Adapting Minds

Adapting Minds examines the research programme known as evolutionary psychology and asks how much of its case actually holds up. Buller, a philosopher of science, does not look for one decisive refutation. He works instead through the separate arguments the field deploys, attending to the details of each, and finds a range of serious problems across them. Two lines of criticism run in parallel. The first concerns the assumptions the programme makes about evolutionary theory itself and about human prehistory, material that earlier critics had already probed. The second, which the publisher's endorsements single out as the book's distinctive contribution, is a close examination of the experimental evidence, where Buller argues case by case that the empirical support for domain specific evolved mechanisms is considerably weaker than has been supposed, weaker even than sympathetic sceptics had assumed. The wider aim is constructive rather than dismissive. Buller separates claims that rest on everyday intuition about human nature from claims that meet the standards of scientific explanation, and hopes to clear ground for a better science of how evolution shapes minds.

Written from the catalogue page for the book at the MIT Press.

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