Restructuring the Debate

Abstract

In the previous chapter we discovered how evolutionary psychology, as a heuristically motivated project, has the potential to stimulate multi-disciplinary research activity. Multi-disciplinary research activity is born not just from a shared platform of knowledge, but also from an attitude of respect, a conviction that other disciplines have something important to say. For many years now these two factors have been strikingly absent in the debate. One of the stumbling blocks to the possibility of multi-disciplinary research on purported pyschological adaptations being realised—the lack of a central database of purported psychological adaptations—will hopefully be removed sometime in the near future. But the other stumbling block, the polarisation of the debate on evolutionary psychology, remains as entrenched and powerful today as it ever has been. In light of the previous chapters, I believe we now have the resources to make sense of the nature and character of the heated debate, that we can not only honour the motivations of both sides of the debate, but also highlight where both have gone wrong, to highlight their strategic and argumentative mistakes, and to thereby depolarise and reconfigure the debate, enabling the debate to finally move on and for genuine multi-disciplinary research to gain momentum. The fruits of doing so are too great to spoil by continuing the status quo.