Dancing in the Dark

Abstract

The Narrow Evolutionary Psychology Movement ₁ represents itself as a major reorientation of the social/behavioral sciences, a group of sciences previously dominated by something called the ‘Standard Social Science Model’ (SSSM; Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow, 1992). Narrow evolutionary psychology alleges that the SSSM treated the mind, and particularly those aspects of the mind that exhibit cultural variation, as devoid of any marks of its evolutionary history. Adherents of narrow evolutionary psychology often suggest that the SSSM owed more to ideology than to evidence. It was the child of the 1960s, representing a politically motivated insistence on the possibility of changing social arrangements such as gender roles:

Not so long ago jealousy was considered a pointless, archaic institution in need of reform. But like other denials of human nature from the 1960s, this bromide has not aged well (Stephen Pinker, endorsement for Buss, 2000)).

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this book, the term ‘narrow evolutionary psychology’ signifies the approach to evolutionary psychology developed by Cosmides, Tooby, Buss, et al. This term was chosen not to imply that this approach has an inappropriately narrow point of view, but merely to suggest that the approach adopts a narrower range of assumptions than ‘broad evolutionary psychology’ (or, just ‘evolutionary psychology’). This latter term signifies evolutionary psychology generally, practiced with any of a very broad range of assumptions possible within the general framework of evolutionary approaches to psychology. For more detail on this terminology, see the editor’s introduction, p 1