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Schematic overviews of empirical evidence from a wide variety of sources and disciplines in order to evaluate the validity of hypothesized evolutionary psychological adaptations
Introduction
Although evolutionary psychology has been a fruitful and progressive research paradigm (e.g., Cosmides and Tooby 2013), many scientists remain skeptical about the value of an evolutionary approach to unravel the origins of the human mind. For example, in the domain of language evolution, Hauser and colleagues (2014) have argued that there is still a lack of empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that language is an adaptation. They argue that there is no fossil evidence related to language evolution in our ancestors, that the communicative skills of nonhuman animals are uninformative because these skills do not resemble human language, that our understanding of the genetics of language is poor, and that models of language evolution are...
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References
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2013). Evolutionary psychology: New perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 201–229.
Hauser, M. D., Yang, C., Berwick, R. C., Tattersall, I., Ryan, M. J., Watumull, J., Chomsky, N., & Lewontin, R. C. (2014). The mystery of language evolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 401.
Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the evolution of music: Pitfalls and prospects. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 513–524.
Ketelaar, T., & Ellis, B. J. (2000). Are evolutionary explanations unfalsifiable? Evolutionary psychology and the Lakatosian philosophy of science. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 1–21.
Ploeger, A., & van der Hoort, B. (2015). Evolutionary psychology as a metatheory for the social sciences: How to gather interdisciplinary evidence for a psychological adaptation. Review of General Psychology, 19(3), 381–392.
Schmitt, D. P. (2014). Evaluating evidence of mate preference adaptations: How do we really know what Homo sapiens sapiens really want? In V. A. Weekes-Shackelford & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Evolutionary perspectives on human sexual psychology and behavior (pp. 3–39). New York: Springer.
Schmitt, D. P., & Pilcher, J. J. (2004). Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: How do we know one when we see one? Psychological Science, 15(10), 643–649.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Ploeger, A. (2016). Nomological Networks of Evidence. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_947-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_947-1
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