BookChapter: Adaptationism and Psychological Explanation   Open Webpage

2003

Dominic Murphy

Adaptationism and Psychological Explanation

The research program of narrow evolutionary psychology1 is most closely associated with the work of Cosmides, Tooby and Pinker (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992; Cosmides and Tooby, 1992, 1994, 1997; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Pinker, 1994, 1997; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, 1995; Wright, 1994). Evolutionary psychology in this sense combines a highly modular view of the mind with the claim that natural selection designed human psychology to solve adaptive problems. It is the meeting of sociobiology and traditional cognitive science: of E. O. Wilson and Noam Chomsky (although Wilson does not seem quite as fond of ‘selfish genes’ as some of the people who have sought to apply his ideas). Of course, many people working in psychology who do not share the assumptions of the Cosmides-Tooby program nonetheless take evolution seriously. They write books or papers such that if you didn’t know what evolutionary psychology was supposed to be, you’d think they were doing it (e.g., Allman, 1999; Atran, 1990; Frank, 1988; Griffiths, 1997; Griffiths & Stotz, 2000; Godfrey-Smith, 1996; Hauser and Carey, 1998; Kitcher, 1990; Sober and Wilson, 1998).