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 interwoven 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.
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