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Evidence in Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies in Understanding Human Cognition and Behaviour
Evolutionary psychology became a popular field of research during the 1970s as a descendent of Sociobiology. As in sociobiology, evolutionary biology seeks to describe human behaviour through an understanding of evolutionary principles. The field itself has, however, been subject to significant criticism from related disciplines, such as human behavioural ecology, evolutionary genetics, paleoanthropology and neuroscience. Many of the criticisms from evolutionary biology are rooted in Gould and Lewontin's infamous 'Spandrels' paper, primarily a criticism of sociobiological theories which have not accounted for the role of non-selective pressures and constraints in determining the evolution of phenotypic traits. The paper has had a significant and influential effect on how research on evolution and adaptation has been conducted since. Criticisms have also asserted that without strong neuroscientific evidence, evolutionary psychology simply cannot determine whether its theories reflect biological realities at all.

Evolutionary psychologists claim that all present-day psychological capacities are adaptations, and thus claim to be able to uncover underlying psychological mechanisms which govern human behaviour, and to be able to explain the evolutionary forces which shaped them. Evolutionary psychology is based on the theory that human minds are made up of a range of individual, specialised and domain-specific 'modules' which have evolved over time under natural selection, in order to solve particular problems and optimise individual fitness. These modules range from mate selection to jealousy, cheater detection and others. The human mind is thus often likened to a computer, whose modules are proposed to have been selected for during the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation(EEA), understood to be during the Pleistocene period. The concept of adaptive lag between the 'EEA' and current environments is supposed to explain why adapted traits might consequently be maladaptive in modern environments, however, this understanding is heavily critiqued, with critics emphasising that whilst many aspects of human behaviour are constrained by ancient evolutionary history, many others have been altered since the supposed 'EEA' in response to environmental changes and thus continue to be under the influence of evolutionary pressures.

Many of the experiments put forward by proponents of evolutionary psychology mostly utilise lab experiments. Most famous are those of Cosmides and Tooby, which have been heavily scrutinised and subject to criticism, both for their metholodologies and unfounded claims based on faulty interpretations of results. Evidence has been said to be in violation of the standards of evolutionary biology, with none of the evidential requirements for hypotheses surrounding evolution being utilised or attempted, and associated claims have been criticised for being based on faulty a priori reasoning in order to dismiss competing hypotheses. Theories which claim that psychological and behavioural traits have been selected for directly in our evolutionary history are premised on the assumption that they are directly determined by specific genes (or networks of genes), but this is not the case - nor do they take into account the role of epigenetics, or the plasticity and flexibility of underlying mechanisms which play a role in brain development. Neurobiologists have argued that developmental plasticity is the adaptation that has been selected for, and that it is this which allows the development of domain-specific functions - the modules themselves are not the adaptation, nor are they determined by genes which have been selected for at some distant point in our evolutionary history.