Just Do It

I n the target article, I tried to make several points. The most important of these are: 1) adaptations sometimes can be illuminated by studies of current reproductive consequences; 2) studies of current reproductive consequences (adaptiveness) can help us understand the extent to which psychological mechanisms are general purpose; 3) environmental novelty can foul-up the development of psychological mechanisms, just as it can foul-up adaptive outcomes; 4) it is inadequate to simply assert that a current psychological construct, even if universal (e.g., mate-choice preference for average facial features, etc.), must have produced adaptive outcomes during the Pleistocene; 5) the methods extolled for evaluating current adaptiveness are not equally valid; and 6) the most evolutionarily relevant aspects of the Pleistocene were probably social, implying that (a) current environments may have changed much less than is widely assumed and (b) hunting and gathering per se is probably not a crucial aspect of our evolutionary background.