Evolutionary Psychology and Novel Predictions

Abstract

So far, the case for evolutionary psychology is not looking promising. As a paradigm, evolutionary psychology is problematic, contentious and antagonising, being fiercely scrutinised and challenged. Its explanations are exposed as embarrassingly naked in historical and scientific detail—the kind of detail required to vindicate them. If that is all there is to evolutionary psychology, one should think the case against it is decisive. Indeed, many have come to precisely that conclusion. But there is another dimension to evolutionary psychology, a dimension relatively overlooked, and indeed often not even recognised, in the literature: evolutionary psychology as a heuristic, a set of tools for discovering new features of human psychology and behavioural phenomena.