In particular, EP is one of the few fields in the social sciences that attempts a sound and unifying approach. That is tremendously valuable and desperately needed in the social sciences.
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EP also has a tremendous amount of explanatory power. Try understanding mating or sex differences without it.
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Common criticisms, like that EP is just so stories, are silly. Any good paradigm allows one to spin post- how explanations. That’s a great starting point. And good EP then tests the predictions of these explanations.
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But EP has its flaws. Namely, it is built on an *implicit* premise that doesn’t fit a lot of interesting aspects of human behavior: That human behavior is best understood through pre-adaptations=evolved responses to environmental cues based on ancestral experience and selection
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Let me illustrate w/ a few examples. But first, a preemptive response: every time I criticize EP, I get the retort that the human mind and it’s capacity to learn *had* to evolve. True. But that’s not the part I am disagreeing w/. I am disagreeing w/ the *implicit* premise above.
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A few examples of this implicit premise in action: From aesthetics, politics, morality, principles, and passions.
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Aesthetics: How can we best understand our sense of beauty? The standard EP view is Pinker’s visual cheesecake story: we like paintings of voluptuous women, sometimes exaggeratedly so, b/c such paintings exploit our evolved predispositions. Seems right.
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But that’s only a small fraction of what’s interesting or puzzling about our sense of aesthetics. Take modern art for example. Almost none of that is cheesecake. Some of it is purposely grotesque. Other parts are highly cerebral.
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And in almost all instances the artists message is purposely opaque, with hidden gems that take a lot of detective work and art criticism to uncover. Hard to explain that with cheesecake. Cheesecake also can’t explain why we like originals more than replicas. (See Paul Bloom.)
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Take other components of our sense of aesthetics. In North East India, where I did some field work, many (male) villagers had two finger nails extra-long. Why? They told me it was beautiful. Wasn’t to me. Presumably not cheesecake.
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In China, two long fingernails were the mark of aristocracy (because it signaled you could not do menial labor); perhaps this inspired these villagers?
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