Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.

Evolutionary psychologists contend that a number of the criticisms against it are straw men, based on an incorrect nature versus nurture dichotomy, and/or based on misunderstandings of the discipline.Segerstråle, Ullica Christina Olofsdotter (2000). Defenders of the truth: the battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. .Alcock, John (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barkow, Jerome (Ed.). (2006) Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tooby, J., Cosmides, L. & Barrett, H. C. (2005). Resolving the debate on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpenetration of motivational and conceptual functions. In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Content. NY: Oxford University Press.Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology by Edward H. Hagen, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5–67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. In addition, some defenders of evolutionary psychology - such as American biologist and skeptic Jerry Coyne - assert that critics of the discipline base their criticisms on a priori political assumptions, such as those associated with "blank-slateism—which may stem partly from the Marxist faith in the infinite malleability of humans". Dismissing arguments based on the arguers supposed ideological commitments--without engaging the actual arguments--shows the Ad hominem fallacy. Similarly, a modal invocation of a particular imaginary of Marxism without support demonstrates false attribution and tendentiousness.

Examples of critics and defenders

The history of the debate from a critic's perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). Critics of evolutionary psychology include the philosophers of science David Buller (author of Adapting Minds), Robert C. Richardson (author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology), and Brendan Wallace (author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work). Other critics include neurobiologists like Steven Rose (who edited Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology), biological anthropologists like Jonathan Marks, and social anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Marshall Sahlins.Buller, David (2006) Adapting Minds. MIT Press. Wallace, Brendan (2010) Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work. Imprint Academic. Rose, Hilary; Rose, Steven (2001) Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. Vintage.

Responses defending evolutionary psychology against critics have been published in books including Segerstråle's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (2000),Segerstråle, Ullica Christina Olofsdotter (2000). Defenders of the truth: The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. . Barkow's Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (2005),Jerome H. Barkow, (2005), Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford, Oxford University Press. and Alcock's The Triumph of Sociobiology (2001). Other responses to critics include Confer et al. (2010),, Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations. Tooby and Cosmides (2005),(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley), including Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005) Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology Full text , and Hagen (2005).Hagen (2005) Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology Furthermore, in one frequently quoted rebuttal of most such critics, psychologist Anne Campbell posited that such people merely believe "evolution stops at the neck".Campbell, Anne. (2002). A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 13

Criticism of key assumptions Massive modularity

Evolutionary psychologists have postulated that the mind is composed of cognitive modules specialized to perform specific tasks. Evolutionary psychologists have theorized that these specialized modules enabled our ancestors to react quickly and effectively to environmental challenges. As a result, domain-specific modules would have been selected for, whereas broad general-purpose cognitive mechanisms that worked more slowly would have been eliminated in the course of evolution.

A number of cognitive scientists have criticized the modularity hypothesis, citing neurological evidence of brain plasticity and changes in neural networks in response to environmental stimuli and personal experiences. Steven Quartz and Terry Sejnowski, for example, have argued that the view of the brain as a collection of specialized circuits, each chosen by natural selection and built according to a "genetic blueprint", is contradicted by evidence that cortical development is flexible and that areas of the brain can take on different functions. Neurobiological research does not support the assumption by evolutionary psychologists that higher-level systems in the neocortex responsible for complex functions are massively modular. Peters (2013) cites neurological research showing that higher-order neocortical areas can become functionally specialized by way of synaptic plasticity and the experience-dependent changes that take place at the synapse during learning and memory. As a result of experience and learning processes the developed brain can look modular although it is not necessarily innately modular. However, Klasios (2014) responds to Peters' critique.

Another criticism is that there is little empirical support in favor of the domain-specific theory. Leading evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have found that performance on the selection task is content-dependent: People find it easier to detect violations of "if-then" rules when the rules can be interpreted as cheating on a social contract. From this Cosmides and Tooby and other evolutionary psychologists concluded that the mind consisted of domain-specific, context-sensitive modules (including a cheater-detection module). Critics have suggested that Cosmides and Tooby use untested evolutionary assumptions to eliminate rival reasoning theories and that their conclusions contain inferential errors. Davies et al., for example, have argued that Cosmides and Tooby did not succeed in eliminating the general-purpose theory because the adapted Wason selection task they used tested only one specific aspect of deductive reasoning and failed to examine other general-purpose reasoning mechanisms (e.g., reasoning based on syllogistic logic, predicate logic, modal logic, and inductive logic etc.). Furthermore, Cosmides and Tooby use rules that incorrectly represent genuine social exchange situations. Specifically, they posit that someone who received a benefit and does not pay the cost is cheating. However, in real-life social exchange situations people can benefit and not pay without cheating (as in the case of receiving gifts or benefiting from charity).

Some critics have suggested that our genes cannot hold the information to encode the brain and all its assumed modules. Humans share a significant portion of their genome with other species and have corresponding DNA sequences so that the remaining genes must contain instructions for building specialized circuits that are absent in other mammals.

One controversy concerns the particular modularity of mind theory used in evolutionary psychology (massive modularity). Critics argue in favor of other theories.

Environment of evolutionary adaptedness One method employed by evolutionary psychologists is using knowledge of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) to generate hypotheses regarding possible psychological adaptations. Part of the critique of the scientific basis of evolutionary psychology is that it often assumes that human evolution occurred in a uniform environment, whereas critics suggest that we know so little about the environment (or probably multiple environments) in which Homo sapiens evolve, that explaining specific traits as an adaption to that environment becomes highly speculative.Plotkin, Henry. 2004 Evolutionary thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Blackwell. p. 149.

The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides state that research is confined to certainties about the past, such as pregnancies only occurring in women, and that humans lived in groups. They argue that there are multiple environmental features that are known regarding our species' evolutionary history. They argue that our hunter-gatherer ancestors dealt with predators and prey, food acquisition and sharing, mate choice, child rearing, interpersonal aggression, interpersonal assistance, diseases and a host of other fairly predictable challenges that constituted significant selection pressures. Knowledge also include things such as nomadic, kin-based lifestyle in small groups, long life for mammals, low fertility for mammals, long female pregnancy and lactation, cooperative hunting and aggression, tool use, and sexual division of labor.The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), David M. Buss, Chapter 1, pp. 5–67, Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Tooby and Cosmides thus argue that enough can be known about the EEA to make hypotheses and predictions.Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. "Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books on Stephen Jay Gould's 'Darwinian Fundamentalism'(June 12, 1997) and 'Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism'(June 26, 1997)." Verfügbar unter: http://cogweb. ucla. edu/Debate/CEP_Gould. html [Datum des Zugriffs: 12.02. 2009] (1997).