“Just So Stories:” Richardson Against Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract

Why do men find young women more attractive than older women? Why do women find high status men more attractive? The answer from recent evolutionary psychologists is that younger women are more likely to be fertile and healthy, and their progeny are more likely to survive. Thus, natural selection, acting primarily on our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer forebears, has led men's preferences to be driven by genetic makeup to optimize the chances of their genes being preserved. Women's preferences, by contrast, have been selected by the need to insure long-term care for offspring. The book at hand is a critique of such explanations, written by a philosopher of science, and directed at the weakness of evidence that such arguments display. The arguments, says Richardson, are "just so" stories, perhaps plausible but lacking in the kind of evidence required by biological accounts of evolution by natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is poor science, by the standards of evolutionary biology. Richardson is not the first philosopher of science to undertake a critique of evolutionary psychology. Starting with Phillip Kitcher's (1985) attack on sociobiology through David Buller's (2005) attack from the standpoint of psychology, philosophers of science have been withering in their criticism of evolutionary psychology. Richardson joins this literature using the standards of biological explanation as the ground for his attack. He brings to the task a wide knowledge of biology and a critical eye for the kinds of accounts that can count as explanation supported by empirical evidence.