Sex, Jealousy & Violence: A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary Psychology

David J. Buller in Skeptic:

Screenhunter_2Despite being an ardent fan of evolutionary psychology, I’m deeply skeptical about the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm. One problem concerns EP’s claim that the human mind is massively modular. Our best evidence indicates, instead, that the human mind is adapted to adapt to highly variable and often rapidly changing environments. Our species’ great cognitive achievement was not the evolution of a legion of idiots savants, but the evolution of cortical plasticity, which enables the brain to reorganize itself in response to changing epistemic demands. In this respect, the brain is very similar to the immune system, which manufactures antibodies as needed in response to changing pathogenic demands.

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