ARTICLENordic Psychology 2011, Vol. 63(3), 50-67 © 2011 Th.docx

ARTICLE
Nordic Psychology 2011, Vol. 63(3), 50-67 © 2011 The authors
& Nordic Psychology
DOI 10.1027/1901-2276/a000039
Can We Save Darwin from
Evolutionary Psychology?
SVEND BRINKMANN, PHD1
Department of Communication & Psychology, University of
Aalborg, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg Ø,
Denmark, [email protected]
Abstract
This article presents the fundamental paradigmatic principles of
evolutionary
psychology, which are then subjected to criticism. It is argued
that evolutionary
psychology suffers from both a number of unfounded empirical
presuppositions
and from conceptual confusion. Evolutionary psychology
invokes Darwin as a
background figure, but the relationship between the two is
rather problematic.
Although critical of evolutionary psychology, the article argues
that psychology
could favorably maintain a form of Darwinian thinking, albeit
one that is more
dynamic and transactional than evolutionary psychology’s
modular thinking.
We need to conceive of organism and environment as much

more closely inter-
woven than in evolutionary psychology, and to think of human
development as
one continuous, transactional process that cannot be factored
out into separate
“biological” (brain, genes) and “cultural” strands.
Keywords: Evolutionary psychology; Darwin; reductionism;
pragmatism; transaction
1 Svend Brinkmann (b. 1975) is a professor of psychology in
the Department of Communication &
Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His main
interests are philosophical, methodological
and moral issues in psychology and other social sciences.
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51Can We Save Darwin from Evolutionary Psychology?
& Nordic Psychology
Introduction

When Charles Darwin articulated his evolutionary perspective
on human beings,
now a little more than 150 years ago, many aspects of the
human self-under-
standing changed. What became clear in The Origin of Species
(first published
1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(first published
1871), and what every school child learns today, is that human
beings are just
another biological species that does its best to survive in a
challenging world.
Human nature, like the rest of nature, is malleable and changing
rather than
forever static and fixed. When this evolutionary insight was
coupled with Gregor
Mendel’s discovery of the genetic inheritance of traits
(originally discovered in
pea plants), the result was the so-called neo-Darwinian or
modern evolutionary
synthesis. This is a synthesis of Darwin’s theory of gradual
evolutionary develop-
ment through selection mechanisms and Mendel’s detection of
the laws of genetic
inheritance. The modern synthesis was finally achieved in the
1930s by Fisher
and Haldane, who, according to one assessment, took the study
of evolution out
of the qualitatively observed natural history (think of Darwin in
Galapagos) and
replaced it with a more abstract mathematized theory (S. Rose,
2000, p. 249).
Darwin’s original focus on organisms in their environments
gave way to one on
gene frequencies within populations.

Before this, however, Darwin’s ideas had disputed the
traditional theological
cosmology, according to which a Creator had made human
beings in his image
once and for all. It is now a commonplace to see Darwin’s
theory as part of the
gradual decentering of humanity that began with Copernicus’
advancements in
astronomy, which implied a “loss of centrality” and a
destruction of the geocentric
worldview, and which culminated with Freud’s depiction of a
“loss of transparen-
cy” of humanity (Weinert, 2009). Whether one agrees with
Freud’s psychoanalysis
or not, it is unquestionable that the view of the human being as
in some sense
opaque to itself had a profound influence on people’s self-
understanding in the
twentieth century and beyond. Between Copernicus and Freud
stands the “loss
of rational design” described by Darwin, which, besides its
formidable scientific
implications, has had more philosophical, ideological and
political implications
than any other scientific theory before or after (p. 94).
Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s ideas have also deeply affected the
human and social
sciences, including psychology. In addition to a general
naturalistic outlook on
human beings as a species of animals, we have also seen more
specific, yet
problematic (from the point of view of the present article),
reinterpretations of
Darwinian thinking, first in the upsurge of socio-biology in the
1970s, represented

by scientists like E.O. Wilson (1975), which was heavily
criticized from within
biological circles, e.g. by Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay
Gould (e.g. 1980),
and more recently in what has come to be known as
evolutionary psychology.
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52 Svend Brinkmann
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Evolutionary psychology is currently one of the fastest growing
fields in psychol-
ogy. It seems to be applicable to almost any aspect of human
behavior, and it
enjoys a massive popularity in the mass media due to its often
appealingly simple
explanations. It should be clear, however, that leading figures in
evolutionary
psychology such as David Buss (2004), Steven Pinker (1997),
and also Leda

Cosmides and John Tooby (2005) have not simply translated
Darwin’s biology into
a psychological idiom. What they have done, rather, is develop
a very specific
theory of the mind that rests not just on a (questionable)
interpretation of some
of Darwin’s ideas, but equally so on certain assumptions made
by the cognitive
scientists from the mid-twentieth century and onwards.
What I intend to do in this paper is to subject the psychological
paradigm
known as evolutionary psychology to criticism. My main point
is that evolution-
ary psychology has some inbuilt theoretical problems to such an
extent that it
would be preferable to go back to Darwin and more or less start
over to develop
psychology on fresh Darwinian grounds. I shall end the paper
with some brief
remarks about how psychology could approach human life in
more genuine
Darwinian, dynamical and “transactional” ways, e.g. by going
back to the writings
of the American pragmatist John Dewey. In many ways,
pragmatism represents
a promising Darwinism without the problems of evolutionary
psychology. This
more subtle (and “non-genetic”) Darwinian psychology,
however, was largely
forgotten in the course of the twentieth century.
One line of criticism that will not be pursued here, but which
deserves to be
mentioned, is the political one. The program of evolutionary
psychology – to

explain human behavior with reference to mental modules that
are supposedly
located in the individual’s brain – fits well with the current
political order and
its individualizing tendencies (N. Rose, 2007). The individual is
approached as
a storehouse of mental modules that are in principle
independent of social and
cultural factors. The downplaying (or outright denial) of the
importance of social-
ity has ideological affinities with how life is governed in late
modern capitalist
societies, and although it is too simplistic to reduce
evolutionary psychology to
a pure reflection of these societal conditions, they may
nonetheless help explain
its remarkable public success.
Evolutionary psychology as it appears today is obviously an
enormous field
with much internal controversy and a huge amount of empirical
research, and
I cannot even begin to do justice to its scope and complexity in
this context.
Instead, I will refer in particular to one foundational text by
Cosmides and Tooby
that lays out in a perspicuous way the main tenets of
evolutionary psychology. I
will thus focus on the basic theoretical foundations and less so
on the many differ-
ent ramifications of evolutionary psychology. After that I will
point to some more
general problems inherent in evolutionary psychology, some of
which affect the
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paradigm more seriously than others, before briefly presenting a
way of preserving
Darwin’s great ideas in psychology that does not suffer from
these problems. My
answer to the question that forms the title of this paper is
therefore yes, we can
and must save Darwin from evolutionary psychology.
What is evolutionary psychology?
Its principles and problems
An authoritative source on the main tenets of evolutionary
psychology is
“Evolutionary psychology: A primer” by Cosmides and Tooby,
which appears as
a programmatic text on the website of the Center for
Evolutionary Psychology
(directed by Tooby and Cosmides) at the University of
California, Santa Barbara

(Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). Other noteworthy members of this
center include
Daphne Bugental and Michael Gazzaniga. From a reading of
other recent pro-
grammatic texts (e.g. Confer et al. 2010; Cosmides & Tooby,
2005), it seems fair
to conclude that the principles of the primer are on the whole
unaltered today,
which is corroborated by the fact that this text is chosen by the
main proponents
of evolutionary psychology as a key representative text of the
paradigm. In the
primer, Cosmides and Tooby characterize evolutionary
psychology in an admira-
bly clear way by outlining what they see as its five fundamental
principles. Before
that, however, they make clear that evolutionary psychology is
not an area of
study in psychology (like vision or cognition), but an approach
to psychology as
a whole. And they define psychology as: “that branch of biology
that studies (1)
brains, (2) how brains process information, and (3) how the
brain’s information-
processing programs generate behavior.” (Cosmides & Tooby,
1997).
It is noteworthy that this definition does not include any
reference to persons
or organisms. Psychology supposedly deals with brains and how
these organs
allegedly process information and subsequently generate
behavior. Conceptual
analysis reveals that evolutionary psychology runs into
problems already at this
stage, for, strictly speaking, brains do not process information.

The brain is an
organ that transmits electro-chemical signals in specific neural
circuits, but it
does not process information any more than the liver or the
kidneys do. For
information is always information for someone. In an ordinary
semantic sense,
information is a set of true propositions, and there can be found
no such propo-
sitions, nor “processing” of propositions, in the brain (Bennett
& Hacker, 2003,
p. 141). Specifying information independently of a subject to
whom the given
pieces of information make sense is impossible. Otherwise, the
concept “infor-
mation” could be applied to anything and it would lose its
meaning. A brain is
not a “someone”, a subject, in the relevant sense – indeed in any
conceivable
sense. Only persons and other living organisms process
information as they go
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54 Svend Brinkmann
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about performing different operations in their environments,
and they could
surely not do so without their brains, but this does not mean
that their brains
as such are doing the processing. Analogously, my car could not
move through
traffic without its engine, but that does not mean that it is its
engine as such that
is moving through traffic.
In an influential critique of current neuro-reductionism, Bennett
(a neurologist)
and Hacker (a philosopher) have referred to the fallacy of
ascribing psychological
predicates to the brain as the “mereological fallacy” (Bennett &
Hacker, 2003).
Mereology is the logic of part-whole relations, and the
mereological fallacy is
committed when scientists ascribe (psychological) properties to
a part of the liv-
ing human being, typically the brain or the mind, which in fact
make sense only
when ascribed to a human being (or an animal) as a whole (see
also Brinkmann,
2006). So persons, as living and acting human beings, can
meaningfully be said
to process information (as when they consider whether to buy a
house or not)
and act on the basis of whatever seems warranted in light of the
evidence – but
not their brains.

Similarly, the statement by Cosmides and Tooby that “the
brain’s information-
processing programs generate behavior” is deeply questionable,
for such pro-
grams would, in analogy with the digital computer, have to
operate according to
specific algorithms, but such algorithms have never been found
in the brain. What
happens in the brain is neurons firing and blood flowing, but
talk of programs in
the manner of Cosmides and Tooby is speculative at best and
illusory at worst. It
is related to the central idea of evolutionary psychology that
“the mind is modu-
lar” (like a Swiss army knife, to invoke the preferred metaphor
of evolutionary
psychology), which has had some popularity in cognitive
science and classical
artificial intelligence research (see Gardner, 1987), but which is
unsupported by
brain research (Karmiloff-Smith, 2000). The very definition of
psychology found in
Cosmides and Tooby’s programmatic text, therefore, is highly
contestable, since it
(1) excludes reference to persons and organisms acting in
environments as central
to the discipline, (2) builds on what appears to be a
(mereological) fallacy about
the capacities of brains, and (3) rests on a postulate about
programs in the brain
that is highly speculative. We shall return to these problems
below.
The authors go on to explain, however, that the five basic
principles of evolu-

tionary psychology, to which I now turn, can be applied to “any
topic in psychol-
ogy” ranging from vision to sexuality (Cosmides & Tooby,
1997). This, indeed, is
ambitious and something that has been referred to as an
attempted colonization
not only of psychology, but of the social sciences at large (H.
Rose, 2000). Such
imperialist ambitions provide reasons for people outside
evolutionary psychology
to engage critically with the fundamental assumptions of the
paradigm. I will now
cite each of the principles directly from the primer and, after
each one, point to
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significant and likely insurmountable problems related to the
principle. My criti-

cism is inspired in particular by the edited book Alas, Poor
Darwin: Arguments
Against Evolutionary Theory by Rose and Rose (2000), but I
borrow freely from
various critics (and other sources) to articulate specific
arguments against each
of the principles.
Principle 1
“The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its
circuits are designed
to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental
circumstances.”
It is hard to disagree with the first sentence of principle 1, but
the next sentence
presents us with a problem that we have already touched upon,
for, given what
we know about the brain, it does not function as a computer. A
computer is a
tool that humans have developed to help them process
information. It works
algorithmically and linearly according to the rules of the
software that clever
humans have composed. According to Barbara Herrnstein Smith
and a host of
other critics, however, this computational model does not
adequately reflect “the
peculiar structural and operational properties of living systems,
including their
characteristically global, self-regulating and, in important
respects, nonlinear
dynamics.” (Smith, 2000, p. 132). Neither minds nor brains are
information-
processing machines like the computer, for neither minds nor
brains work by

solving problems through rule-governed manipulation of
symbols. The brain, to
repeat, is an organ that transmits electro-chemical signals, and
decades of criti-
cism of artificial intelligence research (Dreyfus, 1979, was an
important early
critic) should be enough to convince us that building a
psychological paradigm
upon a view of the brain/mind as a device that processes
information according to
rules and algorithms is, if not downright faulty, then at least a
very shaky founda-
tion. More recent theories of human cognition (sometimes
referred to as theories
of the “embodied and embedded mind”) seem like promising
alternatives, point-
ing to the role of experience, the body and situational
understanding rather than
rules and programs as explanatory (cf. the contributions to
Robbins & Aydede,
2009). To follow in the footsteps of the researchers of “situated
cognition” would
pose a major problem for evolutionary psychologists, however,
since this would
force them to give up not just the idea that the mind is a
discrete information-
processing machine, but also the idea that “the mind’s
architecture” was designed
in the Pleistocene (see the next principle).
Principle 2
“Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve
problems that
our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.”
This is one of the most frequently invoked tropes of

evolutionary psycholo-
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56 Svend Brinkmann
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gists: We have Stone Age or Pleistocene minds, they say, but
live in the twenty-
first century, and this allegedly explains a host of human doings
and sufferings
today, ranging from rape to the stress epidemic. The very idea
that the structure
(or “architecture”, to use the favored expression of evolutionary
psychologists)
of the mind was fixed during the Pleistocene is curious, for, as
Hilary Rose (a
sociologist) and Steven Rose (a neurobiologist) point out (2000,
p. 2), we know
that non-human animals can evolve significantly through natural
selection (not
to speak of artificial selection as in breeding) in the course of

just a few decades,
e.g. the finches studied in Darwin’s own Galapagos that develop
new shapes of
beaks and feeding habits very quickly in response to climate
changes, so why
not humans? Furthermore, we know very little about what life
was like 100,000
years ago. Anthropologists have found shards of bones and a
few bodies, but there
is substantial disagreement even at the level of establishing the
sex of Lucy, the
early hominid discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia (H. Rose, 2000, p.
118). In light of
this (unsurprising) lack of evidence about life in the
Pleistocene, it seems quite
speculative to use this period, and how “neural circuits were
designed by natural
selection” during the period, to explain purportedly universal
cultural practices
to do with the age difference in marriage between men and
women or female
beauty, to cite just some of the well-known arguments of
evolutionary psycholo-
gists (p. 117). We simply do not know in sufficient detail which
problems our
ancestors faced.
Even worse for evolutionary psychology, biologists and
biological anthro-
pologists have argued that it is senseless to say that neural
circuits as such are
designed by natural selection. It is not so much the design-part
of the sentence
that is problematic (although this too is strange, for there is no
designer involved
in evolution), but the very idea that natural selection as such

works on the
genetic materials that co-determine the neural machinery. As
Tim Ingold has put
it: “Natural selection, in short, may occur within evolution, but
does not explain
it.” (2000, p. 243). Why not? Because the idea of the genotype,
which is necessary
to account for the link between gene frequencies and capacities
of organisms that
are independent of the concrete dynamics of development, is
dubious (p. 243).
According to Ingold, there simply is no such thing as a
genotype conceived as a
context-independent design specification (p. 234). It is
impossible to factor out
what the purely genetically based capacities of humans are (that
are thought of,
by evolutionary psychologists, as identical in the Pleistocene
and today), and what
is ontogenetically acquired. There are no pre-programmed
essences in the genes.
Genes are parts of long molecules (DNA) that control the
production of proteins
in organisms, but genes only interact with cells that are the
building blocks of
bodies that operate in environments. Natural selection, when it
works, works on
organisms in environments, and not on genes. And what
organisms are is a result
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of complex developmental processes that cannot be predicted by
looking solely at
genes. Evolution, according to Ingold’s much more complex and
dynamic view,
“is the process in which organisms come into being with their
particular forms
and capacities and, through their environmentally situated
actions, establish the
development for their successors.” (Ingold, 1998, p. 95).
Natural selection may
play a role in this process, and it would be foolish to deny that
cumulative chang-
es in gene frequencies within populations take place over time,
but Ingold’s point
is that there is no link between change in gene frequencies and
the capacities of
organisms independently of the dynamics of development itself
(Ingold, 2000, p.
243). The evolutionary-developmental process is primary as
such, and includes
both what we conventionally refer to as natural and cultural
aspects (which is a

highly problematic distinction, as we shall see). The problem
with evolutionary
psychology in this context is that it is based on the fundamental
mistake of assum-
ing that phylogeny is a process separate from ontogeny
(Derksen, 2010, p. 480).
Natural selection does not “design” organisms, as evolutionary
psychologists say,
and the role of genes cannot be specified independently of other
factors (p. 480).
In short, the “selectionist view” of evolutionary psychology is
problematic, since
it treats the animal (or organism) and environment as two
separate entities, with
the environment existing prior to the animal (Withagen & van
Wermeskerken,
2010, p. 495). This is problematic for the plain, yet radical,
reason that there sim-
ply is no environment independently of organisms. There
certainly is a physical
world, but this world becomes an environment (with selection
pressures) only
when there are animals that operate in it and determine what
constitutes the
environment. Even the lowliest animals, like the earthworms
analyzed by Darwin
himself, construct their environments (see Costall, 2004). Or, to
put it in more
dynamic terms, there is a mutualism at work in which animals
and environments
construct each other. The earthworms, which are actually not
well adapted to life
in the topsoil due to their sensitive epidermis that must be kept
warm and moist,
create vegetable mold in their life processes and thereby change

the topsoil in
which they live (Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010, p. 499).
Even such primi-
tive animals construct the very environments in which selection
takes place, thus
complicating the simple model of natural selection in
evolutionary psychology.
The offspring of the earthworms inherit not only genes, but also
an environment
that fits their epidermis better (p. 500). Have birds developed
color vision because
apples are red, thus enabling them to locate and eat the
nourishing fruits, or
have apples developed their red hue because birds have color
vision, thereby
attracting the birds to help spread the apple seeds? Obviously,
both are correct,
and the mutualism works even more pervasively in the case of
humans with their
immense niche construction capabilities, which – for all we
know – were also
exercised in the Stone Age.
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58 Svend Brinkmann
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Principle 3
“Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes
on in your mind
is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can
mislead you into
thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most
problems that you
experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve – they
require very compli-
cated neural circuitry.”
Cosmides and Tooby here employ a certain modern – one might
even say pecu-
liar – psychological interpretation of what a mind is, viz. a
place where things
can “go on”. Some of these things are conscious while others
are unconscious.
It is curious how naturalistic attempts within the sciences (such
as evolutionary
psychology) to move beyond Descartes often invite him in
through the back door,
for this form of imagery of the mind as a “place” or an “entity”
was in fact force-
fully articulated by Descartes. A fundamental critique of
principle 3 will state that
the term ‘mind’ does not refer to some entity, place or
mechanism, but rather to a
set of skills and dispositions that are rightly ascribed to living
organisms, humans
included. And nothing “goes on” in skills and dispositions,

which renders the
idiom of Cosmides and Tooby (which they share with much of
contemporary
cognitive science) quite mysterious and possibly even
meaningless (see Bennett
& Hacker, 2003). Again, this is not to deny that the brain is an
indispensable
component that is needed in order for organisms-in-
environments to exercise the
skills that we refer to with the concept of mind (e.g. perceiving,
remembering,
problem-solving etc.), but it does mean that we cannot
meaningfully say that it
is the brain – or the mind – that is performing these activities.
How can I know that the mind is not a place where mental
phenomena (only
some of which are conscious) “go on”? My answer is that this
Cartesian idea
of the mind is ontologically flawed. It is ontologically flawed
because it intro-
duces the untenable dualisms of mind and matter, and also inner
and outer,
and although evolutionary psychologists are materialists and
would reject the
charge of Cartesian dualism, their idea of the mind as something
inner, related
to the brain’s alleged information processing, does represent a
kind of materialist
“neural Cartesianism”, which has simply replaced the
immaterialist Cartesian Res
Cogitans with the brain as the locus of the mind (Coulter &
Sharrock, 2007, p. 11).
In short, the evolutionary psychologists’ principle 3 largely
repeats a Cartesian
image of the mind as a place in which events take place, some

of which are
“hidden” (i.e. unconscious). Mental life is conceived in spatial
terms, and mental
phenomena are seen as “objects” of some peculiar mental kind,
potentially hid-
den from the conscious observer. But we do not observe the
contents of our minds
anymore than we fail to observe them, for the mind is not a
place with contents,
and there is no homunculus inside us to do the observing.
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Principle 4
“Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different
adaptive problems.”
I have already criticized the contents of this principle above
when I argued

against the modular theory of the mind, which does not hold up
in light of current
neuroscientific evidence. Modern brain science does not support
that idea that
there are these sorts of specialized neural circuits (Hamilton,
2008), and there is
no reason to think that such specialized circuits would be
favored by evolution
anyway. In fact, as Karmiloff-Smith has argued, the reverse may
be true in the
sense that evolution “has helped to guarantee human survival by
raising the upper
limits on complexity and avoiding too much prespecification of
higher cognitive
functions.” (2000, p. 154). Babies’ brains are not Swiss army
knives, and this very
image rests on the false dichotomy of evolution (phylogeny) and
ontogeny. If there
is brain specialization, it is actually the product of child
development (within
the relevant biological and social contexts) rather than its
starting point (p. 147).
Again, the problems of evolutionary psychology here are related
to the core
problem of wanting to specify what is innate and what is
“culturally” acquired.
According to Ingold (2004), it makes as little sense to say that
the human capac-
ity for walking is innate (e.g. in some alleged bipedal
locomotion module) as
it does to say that cello-playing is. Ingold insists on analyzing
these forms of
activity (in fact, all human activities) symmetrically. Walking is
biological through
and through and cultural through and through – just like cello-

playing is. We
cannot factor out what is hardwired and what is culturally
acquired. Both are
skills that are gradually incorporated (or not) into the
operations and life process
of human organisms. And people walk differently in different
cultures – just as
they play music differently. In Japan, people traditionally “walk
from the knees”,
while Westerners “walk from the hips”, keeping the legs as
straight as possible
(p. 216). Playing the cello, like walking, is a bodily skill (and
there surely is
no prespecified neural circuitry for cello-playing!), and cultural
differences are
not “added on” to biological universals, but are, as Ingold tells
us, themselves
biological (p. 216).
Principle 5
“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”
Again, I have already argued against the idea that the so-called
architecture of
the mind was fixed during the Pleistocene. In light of the
arguments of Ingold and
a number of neuroscientists cited by Herrnstein Smith and
Karmiloff-Smith, it is
not possible to factor out a genetically hardwired baseline of
mental functions,
supposedly fixed in the Stone Age (of which, to make matters
worse, we have
very little evidence anyway). Rose and Rose conclude that
evolutionary psychol-
ogy on this note is based on “speculative fantasies” (2000, p. 2),
representing

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almost the antithesis to solid scientific work, which, however, is
the official self-
understanding of the paradigm.
I have also argued that the very metaphor of the mind being
“housed” is prob-
lematic, since it rests on the misguided idea that the mind is a
place where mental
events and processes “go on”. But we can push the critique of
evolutionary psy-
chology further on this point by pointing again to the scores of
dynamic theories
of the mind that have emerged in recent years, demonstrating
that organisms, who
construct the conditions of their own existence, have what Andy
Clark has called

“extended minds” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2008). The
conditions that
must be in place in order for the skills and dispositions we call
“mental” to work
are not confined to “our modern skulls”. We use all sorts of
cognitive technologies
that are outside the skull to “supersize” our minds (Clark,
2008). We use tools to
modify our environments, notes to enhance our memory, glasses
to improve our
eyesight, computers to write texts and pocket calculators to
perform arithmetic,
and these objects outside the skull are part of our collective
inheritance that make
complex forms of mental life possible. As “natural born
cyborgs” (to borrow an
expression from Clark), we are born into a techno-scientific
culture that affords
certain mental operations from infancy, just like earthworms are
born into mold
that has been cultivated by earlier generations of earthworms.
Being a developing
organism means living in such a cultivated world, where it
makes little sense to
seek sharp distinctions between what is “housed within the
skull” and what has
evolved “outside the skull” as aspects of organisms’ behaviors-
in-environments.
We need a much more dynamic picture of life processes
unfolding in relational,
mutualist fields, where the “ecological bodies” (Johnson, 2007)
of organisms are
deeply intertwined with their environments. We must think of
organism/body and
environment, argues Mark Johnson, “in the same way that we

must think of mind
and body, as aspects of one continuous process.” (p. 276). And
this “one process”
is surely not housed within the skull, but demands that we look
at the organism
“not as a discrete, pre-specified entity but as a particular locus
of growth and
development within a continuous field of relationships. It is a
field that unfolds in
the life activities of organisms and that is enfolded in their
specific morphologies,
powers of movement and capacities of awareness and response”
(Ingold, 2004,
p. 219). My brief remarks below on Dewey’s transactional
pragmatism hopefully
serve as an indication that such a dynamic perspective on the
organism was once
articulated within psychology.
In closing my critique of the main principles of evolutionary
psychology, I
should say that there are additional problems in the evolutionary
perspective that
I have not addressed in this context such as: (1) The tendency
toward circular
(and thus unscientific) explanations of the type: Humans display
a certain form of
behavior, we want to know why, evolutionary psychologists
answer “because it
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has been selected for”, and if we raise the question about how
we know this, the
answer is that it would not exist unless it had been adaptive (see
Rose’s critique
(2000) of Daly and Wilson and also Pinker on these grounds, for
example). (2)
Evolutionary psychological accounts often involve quite
dramatic reductions of
psychological phenomena (e.g. love, beauty, aggression) to
something else, which
is not without problems (see Brinkmann, 2011a). And finally
(3), evolutionary
psychology risks undermining itself if it argues that human
normative capacities
(such as our powers of reasoning, judgment and morality) are
what they are, only
because they have been selected for. As Nagel (1997) points
out, such reductive
strategies collapse if the claim is made that whatever we have
reason to believe
(morally, logically etc.) is the result of our psychological
apparatus as a response
to evolutionary adaptation. For if the evolutionary reductionists

want to remain
consistent, this must also apply to the theory itself! On this
evolutionary account,
therefore, the only reason I could have to believe this account
itself would be
grounded in natural selection. Thus, if the evolutionary
hypothesis itself depends
on reason, and if reason is a product of natural selection, then
the hypothesis is
self-undermining. There must be something more than simply
being a product of
natural selection to human perception, thinking, and reasoning
if we are to trust
these capacities. As Nagel says: “I can have no justification for
trusting a reason-
ing capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless
I am justified
in trusting it simply in itself – that is, believing what it tells me,
in virtue of the
content of the arguments it delivers.” (p. 136) (see also the
extended discussion
of the problems of reducing normativity in Brinkmann, 2011a).
Towards a new beginning for Darwinian psychology?
After tackling each of the fundamental principles of
evolutionary psychology and
presenting some additional problems inherent in the paradigm, I
shall sketch the
contours of an alternative Darwinian psychology, based on
Dewey’s pragmatism.
There are quite a few Darwinian alternatives appearing these
years in ecological
psychology, mutualism and dynamical systems theory, but
pragmatism deserves
to be mentioned since it is a classic approach to psychology
based on Darwin’s

ideas that has been sadly neglected. Pragmatism was the distinct
American brand
of philosophy and science that developed on Darwinian grounds
roughly from
1880, originally by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and
John Dewey.
Dewey himself was born in 1859, the year of the publication of
Darwin’s revo-
lutionary book, and the pragmatist line of thinking, not just in
philosophy but
also in psychology and the social sciences, built on the premise
that humans
construct knowledge like they construct buildings, irrigation
and technologies: To
cope with the dangerous and changing world in which they live.
The fundamental
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pragmatist idea, then, is an idea about ideas: “ideas are not ‘out
there’ waiting to
be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and
microchips – that people
devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves”
(Menand, 2002, p.
xi). In many ways, this pragmatist idea about ideas was, and is,
a revolutionary
proposal that turns Western thought on its head. Ideas are not
representations
or copies of how the world is, but are tools, with which we
transform, engage
with, and cope with the world (Brinkmann & Tanggaard, 2010).
In a Darwinian
universe, it is no good having fixed, Platonic representations of
the world, or
universal “mental modules”, sine the world is in flux (see
Brinkmann, 2011b).
Through his long career, Dewey developed a dynamic ontology
that culmi-
nated in the last book he wrote with Arthur Bentley entitled
Knowing and the
Known. It was inspired not just by Darwin, but also by the new
physics of Einstein
and Bohr. Dewey wanted to say that reality is not made up of
metaphorical bil-
liard balls that collide without changing in other respects. This
is mere interaction,
which invites a causal understanding of reality in accordance
with Newton’s
classical physics, where the goal is to map the natural laws that
are at work in
nature. A transactional description instead concerns events and
actions without
giving any underlying elements any independent causal power

(Dewey & Bentley,
1949, p. 108). It is the process itself that is primary, and not
causal powers belong-
ing to separate entities that can be disconnected from the event
as a whole (like
the contribution of genes and culture as distinct factors). While
an interactional
understanding begins with objects and asks how these interact
(according to
which laws?), a transactional understanding begins with the
dynamical process
itself and considers objects as functional distinctions within the
larger whole
(Biesta & Burbules, 2003, p. 26). We can say that I eat, because
I am hungry,
but, according to the transactional viewpoint, it is misleading to
say that there is
some object – hunger – that causes me to eat. Hunger, rather, is
a name for the
organism’s tendency to seek food and eat as an entire event
(Garrison, 2001, p.
284). Similarly, the transactional perspective will reject the idea
that there are
entities such as ‘genes’ that lie behind events and can be
invoked to explain
behavior causally.
In order to explain the transactional perspective, Dewey
presented a historical
narrative running from the Greek philosophers, through modern
science, culmi-
nating with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum
physics. The Greeks
based their metaphysics on an idea of self-action, believing that
objects move and
develop in accordance with inner natures. The capable scientist

was said to be
able to observe how the essences of things unfolded. This idea
is still prevalent
in some of the formulations of evolutionary psychology, but it
was overthrown
by modern, mechanical science, represented by Galileo and
Newton, when the
practice of experimenting arose. The scientist should now
interact with nature
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– rather than observe it at a distance – but scientific practice
was still seen as
separate from, and in principle unable to affect, the processes
observed. A picture
of inter-action in an orderly, mechanical universe was the result
(Dewey, 1929,
p. 186).

Finally, we have transaction, where the life process or activity
of knowing itself
is primary. The concept of transaction is meant to designate the
fluidity of nature
and to break down any absolute distinctions between mind and
matter, inner and
outer, nature and culture:
Transaction is the procedure which observes men talking and
writing, with
their word-behaviors and other representational activities
connected with
their thing-perceivings and manipulations, and which permits a
full treat-
ment, descriptive and functional, of the whole process, inclusive
of all its
‘contents’, whether called ‘inners’ or ‘outers’, in whatever way
the advancing
techniques of inquiry require. (Dewey & Bentley, 1949, p. 123).
Transaction is rather complex and difficult to grasp. For it
builds both on the
premise that the best understanding of nature is one that sees it
as consisting of
events that are becoming in constant transaction, where one
cannot separate out
causal agents working “behind the scenes” (such as genes) and
on the related
premise that any study of nature, such as in scientific practice,
is itself an event
through which nature is affected and developed. Dewey defines
scientific trans-
actional observation as:
an insistence upon the right to proceed in freedom to select and

view all sub-
ject matters in whatever way seems desirable under reasonable
hypothesis,
and regardless of ancient claims on behalf of either minds or
material mecha-
nisms, or any of the surrogates of either. (Dewey & Bentley,
1949, p. 124).
There is no spiritual/mental/social reality opposed to a material
reality. There is
just one evolving reality, which consists of numerous
transactional events with
many kinds of qualities that have complex relations to other
events. Describing
these relations is what Dewey calls transactional observation.
Several interpretations of Dewey (e.g. Burke, 1994; Manicas,
2002) see his
dynamic, transactional view as having paved the way for an
ecological tradition
within psychology. This also goes for pragmatism more broadly
(Heft, 2001).
Like Dewey, ecological psychology as conceived by Gibson
(1986) claims that
our perception of the world is mediated by functional activity,
and that it is
because of activity (rather than “mental modules”) that we can
understand the
affordances of things without having to postulate the existence
of inner mental
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modules or representations. Likewise, Dewey’s ecological
approach implies
that “things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with,
enjoyed and
endured, even more than things to be known. They are things
had before they
are things cognized.” (Dewey, 1925, p. 21). We discover the
properties of things
by actively manipulating them on the background of evolved
habits – things are
first and foremost what we can do with them as we live and
actively construct
our environments.
The perception of affordances happens as part of an organism’s
ongoing inquiry
(Dewey, 1938), where certain habitual patterns are formed that
enable the organ-
ism to perceive properties of the world. Withagen and van
Wermeskerken (2010)
have employed the notion of affordance in a critique of the kind
of selectionist

thinking that lies behind evolutionary psychology, and I have
already referred
to the dynamic alternative as mutualism (which, in many ways,
corresponds to
Dewey’s transactional ideas). Some ecological psychologists
have formulated
their position as mutualism (Costall, 2004; Still & Good, 1992,
1998), and this is
a form of ecological thinking that has many similarities to
Dewey’s transactional
understanding of organisms and environment – where this very
distinction itself
is seen as problematic, and where much of what we commonly
conceive of as
belonging to the environment (gravity, tools etc.) in a
functional sense must be
understood as belonging to the organism (see also Burke, 1994,
for a general
ecological reading of Dewey). A transactional psychology
would agree with
Ingold that “the forms of organisms are not genetically
preconfigured but continu-
ally emerge as developmental outcomes within matrices
comprised of mutually
conditioning relations.” (2011, p. 9). The development of
humans is, from this
perspective, first and foremost a development of life-processes
and practices,
transcending the borders of what we have been used to call
nature and culture.
There is just human becoming as one, continuous process (p. 9).
Conclusions
I hope to have indicated in this article why evolutionary
psychology is both
empirically unsupported in certain respects and conceptually

incoherent in oth-
ers. It is to a large extent a task for sociologists of knowledge to
explain why the
paradigm has received such popularity, not least in the public
media (see also
Hamilton, 2008). The problems of evolutionary psychology,
however, should
not tempt us to discard a general Darwinian orientation in the
study of human
beings. Many psychologists and students of psychology today
seem to think that
evolutionary psychology is a form of Darwinism (perhaps even
the only one in
psychology), but I have tried to show that this is misguided, and
that there are
promising alternatives. It may be wise to bear in mind that
Darwin, as Ingold has
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put it, was no Darwinist, let alone a neo-Darwinist, in the sense
invoked by evo-
lutionary psychologists (Ingold, 1998, p. 97). Ingold’s own
“relational thinking”
in anthropology, along with Dewey’s transactional approach and
also ecological
psychology, may form the basis of a dynamic alternative to
evolutionary psychol-
ogy. This is an alternative that does not seek to invoke mental
modules, conceived
as having evolved in the Stone Age and transmitted genetically,
as an explanation
of human doings and sufferings.
We should stop “essentializing” biology and psychology. We
should stop seeing
biology as a constant of human beings and culture as its
variable (Ingold, 2004, p.
217). We should leave theories of self-action (that refer to the
unfolding of purely
genetic potentials) behind and also theories of inter-action that
are concerned
with an alleged (and deeply simplified) interaction between
nature (genes) and
culture, for there is no such “interaction” between different
spheres. There is just
one transactional-developmental process of organisms-in-
environments. I have
advocated the use of Dewey’s more subtle vocabulary as one
way of articulating
such a transactional perspective, but this is just one suggestion.
In any case, we
need in psychology “nothing less than a new approach to
evolution, one that
sets out to explore not the variation and selection of

intergenerationally transmit-
ted attributes, but the self-organising dynamics and form-
generating potentials
of relational fields” (Ingold, 2004, p. 218). A genuine
transactional Darwinism
could be one place to start.
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Biesta, G. & Burbules, N. C. (2003). Pragmatism and
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Brinkmann, S. (2006). Damasio on mind and emotions: A

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Psychology, 58, 366-380.
Brinkmann, S. (2011a). Psychology as a Moral Science:
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York: Springer.
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b
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ly
.
What is the difference between your topic (sports injuries in
high schools) when written in
1. qualitative research questions
2. quantitative research questions
3. mix methods research questions
Please write 3 research questions of your topic and design.
How would you design each type of study?
What kind of activities should players focus on post ACL
injury?
What are the mental challenges of players post ACL injury?
How to prevent ACL injuries in sports?
With your responses please identify what type of research
question your classmates are using as well as feedback on
variables, verbs, or language. For responses to multi-part mixed
methods research questions, please share which questions are
quantitative and which qualitative.
Example of questions: Ethical and unethical sides of the sports
industry. There were many aspects within the topic that have to
be considered. First, I had to consider the different problems
that were considered unethical or illegal acts within the sports
industry. Are these acts unethical, illegal, or going against the
code of conduct? Second, I had to look at the type of audience
and stake holders that might have concerns over this conduct. In
other words, who benefits from the unethical and ethical
research. People that might benefit from unethical acts during

competition could be the owners, coaches, and possibly the
players because they may have the most to gain as a result of
this. The people who would desire ethics within the game could
be alumni, investors, parents, and even players that may feel
forced to go against their own code of conduct. All the named
above can be set to gain from either direction of the ethical
scale but the research will show it individually. In order to
appeal to those that question the ethics within sports may find
this research important to assure sports is held to a higher
standard.
Practice using research studies to support and inform your
responses. What cutting edge questions could you add based on
research that has already been done? We want to add the next
step in the pattern of research on your topic. Lastly, make your
responses unique. We definitely do not want to be reading the
same responses over and over again. For ethical reasons as
well, we would not want to copy anyone's work. Bottom of
Form
Ethical Considerations for a Research Study
High School football is declining due to injuries. This is a
research topic that will require collecting data from human
subjects and these are the individuals in schools, for example,
the coaches and players of high school football (Bogage, 2018).
Ethical considerations in this study will help determine the
manner which the subjects in the study are handled and also
how the information the offer is handled.
The first ethical consideration in this case, therefore, will be
voluntary players. The subjects who give information for this
study need to do so out of free will. It would be very unethical
to go forcing individuals to give information they are not
comfortable giving. The players must volunteer to give up
information without coercion. This means that they need to have
given consent to players. For the consent to follow ethical
guidelines, it has to be informed that the players need to give
the consent on the basis of full information of the study, its

intentions and procedure and any possible risks or effects.
The second ethical consideration is confidentiality of
information. The information offered by the different
players from different high school needs to be confidential not
only because it is unethical to go putting to the limelight what
specific and identified players pay but also because high school
football is a competitive sport and revealing sensitive
information can affect the competitiveness of a team. In that,
ensuring that information provided by the players in the study is
a very important ethical consideration to help make sure that the
participant does not suffer any harm or regret the decision of
giving u information. It will be important to generalize findings
of the study when reporting to make sure that no information
given in the report can directly be affiliated to a specific player.
Creswell, J.W. (2018). Research design: Qualitative,
quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. (5th Ed.) Twelve
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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