Defending Evolutionary Psychology through Rebutting the Criticisms

Abstract

For the last two decades, since Barkow et al. (1992), evolutionary psychology has been fiercely criticized by many philosophers of science and other scientists. This article aims to rebut these criticisms and defend the research program of evolutionary psychology. I mainly focus on three criticisms: (1) we have not evolved as many modules in the changing environments as evolutionary psychologists have assumed, (2) massive modularity hypothesis fails, and (3) it is difficult to infer the present from the past. Through rebutting them, I conclude that evolutionary psychology is methodologically valid, and also empirically promising to some degree.