The Grand Challenges for Evolutionary Psychology: Survival Challenges for a Discipline

As defined by some of the founders of the field, Barkow et al. (1992), “evolutionary psychology is simply psychology that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human mind will advance the discovery of its architecture.” In the field of biology, there is no (with the exceptions of “creationist” or “intelligent design” research) line drawn between evolutionary and non-evolutionary approaches because “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky, 1973). Like in biology, evolutionary psychologists are often interested in understanding the ultimate adaptations that characterize organisms and account for variance in their behavior. Adaptations are evolved solutions (e.g., color vision for seeing ripe fruit) for specific problems that contribute directly or indirectly to successful reproduction. Adaptations have three characteristics. They occur reliably in a species (e.g., cross-culturally), they are effective at solving adaptive tasks, and they impose reasonable costs on the person. If one assumes, like evolutionary psychologists do, that psychological systems are biological and physical (i.e., no ethereal concept of mind) in nature, evolutionary models must apply to the brain and its sequalae. However, since at least Descartes and, perhaps as far back as Plato, a mindbody dualism has existed whereby the mind (i.e., psyche) has been treated as distinct from the body and there is a tendency to treat humans as distinct from “animals” in some form of implicit anthropocentrism which has led to psychological theories generally being developed in parallel deafness to biological theories (Jonason and Dane, 2014). However, such dualism is problematic as it is (1) less parsimonious than monism and (2) creates untestable hypotheses. Evolutionary psychology is a field that tries to reconcile this problem to integrate the study of human behavior and mental mechanisms with the larger biological literature through interdisciplinary means. It tries to treat humans as just another species and assumes that the models researchers use to understand species from tardigrades to blue whales can be used to explain human variability and outcomes. Adopting an evolutionary framework to the study of human behavior and psychology has been incredibly fruitful. I cannot hope to do it justice here but, instead, I will highlight some of the major areas that evolutionary psychology has provided novel insights. Even work using genetic or hormonal assays, on their own, are merely descriptive in nature indicating that, for instance, being high in sensation-seeking is heritable (e.g., Derringer et al., 2010). Such information tells researchers and people nothing about the ultimate “why” questions that are at the heart of reductionist models of science; evolutionary psychology is reductionistic in nature1. First, psychology, since its inception, has been about understanding why individuals differ from one another. However, the field of personality psychology has been stuck in an atheoretical rut after questionable first attempts were made by Freud to generate grand theories of personality. For