Evolutionary Psychology

Physics is great for explaining the natural world, but offers little help when it comes to explaining human nature. Since one is likely to run into other humans in the course of any given day, it is usually advantageous to have some idea about why people act the why they do. An extremely powerful tool for doing this is evolutionary psychology, which extends the concepts of natural selection to the workings of the human brain. By thinking about specific emotions and cognitive strategies as being beneficial or detrimental adaptations no less than organs or limbs, human predilections that seemed incomprehensible before can be made sense of. Even the popular media invokes EP as the prevailing scientific theory. Time magazine periodically does so; recently, it devoted an entire cover story to the science of hunger, in which it details humans have evolved a strong desire for fat and calorie rich foods, which were rare prizes for our ancestors but now are all too readily available.

Although evolutionary psychology is sometimes criticized as consisting of contrived, post-hoc explanations, it does make testable, falsifiable predictions that have been tested and confirmed by experiment. Almost as important, it has great explanatory value regarding human behavior that is mystifying otherwise. Why do we crave unhealthy foods? Why do teams sports come so naturally to us? Why are we generous to our relatives and distrustful of outsiders? Why do we find certain people to be attractive potential sexual partners more than others? Why do we feel compelled to enforce fairness and punish cheaters, even if it is not in our immediate self-interest? Consider the alternative religious explanation: "Humans act that way because that's just how God made us." In addition to the fact that this has zero explanatory value, it also doesn't make sense on it's own. Why would a deity create us a propensity to selfishness, a desire to mate with forbidden partners, or a mind that come up with rival gods and religions? To say that "the creator (or the devil or whatever) is just testing us" is to engage in real post-hoc storytelling.