So What?
Why an evolutionary view of human psychology matters.
In our Mission Statement and Overview, we try to make the goal of this Substack clear: to apply an evolutionary perspective to the study of mental health. One might fairly ask: So what? Why does that matter?
It matters because most people’s understanding of their mental health—and of their subjective experience in general—rests on tenuous foundations. Replacing those foundations with sturdy, scientific ones is an important step in helping people understand, and ultimately improve, their experience.
Why tenuous foundations? Because the field of psychology in general, and clinical psychology in particular, resembles the state of biology before Origin of Species. Before Darwin, biology had a rigorous method of classification (Linnaean) and had accumulated plenty of certain kinds of data (anatomy, behavior, reproductive cycle, and so on). What it lacked was a coherent, causal theory for how such diversity of life came to be. Until evolution was proposed, biologists studied the outputs of a process they did not understand.
Psychology, or the study of the mind and its processes, is in the same position—except this time, unnecessarily so. While evolutionary psychologists argue that the same basic insight from Darwin’s work can explain how, and for what purposes, the human brain was designed, this explanation has been slow to spread throughout psychology as a whole. Although natural selection has been accepted as the ultimate explanation for every other biological phenomenon, the human mind remains an exception in many circles. In 1994, Tooby and Cosmides wrote: “The only behavioral scientists who still derive their hypotheses from intuition and folk psychology, rather than an evolutionary based theory, are those who study humans.”1 Some progress has been made since then, but in my opinion, not nearly enough.2
Every introductory psychology book should begin by invoking natural selection as the process by which our brains came to be, and Darwin’s insight should underlie every branch of the discipline, including clinical psychology, which deals with mental health and illness. But having largely declined this opportunity so far, psychology remains without an organizing principle for its research, and is leaving explanatory power on the table. What this means for the earnest layperson, someone who genuinely wants to understand their mind and its processes, is that they’ve been fed a lot of crap. Hopefully, Living Fossils can help replace some of this crap with non-crap. (Which is also the short version of our Mission Statement.)
What have been the obstacles to evolutionary psychology (EP) taking root? Some are boilerplate reasons, like an aversion to new ideas, which every discipline suffers from. Another obstacle is anthropocentrism, i.e., our reluctance to think of ourselves as animals. Indeed, it can be hard, at times, to understand how we share around 96% of our genetic material with this guy:
Other resistances to evolutionary thought are a bit trickier, like the distinction between brain and mind.3 Psychology’s response to this problem has been to say that the brain is the physical instantiation of the mind, but therein lies the issue: natural selection is generally understood to act on physical stuff, such as knees, tongues, and livers, so people sometimes balk at the notion of evolution shaping something “immaterial,” like our emotions or memories. Furthermore, hypotheses about how the mind is organized must rely on creative methods for testing, methods that are often much less satisfying than being able to point at something and say—Look! These difficulties, though, are not themselves good arguments for abandoning an evolutionary framework.
Finally, we can’t ignore the unfortunate ways that evolutionary theory has been applied in the past. People understandably recall political movements like Social Darwinism and eugenics, and are usually familiar with evolutionary-flavored, pseudo-scientific justifications for racism, sexism, colonialism, and so forth. In addition, claims about human nature—from every discipline—are often misunderstood by the public. A common example is the almost-willful confusion of genetic predisposition for genetic determinism. For an in-depth history of evolutionary ideas and their (often hostile) misinterpretations, I’d recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Despite all this, we at Living Fossils maintain that when applied correctly, EP provides broad explanation, conceptual coherence, and a way to generate and test hypotheses in a field of psychology that is desperate for all three.4
One crucial distinction to keep in mind as you read is between normative and positive statements. Normative statements are about ethics and often involve the word should. Positive statements typically involve the word is; they are claims about truth. In the past, observers of the field have misinterpreted EP’s positive statements as normative, leading to confusion and anger. For example, if a male’s reproductive success improves with more partners, that fact doesn’t say anything about how men ought to be behave. Indeed, a major part of our work will be to ask what then? after discussing a purported feature of human psychology. Humans are not destined to follow rote patterns outlined by their nature. Instead, among all the animals, we are distinguished by our flexibility and improvisation.
The reasons above—plus a few others, I’m sure—help explain why psychology has not embraced evolutionary theory in an effort to better understand human behavior. This resistance, in turn, might account for why psychology is so often an unsatisfying discipline, both to outside scholars who occasionally look to it for answers, and to laypeople wishing to understand their experience. Which is too bad, because I would guess that “understanding my subjective experience” is at the top of many people’s list for what they’d like to know from science. At least, I am not acquainted with too many people who would shrug their shoulders and say “Eh, who cares” to the prospect of knowing more about what makes them happy, sad, regretful, nostalgic, and so on. Without EP, however, the various threads of psychology are scattered and disorganized. Our aim is to bring some of these threads together so that the reader can walk away with a better understanding of human thought and behavior, most notably their own.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: Toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science. Cognition, 50(1-3), 41-77.
See Pinker, S. (2016). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. Penguin. (Original work published 2003), as well as Silberberg, P. J., & Thyer, B. A. (2023). Evolutionary psychology and social work. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 1-26.
See Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies, 2(3), 200-219.
See The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal, as well as Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T. H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., ... & Wu, H. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature human behaviour, 2(9), 637-644.