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 “creat...

A central goal of our target article was to evaluate the soundness of evolutionary psychology’s epistemology in relation to the critical claim that evolutionary explanations are unfalsifiable. None of the 16 commentators challenge our central assertion—that the methods and strategies employed by evolutionary psychologists to generate and test hypotheses are scientifically defensible—and thus we...

Theories within psychology tend to follow a Lakatonian structure, sometimes harbouring a strong resilience towards falsification. Theories that potentially could be discarded stay in the field because no strong challenger exists. Popper’s philosophy suggests that falsified theories should be rejected, but in practice psychology is more robust and theories are typically subject to batteries of e...