Evolutionary psychology explanations

Moving now from science fiction by philosophers to science fiction by scientists, we can describe circumstances under which evolutionary psychological explanations would be indisputably correct. Suppose, for instance, that rape was indeed caused by a particular module in the brain. This can be a module possessed by all males but activated only under certain circumstances (in which case, the explanation of rape will of course be incomplete), or a module peculiar to rapists. It must be a module produced by some set of genes, and those genes must have been selected in part, at least, because of their tendency to produce rape-generating brain modules. Generalising, we can identify the following three principles ... 

When evolution selects the genes that build the parts of brains (modules) that produce a particular kind of behaviour, and evolution selects them because of the fitness benefits of that kind of behaviour, we have the conditions for a perfect evolutionary psychological explanation. 

Returning to my original fanciful example, the first thing to note is that reductive explanations may fail to be relevant or appropriate even when they do introduce factors that are at least preconditions for the phenomenon in question. (Perhaps there is always some kind of reductive explanation that does this much.) This possibility is obvious for evolutionary psychology. To take an extreme (in the absurdity of the evolutionary explanation) and notorious example, there is no doubt that men have evolved both the capacity to commit rape, and a disposition, under some circumstances, to do so. This much is true for any behaviour that actually occurs, although the disposition to play the sousaphone or to extract cube roots is something that requires extremely special circumstances. 

Cosmides L, Tooby J 1999 Evolutionary psychology. In Wilson R, Keil F (eds) MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p 295—298 Davis HL, Pratt C 1995 The development of children s theory of mind the working memory explanation. Aust J Psychol 47 25—31... 

Trivers description of human reciprocal altruism certainly gives prominence to emotions. This behavioral system may have evolved from dominance hierarchization, an ethological concept (Weisfeld, 1980). There seems to be an opportunity to analyze other social psychological phenomena in adaptive terms usually they are explained only in terms of very narrow, specific mini-theories. Roes (1993) has offered an evolutionary explanation of reactance theory, for example. 

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