Introduction

Abstract

What today we call ‘evolutionary psychology’ was pioneered by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the early 1990s and was subsequently developed and popularised by Steven Pinker, David Buss and Jerome Barkow among others. To its champions, evolutionary psychology is not just another research programme in the behavioural sciences: it is a revolutionary paradigm of the behavioural sciences. Evolutionary psychology is typically understood in terms of strong commitments: to particular views about evolution, to a particular view about the mind, as being an explanatory project, as being a metatheory for psychology in particular and for the behavioural sciences more broadly. Evolutionary psychologists claim to have shed new light on our psychology and to be working towards making visible the hidden processes of the mind. Evolutionary psychologists have also claimed that those insights have important public policy implications.