As it is, the focus on reproduction and reproductive success is demented.

I mean, I have no other way to describe it.

It’s utterly delusional.

It’s utterly counterfactual.

First of all, a huge part of a population nowadays do not want to reproduce.

They absolutely don’t want to have children.

They regard children as a serious threat to their happiness and their lifestyle.

And academic studies support this contention.

Parents, people with children, are much less happy than childless people.

So the inexorable urge to find an intimate partner made selection and then to reproduce as often as one can to have 200 children, 400 children.

I don’t know where these guys, where these so-called scientists came up with this nonsense, utter unmitigated nonsense.

And also, even if you were to accept this assumption that everyone wants to have as many children as possible, especially men, even if you were to accept it, how would you explain rape?

Rape is a misogynistic power trip.

It’s not about reproduction. It’s not about sex even.

And yet evolutionary psychology explains rape as a way to reproduce.

Men who cannot obtain sex otherwise rape women in order to reproduce, say evolutionary psychologists.

When all the studies of rape and rapists have demonstrated beyond any doubt in the last 70 years, that rape has nothing to do with sex, or with reproduction of course, it is this kind of nonsensical claim that renders evolutionary psychology suspect, makes it sound totally detached from reality.

Evolutionary psychology flies in the face of the entire corpus of psychology.

Everyone we know about how the mind operates, people’s motivations, how traits and behaviors are interlinked, all this is upended by evolutionary psychology.

And they come up with claims such as this, rape is about reproduction, people rape in order to have children.

They come up with this kind of claims, and I can give you another 10 claims, which are equally deotic, that undermine the whole foundation of this.

There is no debate, as I said, that genes in evolution are somehow linked to the brain, and that the brain is the seat of the mind somehow.

We are not sure yet how, but it is the seat of the mind.

It’s a reasonable assumption.

And therefore, the mind is affected third hand, not directly, by the evolutionary processes which have embedded themselves into the gene, into our genes.

There is a connection, however tenuous, between evolution, our genetic make-up, and the way our mind functions, and its contents.

No one is disputing this. To dispute this would be equally stupid.

But to claim that only evolution, and only genes, determine this complex machine known as the human mind, is to be out of your mind.

And it leads to such preposterous claims as the one I’ve just told you about, regarding rape.

Additionally, evolutionary psychology ignores the critical role of intangibles in psychology.

Narratives, delusions, meaning, truth, security, a sense of security, happiness, personal development, and growth. All these are ignored in evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychologists do take into account, and try to account for, changing environments, but only via the transmission mechanism of genes, and only over long stretches of time.

That’s not the case with human beings.

evolutionary psychologists would do well to exit their laboratories and actually talk to people in a hub.

That’s not the way how humans work.

Not at all. Not even remotely.

People are motivated, men and women, people are motivated, to self-sacrifice, and therefore not reproduce.

For example, soldiers at war, people are motivated to be altruistic, to give up on certain benefits and assets in order to help others, even other people who are not related to them. People would give up anything in order to acquire meaning.

Viktor Frankl’s famous observations, meaning is crucial for mental health, for motivation, and so we imbue our lives with meaning. A lot of it is artificial and invented, but still, you know, a nation state is an example.

The church, people are willing to die for a piece of fabric known as the flag, because this piece of fabric endows them, imbues their lives with meaning and sense, makes sense of their lives.

What is the role of meaning in evolutionary psychology?

Nowhere to be found, of course.

How about love?

Not the biological urge to reproduce, not lust, not infatuation, not limerence, the deep, the profound, abiding, non-selfish sharing of space and time and life with another human being, including companionship and compassion and succor, even when the other person can give you nothing because they are sick, for example.

So how do you explain relationships that last after the reproductive age?

There’s so many holes in evolutionary psychology that it makes Swiss cheese look solid, you know.

Evolutionary psychology challenges the concept of domain general psychology.

Domain general psychology simply says that we have a machinery, a universal computer, and this machinery can adapt itself to changing circumstances as required.

The machine itself doesn’t have embedded sets of algorithms and instructions. It has a general program that allows it to react to changing environments, challenges, is it an entrance of other people into our lives, demands, crises, exigencies, vicissitudes, and so on.

So it’s what Alan Turing called a universal machine or a universal computer.

This is what most psychologists believe, myself included.

The evolutionary psychologists believe in domain-specific modules.

They believe that the brain is divided into areas, each area dedicated to a task.

And so these are domain-specific modules, and they kick into operation when confronted with a stimulus or an environmental cue which triggers them or provokes them, brings them, arouses them into action.

Now, that’s pretty easy to prove that it’s not true, that it’s wrong.

Because in traumatic brain injuries, the brain takes over, other parts of the brain take over.

So if some area of your brain is damaged, stroke, concussion, injury, proper injury, and so on. One area is damaged, another area of the brain takes over the functions of the damaged area.

That’s a fact. That’s an absolute fact.

The brain is built with enormous redundancy. You could cut away huge portions of the brain and still function utterly perfectly.

There’s even been cases of people who were born with extremely little brain, and they’re leading normal lives.

So yes, of course, various areas of the brain specialize in tasks, in specific tasks, but not because they are domain-specific or task-specific, but because they happen to be there.

And in case of injury, other parts take over and perform the same functions relatively perfectly.

In short, the brain is a product of learning, acquired skill sets, skilling, so that specific parts of the brain are reactive to specific tasks. A form of conditioning, if you wish, conditioning indeed, is a behavioral learning technique we learned via conditioning.

That’s behaviorism in the 1960s.

So that’s a huge debate here.

Is the brain an all-tasks, all-purpose, universal, redundant machine? Or is it a set of rigid modules, a collection of rigid modules, each one dedicated to a task?

I think neuroscience supports this contention of evolutionary psychology, and that’s the understatement of the year, probably.

Computational models, and evolutionary psychology is computational.

It compares the brain to a computer, not a universal computer, but a series of task-specific computers.

Why would nature, by the way, come up with a seriously inefficient solution such as dedicated task-specific, domain-specific modules?

It’s the most inefficient solution imaginable.

Why would nature come up with this inefficient solution rather than with a much more efficient solution over a universal machine that can do anything depending on environmental cues and stimuli?

Why would nature select this solution is beyond me?

Why would evolutionary psychologists claim that nature had selected this solution is also beyond me because it defies every fact we have?

Evolutionary psychology is humongously counterfactual in numerous cases.

Anyhow, the core of evolutionary psychology is the assumption that the brain is a computer, so they use computational models.

The typical computational model of evolutionary psychology is input stimulus, or Q, input, sensing of the input, and then output.

You see a spider, that’s the input, you process the image, and then your output is fear, arachnophobia, you’re afraid of spiders.

Okay?

That’s a typical model in evolutionary psychology.

But of course, this model is a black box model.

What this model says is that we see event A and we witness event C. Event A is the spider, event C is the fear or recoil.

What happens between event A and event C is unknown.

That’s the processing in the task-specific module.

Presumably, there’s a fear-generating module and it processes spiders more than anything else because spiders are a very common example in evolutionary psychology.

I’m not quite sure why.

There’s a place here for clinical psychologists and psychiatrists to analyze evolutionary psychologists.

But this model tells us nothing. It doesn’t add to our knowledge. There’s no enlightenment there. There’s no insight. It’s not science.

To say that event A leads to event C, but we don’t know how, and to label the interim processing, the interim stage processing, that doesn’t make you a scientist.

Compare for example, the dual inheritance theory, DIT, a competitor of evolutionary psychology, an adversary, if you wish. The dual inheritance theory claims that genes, our genetic makeup, genes interact with culture. Culture is a global name for the environment. Genes interact with the environment to generate the panoply and the kaleidoscope of human emotions, cognitions, traits, behaviors, choices, decisions, and so on and so forth, and mental illnesses as well.

Now that’s a far more flexible approach.

In my view, also more falsifiable. In other words, it can yield, it can generate hypotheses and predictions that can be falsified, which is the essence of good science.

Environmental psychology cannot generate hypotheses that can be somehow tested or falsified. It suffers from a problem known as under generation of hypotheses.

One of the main reasons it cannot is because it’s tautological, and I’ll come to it a bit later.

Dual inheritance theory, one example is the Baldwin effect.

Dual inheritance theory is a serious competitor, which I think describes reality far more accurately.

Now, of course, evolutionary psychology is deterministic.

What these people say is that our history has, our history determined or determines who we are. That our Stone Age experience determined who we are today.

This of course ignores completely neuroplasticity, the enormous reactivity of the brain, the brain’s huge elastic capacity to shape and reshape and shape shift as the environment changes.

And I’m talking about micro environments, not the Stone Age, not the Ice Age, but the invention of the smartphone, which is pretty recent. We’ve been completely transformed in 20 years. Our exposure to individual small screens has completely transformed us beyond recognition.

And this is the brain’s neuroplasticity in action. I think we have been much more determined. I think we are who we are much more because of screens than because of our history hunting mammoths and other animals in the Stone Age.

I think to claim that our mental makeup, our mental map, to claim that our psychology is the outcome of our hunter-gatherer history and not of our exposure to modern technology in the last 400 years is a ridiculous, preposterous, reasonable claim.

I think modern human beings have been shaped mostly by the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, cinema, the internet and smartphones than they’ve been by their alleged history during the Stone Age.

I’m saying alleged because no one knows what has happened during the Stone Age.

That’s another problem.

We know very little about the environment in such a distant past. We don’t know how people lived in the Stone Age. We speculate, of course. We observe primitive tribes in the Amazon and we say they probably live the same way. Hunter-gatherer societies were presumed to have been nomadic, wandering all the time, all over.

Only recently have we discovered that hunter-gatherer societies actually established settlements and tended to the land, primitive proto-agriculture.

This is a recent discovery, like two, three years ago. We don’t know anything.

It’s arrogant and grandiose to claim that we have almost perfect knowledge about the Stone Age and therefore we can say that we are the products of the Stone Age.

Even if we were to have all the knowledge in the world about the Stone Age, why would the Stone Age be more relevant and more determining and more pertinent and more influential than, for example, the last hundred years with two world wars and an explosion of new technologies, space technologies, computing technologies and so on, artificial intelligence soon? Why would artificial intelligence be less influential in shaping us and making us who we are than, for example, our need to forage and to hunt?

We know very little about the environment in the past and any claim that our past is far more important than our present and our future is beyond ridiculous.

Human beings are storytellers. Humans are actually far more influenced by their visions of the future and their experience of the present than by anything that has happened to them in the past.

That’s why people go to psychotherapy.

They try to forget the past or to somehow reframe the past.

People are capable of overcoming the past.

Unfortunately we are very rarely capable of overcoming the present and we always catastrophize the future.

These stories, this fiction that determines our lives, religion, for example, art, religion and art, in my view, have been far more influential and far more powerful in shaping who we are than anything we’ve experienced as hunter-gatherers.

This is also the question of transmission.

Allegedly our lifestyle somehow has altered our genes, epigenetically perhaps, via natural selection.

That could be true.

But these genes are expressed or dormant in reaction to environments. Technology is part of our environment nowadays. Religion has been a part of our environment for thousands of years. Genes are not masters of the universe. Genes don’t control us. Genes don’t define us. We are not robots with a genetic program.

That’s a very counterfactual, delusional way of perceiving human beings.

They are not like that, simply, scientifically speaking.

So genes can’t dictate to us how to behave, what to think, how to feel, how to relate to other people, interpersonal relationships and so on. Genes have no input in any of this, or very little input in any of this.

Definitely the environment is far more, far more relevant than any genes or any gene or array of genes.

The transmission mechanism is inefficient. Genetic templates are inefficient as behavior modifiers. The connection between genes and behavior is very tenuous.

Pollens, for example, are much more relevant.