”
  • “Evolutionary psychologists routinely confuse theory and speculation.”
  • Of most of its claims: “Plausible? Maybe. Scientifically testable? Absolutely not.”
  • “Evolutionary psychology functions very much like an ideology” and is used to support ideologies.
  • “So much of evolutionary psychology…is utterly lacking in sound scientific grounding.”
  • Evolutionary psychologists often “use rhetorical tricks that mislead the general reader about their arguments.”
  • EvoPsych consists of too many “just-so” stories that “do not qualify as science” and “do not deserve the assent, or even the respect, of the public.”
  • It too often mistakes tautologies for empirical insights.
  • It too often ignores evidence that contradicts its claims.
  • It too often ignores the role of culture and the fact that cultural evolution can produce identical results.
  • And, above all, evolutionary psychologists ignore the fact that “Human civilization…arose in only the last one-tenth of one percent of the interval since we branched off from our primate ancestors” and therefore “current observations…bear little relation to forces acting in our ancestors,” yet evolutionary psychologists will “proceed to argue for [a] direct-selection hypothesis by using statistics from modern Western societies.”
  • And occasionally, they even grossly misrepresent the evidence.

His prize example: the pseudoscientific monograph A Natural History of Rape. That is a prime example of EvoPsych as pseudoscience. It’s failure to adhere to any credible methodology has been thoroughly documented by dozens of experts.

But apart from that particular example, Coyne notes in general the especially pernicious problem of the inability to rule out accident as the cause of an observed behavior: refusing to pass this basic and necessary falsification test (largely because of the practical inability to take the test) is what nullifies most conclusions in EvoPsych. The persistence of EvoPsych in publishing despite this is what makes the bulk of it a pseudoscience.

And even “byproduct” theories are hard to verify. Though all behavior is a “byproduct” of evolution, that does not mean—again as Coyne himself points out—that any guess you may have of how that byproduct was generated (what the actual selected attributes underlying it are) is scientifically correct. Guessing is not science. Publishing guesses and calling them science is pseudoscience. Unless, of course, all you are doing is proposing a hypothesis for future study, and not proposing a conclusion that you have determined to be even likely the case. But too much in EvoPsych slips from one to the other without warrant. And that’s what makes it largely a pseudoscience.

Coyne now says in the fifteen years since that the field has gotten better. Though he gives no examples of this. Instead he just gives another list of untested speculations. And ironically, he counts the “falsification” of the homosexual kin selection theory as an example of good science, when it is in fact a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience in EvoPsych (as I noted above). Indeed, it exhibits several of the same failures that Coyne himself criticized in the field generally. He has evidently forgotten his own arguments—or isn’t reading the research papers he is now endorsing.

The paper that Coyne thinks falsified the hypothesis of auxiliary selection effects causing homosexuality ignored evidence to the contrary (the thesis is confirmed in cultures closer to our ancestral structures) and studied the wrong society (modern Western homophobic civilization), two things Coyne himself warned made work in EvoPsych pseudoscientific. The authors declared their conclusion’s certainty out of all proportion to the evidence in light of these facts, even as they concede these facts. Though, indeed, they didn’t even consider how their observations would differ in the paleolithic’s decidedly non-Western and non-modern condition of extended family co-location in an economy where, for example, physical combatants defending a family are far more valuable than coined money that didn’t even exist. Worse, other EvoPsych proponents, not just Coyne himself but even actual EvoPsyc researchers under peer review (Confer 2010, discussed below), cite this as “falsifying” the thesis, even though it was wholly incapable of doing so (nor could others, which have committed exactly the same errors). This is what we mean by pseudoscience.

Coyne should heed his own advice from 2011:

Every time I write a piece…thatā€™s critical of evolutionary psychology, I get emails from its practitioners, chewing me out for being so hard on their field. And my response is always the same: Iā€™ll stop being so hard on your field when you guys start being more critical yourselves. If you policed your own discipline better, I wouldnā€™t have to.

Amen.

Even when Coyne tried to defend EvoPsych with the aid of Steven Pinker and asked Pinker what EvoPsych has accomplished of note, Pinker gave him two paragraphs of response that never answered the question. Not even with a single example. That doesn’t bode well.

  • Richard Lewontin

Another renowned critic of EvoPsych is the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin. In The Spandrels of San Marco Revisited: An Interview with Richard C. Lewontin (2015), evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson queries him about his misgivings, and they include a lot of the same ones, and he hasn’t changed his mind about this even after forty years of observing the field (from when it was originally called sociobiology).

Lewontin decries “a tendency to try to find, in every instance, some selective advantage for things,” and thus developing the cursed “just so” stories that typify EvoPsych. Because, in fact, “there are a whole variety of forces that give rise to observed traits and they are not all directly selected for,” whereas EvoPsych is always trying to be overly simplistic and reductive. But biological, psychological, cultural, and environmental reality doesn’t work that way. They are far too complex, and their interaction far more complex still. Consequently he thinks EvoPsych is too arrogant. “We do not have any hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change,” and we need to admit that in most cases we just can’t know what happened. As he says (emphasis mine):

As either a philosopher or biologist, [we ought to] ask in a particular case what is the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a particular story is true or not true. Most of the time weā€™re going to have to say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we havenā€™t the foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution.

And yet, EvoPsych refuses to admit this simple truth, and has become instead “a branch of academic life that consists entirely, as far as I can see, of making up what would seem to be plausible stories.” And as scientists, “I would say thatā€™s not what we are in business to do.”

Amen again.

Lewontin also catches them in their tautological thinking with an example:

For example … [in E.O. Wilson’s seminal book on sociobiology] it is written that aggression is a part of human nature. It says that in the book. It lists features of human nature and aggression is one of them. So then I have said to Ed and others of his school, what do you do about people who have spent almost their entire lives in jail because they refuse to be conscripted into the army? What do you think the answer is? That is their form of aggression.

In other words, aggression is natural to humans, because every conceivable behavior is aggression. Even non-aggression is aggression. Vacuous, unfalsifiable tautologies are practically definitive of pseudoscience. As Lewontin says, “If everything can be said to be a form of aggression, even the refusal to be physically aggressive, what kind of science is that?” Indeed.

  • P.Z. Myers

Myers is an evolutionary biologist who has gone rounds over this with Steven Pinker, an EvoPsych advocate. He summarizes the issues that Pinker keeps avoiding and never addresses in Tackling Pinkerā€™s Defense of Evolutionary Psychology. It’s the follow up to Coyne’s last piece cited above, in which Pinker wouldn’t even answer Coyne’s question. Myers summarizes his criticisms as follows, and indeed Pinker studiously avoids ever addressing them:

Myers objects to “the habit of evolutionary psychologists of taking every property of human behavior, assuming that it is the result of selection, building scenarios for their evolution, and then testing them poorly.” That’s a pretty good summary of the problem. But to see why, consider his elaboration:

The repertoire of human behavior is so complex and rich, and relatively recently evolved, that to argue that every behavior is the product of specific selection imposes an untenable genetic load. The bulk of the genetic foundation of our psychology (and I agree that there must be one!) must be byproducts and accidents. The null hypothesis of evolutionary psychology should be that a behavior is non-adaptive, yet for some reason all I ever see is adaptive hypotheses.

First, EvoPsych imagines such a vast repertoire of evolved stimulus-response psychological mechanisms as to require a vast genetic apparatus that simply isn’t found in the human genome. Once you subtract what we share with Chimpanzees, for example, and then subtract what remains to govern human-specific non-neural organ development and mangement, very little remains. This entails that human psychology must be built out of a much smaller series of more generic substrate mechanisms than evolutionary psychology research comes anywhere near to allowing. This is one reason that its refusal to look for the genetic basis for anything is a problem: had they done that, they might have noticed the problem Myers is calling attention to. How they imagine the evolution of the brain is physically impossible. This does not mean none of the actual biology of human psychology evolved. What it means is that most of the claims about that made by EvoPsych cannot be true. Their claims are simply too numerous, too complex, to have any plausible connection to human genetics. I can’t evaluate that claim myself. But it seems pretty clearly correct. And Pinker makes no reply. Nor has any EvoPsych proponent I know.

Second, and more to my area of understanding as a historian and philosopher of science, Myers is right about method: EvoPsych needs to test the non-adaptive hypothesis for any claim first. It should not be assuming every human behavior is a product of biological adaptation. That’s pseudoscience. Too many of our behaviors are products of culture (as cross-cultural and historical studies show), too many are simply intellectual innovations that could in no way have been adaptively predicted by biological evolution. And even when biological, too many are just random accidents, byproducts of other adaptive functions, and genetic drift. EvoPsych almost never does anything to rule out these alternative explanations of its observations. And that’s really what makes it pseudoscientific. Because a real science would not make knowledge claims about the causes of an observation without ruling out other known causes of observations in the same domain (human behaviors).

Myers then criticizes EvoPsych for making other kinds of meaningless, unempirical claims, such as that there are “modules” in the brain (or genome?) governing every specific behavior it makes claims about. But it never does anything to discover that they exist. “Evolutionary psychologists donā€™t do neurobiology, and they donā€™t do genetic dissections, and they donā€™t do molecular genetics, so why do they insist on modularity?” They won’t do any of the tests needed to verify that such things exist. So how can they claim they exist? This is a problem of the first order. It’s one of the reasons EvoPsych remains almost always speculation, not fact. Yet EvoPsych authors treat speculations as probable, and sometimes even certain fact, all the time (the closing defense paper I discuss does so repeatedly). That’s pseudoscience. That’s just like pretending we “know” the Ekpyrotic Big Bang theory is true, simply because we can make it fit the data. Never mind the need to find evidence that the other required universe that bumped into ours exists.

Myers points out that of course the brain evolved. But we know too little about the early environment we evolved into—not nothing about it, too little about it—to sustain most of EvoPsych’s certitude about how things worked and evolved then or how people behaved then. Claiming to know the unknowable is pseudoscience. The people today, especially “Western college grads” (almost the only subjects ever studied), but even especially Westerners of any kind, and even most people on earth, do not live at all as, or interact at all with the same environment as, our evolutionary ancestors. Thus studying human behaviors in these alien cultures is all but useless. The genes we evolved to have, are interacting now with radically different environments than they original evolved to interact with. That renders most EvoPsych conclusions all but worthless. They are studying the wrong subjects, in the wrong environment. To then say they are studying what they claim to be but aren’t, is pseudoscience.

  • Jonathan Marks

In “Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither” (2015), biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks adds more to the critique. For one, most other scientists of human nature observe that human beings are remarkably adaptable, not remarkably adapted. Yet EvoPsych effectively denies the observed reality (that we have adapted in fact to be highly adaptable, far more than we have adapted to any particular environment or condition), and insists on the contrary (that we have been molded to a certain bygone environment, and that this explains everything about us). Somewhere in between a sensible EvoPsych thesis can be found (there being some mixture of both facts), but you won’t find this in published EvoPsych research, which is only concerned with finding fixed human adaptations, rather than with explaining, and exploring the scope of, how we are so vastly more cognitively adaptable than any other animal.

Even more serious is the straight up pseudoscience that EvoPsych churns out, ignoring cultural realities, and resorting to hasty generalizations based on selectively biased data, a common characteristic of pseudoscience:

My personal favorite is the claim that 37 different cultures attest to the divergent features that men and women like in mates, which can now be safely ascribed to nature—until you control for gendered economic inequality, at which point the apparent divergence disappears.[Eagly & Wood 1999] It wasnā€™t nature at all; it was history and sloppy scientific reasoning. My second personal favorite is the presumptively evolved disposition for men to be attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.67, the same as that of the stereotypical 36-24-36 Hollywood starlet. Again, naively cross-culturally supported, until you try to control for familiarity with Hollywood. Then it breaks down quickly.[Yu & Shepard 1998] Again, history and sloppy scientific reasoning; what passes for cross-cultural generalization in evolutionary psychology tends to appall scholars actually familiar with cross-cultural analyses.[Fuentes 2012]

Amen.

Marks also observes that (emphasis mine):

Our knowledge of human evolution tells us that (1) non-adaptive or even maladaptive traits can evolve under appropriate demographic conditions (notably, small population size); (2) those were precisely the conditions under which the great bulk of human evolution occurred; and (3) origin and modern use do not map well onto one another, for either biological or cultural traits.  Consequently, there is not the slightest reason to think that any specific feature has to have an adaptive explanation, much less that we have a reliable method for ascertaining it.

As I already noted. Hence with good reason Marks concludes:

[T]he methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science. For a notable example, it is apparently a revelation to evolutionary psychology that one cannot readily generalize about the human condition from a sample of humans that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Perhaps this was news in psychology—creationist, evolutionary, or otherwise—but, sad to say, everybody else who works with cultural diversity knew that a really long time ago.

He’s simply not wrong about that. Yet this fatal problem is widely ignored in EvoPsych.

  • J.J. Bolhuis et al.

These points have been supported by even teams of analysts. In J.J. Bolhuis et al., “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology.” PLoS Biol 9.7 (2011), we find several conclusions well documented to the detriment of even fundamental EvoPsych premises:

(1) The evidence actually suggests human evolution may operate at a faster pace than EvoPsych requires, such that its assumption of ancient environments being wholly determinative of present biology is false. Though this only complicates the problem, since that means some of our traits evolved in that ancient period (which ones?) while others evolved in adaptation to civilization (which ones?), while the latter poses the further problem that civilization has ramped up the rapidity of its own change: the civilization environment of humans 4,000-1,000 years ago was notably different than 1,000-200 years ago which was in turn notably different than 200-50 years ago which was in turn notably different than 50-20 years ago which is in turn notably different than 20 years ago to the present (when even goat herders in Afghanistan have cellphones and use electronic currencies). How does one determine what evolved? And when? For what environment? There is hardly any real methodology for that.

(2) “Neuroscientists have been aware since the 1980s that the human brain has too much architectural complexity for it to be plausible that genes specify its wiring in detail,” essentially Myers’s point. “The notion of universalism has led to the view that undergraduates at Western universities constitute a representative sample of human nature, a view that has been subject to criticism from anthropologists and psychologists,” and rightly so, because it is not at all tenable—it is in fact a pseudoscientific assumption. And “Recent trends in developmental psychology and neuroscience have instead stressed the malleability of the human brain, emphasizing how experience tunes and regulates synaptic connectivity, neural circuitry and gene expression in the brain, leading to remarkable plasticity in the brain’s structural and functional organization,” thus casting into extreme doubt most EvoPsych claims for a remarkably unchanging neural hardwiring lasting tens of thousands of years, in the face of evidence of the contrary fact of extreme adaptibility rather than adaptedness. Essentially Marks’s point.

(3) “The view that a universal genetic programme underpins human cognition is also not fully consistent with current genetic evidence.” In fact, “Humans are less genetically diverse than many species, including other apes, largely because human effective population sizes were small until around 70,000 years ago,” and yet, “there is enough genetic variation to have supported considerable adaptive change in the intervening time, and recent thinking amongst geneticists is that our species’ unique reliance on learned behaviour and culture may have relaxed allowable thresholds for large-scale genomic diversity,” and the evidence abundantly supports that very conclusion: we have evolved into cognitive generalists, not the kaleidescopically cognitive specialists all EvoPsych research portrays us as.

(4) “Human behavioral genetics has also identified genetic variation underlying an extensive list of cognitive and behavioural characteristics,” thus challenging any claim that certain traits were adaptively selected for—when clearly, after tens of thousands of years, the variance was clearly adaptively selected for. That’s why it remains robust across all populations. Notably, for example, psychological traits are far more similar between the sexes, than basic physical characteristics like height and innate muscle development, greatly undermining a key analogy in EvoPsych reasoning—in fact, as everyone agrees, women vary far more among each other in psychological attributes than they do from men, and vice versa, which indicates humans have been evolving toward cognitive parity between the sexes, rather than adaptive differentiation, undermining another common assumption in EvoPsych research.

(5) “The thesis of massive modularity is not supported by the neuroscientific evidence,” in fact “there is no evidence for modularity in central systems such as those involved in learning and memory.” So much for Pinker’s magical modules. When your science ignores the fact that the other sciences are contradicting the foundational assumptions of your science, your science might be a pseudoscience. In fact, “comparative psychology presents an unassailable case for the existence of domain-general mechanisms.” (Remember that point. It will become relevant later.)

(6) “Evolutionary psychologists rarely examine whether their hypotheses regarding evolved psychological mechanisms are supported by what is known about how the brain works.” Once again. When your science is ignoring the findings of other sciences fundamentally relevant to your science, your science might be a pseudoscience.

(7) EvoPsych needs to start doing experiments in social learning, to see what can and can’t be unlearned by a change in culture and cognition, so as to isolate what actually is biological, and what is actually instead just picked up from one’s parents, peers, and culture, and from their own exploration of their environment (trial & error learning; social learning from observing the cause-effect experiences of others; etc.).

(8) And most fundamentally again (emphasis mine):

Evolutionary psychologists have conducted hundreds of empirical studies to test the predictions generated by consideration of evolutionary arguments. However, we should be clear that such studies do not test the evolutionary hypotheses themselves, but rather test whether the predictions about the psychological mechanisms have been upheld. For example, the numerous studies supporting the hypothesis that human beings are predisposed to detect cheaters in social situations are consistent with several evolutionary explanations. While the original researchers reasoned that cheater detection has resulted from a selective history of reciprocal altruism, alternative evolutionary explanations, for instance that a history of cultural group selection has selected for this trait, and non-evolutionary explanations, are also plausible.

In other words, by failing to rule out plausible alternative explanations for all of its results, EvoPsych has actually failed to prove anything at all. That’s pretty pseudoscientific if you ask me.

These researchers also recommend that EvoPsych get off its butt and start doing population genetics, as that’s the only way it can start ruling out alternative explanations and narrowing possibilities of biological basis. They suggest other methods be adopted from better-established sciences, like social learning experimentation, and ecology. And they point out that massive cross-cultural studies are essential to EvoPsych, just as they are in ecology (which studies the analog of diverse populations and environments to look for universal ecological laws), because only then can EvoPsych start to talk informedly about “what percentage of the variance in [human] behaviour is explained by local ecology and what percentage is better predicted by cultural history.” In other words, that’s the only way to rule out cultural causes, which in turn is the only way to rule in biological causes. It is, in other words, very nearly the only logically valid way to do EvoPsych. Yet it is almost never what EvoPsych does.

That’s enough for now. I could add the voices of psychologists Christopher Ryan and Brad Peters, psychologists Russell Gray, Megan Heaney & Scott Fairhall, neuropsychologists Jaak and Jules Panksepp, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, anthropologists J.B. Cohen & H.R. Bernard, medical scientist Ben Goldacre, philosopher of mind David Buller, and philosophers of science Robert Richardson and Jonathan Michael Kaplan … or if you want even more, Wikipedia has a whole article for you. As does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That’s a lot of experts pointing out serious and fatal flaws in what EvoPsych is doing. None of which EvoPsych experts have ever presented an adequate response to. And getting all in a huff about that is unproductive. You need to fix EvoPsych. It’s that simple. Or else these criticisms will remain unanswered, and EvoPsych will remain 90% pseudoscience.

I will at this point reiterate my warning: EvoPsych defenders will predictably ignore everything I’ve actually said, quote mine me as if I said something else, rebut what I didn’t say, and claim to have rebutted what I did say. Do please notice when they do that. Because it confirms my thesis.

Fourth, Defenses of EvoPsych Remain Inadequate

No one has adequately answered these criticisms. EvoPsych defenders typically ignore what their critics are actually saying, and rebut something they didn’t say, and then pretend to have rebutted what was originally said. Which is a big red flag for pseudoscience. The best defense they have is that “not all EvoPsych is pseudoscience,” which is just repeating what all of its critics have already said: they agree with that. That is not rebutting the criticism: that a lot of it still looks like pseudoscience (or at best really bad philosophy). Or its defenders will admit EvoPsych is speculative. But critics don’t have a problem with responsibly speculative hypothesis proposals. They are criticizing the ubiquity of irresponsible speculations (those that have inadequate grounding in the data to even warrant publication, or pose no evident means of falsification) and the repeated treating of speculations as if they were conclusions (EvoPsych proponents, and especially their fans, do this so frequently as to be wholly irresponsible, even if this mostly occurs outside the controls of peer review—though as we shall see, it occurs even there). So admitting that most EvoPsych is speculation is again not rebutting what its critics are saying.

Possibly the best (and most official) attempt to defend EvoPsych from its endless (and expert) critics is Jaime Confer et al.’s “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65.2 (February-March 2010), pp. 110-26. It notes some examples of successes in EvoPsych. For instance:

Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment.

Assuming this was indeed established cross-culturally enough to be a confirmed universal (I didn’t check), then this would indeed be evidence for evolved perception-fear circuits in the brain in response to those stimuli. The difference in intensity and frequency of fears for those stimuli vs. others that relate to things even more dangerous now supports a biological origin. And the DRS mathematics showing the benefit of such a selection process would likely be strong. Likewise, other autonomic examples like this include our innate ability to temporarily suppress hunger when faced with a fearsome stimulus.

But none of that involves complex behavior. It’s merely a simple stimulus-response cascade. None of it is cognitive. Fearing snakes, for example, is innate and near-enough universal; but beliefs about snakes vary; and no complex cognitive understanding of cultural or social relationships is required to have a fear response to a direct stimulus. This is extraordinarily different from having evolved the ability to think of, plan, and execute a rape, for example, fully conscious of what you are doing. Or knowing the difference between what a mate is and what a friend or sibling is and only feeling jealousy when the one has sex with someone else and not the other. That’s a lot of complex things to understand, before the emotion even makes sense, much less can be triggered. Likewise other complex behaviors such as mate selection, gender etiquette, or monogamy preference. Remember the distinction earlier between agency overdetection, an autonomic phenomenon, and having a religion. Pointing out successes in the autonomic realm in no way endorses success in the cognitive realm. To think that it does would be pseudoscientific. We need comparable examples of successes in the cognitive realm. This paper cites none. Not even one.

The paper then tries to answer critics under eight headings. None actually respond to what critics are saying.

  • (1) Using Improper Tests

This paper says “evolutionary psychologists sometimes use methods not typically used by psychologists, such as comparative analyses across species, ethnographic records, archeological records, paleontological data, and life-history data,” but in fact it is the rarity with which these forms of evidence are actually consulted in the publication record that is the problem with EvoPsych. If consulting such evidence were mandated by peer review within the field, for any claim that cannot be established without passing falsification tests against such data (e.g. “Is the behavior you are studying present across the entire ethnographic record, or are you only studying weirdos?”), then a major channel of pseudoscience could be avoided. But that is not happening. And that is precisely the problem.

This is illustrated when Confer et al. claim the homosexual kin selection hypothesis “has been refuted” (p. 114) by studies not even logically capable of doing that (as demonstrated above, under my discussion of Coyne). They don’t even get the point: they are here ignoring the very thing critics are saying, that by ignoring the enormous environmental changes human societies have undergone, changes directly relevant to the question, and by ignoring the crucial role of culture in determining the channeling of behavior, they cannot be producing valid results with studies like these. Yet they cite invalid results as conclusive. That is pseudoscientific.

More broadly, they admit “just so” stories are not science, but they don’t respond to the criticism that most published EvoPsych consists of precisely those. Yes, we agree it’s possible to have strong, falsifiable, and even falsification-passing results in EvoPsych. We are not concerned with what’s possible. We are concerned with what is actually passing for results in Evo-Psych—and it isn’t that. Rarely are proper falsification tests engaged upon any claim in the peer reviewed EvoPsych literature (even the studies they cite on the homosexuality kin-selection question illustrate this). That’s the problem. And Confer et al. do not even acknowledge this as being the problem, much less offer any rebuttal to it. They are therefore not responding to what their critics are actually saying.

  • (2) Not Accounting for Generalization of Function

The second general criticism they address is the point that most human behavior is the complex product of simpler and more generalized reasoning skills, and not actually biologically innate. The absurdity of Confer et al.’s response is that they think this is ridiculous. When in fact it should be obvious. Rejecting obvious facts in pursuit of a dogmatic need to defend one’s field is indicative of pseudoscience. Most human behavior is a product of an array of generalized reasoning skills (problem solving, symbolic reasoning, social reasoning, planning, mind-reading, etc.). This is in fact what characterizes human evolution generally: unlike other animals, we are generalists. Our teeth and our hands reflect this trend towards generalization of function. Our brains have obviously trended the same. That’s why we can play violins, conduct social life on an ‘internet’, speak dozens of languages, and land men on the moon.

Our extraordinary innovativeness and adaptability would be impossible if our behavior was not primarily driven by generalized functions of thought and problem solving. This is also why humans respond so profoundly to education, self-reflection, and psychological therapy. We have an extraordinary ability to alter and command our behaviors, beliefs, desires, and attitudes. It is not universal, some things are too inborn to wholly control (although sometimes even those we can work around with compensating behaviors, running software patches on our broken hardware: the protocols of scientific method, for example, are essentially just that). But most of our behavior is obviously the product of generalized cognitive functions (as the entirety of modern civilization itself attests). The evidence that this is the case is vast and beyond dispute. So to deny it is ridiculous.

They of course present no evidence supporting their denial. They deliver armchair arguments instead, of the sort Aquinas might have attempted to prove the earth is the center of the universe. Critics of course aren’t denying that some specific behavior modules might exist. What they are saying is that you can’t ignore the role of generalized functions either. The Confer team embarrassingly straw mans the argument as being a claim to some sort of “universal rationality,” which in fact no critic has ever claimed or would ever believe. So their refutations of it are wholly irrelevant to what their critics are actually saying. We are saying, rather, that there is obviously in our brain a collection of highly generic desires modulated by a system of highly generic problem solving tools.

The Confer team doesn’t respond to this (our actual) criticism. Nor do they recognize that the critics are not claiming they can prove that a behavior derives from some interplay of generic systems. To the contrary, these critics are saying that evolutionary psychologists cannot prove a behavior does not. Or at least, not without a far more extraordinary collection of evidence than EvoPsych ever seems able to gather. In fact we almost never have the means to tease apart the effects of generic and specific behavioral and reasoning systems in the brain. And that means we have to just accept that most of what EvoPsych wants to know, we just can’t know. Just as Lewontin pointed out.

They hang all their hopes on one single example (even though you can’t prove a generalization with one example; and not knowing how logic works is another indicator of pseudoscientific thinking): “The predictability and rapidity of menā€™s jealousy in response to cues of threats to paternity points to a specialized psychological circuit rather than a response caused by deliberative domain-general rational thought” (p. 115). Here they are wrong both on the facts and their inference model. The “predictability” is not there. Too many men don’t react this way at all; many men react in quite the reverse way; and how men react to jealousy is extremely varied by culture, experience, and upbringing. They have taken a claim that they didn’t test in any adequately cross-cultural way, and an effect size that is actually too small to warrant their conclusion (the outlier space is simply too large), and then claim it is a scientific fact. That is pseudoscience.

It’s particularly embarrassing because the emotion of jealousy is not even specific to sexual (much less, as they aver, “paternity”) interests. Men (and women) express jealousy over the distribution of affection (and even material resources) among siblings, parents, friends, and coworkers. So the EvoPsych model doesn’t even explain the actual activation of the emotion in practice. In fact, intensity of jealousy-response tends to correspond to previously honed and considered worldview assumptions, and thus appears to be a cognitive product of reasoning: men are taught to be jealous, depending on how much their culture tells them they need to save face with their peers, how much it tells them women are their property, how much it tells them they need to secure a woman’s sole affection and attention (and labor). This is why jealousy responses vary so much across cultures and subcultures, and so readily change with reflection and worldview shift (more on that later).

They think citing a bunch of studies that find sex differences in jealousy-response in similar modern cultures (yet never studying any cultures that are relevantly different on this dimension) proves their biological hypothesis. And they cite this as an example of EvoPsych withstanding verification. But that is pseudoscientific thinking. Publishing a thousand papers that are incapable of verifying your hypothesis cannot verify your hypothesis.

Whereas, in fact, properly conducted studies have refuted their hypothesis. For example, Christopher Carpenter, in “Meta-Analyses of Sex Differences in Responses to Sexual Versus Emotional Infidelity: Men and Women Are More Similar than Different,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 36.1 (March 2012), found that when you ask the right questions (and not questions rigged to get the results the researcher expects), “both sexes tended to be more upset by emotional than sexual infidelity when forced to choose which type of infidelity was more distressing” and “both sexes indicated that sexual infidelity was more distressing than emotional when asked to rate their level of distress separately for each using continuous measures.” So much for the claim of sex differences in jealousy reaction. When you are claiming as fact what has been scientifically refuted, you are doing pseudoscience.

Similarly, Ralph B. Hupka and Adam L. Bank, in “Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution or Social Construction?” Cross-Cultural Research 30.1 (February 1996), also tested the EvoPsych claim that “sex differences in the dislike of sexual or emotional infidelity supported the socio-biological hypothesis of men (i.e., most men) having evolved sexual jealousy, whereas women (i.e., most women) evolved emotional jealousy.” They did not find that that was the case. To the contrary, “over 50% of the men and women reported greater upset over imagined emotional infidelity.” That’s a problem. They also found that why people varied in their responses corresponded to socially constructed assumptions about gender—which cannot have biologically evolved (we have to learn that).

Similarly, Lars Penke and Jens Asendorpf, in “Evidence for Conditional Sex Differences in Emotional but Not in Sexual Jealousy at the Automatic Level of Cognitive Processing,” European Journal of Personality 22.1 (1 February 2008) found “no evidence for a sex difference in jealousy,” despite testing a sample of 284 subjects. Even what small differences some of their tests found were, like most psychological variances between men and women (a fact EvoPsych consistently ignores), not even at ten percentiles: 77% of women reported being more concerned about emotional than sexual infidelity; and 63% of men said the same. How can a behavior that exists in only a third of men (the “excess” interest in sexual fidelity among men the Confer team insists is fact) have been a biological adaptation? Wouldn’t what manifests in the majority of men be more indicative of our evolution? (If this is a result of evolution at all; EvoPsych, remember, never actually shows that it is.) Penke and Asendorpf’s study also found that even this sex difference decreased among the high-school educated: respondents who completed school were less preoccupied with sexual infidelity than drop-outs. Not only did that decrease the difference between men and women, but both men and women became less preoccupied with sexual infidelity in result of finishing high school. As that difference in achievement strongly tracks social class, and education transmits culture, this is evidence for sex differences in jealousy being a product of culture.

Even Brad Sagarin et al., in “Sex Differences in Jealousy: A Meta-Analytic Examination,” Evolution & Human Behavior 33.6 (November 2012), who surveyed the entire body of research, including 40 papers in all, though essentially useless (since so many use invalid methods, as just noted, it doesn’t matter how many of them there are), found some troubling things even in the body of work that found sex differences in jealousy:

  • “Studies using nonrandom samples (typically student samples) produced significantly larger effects than studies using random samples. This is a troubling finding for the theory of evolved sex differences in jealousy, as it shows that the studies with the greatest generalizability (those with random selection) yielded smaller effects.”
  • The reproducible effect across all studies was actually small (barely a ten percentile difference between male and female responses; or a confidence interval inclusive of same). It is hard to explain how such a small difference can be a product of the EvoPsych selection hypothesis.
  • And this was even when you loosen the p-value to 0.09 (almost double the already problematically loose standard of 0.05). So the effect is also not very well established to high standards of certainty, even despite so many hundreds of subjects having been tested.
  • Even the one group that they could find an effect at p = 0.03 was small and wildly variant: studies of responses to actual infidelity. Of those, “the largest study—and the only study with a random sample—showed a very small, nonsignificant effect” (a variance of only a few percentiles).
  • The effect size varied significantly with group tested (students differed from nonstudents, young from old, educated from uneducated, people tested in the 90s from people tested now). That does not look like biology. Though Sagarin presents “just-so” biological explanations of it (illustrating the rampant trend toward just that kind of pseudoscience in this field).
  • The studies overall did not actually demonstrate a sex difference in emotions of “anger; hurt; disgust; or, for that matter, distress or upset” but in fact only jealousy alone. Consequently, they conclude “the present results support the perspective that jealousy is a unique, functional emotion that is not isomorphic with other negative emotions.” What evidently does not occur to them is that jealousy minus “anger; hurt; disgust; distress; and upset” is not called jealousy. It’s called envy. They have been measuring the wrong thing.
  • Moreover, the EvoPsych hypothesis is refuted by this revelation. The EvoPsych hypothesis requires jealousy to motivate men to get angry/hurt/disgusted/distressed/upset so as to initiate “paternity control” defensive actions. But if most of these studies have not even been testing that, but merely jealousy independent of precisely those emotions, then it has not been supporting the EvoPsych hypothesis at all.

I would add another point as well. Though they claim the effect still persists “cross-culturally,” they do not identify which cultures were compared. Often EvoPsych studies will compare, for example, American and Norwegian cultures, and claim this is an adequate test: two modern Western liberal high-tech societies? I doubt that. What we want to know is if the effect holds up in cultures we should expect it might not, e.g. polyandrous societies, and societies with open wife sharing. No one has ever even realized they should be asking that question. Much less answered it. And yet that’s the only cross-cultural test that can constitute a real test of the persistence claim.

When we add all that up, the Confer paper’s pride in this being a well-confirmed result in EvoPsych actually exposes the pseudoscientific nature of the field as a whole.

  • (3) Ruling Out Culture (Learning & Socialization)

EvoPsych proponents usually do admit that “it offers a truly interactionist framework” and that (at least most) “evolutionary psychologists fully accept the potential importance of environmental influences” (pp. 116, 117). But no one has told this to most EvoPsych researchers who don’t take into account how this interaction can produce different outcomes as the environment changes and thus the interaction changes, as with the homosexuality kin selection argument. EvoPsych arguments almost always assume genetic determinism, and do not recognize cultural variability. They deny this (see below), but this denial is not born out in practice when one surveys their published research. And it’s what EvoPsych actually does that critics are objecting to; not what EvoPsych claims to be doing.

Nor do many evolutionary psychologists take into account the complexity of this socialization interaction. As with the analogy of agency overdetection and scripture-based monotheism: most of the latter is socialized, not genetic; the genetic underpinnings are far more generic and don’t actually have anything directly to do with religion, much less any specific set of religious ideas. This at least I think most EvoPsych literature agrees with. But not all examples follow this correct distinction. So saying they all do is not answering the critics, who are saying EvoPsych is not adequately taking this into account. This article claims they do, but provides no examples of it. And the examples one could randomly pick do not usually corroborate it, either. So this is not answering the critics. If EvoPsych studies mostly don’t even check for cultural causation as the alternative hypothesis or contributing cause, they aren’t doing science. Unless they admit that when they fail to do this, they have not produced any verifiable conclusions, until that alternative is finally properly tested and teased out. But EvoPsych publications tend to be overly triumphal, and less like cosmology papers, which are explicit in declaring that they have not proven anything (other than what to look for in future).

Nor is the fact that genes and environment interact helpful to the point. Critics agree that that must be the case. Everyone is an interactionist. What they disagree with is that we have the means to separate genes and environment in any way that can produce reliable knowledge in all but the fewest of cases, yet EvoPsych papers keep being published that claim to have done the impossible, yet failed to do so by any logically valid means. So on this point again, no answer is being given to the actual criticism. Even this paper only speaks of what’s theoretically possible. They never address the actual EvoPsych literature and whether it accomplishes any of the things thus claimed.

Worse, this paper, in attempting to defend EvoPsych, actually cites the pseudoscientific “gendered toys” papers as if these were an example of good science, when in fact they are precisely the kind of pseudoscience critics are attacking as inane.

In Gerianne Alexander & Melissa Hines, “Sex Differences in Response to Children’s Toys in Nonhuman Primates,” Evolution & Human Behavior 23.6 (1 November 2002) and Janice Hassett et al., “Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy Preferences Parallel Those of Children,” Hormones & Behavior 54.3 (August 2008), they claimed even monkeys showed the same sex difference in toy choice as 21st century American children: girls play with Dolls, Cooking Pots, and Teddy Bears, boys play with Trucks, Police Cars, and Balls. In the first study, more specifically: a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog (in the second study, wheeled toys and plush toys)—not one of which would be meaningful to a monkey, of any gender. Never mind that monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do, that trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in, that human boys play with dolls as often as girls (I never went anywhere without my G.I. Joe, whom I also dressed; today, kids play with Action Figures, as did I), and that the Teddy Bear was originally a boy’s toy. Culture is seriously confounding here, and the thesis illogical. It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience. (And why are we studying monkeys, our most distant primate ancestors, when we actually have sex-difference studies of tool use and play in our much closer cousins the Chimpanzees? Oh, right, because those results don’t support the sexist assumptions of these researches…though, of course, humans still aren’t Chimpanzees, either.)

Professor Letitia Meynell has surveyed many of the outlandish things in the first study (a draft of her detailed critique can be found here):

  • “Because ‘object preference’ is defined [in the study] in terms of contact, if a monkey had violently attacked a toy it would count as an expression of preference.”
  • “The observation time, just a few hours in all, is insufficient for the careful development and application of ethograms of the kind used by ethologists in the field.”
  • “While [human] girls may express female behavior patterns associated with cooking utensils, a pot is not, in Alexander and Hinesā€™s terms, ‘an opportunity for nurturance’ for a vervet monkey. Nor, indeed, do pots typically appear in the vervetā€™s natural environment and they could not have been a part of a behavioral pattern for a shared ancestor 25 million years ago” (nor in fact even 6,000 years ago).
  • “The very idea of a gendered toy suggests a stimulus, the toy, that tends to prompt specific play behavior because the toy has recognizable features that are salient to the animal and the behavior in question. Pots cannot have such salience to a non-cooking animal.” In fact, “it is unlikely that books, cars, balls, dolls and soft toys do either” (even the dolls and soft toys used did not resemble infant monkeys in any fashion cognizable to a monkey).
  • “There is little reason to think that the toys are salient to the vervets in any way that relevantly resembles the ways in which they are salient to human children, which is required if the study is to justify Alexander and Hinesā€™s conclusion about human evolution.”
  • The study found, perversely for its thesis, “females and males spent more time in contact with pots than dolls.”
  • The study thus hedged that toys were female-preferred because they were pinkish in color, citing the equally pseudoscientific EvoPsych study falsely claiming evolved gendered color preferences that is even more embarrassingly bad science (that ignored cultural variation yet again).
  • “It seems fairly clear that by their own lights, Alexander and Hinesā€™s experiment lacks crucial controls for color preferences, which presumably renders their positive results irrelevant.” In any other science, that mistake would not pass peer review.
  • “The assumption at the base of this account, that reddish-pink things are opportunities for nurturance because primate infant faces are pink, is problematic as not all primate infant faces are reddish-pink. Within our own species there are a wide variety of different facial colors and, by Alexander and Hinesā€™s logic, one might expect a dominant female preference in the human population for various shades of brown,” a subtle dig at the inherent racism in their methodological assumptions (“Oh, right, we forgot humans used to all be black!”).
  • The study admits that “because the males had greater contact time with the toys overall they may have had the same amount of contact time with feminine toys as the females did.” Oh really.
  • “Even with this approach to data analysis, Alexander and Hines report that the males ‘had similar percent contact with “masculine” and “feminine” toys’, implying that they equally prefer masculine and feminine objects; only the female vervets showed preferences similar to their human cousins.”
  • “We can see that some subjects revealed no object preferences (only 33 of 44 males and 30 of 44 females came in contact with the toys).” Seriously.
  • “We cannot see if all the females revealed similar tendencies with, say, each female contacting the feminine objects, or if there was a wide variance in behaviors among females.” (This ignoring of the “variance with and the overlap between sexes of sex-typed traits” belies a common pseudoscientific assumption in EvoPsych.)

Her overall conclusion is correct:

The more closely one looks at the study and tries to understand the actual behaviors, stimuli, developmental pathways, and evolutionary mechanisms, the more difficult it becomes to make a coherent evolutionary story from Alexander and Hinesā€™s data. Without a more detailed account of the actual behavior and the causation of that behavior it is difficult to see how a plausible evolutionary account can be found.

The researchers even use single anecdotes to make sweeping claims about sex differences (the behavior of a single subject, is assumed to indicate the tendencies of all members of that sex), which is quintessential pseudoscience. The second study, bizarrely, these researchers heralded as confirming their results, when in fact they contradicted them, finding that “male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences.” Notice that Hines & Alexander found the opposite: total variability in male monkey preferences and only selectiveness in female monkey preferences!

And the same issues abound in that study, too. Why would monkeys know what wheels are? Or care? If you look at the Chimpanzee studies, a possible hypothesis forms: male-female primate differences appear to reflect violence-based dominance play in small groups, a behavioral mechanism no longer typical in human populations; young male primates thus practice motions typical of inflicting harm; they actually don’t know or care what the motion is with. The Hassett team did absolutely nothing to control for this hypothesis. Their results thus failed to establish any conclusion. (If their methods can even be trusted at all. See a critique here.)

This is, overall, just terrible, terrible science. This is the phrenology Jerry Coyne was talking about. And yet this is what Confer et al. are citing as their best example of good EvoPsych.

I hardly need say more. This is not how you answer your critics. This is how you shoot your foot.

Confer et al. also, notably, cite a very old study, by B.S. Low, “Cross-Cultural Patterns in the Training of Children: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 103 (1989), as confirming the EvoPsych hypothesis that parents evolved to police their daughter’s sexuality. It does no such thing. This is another example of pseudoscientifically claiming something that was never proved, is an established scientific fact, and a “good” example (!) of EvoPsych. In this case, they cherry picked it I’m sure because it is one of the very rare instances of an EvoPsych study actually employing some attempt at a highly diverse cross-cultural comparative study.

Of this the Confer team says, “In a massive cross-cultural study, Low found support for the evolution-based daughter guarding hypothesis in a study of 93 cultures—girls across cultures are taught to be more sexually restrained than boys” (p. 118). That is false. The study cited does not say that. Low’s research found this disparity only in 78 of the 93 cultures studied, and almost all of them were polygynous and thus intrinsically male-dominant sexist societies in which women were culturally coded as the property of men (notably, polyandrous societies—the very ones that should have been examined for comparison—were included in the data examined but never discussed in respect to this variable). The report also only says that girls were “more intensely” reinforced on that variable than boys in those 78 cultures, not how much more (in other words, the actual effect size was not discussed).

Moreover, Low explicitly found that sex differences in child rearing varied significantly with the structural differences in the cultural system they had to navigate as adults. This actually disconfirms EvoPsych explanations, and rather verifies that people adapt to the cultural system they find themselves in, and develop the strategy that works within that system. This is not biology at play. Biology can at most underlie the more basic needs operating in decision making, such as the need to succeed within the system one finds oneself in. But those systems vary too much for humans to have evolved a specific strategy for doing so. To the contrary, even Low’s data (which actually ignored cultures not conforming to the thesis paradigm) shows that humans evolved a generic skill of adapting to and succeeding within novel social systems.

One of Low’s most relevant findings was that “the larger the size of the social group…the more [both sons and daughters] are taught to be obedient, sexually restrained, and submissive” (p. 316), and yet the ancient cultures in which our evolution occurred would have been on the bottom of the size scale. That means that as our environment changed to be more unlike the environment we evolved to thrive in, sexual restraint training increased, which does not suggest inculcating sexual restraint was an evolved trait. To the contrary, it looks like a culturally adaptive trait, resulting from an observed need to cope with a new environment that people weren’t evolved for.

Low’s own hypothesis (notably not the one the Confer team claimed, or even mentioned, even though it supersedes their hypothesis) is that all the traits examined were being modulated according to a single evolved motive, which is: the reduction of friction within the social group (p. 316). Accordingly, she hypothesized that which practices do that will vary according to the cultural system in place. Sexual restraint was just one dimension in friction management, and thus cannot be verified to be a biological urge in parents to control their daughter’s fertility. In fact, Low says, certain “societies ought to show stronger inculcation of daughters in sexual restraint and obedience than in other societies, because these increase a woman’s apparent value to prospective high-status husbands” (p. 312). In other words, only where women were coded as marketable property has controlling their sexuality become a concern; it therefore cannot have been a biologically evolved concern, as property is a late human invention. Moreover, Low’s observation means the difference causing the effect is cognitively observed, and effective at the level of conscious decisions (the decisions of mating men, and families anticipating those decisions in order to gain social advantage from it). Which means no biological background is needed for the phenomenon to develop. Culture can fully explain it. Thus its existence in no way supports a biological over a cultural cause. In fact, that sexual restraint reinforcement varies by cultural structure argues for a cultural and not a biological cause.

Low does go on to tell a bunch of just-so stories, which are asserted to be probable without evidence (pp. 317-18), exemplifying the irresponsible nature of EvoPsych research generally. But apart from that, Low’s study does not confirm what Confer’s team claimed, even when it was responsibly drawing inferences from responsibly collected data.

So in the attempt to answer critics, the Confer team’s use of Low just confirms everything critics are saying: extraordinarily flawed methods, wholly incapable of verifying the conclusions published, are being cited as well-confirmed scientific facts demonstrating the merits of EvoPsych. This is appalling. Far from answering our criticism, Confer et al. is simply validating it. And demonstrating that they aren’t even aware of the fact that they are promulgating or defending pseudoscience.

  • (4) Ruling Out Culture (Cultural Evolution)

Culture is the number one competing hypothesis EvoPsych needs to rule out in any study before it can claim an observed behavior is biological. Number two would be the gamut of accident-byproduct explanations. But culture should be the first alternative tested. And culture-as-cause operates two ways: through human innovation and transmission (learning & socialization, which Confer’s team attempted to address above), and through cultural evolution itself. For example, families that adopt a behavior that benefits them will not only be better positioned to transmit what they learned directly (thus evolving their culture), they will also be emulated by social observers (thus spreading that evolved culture further). As this process continues over time, behaviors will evolve exactly in line with EvoPsych assumptions, yet without any underlying biological evolution occurring: the adaptations are not happening genetically, but previous (and for being multiply adaptive, essentially fixed) genetic inheritances (e.g. problem solving; social emulation) are generically operating to develop a culture (like an operating system running on top of the hardware) that produces the behavioral complexity EvoPsych proponents want to study.

It should be obvious that this happens. It therefore should be obvious that you have to rule this out before you can claim a biological adaptation is occurring instead of a cultural one. Yet EvoPsych almost never does this. And since they are not ruling out such a highly likely alternative hypothesis, none of their studies that fail to do that can logically claim to have established any EvoPsych hypothesis. This is one reason why most EvoPsych is pseudoscience (when, for example, studies that are logically incapable of verifying their conclusions, are claimed to have verified their conclusions).

How does Confer et al. respond?

By ignoring the criticism completely. They respond instead to wholly unrelated concerns. Such as, “Whether humans have evolved psychological adaptations over the past 10,000 years for other culturally transmitted inventions, such as cash economies, remains an open question” (pp. 118-19), although that is at least a good concession. But then they argue:

  • “(a) cultural phenomena are real and require explanation,” which is what we are saying, yet EvoPsych papers frequently ignore this assumption. And Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
  • “(b) labeling something as ‘culture’ is simply a description, not a causal explanation,” but that is false, because culture can be invented and vary on a scale of years, but biology cannot, and a cultural adaptation can cause a behavior without any underlying change in biology, and this very definitely is as much a causal explanation as the converse is.
  • “(c) it is useful to distinguish between different forms of cultural phenomena, such as evoked culture and transmitted culture,” which is true, but not relevant to their critics’ concerns.
  • “(d) explaining evoked cultural phenomena [the result of different circumstances interacting with common biology] requires an understanding of the evolved psychological mechanisms and the relevant environmental input involved in their elicitation,” which is simply a tautology. That it is true does not mean we have been able to identify which cultural mechanisms are evoked this way or by what biological mechanism. And critics are saying EvoPsych isn’t doing this in any sound way. Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
  • “(e) explaining transmitted culture requires the invocation of evolved psychological mechanisms in both transmitters and receivers,” is obviously true, but again is not a response to EvoPsych’s critics. It is vacuous to say transmitted culture requires evolved biological mechanisms (like social intelligence, vocal chords, and eyes). Critics are instead saying transmitted culture can cause the very observations that EvoPsych researchers are unwarrantedly claiming are caused by biology. And EvoPsych almost never controls for that fact. Confer et al. give absolutely no response to that (our actual) criticism.
  • “(f) transmitted culture, if recurrent over generations, can influence the evolution of novel adaptations, which in turn can affect transmitted culture, theoretically producing adaptation—culture coevolutionary processes,” which is true and not in dispute. But that it is possible does not mean we have been able or can know when this has been the case. And critics are asking how EvoPsych can claim to know that, when it rarely ever submits such knowledge to adequate falsification tests, or even tests of any kind.

That is all the Confer paper says in response to critics on the culture question. Note how they did not respond to any of our actual criticisms. And actually made patently false claims (such as that culture is not a causal explanation of behavior). This is what a pseudoscience looks like.

  • (5) Accounting for Radical Changes in Modern Environment

This is one other form of “you can’t keep ignoring culture like you do” argument. And they admit, “Extremely novel recent environments, of course, have not had enough time to influence the evolution of psychological adaptations” (p. 119) and “mismatches between modern and ancestral environments may negate the adaptive utility of some evolved psychological mechanisms” and “novel environmental stimuli, such as media images or pornography, may trigger, hijack, or exploit our evolved psychological mechanisms.” Among other things. But “possibly, therefore probably” is a fallacy. How do we prove this is what is happening? No credible answer is given.

Obsessed again with “male sexual jealousy” as the example, the Confer paper now makes ridiculous just-so claims that contradict plain observation—sounding very much like Medieval academics in their unscientific attempt to explain nature. The Confer team says, “Male sexual jealousy almost certainly evolved, in part, to serve a paternity certainty function.” But that is challenged by contrary evidence. It ignores the wide enough frequency of polyandry and wife sharing in a variety of cultures closer to ancient social structures than post-civilization structures are, including cultures that explicitly eschew paternity entirely (like the “open marriage” system of the Mosuo). If animals varied that much, we would no longer claim that jealousy was biologically determined, but that it was a cultural adaptation to a certain varying cultural system, such that when you change the system, the behavior disappears or transforms. It also ignores the known psychological reality that sexual jealousy often stems from very different concerns about social status maintenance rather than paternity (in societies where a cuckold’s masculinity is threatened among peers when he allows his mate to stray), possessiveness (which is based in ownership of women and their physical and emotional labor, and role as status symbols, not simply access to their womb), and fears of abandonment (in actual fact, I’d argue, the most common cause of jealousy in men who have unlearned possessiveness), which has little to do with paternity.

Paternity need not be the sole driving factor, if ever it was. Bonobos, for example, exhibit no such concern, and in fact their fluidity of relationship formation is actually closer to human patterns than any other ape known, so it is not automatically to be assumed we would have evolved to be any more concerned about paternity than male Bobobos did. Paternity concern could well be a cognitive cultural innovation: caused by coming to understand what paternity is and its situational value. The effects would be identical. So EvoPsych cannot simply assume that wasn’t the cause of human paternity policing. Especially when so many men so easily don’t at all care about policing paternity, a phenomenon that would be bizarre if observed in most other mammals (and EvoPsych should be especially interested in explaining what is bizarre about us). Indeed, we even observe a number of cultures that have wife sharing. That should be impossible if men’s “womb control” instincts were biologically innate.

The Confer paper not only ignores all of this, and has nothing to say about it (in fact, it seems utterly blind to even the existence of these points), it goes on to say really stupid things like:

“If the relevant adaptation is a powerful emotion triggered by modern instances of ancestral cues, such as witnessing oneā€™s mate kissing a rival,” then male jealousy is explained. This ignores the fact that telling the difference between chaste and sexual kissing, and kissing sexual rivals vs. kissing family members, requires highly complex learned cognitive understanding. Which cannot be evolved. Yet we do not instinctively flare up with jealousy the moment our wife kisses her sister or father or brother or son. The fact that we easily and completely discriminate between these things, proves we did not evolve a stimulus-response reaction to seeing our woman kiss someone. We had to learn it. We had to learn what kissing was. We had to learn what kissing meant. We had to learn it meant different things in different contexts. That’s culture. Not biology. EvoPsych has a whole lot of work to do before it can convincingly (read: empirically) prove otherwise.

Even the knowledge of who is your mate and who isn’t—e.g. before engagement or after breakup—requires advanced learned cognition that cannot be innate. We do not imprint, on parents or sex partners, like some other animals do. We are far more adaptable than that. Which is why human mating patterns are so varied culturally: from monogamy to polygyny to polyandry. And it might be worth noting that too many men enjoy watching their women kiss other men (indeed sexually) for a kiss-jealousy response to possibly be biologically innate the way it could be imagined to be in other animals. EvoPsych simply ignores the bizarrely frequent variation and adaptability of human behavior, a feature of humans that is extraordinarily strange compared to any other mammal, and thus very much in need of attention and explanation. And yet when your science ignores obvious data like this, it’s starting to look like a pseudoscience.

An even stupider thing they say is that “there would have been no selection pressure to design a mechanism capable of distinguishing between a situation in which a nude woman was seen and a sexual opportunity existed, and a similar situation lacking such sexual opportunity (e.g., a photograph of a nude woman).” And in one sentence, like a Medieval academic, they completely forget about male fantasies. Men have surely always, as they do now, daydreamed sexual encounters with women. That was the original porn. (Never mind also that the more primitive of human societies routinely interact with each other in the nude—the idea of not doing so is a late invention.) The fact that Confer’s team can’t even get basic facts right about fundamental human behavior, and then feel free to make completely bogus claims about it because of that, does not bode well for EvoPsych. It rather illustrates why we are calling it mostly pseudoscience.

Once again, at no point in this section is any actual criticism addressed: that the environment has changed so radically that studying modern populations is a highly unreliable way to determine what behaviors our genes evoked in us in ancient environments, and not controlling in any effective way for that fact, renders results in EvoPsych useless. To ignore this and insist the results reliably pertain to evolved traits in ancient environments is pseudoscience. And even if they want to claim something evolved after the paleolithic (the example they cite is lactose tolerance; though that is not a psychological trait), they still have to present evidence that in fact it did, without which they cannot claim to know, and if they cannot claim to know, they cannot claim to know a behavior has a biological cause at all. They do not even seem equipped to think rationally about behavior in the first place—such as we see with this Medieval armchair nonsense about male sexual fantasies not being a thing, or nudity never having been the norm, or there being a visual kiss-jealousy stimulus-response module.

[It’s all the more embarrassing that, once again, EvoPsych fails to do any real science, and thus didn’t know kissing is in fact a cultural phenomenon: most cultures don’t even have romantic kissing, or even regard it as disgusting. And even when Chimpanzees kiss, it has no sexual connotation.]

  • (6) Getting the Genetic Confirmation

That brings us to genetics. I used to think this was a more severe criticism of EvoPsych than it really is. But EvoPsych could theoretically make advances without isolating and studying genes. It’s just a lot harder to do that, since genetic evidence is so useful to a variety of tasks EvoPsych needs to complete in order for its results to be scientific. And many critics have pointed this out.

Likewise, I am not sure the charges of genetic determinism that critics also level at EvoPsych are really of what typifies actual research so much as how that research is used and reported. Maybe a little of the former. And there is certainly enough of the latter to warrant censure. Once again, the Confer team insists they disavow genetic determinism, by saying EvoPsych allows outcomes to be an interaction of genes and environment. But at no point do they address the actual criticism, which is that humans are known to be extremely adaptable with cognitive effort, e.g. cultural variability, both historical and geographical, psychotherapy and self-reflection, and education and training, can all cause enormous changes in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes, which EvoPsych does not adequately account for in its attempt to insist all behavior is the inevitable outcome of a biological mechanism when in contact with a particular environment. We have demonstrated far more cognitive control over ourselves than that. Which among mammals, again, makes us really bizarre.

Which fact alone requires evolutionary explanation: How did we acquire that power and why was it selected for? What in fact is it that was selected for, that makes it possible? But more importantly, that it was selected for (as cannot be denied), undermines most claims of EvoPsych. Unless they can show that some behavior can’t be unlearned or modified with cognitive change, biology does not adequately explain the behavior itself, for if it is that easily unlearned, then it was probably learned in the first place—it almost certainly cannot be biologically innate; you can’t “unlearn” your genes out of you. But since EvoPsych almost never submits any of its claims to this test (not even indirectly, by broad cross-cultural comparative studies), almost none of its claims can be known to be true. Refusing to admit this is another thing that tends to make it a pseudoscience.

Though it is technically true that “molecular genetic analysis is not necessary for carrying out the research program of evolutionary psychology,” that is only if you can pass some other falsification test that rules out culture as the cause. Critics don’t say you need to find the genes. They say you need to rule out culture, and if you never confirm genetic correlations, then that eliminates one major way of doing that, necessitating you employ some other way of doing it. But EvoPsych typically does neither. And even if an alternative is used, e.g. demonstrating cultural universality, its claims still remain insecure. Because a cultural universal can still be a product of convergent cultural evolution (as people converge in their innovations on common optimal solutions to common problems), and the only way to rule that out, is to show a strong genetic correlation between those who exhibit the behavior and those who don’t (among other like tests). Otherwise, if genes don’t correlate with a behavior at all, or only weakly, then the behavior is either wholly learned and not innate, or it is so much a mixture of both as to render any claims as to which part is which impossible—without some form of advanced future science. And if you don’t have the tools yet to do this science, the science needs to be shelved until you do. Otherwise you aren’t doing science. (Unless, again, you are doing it in the explicitly non-truth-asserting manner of cosmologists.)

  • (7) Finding Practical Applications

This is the most disturbing section in the Confer defense. They seem to be responding to an imagined criticism that EvoPsych needs to have applications to be worthwhile, which is not really a good critique of any science. Though maybe some have said that, I think most critics have the opposite concern: that because over 90% of EvoPsych must be false, it is dangerous to start basing applications on such unreliable conclusions. The Confer team seem wholly oblivious to this serious concern, and to the contrary, validate it, by actually making bold and terrifying claims about how EvoPsych should be applied.

This just illustrates how dangerous EvoPsych is: they here make all sorts of confident assertions about how EvoPsych conclusions, which we just saw are at least 90% false and almost never validly tested and thus almost never actually known, can transform, for example, mental health care and the law. This is scary as fuck. It reminds me to mention What’s the Harm. We must not allow anything so close to a pseudoscience as EvoPsych do this. It is decades if not centuries too soon for it to be anywhere near responsibly able to make recommendations in such domains (or any area of human life, really).

We must instead be testing actual outcome measures (e.g. if a therapy recommended by EvoPsych conclusions actually works better than present best practices, then indeed advocate it; but don’t advocate it in the absence of any such confirming test). Rather than assuming EvoPsych is reliably informing us. And we shouldn’t be advocating any changes in law or jurisprudence until we are damn well certain our science is indisputable. And EvoPsych just isn’t.

Fortunately, the authors handwave at this point, failing to find any recommendation at all from EvoPsych for the law. They suggest maybe it can contribute to sexual harassment jury decisions somehow (it is never said how), because “evolution-guided research…has shown that women consistently judge a variety of acts to be more sexually harassing than do men, and women experience greater levels of fear than do men in response to specific acts of being stalked.” But this is more pseudoscience. None of the cited studies showed these sex differences were evolved or biologically innate, rather than produced by different experiential databases that result from men and women being treated differently in their culture.

This is where the pseudoscience of EvoPsych gets impaled once again on our most fundamental criticism of it: it fails to distinguish culture from biology, and in consequence irresponsibly leads us to ignore cultural solutions to problems like this. In actual fact there is abundant data available that when men experience the world as women do (or even just start to see enough of the evidence that women do), their attitudes toward harassment and stalking shift toward women’s perspective. That indicates that this sex difference is learned behavior, and not biologically evolved at all. The real lesson would thus be, we need to educate men. Biology has nothing to do with it.

EvoPsych is thus pernicious if ever proposed as a source of practical advice. And the Confer paper never addresses this concern. At all. Even though critics have articulated the point in countless forms by now.

  • (8) Admitting Limitations

In their closing sections all they talk about are strange human behaviors that are contrary to DRS that EvoPsych “has yet to explain.” Which is amusing to me, because as I have shown, it’s unlikely EvoPsych has explained much of any human behavior at all. Remember, we are lucky if even 10% of its results are true! Beyond that, they admit we can’t observe ancient conditions or cultures—but don’t address what critics mention this for: the inability to observe that is very damning to EvoPsych’s entire enterprise. This paper offers no rebuttal. At most they talk about what few things we can know about that ancient environment, which no one disputes. But that’s simply not enough for the requirements of the kind of elaborate claims made by EvoPsych, which need psychological data gleaned from the inhabitants of those ancient environments, which simply can’t be accessed at all. Even supposedly “primitive” cultures today like African Bushmen are actually not wholly typical of our ancestors, since they have been pushed into the most desperate resource areas by encroaching civilization, and have also been significantly influenced by knowledge of, and trade and interaction with, modern cultures.

Hence to illustrate the problem: EvoPsych needs to know how did homosexuals fit into paleolithic filial and social systems? We don’t know. We can speculate. We can test that speculation with mathematical models. We can verify that homosexuality is strongly a function of genetics and fetal environment (which in turn means, a function of the mother’s genetics), and therefore not a free floating cultural variable. We can look for and examine as many cultures as come closest to what we think our paleolithic cultures were like. And things like that. But that’s not enough to know for sure. And these data are all a lot more than we have for most EvoPsych claims. And yet even here we can produce no certainty. That’s a serious problem. And Confer et al. never address it.

Instead the Confer paper ends with such impertinences as that EvoPsych has been (has it now?) “far more successful in predicting and explaining species-typical and sex-differentiated psychological adaptations than explaining variation within species or within the sexes,” which is a telling admission, since the strangely high variation within the sexes (in psychological traits women vary more among each other than they do from men, and vice versa) nullifies most claims to evolved sex differences (since the variability within the sexes, and the overlap between the sexes, is too great to have the kind of strong effects as sex differentiation does in other animals).

Conclusion

And as if to prove my entire thesis, the last evidence cited in the Confer paper in defense of EvoPsych is the assertion that “evolutionary psychologists have discovered a female superiority in spatial location memory.” Which in fact is simply false. The study the Confer team cites, failed to be replicated in the field.

… As shown by Elizabeth Cashdan et al., “Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition among Hadza Foragers,” Evolution & Human Behavior 33.4 (July 2012).

Yep. That’s how bogus EvoPsych is.

-:-

Ā§

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