YOU can hardly open a newspaper or magazine or turn on a TV these days without stumbling on evolutionary explanations for any number of human behaviours: from what we seek in mates and why we are unfaithful, to why we love our children but not our stepchildren, why men and women differ, and even why husbands kill their wives. All this is put forward in the name of evolutionary psychology.
As an ardent and thoroughgoing evolutionist, I would like to endorse all of these explanations. But I don’t. It’s not that I reject the idea of an evolutionary psychology. In…
