Kaldy, Z. (2001). A critical picture of evolutionary psychology. In: C. Pleh, V. Csanyi & T. Bereczkei (Eds.), Mind and evolution (pp. 74-96.) Osiris, Budapest. (In Hungarian).

This review chapter introduces and critically evaluates the main program of the newly established field of evolutionary psychology. The main proponents formed their theoretical credo in the early nineties in California and it immediately became the center of discussion in cognitive science (Pinker, 1997, Fodor, 2001). Their plan is to create, with the help of the theory of evolution, a metatheory that can be the scientific basis of psychology. The core of this metatheory is the following two claims:

(1) The human mind is a product of evolution.

(2) It contains a set of domain-specific tools, each of which were evolved to solve a specific adaptational problem.

First, a few specific criticisms are discussed: the model’s commitment to an extreme modularism, its oversimplified view of culture and its effects on the human mind, and the lack of falsification criteria in evolutionary explanations. Secondly, there were at least three largely similar proposals in the twentieth century history of natural sciences: comparative psychology, human ethology and sociobiology; the review compares and contrasts these approaches with this recent attempt.