Reading Helen De Cruz's interesting post on Evolutionary Psychology, it occurs to me that EP is of two kinds, stemming from two rather different motivations. The baddest stuff mostly belongs to the second of these two kinds--see below.
The biggest problem in human evolution is its speed and huge discontinuities in a small amount of time. Speculation in this area has been supported by a concerted effort to compare human early cognitive development with that of other primates, since this gives evidence of phylogeny. (Hauser's research on cottontops was in this genre.) There are a number of hypotheses that have been advanced to try and show how fast evolution could have occurred. The most promising ones invoke assortative mating and sexual selection. The late Denis Dutton's book, The Art Instinct (which I review in the July 2011 issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy) is an example of this kind of work.
This research area is wide open, highly speculative, and very exciting. People put forward all kinds of wild hypotheses: cheater detection in the pleistocene, massive modularity, art as sexual display, and so on. These wild hypotheses are probably all wrong, but they are a necessary launching pad for the ultimate true theory. It's misguided, in my view, to demand discipline in this area. Nobody knows what discipline would be, aside from silence. (Of course, we do know that it is a failure of discipline (!) to fabricate evidence.)
A second strain of EP is, to my mind, much less exciting, and comes from an opposite point of view. It doesn't address the question of how humans developed all their unique abilities in a short period of time. Rather, it addresses how humans are depressingly the same as primates: sexually dimorphic with regard to cognitive abilities, sexual behaviour and mate choice, generally violent, inclined to racism, etc. It relies on what is in large measure unconvincing empirical research. It exaggerates and misinterprets this research, which is already flawed. It advances madcap "explanations" of misinterpreted research. Satoshi Kanazawa is a gargoyle on the edifice of this line of EP. From what I have read in the reviews--dangerous source of information, I must say--David Brooks is another practitioner.
I can't see much value in wild speculation in this second area of evolutionary psychology. Discipline here is easily defined: shut up unless you have subjected your evidence and theories to the normal standards of scientific scrutiny. Advance cautious hypotheses. Take social conditioning into account.
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