Can Evolution Explain How the Mind Works? A Review of the Evolutionary Psychology Debates

Melanie Mitchell

Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute

Abstract: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." It would be hard to find a biologist today who disagrees with geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky's famous claim. Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection has done more than any other principle to explain the biological world, and to illuminate the relationships among all current life forms and among those found in the fossil record.

If nothing in biology makes sense without evolution, the same should be said for the behavior and thinking patterns---the psychology---of biological creatures such as ourselves. The human mind has been often described as the pinnacle of evolution: the most complex organ ever "designed" by natural selection. Darwin himself believed that his principles would one day explain not only the biological world but the psychological; that due to his theory, "psychology will be placed on a new foundation." [1]

After a long period in which the two fields were largely separate, evolutionary theory has recently begun to play a significant role in psychological research, most prominently in an area called "Evolutionary Psychology." Just as evolutionary biologists attempt to explain the morphology and other explicit physical features of organisms by using evolutionary arguments, evolutionary psychologists want to explain people's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by asking questions about their adaptive significance over evolutionary time. "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." [2]

Such a quest sounds eminently reasonable, no? One might expect that (biblical creationists and other anti-evolutionists aside) most people would find the evolutionary psychology research program uncontroversial and admirable.

However, it turns out that evolutionary psychology has engendered deep, emotional, and rancorous debates within the scientific community, not only in dry scientific seminars and journals but also in the more free-wheeling (and mud-slinging) pages of the New York Review of Books and other popular periodicals. Why?

In this essay, inspired by Steven Pinker's fascinating book, How the Mind Works [3] and other expositions of evolutionary psychology, and by attacks on such works, I will explore, from an informed outsider's perspective, what evolutionary psychology is all about, where it came from, and what its prospects are in light of recent debates surrounding its controversial methodology and claims.

To appear in Complexity.

Keywords: Evolution; psychology; evolutionary psychology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-11
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