Critical Approaches to Evolutionary Psychology (original) (raw)

Evolutionary Psychology—the study of human cognition and behavior premised upon evolved adaptations resulting from the processes of natural and sexual selection—has emerged in recent years as a subfield of Psychology with aspirations to become a “metatheortical framework” from which questions in Psychology are best situated and pursued. An evolutionary perspective in Psychology focuses on hypothesized mental and behavioral traits/characteristics, in some notable cases gender specific, that have ostensibly evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and continue to shape human behavior and mentality even in our modern physical and social environment that has taken us quite far from the environmental “conditions of possibility” under which we have evolved. Although Evolutionary Psychology has made some impressive inroads in considering such topics as, “problems of survival, long-term mating, sexuality, parenting, kinship, cooperation, aggression and warfare, conflict between the sexes, status, prestige, and dominance hierarchies” it is not without its increasingly concerned critics who contend that Evolutionary Psychology has in some important instances unjustifiably hypostasized modern environmental conditions as existing in our evolutionary pre-history, thereby deriving erroneous conclusions from a circular logic where the conclusion of gendered differences in mentality and behavior justifies the premises of research. The purpose of this course will be 1) to become familiar with and critically consider the fundamental premises and logic of Evolutionary Psychology as they are outlined in canonical sources, 2) to engage with emerging critiques of this field from recent scholarship in Cultural Studies as well as immanent critiques/alternative perspectives from within the field of Evolutionary Psychology itself, and 3) to imagine some possible paths forward that allow for creative visions on the relationship between necessity and contingency at the interstices of Nature and Culture.