Joel Kontinen
Subrena E. Smith writes this about evolutionary psychology:
"In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that the mind has an architecture that has been conserved since the Pleistocene, and that our psychology can be fruitfully understood in terms of the original, fitness-enhancing functions of these conserved psychological mechanisms."
Then she goes on to say:
"But for evolutionary psychological explanations to succeed, practitioners must be able to show that contemporary cognitive mechanisms correspond to those that were selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that these present-day cognitive mechanisms are descended from the corresponding ancestral mechanisms, and that they have retained the functions of the ancestral mechanisms from which they are descended. I refer to the problem of demonstrating that these conditions obtain as “the matching problem,” argue that evolutionary psychology does not have the resources to address it, and conclude that evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is therefore impossible".
AS As David F. Coppedge writes; “Smith is an evolutionist herself, she challenges psychologists with the “matching problem” that she says plagues evolutionary psychology: its inability to match what selection pressures or responses our ancestors faced with what humans face today. If humans can only respond blindly to their evolutionary past, how are governments supposed to hold them responsible?”
Source:
Smith, Subrena E, 2020. Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? Biological Theory volume 15, pages39–49(2020)
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