Psychological topics, Vol. 15 No. 2, 2006.
Original scientific paper
Evolutionary Psychology is Not Evil! (… and Here’s Why …)
Glenn Geher
Abstract
Evolutionary psychology has faced ‘implacable hostility’ (Dawkins, 2005) from a number of intellectual fronts. Critics of evolutionary psychology have tried to paint this perspective variously as reductionist and overly deterministic, at best, and as sexist, racist, and downright evil at worst. The current paper argues that all psychological frameworks which assume that human beings are the result of the organic evolutionary forces of natural and sexual selection are, essentially, evolutionary in nature (regardless of whether they traditionally fall under the label of evolutionary psychology). In other words, the perspective presented here argues that all psychology is evolutionary psychology. Two specific mis-characterizations of evolutionary psychology ((a) that it is eugenicist in nature and (b) that it is a fully non-situationist, immutable perspective on behavior) are addressed here with an eye toward elaborating on how these distorted conceptions of evolutionary psychology are non-constructive and non-progressive. A final section focuses on how the social sciences in general could benefit from being evolutionized. well that it is actually a bit unsettling.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
8818
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2006.
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