Dancing in the dark: Evolutionary psychology and the argument from design

In Steven Scher & Frederick Rauscher (eds.), Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 135--160 (2001)
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Abstract

The Narrow Evolutionary Psychology Movement 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’. 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.’ ) " This view of history does not ring true to those, like the authors, who have worked in traditions of evolutionary theorizing about the mind that have a continuous history through the 1960s and beyond: traditions such as evolutionary epistemology and psychoevolutionary research into emotion (Griffiths

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Author Profiles

Karola Stotz
Last affiliation: Macquarie University
Paul Edmund Griffiths
University of Sydney

Citations of this work

Natural sources of normativity.Wayne Christensen - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):104-112.
Self-directed Agents.W. D. Christensen & C. A. Hooker - 2001 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1):18-52.

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