Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology

by Hilary Rose (editor), Steven Rose (editor)

In recent years, the claims of genetics and evolutionary psychology to explain and indeed legislate on the human condition have been loudly trumpeted in a host of popular books. Genes are said to account for almost every aspect of our lives. Evolution is supposed to explain alleged human universals, from male philandering and female coyness to children's dislike of spinach. There are even claimed to be genes that account for differences between people -- from sexual orientation to drug addiction, aggression, religiosity, and job satisfaction. It appears that Darwin, at least in the hands of his popularizers, has replaced Marx and Freud as the great interpreter of human existence.

Biologists, social scientists, and philosophers have begun to rebel against this undisciplined approach to their different understandings of the world, demonstrating that the claims of evolutionary psychology rest on shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises, and unexamined political presuppositions. In this groundbreaking book, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose have gathered the leading and outspoken critics of this fashionable ideology in a shared and uniquely cross-disciplinary project. Contributors range from biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Gabriel Dover, Patrick Bateson, and Anne Fausto-Sterling; to anthropologists and sociologists Dorothy Nelkin, Tim Ingold, Tom Shakespeare, and Ted Benton; to philosopher Mary Midgley and cultural critics Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Charles Jencks.

The result of this joint work, Alas Poor Darwin , is a sharply engaged, accessible, and highly entertaining critique of evolutionary psychology's tenets. What emerges is a new perspective that challenges the reductionism of evolutionary psychology and offers a richer understanding of the biosocial nature of the human condition.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Evolution, Anthropology, Biology

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2000

About the author

Hilary Ann Rose (born 1935) is a British sociologist. Rose has published extensively in the sociology of science from a feminist perspective and has held numerous appointments in the UK, the US, Australia, Austria, Norway, Finland and at the Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Science. She is visiting research professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Professor Emerita of Social Policy at the University of Bradford. She was the Gresham Professor of Physic between 1999 and 2002. In 1997 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden for her contribution to the feminist sociology of science.

Reviews

[Osore Misanthrope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Солидни есеји, најадекватнији као секундарна или терцијерна литература на пољу филозофије биологије. Списак примарне литературе налази се на крају
овог приказа. Наслов Авај, јадни Дарвин може бити misleading - ово није критика еволуције (булажњење креациониста), већ сасвим оправдана критика ђавоље социобиологије и њеног окота званог еволуциона психологија. Тврдње ових двеју дисциплина су толико сулуде (непроверљиве, спекулативне и често силеџијске) да би ова књига добро прошла и без контрааргумената (које свакако садржи).

Омиљени есеј: Извлачење смрада из инстинкта Патрика Бејтсона.

Одличан поговор проф. др Биљане Стојковић доступан је овде. 🟢🟣

[Nebuchadnezzar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This edited volume by Steven and Hilary Rose is unfortunately characteristic of many of the overzealous reactions to evolutionary psychology. I'm actually sympathetic to Rose and Rose in my views and closer to their position than many of the targets they snipe at in this book. However, most of the criticisms lack any substance. Many of the authors seem content to just bandy about the accusation of "genetic determinism" and call it a day. A number of essays attack popularizations of evo psych rather than the primary literature. Many straw men are built up and knocked down.

Some essays are of questionable relevance, such as a rather curious one describing similarities between evolutionary psychology and religion. I admit that I got a bit of a laugh out of that Mary Midgley-esque argument as evo psych's most hard-line proponents do indeed seem to be constantly talking about how our minds are "designed" by natural selection in rather theistic overtones. It's not a scholarly critique of evo psych research, though. Speaking of Midgley, she gets an essay on memes, which I agree with and charitably call memetics a protoscience descending into pseudoscience, but I don't see how it's at all relevant to evo psych.

The good points are few and far between, diamonds to be extracted from the rough. For a rigorous critique of evolutionary psychology, skip this and pick up David J. Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.

[VEL – The Contemporary Heretic · Rating 1 out of 5]

‘Alas Poor Darwin’ is an edited book composed of essays by different authors ostensibly critiquing the field of evolutionary psychology.

The multiple authorship makes it difficult to provide an overall review. The editors themselves admit that the contributors “do not speak with a single voice” (p9)—a tacit admission that they often contradict one another.

Thus, Fausto-Sterling chides Symons for arguing the female orgasm is a nonadaptive byproduct of the male orgasm (“Women did not even evolve their own orgasms”: p176); yet Gould criticizes evolutionary psychologists for viewing every trait as an adaptation and ignoring the possibility of byproducts (p103-4).

Some chapters are irrelevant to the project of evolutionary psychology. That of part-time philosopher and full-time ‘Dawkins-stalker’ Mary Midgley critiques the separate approach of ‘Memetics’.

Gould’s Deathbed Conversion
Undoubtedly the best known, and arguably most prestigious, contributor to the volume is Stephen Jay Gould. Indeed, such is his renown that he evidently did not feel it necessary to contribute an original chapter for the volume, instead simply recycling, with a few minor alterations, what appears to be a book review, previously published in the New Yorker (Gould 1994).

This is a critical review of a book—Darwin's Dangerous Idea—itself critical of Gould.

Neither the book, nor the review, deal primarily with the topic of evolutionary psychology, but rather with more general issues in evolutionary biology.

Yet the most remarkable revelation of Gould's chapter—especially since it appears in a book ostensibly critiquing evolutionary psychology—is that the best-known and most widely-cited erstwhile opponent of evolutionary psychology is apparently no longer any such thing.

On the contrary, he now claims:

“‘Evolutionary psychology’… could be quite useful, if proponents would change their propensity for cultism and ultra-Darwinian fealty for a healthy dose of modesty” (p98).

Most strikingly, he acknowledges:

“The most promising theory of evolutionary psychology [is] the recognition that differing Darwinian requirements for males and females imply distinct adaptive behaviors centred on male advantage in spreading sperm as widely as possible... and female strategy for extracting time and attention from males… [which] probably does underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities oof human males and females” (p102).

In other words, Gould now accepts the position of evolutionary psychologists in that most contentious area—innate sex differences!

Ultra-Darwinism?
On the other hand, Gould’s criticisms of evolutionary psychology have not evolved at all but merely retread familiar gripes with which sociobiologists dealt decades ago.

Thus, he claims evolutionary psychologists view every trait as adaptive and ignore the possibility of byproducts (p103-4).

But this is simply not true.

For example, Daly and Wilson view the high rate of abuse perpetrated by stepparents, as not itself adaptive, but a byproduct of the adaptive tendency for stepparents to care less for stepchildren than for their biological children (see The Truth about Cinderella: reviewed here).

Likewise, Symons argued that the female orgasm is not itself adaptive, but rather a byproduct of the male orgasm, just as male nipples are a non-adaptive by-product of female nipples (see The Evolution of Human Sexuality: reviewed here; see also here).

Meanwhile, Thornhill and Palmer are divided as to whether rape is adaptive or a byproduct of men’s greater desire for promiscuous sex (see A Natural History of Rape: reviewed here).

Untestable?
Gould’s other main criticism is that sociobiological theories are inherently untestable ‘just so stories’.

But one only has to flick through copies of Evolution and Human Behavior, Human Nature, Evolutionary Psychology and many other journals to see evolutionary hypotheses being tested, and sometimes falsified, every month.

As evidence, Gould cites Robert Wright’s assertion that our ‘sweet tooth’ evolved because, in ancestral environments, “fruit existed but candy didn't” (The Moral Animal: p67).

Gould protests that Wright cites “no paleontological data about ancestral feeding” (p100).

But Wright is a popular science writer, not an academic. As such, he is not expected to cite a source for every claim.

Moreover, do we really need “paleontological data” to demonstrate that fruit is not a recent invention and candy is?

Straw Men and Fabricated Quotations
Rather than arguing against the actual ideas of evolutionary psychologists, contributors resort to the easier option of misrepresenting these ideas, so as to make the task of rebutting them less arduous.

Yet co-editor, Hilary Rose crosses the line from misrepresentation to defamation of character when, on p116, she falsely attributes to David Barash an offensive quotation violating the naturalistic fallacy by purporting to justify rape by reference to its possible adaptive function.

“The sociobiologist David Barash’s rhetorical appeal in defence of his mysogenist [sic] claims that men are naturally predisposed to rape, ‘If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,’” can no longer plug into the old deference to science” (p116).

Yet Barash simply does not say the words she attributes to him on the page she cites (or any other page) in Whisperings Within.

Rather, after a discussion of the adaptive function of forced copulation in ducks, he merely ventures tentatively that, although vastly more complex, similar behaviour in humans may serve an analogous evolutionary function (Whisperings Within: p55).

Steven Rose, a Scientific Racist?
Steven Rose, the book’s other editor, unlike Gould, does not repent his sins and convert to evolutionary psychology. But, in maintaining his crusade against sociobiology and all related heresies, Rose inadvertently undergoes a conversion even more dramatic.

To understand why, we must examine Rose's position in more depth.

Steven Rose is not a creationist. He is a neuroscientist who accepts Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Rose is therefore obliged to reconcile his opposition to evolutionary psychology with the recognition that the brain is, like the body, a product of evolution.

Ironically, this leads him to employ evolutionary arguments against evolutionary psychology.

For example, Rose mounts an evolutionary defence of group selection theory, whereby it is argued traits evolve because they aid the survival of the group even at a cost to the fitness of the individual (p257-9).

Rose even claims:

“Selection can occur at even higher levels—that of the species for example” (p258).

Similarly, in the book’s introduction, the Roses dismiss the evolutionary psychological concept of the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness’ (or ‘EEA’).

This refers to the idea that we evolved to maximize our reproductive success, not in contemporary western societies, but rather in the sorts of environments in which our ancestors spent most of our evolutionary history, namely as Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

On this view, much behavior in modern Western societies may be maladaptive, because we have not had sufficient time to evolve psychological mechanisms for dealing with such ‘evolutionary novelties’ as contraception, paternity testing and candy.

But the Roses argue that evolution can occur much faster than this, citing:

“The huge changes produced by artificial selection by humans among domesticated animals—cattle, dogs and… pigeons—in only a few generations. Indeed, unaided natural selection in Darwin’s own Islands, the Galapagos, studied over several decades by the Grants is enough to produce significant changes in the birds’ beaks and feeding habits in response to climate change” (p1-2).

Finally, Rose rejects the modular model of the human mind championed by some evolutionary psychologists, whereby the brain is conceptualized as being composed of many separate domain-specific modules, each specialized for a particular class of adaptive problem.

As evidence against this, Rose points to the absence of a direct one-to-one relationship between postulated modules and brain anatomy (p260-2).

“Whether such modules are more than theoretical entities is unclear, at least to most neuroscientists. Indeed evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker go to some lengths to make it clear that the ‘mental modules’ they invent do not, or at least do not necessarily, map onto specific brain structures” (p260).

Thus, he protests:

“Evolutionary psychology theorists, who… are not themselves neuroscientists, or even, by and large, biologists, show as great a disdain for relating their theoretical concepts to material brains as did the now discredited behaviorists they so despise” (p261).

Yet, in employing evolutionary arguments against evolutionary psychology, Rose, unlike many of his co-contributors, implicitly accepts an evolutionary approach to human psychology.

Thus, if Rose is right, it would suggest, not the abandonment of an evolutionary approach to psychology, but rather the need to develop a new evolutionary psychology stressing the importance of group selection, recently evolved adaptations and domain-general mechanisms.

But this new evolutionary psychology may not be all that new and Rose may find he has unlikely bedfellows.

Thus, group selection—which implies that conflict between groups such as races and ethnic groups is inevitable—has already been defended by race scientists such as Phil Rushton and Kevin MacDonald.

For example, Rushton has authored papers with titles like ‘Genetic similarity, human altruism and group-selection’ (Rushton 1989) and ‘Genetic similarity theory, ethnocentrism, and group selection’ (Rushton 1998), which explain racism and ethnocentrism in terms of group selection; while antisemite Kevin Macdonald has developed a theory of cultural group selection to explain Jewish success and ethnocentrism in A People That Shall Dwell Alone ) (reviewed here).

Likewise, the claim that sufficient time has elapsed for significant evolutionary change to have occurred since the stone age necessarily also entails the belief that sufficient time has also elapsed for different human races to have significantly diverged in their morphology and psychology (see The 10,000 Year Explosion ; A Troublesome Inheritance).

Finally, rejection of a modular conception of the mind is consistent with an emphasis on the ‘general factor’ of intelligence (or ‘G Factor’), as championed by psychometricians, intelligence researchers and race theorists like Jensen, Lynn, Chris Brand and Rushton, who believe that individuals and groups differ in intellectual ability, that some individuals and groups are more intelligent across the board, and that these differences are partly genetic in origin.

Indeed, contradicting his earlier acknowledgement that “evolutionary psychologists are often at pains to distinguish themselves from behavior geneticists and there is some hostility between the two” (p248), Rose himself acknowledges:

“The insistence of evolutionary psychology theorists on modularity puts a strain on their otherwise heaven-made alliance with behavior geneticists” (p261)

Thus, in rejecting the tenets of mainstream evolutionary psychology, Rose inadvertently advocates, not so much a new form of evolutionary psychology, as an old form of what Rose himself might term ‘scientific racism’.

Yet Rose is not a racist.

Indeed, I feel the need to emphasize that Rose is not a racist, not least lest he sue me for defamation if I suggest otherwise—and if you think the idea of a professor suing someone for a review on goodreads is silly, then, remember, this is a man who once threatened legal action against publishers of a comic book—yes, a comic book—and forced them to append an apology to some 10,000 copies of the comic book, for supposedly misrepresenting his views in a speech bubble in said comic book, complaining “The author had literally [sic] put into my mouth a completely fatuous statement” (Brown 1999)—an ironic complaint given the fabricated quotation, of a genuinely defamatory nature, attributed to David Barash by his own wife Hillary in the current volume.

Yet, descending to Rose’s own level of argumentation (i.e. guilt by association), he is easily characterised as racist. His arguments against the concept of the EEA, and modularity and in favor of group-selection directly echo those employed by the very ‘scientific racists’ whom Rose has built a minor literary career out of attacking.

Thus, by rejecting many claims of mainstream evolutionary psychology—about the EEA, group-selection and modularity—Rose plays into the hands of the very racists he purportedly opposes.

If his friend and comrade Stephen Jay Gould, in own his contribution to the current volume, underwent a surprising but welcome deathbed conversion to evolutionary psychology, then Steven Rose’s own transformation proves even more dramatic but perhaps less welcome.

He might, moreover, find his new bedfellows less good company than he expected.

Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review available here.

References
Brown (1999) Origins of the specious, Guardian newspaper (30 November, 1999)
Gould (1994) More Things in Heaven and Earth, New Yorker (Nov 28):450.
Kanazawa, (2004) General Intelligence as a Domain-Specific Module, Psychological Review 111(2):512-523
Rushton (1989) Genetic similarity, human altruism and group-selection, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12(3):503-59
Rushton (1998). Genetic similarity theory, ethnocentrism, and group selection. In I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt & F. K. Salter (Eds.), Indoctrinability, Ideology and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives (pp. 369-388). Oxford: Berghahn Books.

[Brannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terrible. The arguments made against evolutionary psychology are weak and irrational. The authors of the various articles in this book misrepresent the assertions of EP and go on to argue against these false claims. It's a bunch of bullshit. There are various EP theorists they cite who are not the mainstream in the field, and whose extremist views are not considered fact or science by the leaders in the field. I love scientific debate between social and evolutionary perspectives; I believe in both and object to neither. This book is shameful propaganda that seeks to discredit a credible perspective based on misdirection, misrepresentation, and appealing to the emotions of those who are already hesitant to accept an evolutionary perspective.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alas, Poor Roses

One is hardly onto to the second page of this misguided, miss-conceived and miss-edited book than the illogic and misrepresentations begin. The authors begin by branding evolutionary psychology "henceforward EP" as "a particularly Anglo-American phenomenon," and reference this claim with a footnote on page 16 stating that "Other European countries, notably France, have been less overwhelmed by Darwinian evolutionary theory." One wonders at the point of this. How does it play in China or Japan? On the other hand, maybe they're after evolutionary theory itself and not just EP! One also wonders what the acceptance of "Darwinian evolutionary theory" by some countries and not by others (even if that was somehow demonstrated) has to do with a critique of evolutionary psychology. If France has not been "overwhelmed by evolutionary theory" perhaps the worst for France. And who says Anglo-Americans have been overwhelmed by Darwinian evolutionary theory? Most Americans, at any rate, still believe in angels!

This sort of slippery, non sequitur-filled prose is, alas, typical of much of what follows. Here's another quick example, in a footnote on page 16. The authors reference a poll from the journal Science showing "that a great majority of life scientists are now non-believers." Incredibly, they follow this immediately with the non-logical: "Physicists are less hostile to religion..." seemingly innocent of the fact that being a non-believer does not necessarily imply hostility to religion! Still on page two the authors write, "It [evolutionary psychology] claims to explain all aspects of human behavior...on the basis of ...features" formed "during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago." All? Who said "all"? There is no footnote. Evolutionary psychologists emphatically do not claim to explain all aspects of human behavior. EP is a guide to human tendencies based on insights provided by the process of evolution, nothing more, and, importantly, nothing less.

By the way, this fictional character that attempts to explain all aspects of human behavior with EP, is straw man number one. There are, alas, many more to come in this book. As other reviewers have pointed out the style here is to set up easy targets that have little or nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, and then throw rocks at them. The authors are afraid of something and that something is the truth.

I'll skip past the rest of the Introduction penned by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose and on to the articles edited. The first, by sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, doesn't even attempt to address the validity of evolutionary psychology at all. What it attempts to do, and it does that poorly enough, is to claim that the proponents of EP are using "missionary fervor" (p. 23) and a "quasi-religious narrative" (p. 30) "seeking to convert others to their beliefs" (p. 23), an accusation that is practically laughable, but even if true would amount as a criticism of EP to nothing more than another non sequitur. Nelkin uses as support for her (totally irrelevant) argument the religious fervor displayed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in his book, Consilience (1998). She also brings physicists Leon Lederman, Steven Weinberg, and Stephen Hawking into it because of their apparent religious fervor in expressing the wonders of physics. (By the way, both Nelkin and the author of the next essay bring the physicist's dream of a "Theory of Everything" into the discussion as an analogue of EP; but again that is a straw man: evolutionary psychology does not pretend to be a theory of everything, psychological or otherwise.) One wonders why the physicists are brought into the fray. Perhaps it is because they are "hard" scientists (those meanies) and not sociologists. Anyway, I guess Nelkin thought it would be cute to accuse evolutionary psychology of being too religious.

The second essay by Charles Jencks would appear to be mostly an ad hominem attack on E.O. Wilson, albeit gently and cleverly done. Actually it is a rather well-reasoned satirical critique of EP, lambasting its limitations in a comedic rhetorical style sure to delight "non-believers," using an observation of Wilson during a conference on postmodernism in Boston in 1998 as a narrative device. Jencks is an architect and Mr. Postmodern who is also to my mind a very fine creative writer. But I would remind him that all psychologies are limited, and so to criticize evolutionary psychology for being limited in what it can tell us about ourselves, isn't much of a criticism, unless one can also argue that cognitive, or behaviorism, or psychoanalytic, or some other psychology is superior. I happen to think, as I have said before, that the psychologies found in the great world religions are superior to any of the academic psychologies. Only evolutionary psychology is able to offer something with the same kind of antediluvian power. Jencks does not mention other psychologies. He does claim that Wilson, at the end of his lecture, went from the "is" of evolutionary psychology (which is really how to understand and appreciate EP) to the "ought" of a moral imperative, the classic error incidentally made by many who criticize EP. Problem is, Jencks doesn't reveal what Wilson said that convinced him that Wilson had gone too far (maybe I missed it). I do know from having read several of Wilson's books that he knows better than to fall into that trap. I wish I could say the same for the Roses.

This is by way of signing off: I am about to exceed Amazon.com's 1,000-word limit. Some of the other reviews at Amazon comment very intelligently on some of the other essays. I particularly recommend the reviews by Todd I. Stark and A.P. Jackson.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

FOURTEEN ESSAYS CRITIQUING VARIOUS ASPECTS OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

Editors Hilary and Steven Rose are, respectively, a sociologist ['Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology'] and a neurobiologist ['Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism'].

They wrote in the Introduction to this 2000 book, "Why is this book important? Because it brings together a multidisciplinary group of authors with the shared aim of challenging what we feel has become one of the most pervasive of present-day intellectual myths." (Pg. 1)

They add, "We recognized that... the critiques of EP [Evolutionary Psychology] must come from many disciplines... the postmodernist architectural critic Charles Jencks... hosted a three-day seminar in September 1998... Fifteen of the potential contributors met to discuss the precirculated drafts that formed the basis for most of the chapters in this book." (Pg. 10-11)

One essayist asserts, "[Richard] Dawkins's selfish genery propagates a nonsense that is genetically misconceived, operationally impossible and seductively dangerous. It is Dawkins's dangerous idea, not Darwin's... which is seriously misleading. Theorists from diverse disciplines seem, unfortunately, quite happy to accept that evidence for a genetic contribution to complex human behavioral or morphological traits inevitably means evolution of that trait by a natural selection of selfish genes." (Pg. 60)

He adds, "Dawkins's hard line is that he has opened our eyes to a dramatic new way of thinking... his soft line is that he is saying nothing new of major importance... We should not be taken in by this edgy ambivalence; the perceived thrust of Dawkins's writing is only about only one thing: Everything of functional importance and complexity is an adaptation fashioned by natural selection working for the good of selfish replicators." (Pg. 65)

The late Stephen Jay Gould states, "selection cannot suffice as a full explanation for many aspects of evolution, for other types and styles become relevant, or even prevalent, in domains both far above and far below the traditional Darwinian locus of the organism. These other causes... operate differently from Darwin's central mechanism." (Pg. 105-106)

He adds, "Natural selection does not explain why many evolutionary transitions from one nucleotide to another are neutral, and therefore non-adaptive. Natural selection does not explain why a meteor crashed into the earth sixty-five million years ago, setting in motion the extinction of half the world's species." (Pg. 109)

Another essayist observes, "In the evolutionary psychologist's scenario, individual females who learned to recognize high-resource males survived and reproduced more frequently than those who did not. But what, precisely, were the recognition mechanisms that evolved?... Perhaps women who talked a lot with other women could gather information through social and cultural networks... The result might be the evolution of elaborate cultural mechanisms, not some built-in hard-wired unchangeable brain response." (Pg. 222)

Another points out, "On the one hand, it is claimed that the selective advantage conferred by brain development is the way it opens up the possibility of flexible and innovative responses to environmental challenges. On the other, it is also claimed that selective pressures would lead to a progressively 'hard-wired' set of learning dispositions and 'behavior-generators.' The unresolved tension between these different elements in the EP story is one major cause of their confused and contradictory zigzags between theoretical modesty and extreme biological determinism." (Pg. 263)

The brevity of the essays prevents them from constituting a "detailed," scholarly assault on evolutionary psychology. But this is an excellent "overview" of various objections to the theory.

[Dejan Basic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stellar

[Gary Robert Gress · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor Roses,

People should understand the topic they write about.

Towards the end of Origin (1859), Darwin himself predicted that evolutionary theory would aid psychological research in a profound way.

But no one - except these authors - has ever said EP claims to explain or determine everything. Far from it.

My advice to the Roses: Do your research very thoroughly before you attack, because the theory is strong. As it is, you discredit yourself and waste everyone's time.

Embrace your origin,
and theirs and mine.
Cherish the freedom
we gave ourselves,
to learn, determine,
and decide.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the one hand, this is an excellent refutation to evolutionary psychology because most of their arguments conflate biological premises with social premises, so it's nice to hear the other side. Most of it boils down to humans being far more complex than retroactive attempts to justify our behavior as inherited or somehow an evolutionary adaptation, which is correct. So, if you need a resource for the other side of your argumentative paper, this is definitely a good source. However, it is very dry for casual reading, even for someone experienced in reading science and philosophy.

[Ian Pitchford · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should really be subtitled 'arguments against some ideas associated with evolutionary psychology and psychologists' as it's mostly irrelevant to the possibility of an evolution-based approach to human psychology. In his chapter Sir Patrick Bateson concludes "my argument is not, therefore, with the app!location of Darwinian theory to human behaviour but with its misapplication." And who could argue with that?