Geoffrey MillerVerified account

(In fact I was 100% EP myself, until I was trying desperately to understand certain problems (to be described soon) and just found the EP mindset, and common EP hypothesis, insufficient in these domains. Had to switch tacks.)

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.

EP also has a tremendous amount of explanatory power. Try understanding mating or sex differences without it.

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.

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

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.

A few examples of this implicit premise in action: From aesthetics, politics, morality, principles, and passions.

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.