Kudos

The Wall Street Journal’s Sharon Begley, one of the country’s top science writers in the popular press, highlighted the work of NIU Philosophy Professor David Buller in the April 29 edition of the paper.

Begley devoted her column to Buller’s new book, “Adapting Minds,” which examines the claims of evolutionary psychology. The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that human nature was designed by natural selection in our hunter-gatherer ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. Buller examines in detail the field’s major claims and rejects them all.

Evolutionary theory can still be applied to human psychology, Buller said. But he maintains that the conventional wisdom in the field is misguided.

Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems that our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them.

The field’s proponents claim many discoveries based on this approach, including the evolutionary rationale for human mate preferences (that males prefer nubile females and females prefer high-status males) and for “discriminative parental solicitude” (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children).

Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that several of evolutionary psychology’s most publicized discoveries are not supported by the evidence.

Begley said Buller’s book is “the most persuasive critique of evo psych I have encountered.” She further added, “After ‘Adapting Minds,’ it is impossible to ever again think that human behavior is the Stone Age artifact that evolutionary psychology claims.”

More information on Buller’s books is available on his homepage at www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/research.shtml.

5-9-05