Philosophy professor ignites discussion on evolutionary psychology

Subrena Smith, Ph.D. had no idea she would spark a scientific discussion with the publication of an article. But that’s how things have evolved.

Smith, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire, wrote “Is evolutionary psychology possible,” which was published in the December issue of the journal Biological Theory.

The response was immediate and passionate, according to an article in UNH Today.

“I still can’t believe it!” said Smith, an assistant professor in UNH’s Department of Philosophy. The article has been downloaded more than one thousand times, and has an Altmetric rating of 142, which puts it in the 99th percentile of the more than fourteen million research outputs ever tracked, and number 1 of all of the papers published in Biological Theory. With this level of uptake, it’s not surprising that Springer Nature made the article available for free download throughout the month of January, and Biological Theory will do the same in February.”

Subrena Smith explained to Current Science Daily why she wrote the article and the points she was trying to make.

“Evolutionary psychology purports to provide explanations of some contemporary human behavior in terms our evolved psychology,” Smith said. “The thought is this: evolution fitted early humans (around 300,000 years ago or so) with particular psychological mechanisms because of which they attained reproductive success. We know that it is indeed true that our ancestors did achieve fitness. We are all the result of their having done so.”

“For evolutionary psychology, though, it’s not just that evolution has something to do with what we are — what sorts of behaviors we exhibit, and what those behaviors are for — it’s rather that we have the wetware that is responsible for us behaving in certain ways,” she said. “Our wetware, our psychology, is the same as the psychology that our ancestors had. In other words, we who are alive today, and who engage in caring for our kin, seek and successfully find mates, and so on, do so because of the particular psychology that we inherited, and which still produces evolved effects.”

“Evolutionary psychology is therefore a methodologically self-supporting framework that offers theories of human psychology that its practitioners believe are entailed by evolutionary theory,” she said. “This framework is intended to be substantive, it is indeed consequential, but it is not possible to execute, on methodological grounds.”

A major part of her paper is her discussion of “The Matching Problem” in evolutionary psychology.

“The Matching Problem has to do with the difficulty (I believe, impossibility) of matching the mechanisms that operated in our ancestors’ heads and which resulted in particular behaviors that they exhibited, with the ones that are operating in contemporary human beings and which cause our behaviors today,” Smith said.

“Evolutionary psychologists need to be able to do this, because their claim is that at least some of our behaviors are caused by those evolved mechanisms,” she said. “That is, those mechanisms are doing for us what they did for our ancestors: either because they cause the same behaviors, they produce behaviors with the same functions, or they produce behaviors that bring about the same effects.”

“There are two obvious obstacles to establishing this. We do not know (nor do we have any way to determine) what kinds of behaviors our ancestors exhibited. They have not left behavioral evidence,” Smith said. “Second, the fact that a mechanism was implicated in certain behaviors in the past does not mean that that mechanism is operating now today and is also implicated in producing the same behavior.”

In her paper, she states that evolutionary psychology is “impossible.” What does she mean by that?

“As I say above, unless the matching problem can be met and resolved, evolutionary psychology, as a framework for explaining contemporary human behavior, is not possible,” Smith said.

Her paper has been met with a mixed reception.

“People in many disparate disciplines have responded positively,” Smith said. “But there have also been some very negative responses. Some of those negative responses come from people who have not read my original article. Perhaps understandably, a number of supporters of evolutionary psychology were rather skeptical, and few were hostile.”

“It is always difficult to be open to criticisms of what one spends one’s life pursuing, and which is a part of one’s professional identity,” Smith said. “Some people say that my claim that EP is impossible is overblown. Some have taken me to be hostile to evolution. Some have said that the matching problem is easily solved.”

While most of the criticism has been professional, some has been personal. “Yes, there have been a few snide and derogatory comments,” Smith said.

On Gizmodo, a design, technology, science and science fiction website, Smith said evolutionary psychology could be used to support weak scientific claims that some might try to use justify discrimination against minority groups. She said she that is a position she sticks by now.

“Absolutely, I do. I am urging caution,” Smith said. “It is dangerously seductive to reach for explanations that are supposed to reveal who we really are, and therefore what some of us deserve, because of our allegedly evolved natures.”

Jonathan Marks, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte Department of Anthropology, has studied Smith’s paper.

Marks, who previously worked at Yale and the University of California-Berkeley, focuses on biological anthropology and genetics, but his interests are broad, but has published widely across the sciences and humanities on the general topics of human origins and human diversity.

He has an impressive resume, which can be obscured by his dry sense of humor, as his online biography displays.

“Although he has written books called ‘What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee’ and ‘Why I am Not a Scientist,’ he would like it to be known, for the record, that he is about 98% scientist, and not a chimpanzee,” it states.

Marks told Current Science Daily that Smith has made an intriguing case.

“I think Dr. Smith’s critique is trenchant,” he said. “Those of us who actually work in human evolution and human diversity have always focused on the adaptability of the human mind, rather than its presumptive adaptedness. Evolutionary psychology begins with an apparent denial of the most basic facts of the scientific study of our evolution.”